Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (6 page)

Catching up with the cast and crew, Dwan discovered that their alcoholic director had abandoned them, so he took on the directing job himself. He then continued casting about for unusual locations, filming one-reelers wherever he found picture-worthy settings. Eventually he settled in La Mesa, a dozen miles north of San Diego. (Hathaway’s mother, a musical comedy actress stranded in San Diego, began performing for Dwan, who used Hathaway as a juvenile bit player.) For a year in La Mesa, Dwan put out films at the rate of two a week. Neilan was his scout and actor as well as the driver of Dwan’s elaborate car, a Mitchell Six. When Dwan went looking for new locations and headquarters, Neilan suggested Santa Barbara, a sleepy coastal town that was a three-hour train trip from Los Angeles. It impressed Dwan with a variety of potential shooting sites: picturesque cliffs and spacious beaches; hills and mountains glinting with streams and dramatically cut by gullies; nearby Santa Cruz Island, with its primitive beauty; and aristocratic Mediterranean mansions, with their airy luxury. On July 6, 1912, the Flying A moved into a makeshift studio on an abandoned ostrich farm and began churning out one- and two-reelers.

The year before, Fleming had become the chauffeur for a prominent Santa Barbaran, a wealthy retired merchant and banking heir
named
Clinton B. Hale. “A chauffeur in those days was quite somebody—like a pilot is today,” John Lee Mahin once explained. For Fleming it was a steady job in a pretty spot when he was going through hard times. Clara didn’t join him in Santa Barbara; on grounds of desertion, he filed for divorce. By the time he had the papers served at the Venice Apartments in L.A. in 1912, Clara had gone back to Ohio. (She protested the desertion charge, but the divorce became final in 1915. Eva told her grandchildren that Clara succumbed to the 1918 flu pandemic; Fleming’s daughters remember hearing that she died of sunstroke.)

Tooling up Hale’s several luxury cars while living in a boardinghouse, Fleming was one of fifteen thousand Santa Barbara residents in the second decade of the century. It was a relaxed, pleasant town, and he even had family close at hand—his sister Arletta worked there as a clerk at a millinery shop. His new flame was the stage actress Charlotte Burton, a beauty from old Santa Barbara stock and, at twenty-one, herself a veteran of a failed marriage, with a six-year-old daughter also named Charlotte. Burton grew up in San Francisco. She had been acting in theatrical stock companies when the movie business lit up Santa Barbara. Her divorce—and the Flying A—brought her down the coast. In November 1912, the studio signed Burton to star in pictures and lauded her in its announcement for her “superb figure” as well as her “cleverness.” Her relationship with Fleming lasted several years. He began hanging around the Flying A and its footloose crews, watching pictures being made. He hired Albert Witzel, the photographer of choice for early movie stars and a forerunner of the glamour-master George Hurrell, to take a portrait of him for his new gal. Compare it with photos taken a year or two before, and the change is startling. The slablike lines of the chauffeur’s face suddenly seem hewn from red marble, and the right eyebrow is cocked as if he’s about to fire a fatal gaze on an adoring lover.

Dwan, thanks to Neilan, entered Fleming’s life at that time, too. “We developed some sort of engine trouble in that car we bought,” Dwan told Peter Bogdanovich, “and all the mechanics in Santa Barbara didn’t seem to be able to fix it.” Neilan said he knew a chauffeur for a wealthy family: “If I can find him, he knows more about engines than any guy I ever met.” So he and Dwan drove around looking for this fellow and at the estate where he was working did find a tall young man shooting a .22 with a Maxim silencer at a target in the garage.

Mickey
said, “There he is now,” and we drove up behind him. Without even looking at us, he said, “One of your tappet valves is stuck.” Anyway, while he was fixing the car, I looked around the garage and saw over in the corner a bunch of photographic equipment—still cameras. So I said to him, “Are you interested in photography?” He says, “You bet I am—I like it very much.” And he showed me some very pretty things he was doing. So when he got through with the car, I said, “How’d you like to go into the moving-picture business and be a photographer?” He said, “Well, that sounds pretty good, but I’ve got to eat—do you pay for it?” I said yes, so he joined us.

In reality it wasn’t so immediate. Fleming told Paramount in 1928, “I wanted to start in at the bottom. A person can’t begin at the top in any business. If he does, he’ll undoubtedly lose his balance and slip off someday.” So, probably following Cotton’s advice, he begged the company’s president, Samuel Hutchinson, for a job,
any
job, offering to work for nothing. Hutchinson complied and soon sent Fleming a note praising his efforts and awarding him a salary that applied even to his first “free” days at the Flying A. (Fleming framed the note.) Fleming often said, “My introduction to the business was an order to repair an old Williamson camera that had been chewing up good film in the manner of a buzzsaw with cordwood. I discovered that the brass plate was fouling the film and replaced it with a new aperture plate of steel.” But his first regular job at the Flying A was simply to drive cast and crew out on location. Fleming wrote in
Action
that the Flying A cameraman Roy Overbaugh was “instrumental in placing me in the [developing] laboratory, from which I graduated to become an assistant cameraman.” (Vic and Charlotte and Roy and his girlfriend would go on double dates.) Overbaugh, Hutchinson, Neilan, and Dwan all deserve credit for helping to launch Fleming’s career.

