Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (59 page)

Published rumors of Fleming’s possible departure began the first
week
in April. “Whatever I do, they’re fighting me all the way,” he confided to his brother-in-law Dick Kobe, who feared that a breakdown was imminent. On April 14—a Friday—Selznick sent out a memo stating that Fleming “is so near the breaking point both physically and mentally from sheer exhaustion that it would be a miracle, in my opinion, if he is able to shoot for another seven or eight weeks.” Myrick wrote in her diary the same day, “Vic told me . . . he was tired to death and he thought he was getting the jitters and would just have to quit.”

Yet Fleming maintained his family dinnertime schedule before returning to Culver City for night shoots or to edit
The Wizard of Oz.
That Sunday, he also summoned sufficient energy to fulfill an obligation to direct a live radio program—an episode of the
Gulf Screen Guild Theater
for the benefit of the Motion Picture Relief Fund. Although directing a tightly written half-hour program was nowhere near as strenuous as taking the helm of a movie, Fleming still had to be at the CBS studio for both the rehearsal and the broadcast. Oddly enough, the episode, “The Hand of Providence,” written by Charles Tazewell (
The Littlest Angel
), involved a return to Kansas—this one starring James Cagney and Andy Devine as two escaped cons who go straight under the influence of a farm girl played by Priscilla Lane.

De Havilland explains that she was one of the few cast members to see the strain behind Fleming’s bold facade in late April:

I found that during the lunch hour, it did me good to repair for a while to a quiet spot on the back lot before returning to the set. One day, as I was eating in the fresh air and sunshine, Fleming—no doubt searching for similar solitude and relief from the oxygen-deprived confines of the soundstage—wandered into the same area and discovered me there. It was, I think, during our walk back to the set that he gravely told me that on the previous Saturday night he had driven to the top of a cliff and had contemplated leaping from its edge. As we presently can see, he was suffering from a depression which, now that I think about it, must surely have predated the filming of
Gone With the Wind
and not only required his absence but must also have continued in some measure after the film was finished. But on the film, despite his melancholy, he was unfailingly professional, capable, courteous, and considerate, I would never have guessed that he was a deeply suffering man—
serious,
grave, aware of his enormous responsibility, yes, but not despondent to a profound degree. Fleming, finding me so unexpectedly in that quiet sunlit spot, may have sensed a kinship of some sort, and perhaps this impelled him to make his anguished admission.

Shortly after that, Fleming filmed Melanie’s death scene, which included Mickey Kuhn, a seven-year-old actor, already a veteran of a half-dozen movies, playing four-year-old Beau Wilkes. No other fictional scenario would have cut closer to Fleming than a four-year-old boy losing a parent, but he knew how to control his emotions around children. Before filming, Fleming approached Kuhn’s mother and said, “I want to talk to Mickey.” In Kuhn’s recollection:

He just talked to me. He just knew how to get to people. He said, “You know, it’s a very sad day. Your mother is dying.” And he said, “How would you feel if your mother was dying? She’s dying, and she’s very, very sick.” I cried easily in those days. He patted me on the back and handed me to Leslie Howard, and on the count of five, as I remember, we went out and did the scene. One take. What you see is what it was. Afterward, he picked me up and held me and took me back to my mother. Because I was crying, you know, pretty hard. I don’t think what I did in that scene could be done just by acting ability. It needed someone like Victor Fleming to plant the seed, you know what I mean?

Kuhn, in turn, helped bring out Fleming’s emotions, as Leigh’s companion Sunny Alexander recorded. She wrote that Melanie’s death “was so real and everybody so emotional and so tired from working so hard that when [Fleming] said ‘Cut,’ everyone on that set was crying—the crew, the electricians, the third and fourth assistant—everybody was weeping as if we’d been to a memorial service or something. That’s how real it all seemed. Vic knew he had a good shot when he saw tears in everybody’s eyes—including his own.”

Gable didn’t agree. It took two days of rehearsal and shooting for Fleming to wring just the right anguish from Gable for Rhett’s mourning of Melanie. The director envisioned some exhausting takes on the horizon; he knew he would want Gable to shed tears when Rhett reacts
to
Scarlett’s miscarriage. Yet he had to move on without pause to prepare his back-lot Atlanta for a night scene with Scarlett, Melanie, and Rhett’s mistress, the notorious madam Belle Watling (Ona Munson). Once again, Leigh fought Fleming’s determination to convey Scarlett’s most unlikable qualities, such as her cynicism and snobbery toward Belle—but this time Fleming responded, “Miss Leigh, you can stick this script up your royal British ass!” Then he stomped off the set and didn’t come back.

It was April 27. “Confusion redoubled today when doctors ordered Victor Fleming to quit work,” Sidney Howard wrote his wife. Fleming said his doctor ordered him to bed after eighteen months of nonstop labor. He typically crashed from exhaustion at the start of his prolonged vacations. But no one in Hollywood had worked on such a relentless procession of complicated, big-budget projects (including
The Great Waltz
), and the pressure finally got to him, as it would two years later when his production of
The Yearling
collapsed in Florida. Victoria remembers exactly what happened during these episodes: her father was confined to his bedroom for two weeks, and the only person allowed to enter, other than his doctor, was his butler, Slocum.

Selznick announced the same day that Sam Wood, a competent and sometimes better-than-competent director (
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
), would spell Fleming. Wood was not in the same league as his predecessors, but, wrote Scott Fitzgerald, he “takes things a little less hard” than Cukor or Fleming. All the news reports indicated that Fleming would return in a week to ten days, but his absence did stretch into two weeks. During his recuperation, Selznick, Gable, and Leigh visited the director at his Balboa beach house. Selznick even offered Fleming a piece of the profits as part of his salary. But this risk-averse son of a citrus rancher responded with “What do you take me for, a chump?” On May 2, Charles Cotton, hoping to lift Vic’s spirits, paid him a visit, and for that he did dress up and perk up, as caught in the Fleming family’s home movies.

Gavin Lambert’s perceptive yet frustrating
GWTW: The Making of
“
Gone With the Wind
” (1973) recounts a Selznick-oriented version of Fleming’s departure in which the producer discovers from Fleming’s doctor that the breakdown was “feigned”—“a protest against what he considered David’s domination of the picture.” In this skewed rendering, the collapse is a tactic conceived “under the false impression that Selznick would promise to reduce the pressure if he came back,” and
the
hiring of Wood a ploy on the producer’s part to rouse Fleming to his senses. Some members of Selznick’s team, such as Rabwin, suspected Fleming of faking his illness—but Selznick’s own intuition in the April 14 memo and the testimony of Myrick and Fleming’s daughters back up its reality.

Wood shot the troublesome Belle Watling scene until early morning, then returned a few hours later to shoot Mammy helping Scarlett make her famous green-velvet-curtain dress. Working with the first unit and later with an alternate first unit (known simply in Selznick’s memos as “the Wood unit”), he filmed many scenes with Leigh, including Scarlett’s marriage to Frank Kennedy. (He directed for sixteen days when Fleming was out and eight more with his “Wood unit.”) But Gable didn’t warm to Wood. Although a May 3 Selznick memo says, “Mr. Gable has just told me he has withdrawn his opinion about Sam Wood and is very happy with him,” after Fleming resumed shooting May 15, Selznick steered Wood toward scenes centered on Scarlett and Ashley. The producer’s memos increasingly reflected his high evaluation of Fleming: Wood was being “very slow and obstinate,” and Fleming was keen at catching miscues such as Union artillery speeding over a bridge too quickly while Scarlett is hiding underneath. (Fleming, like Selznick, was obviously reviewing all the footage, not just scenes he’d shot himself; Menzies had taken the first swipe at the bridge scene.) Selznick also grew to appreciate Fleming’s feel for physicalizing drama: he liked Fleming’s “addition of Scarlett throwing the dirt in Wilkerson’s face,” though he thought it needed some improvements.

Selznick eventually concluded that Fleming should “direct everything, however seemingly unimportant. Vic is more relaxed now and also is very hopped up about the picture, and I think we should have the extra quality that he can give even to these seemingly unimportant bits.” Fleming also made an effort to show his approval of Leigh’s performance, congratulating her instead of shouting “Cut!” after she enacted Scarlett’s sobbing at Rhett’s exit.

Not everyone found Fleming more relaxed. When Canutt, who had done stunts on
The Farmer Takes a Wife,
showed up to complete his scenes as the lowlife who attacks Scarlett on a bridge, he “was amazed at the difference in [Fleming’s] appearance and behavior. He was cranky as all get out and seemed to have aged years. The first take on my scene with Scarlett was cut before I had hardly opened my mouth.
Fleming
stalked over to me and sneered, ‘All right, ham it up!’ He then went back to the camera, leaving me bewildered. Whatever his disposition, it certainly did not affect his talent for making great pictures.” Yet the bit player William Bakewell, an old friend of Fleming’s (possibly from Pickfair days) who portrayed the Confederate cavalry officer advising Scarlett that she “had better refuge South,” said he “got a warm greeting” for “one of the briefest parts I’ve ever had.”

Fleming’s first scene on his return was of Scarlett, ravaged by hunger and desperation, digging up a radish and declaring, “I’ll never be hungry again!” It was an all-nighter; the crew, Leigh, and Fleming arrived in Lasky Mesa, near Agoura, after midnight so they’d be set up to catch the first rays of the morning sun. The scene in the film as Scarlett beats the earth with her fists is the fifth take, Leigh’s exhaustion and anger real. A Leigh biographer wrote, “All the way back to town in the director’s car she sulked with rage,” but she apologized to Fleming the next day.

When Rhett finally proposes marriage to Scarlett, it’s with the questions, “Did you ever think of marrying just for fun? You’ve been married to a boy and to an old man; why not try a husband of the right age, with a way with women?” But the courtship is far from triumphant. Scarlett says she’ll marry him, but at least “partly” for money, and she won’t say she’s madly in love with him. A change comes over Rhett; he can no longer be his authentic self until he goes as far as he can with his love for Scarlett, even into faithful matrimony. His air of gaiety at her untamed liveliness, including her covetousness and greed, can’t quite camouflage his longing for her to love him absolutely.

Rhett’s hidden nobility comes to the fore in his devotion to Melanie and Mammy—each, in different ways, a pillar of rectitude. The romantic and domestic ideals beneath Rhett’s amorous deal making emerge as the anchors of the movie. That’s why it was so crucial for Fleming to get Gable to cry when Rhett feels that he has brought on Scarlett’s miscarriage. The movie needs this cathartic revelation of Rhett’s frustration at being unable to make his marriage work and his guilt over masking his marital pain with sarcasm and bravado. Afraid of the emotional exposure, Gable balked.

Rand Brooks, who wasn’t present for that scene, summed up what the other actors believed: Fleming “got Gable drunk to get that crying scene. He would call him every name in the book, say you can’t act
worth
shit, every name under the sun, go in and do it right or I’ll go off and leave you. Gable was a consummate technician, but didn’t have much range. But after that he did some very emotional things. You are what your directors tell you, and Fleming could say what he wanted to Gable, there was so much affection and respect there.”

De Havilland, who was there, recalls no drunkenness or verbal abuse:

Clark did rebel against crying in the scene . . . In the culture of that time, men were not permitted to cry. To weep was regarded as an act of ultimate unmanliness, a sign of unacceptable weakness. No wonder Clark rebelled. This reigning view (plus, perhaps, a fear that he might not be able to summon the tears—technically a difficult thing to do) explains Gable’s resistance. The idea of crying not only embarrassed him as a man but was unsuitable, so he thought, to his career. He did not want to disappoint or alienate his vast and admiring audience. Victor insisted, of course, that it was essential to the scene and to the film that Gable weep. When Gable reluctantly agreed to film a weeping Rhett, not only Victor but also I tried to reassure and encourage him. Then, just before the scene began, we sensed that Gable had at last committed himself, and when the cameras rolled, the tears were there and Clark was wonderful.

Fleming actually shot the scene twice—once with tears, once without—so Gable would feel more at ease knowing he had a fallback. The journalist Gladys Hall observed that afterward, “Clark crept to his bungalow via the back porch of the sound stage, slithering across the yard as though afraid that someone would see him, would speak to him. He wasn’t himself for the rest of the day.”

Selznick’s story editor Val Lewton, later known as RKO’s master of low-budget horror filmmaking, conceived the most elaborate and expensive crane shot ever made: the camera pulling back and up to show Scarlett picking her away among hundreds of wounded Confederate soldiers in the Atlanta railroad yards. “I clearly remember my father talking about it,” says Val Lewton Jr. “He said he wrote the scene as a joke, knowing it would be impossible to shoot.” (Lewton had tried to dissuade Selznick from buying Mitchell’s novel.) But if Lewton
thought
it up and Menzies designed it, on May 20, Fleming was the one who called “Action!” on this staggering vignette of the wages of war, ending on the tattered battle flag of the Confederacy. Mitchell had described Scarlett seeing the wounded remnants of the Confederate army “lining the tracks, the sidewalks, stretched out in endless rows under the car shed. Some lay stiff and still, but many writhed under the hot sun, moaning.” What makes it breathtaking in the movie is that you never lose sight of Leigh as the stunned, groping Scarlett maneuvers among the wounded and the dead—consisting of extras, dummies, and, for a jolting dose of realism, amputees from Sawtelle Veterans Hospital.