Fleming next struck up a friendship with Wallace Reid, a budding cowboy star who had “transferred his affections from bucking horses to racing automobiles. We had the love of speed and the interest in engines as a common bond and I can still remember some of the rides we took in those early vintage automobiles. Wally was a good mechanic. He was also reckless, a quality that was equaled only by the generous nature which made him one of the most lovable characters in the field.” Reid would be a top name at Paramount/Famous Players–Lasky from 1915 until his untimely death in 1923. (Introduced
to
morphine as a painkiller, he became addicted to the drug and died in a sanatorium.) There’s no proof, but if Fleming did occasionally do some “doubling for a star as an auto driver or an aviator,” as his publicity suggests, the star was likely to have been Reid. In the actor’s 1919 movie
The Roaring Road,
he plays an auto salesman who goes against the wishes of his car-dealership boss and races on the Santa Monica road course. For Fleming, it would have been a case of entertainment imitating life.

Yet another nascent Hollywood luminary was hanging around racing cars back then. Howard Hawks, the Pasadena rich kid who became Fleming’s pal, traced their relationship to a dirt-track race Hawks said they competed in when he was about eighteen and Fleming, now going back and forth between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, was about twenty-five. “[When] I used to drive a race car,” Hawks told the film critic Richard Schickel,

in one race there was a fellow coming up on the outside and I put him to the fence. We weren’t very polite about driving in those days. I won the race. After the race was over, I saw the fellow coming and I thought, Oh Lord, here we go. I’m going to have a fight. Instead he came up and he said, “That was pretty good. But,” he said, “you better not try it again because next time I’m going to run right into you” . . . We used to be on the point of a fight many times, but we never quite got into it. We always had to laugh before it started.

Hawks’s biographer, Todd McCarthy, has written, “True, false, or merely exaggerated, the story sets the tone for an enduring friendship that had a strongly competitive edge but that the men never allowed to become endangered by personal or professional jealousy, despite repeated opportunities over the years.” The story was probably false: an early example of Hawks’s retrospective one-upmanship. Hawks entered Cornell University in the fall of 1914. Fleming stayed enrolled in the hard-knocks school of early filmmaking.

In those days, knowing how to drive a car was as crucial to the makers of outdoor adventures as knowing how to ride a horse. Fleming wrote for a 1944
Lion’s Roar
article that in 1914 “we used to load director and principals in one car, cameraman and crew in another, and go looking for scenery that would look well as background. Sometimes we changed stories to suit the scenery!” As he put it in
Action,
cowboy
actors
brought “their own props from the bunkhouses and corrals,” and autos were so rare “that few actors knew how to drive and not many cared to attempt it. As a result, those of us who could drive were invariably used to double for the stars in those early thrill scenes when automobiles were in the picture.” Cowboys left the studio an hour early so they could ride to location on horseback. “The natives were never quite sure whether it was a hanging party or a movie outfit that rode down upon them before the sun was high in the heavens. We frequently used them for atmosphere.”

It was a good thing that Fleming had grown up with California landscapes, for he saw less of them when he became a cinematographer than when he was a driver—as a cameraman he had to carry equipment in his lap en route, and it blocked his view. Dwan and his Flying A compatriots put a premium on speed, utility, and movement. They were, Fleming wrote in
Action,
making
motion
“pictures and we moved nearly everything but mountains. We employed house painters and carpenters who could achieve their art with brush, hammer and nails, because regular stage technicians were familiar only with canvas scenery and structures of but one dimension. We even took on ‘powder monkeys’ from the mines to work as actors, because in the movies we used real fire, and when the script called for an explosion we didn’t do it with bass drums, but dynamite.”

Without ego inflation, Fleming painted a self-portrait of a gutsy youth making his way into a brave new aesthetic world sans stuffiness or rules:

There was no science of artificial lighting. It was the California sunlight, of course, that originally brought the motion picture industry to the West. In addition, we had the advantage of a variety of scenery which no stage artist could hope to duplicate. On one side there was the Pacific, on the other the snow-peaks of the Sierra and in between the rolling range. When the script called for a train scene we set up near a railroad right-of-way and if there happened to be water in the story, we located on a stream, or down beside the sea. Work began at 7 o’clock in the morning and we knocked off about 4 in the afternoon, usually with our picture in the can.

According to
Action,
even during Fleming’s days with the Flying A, its crews fell prey to marauders. When he was assisting Neilan on cam
era
during a location shoot in La Mesa, “bullets began to sing around the camera from a mesquite thicket. It was evident that the sniper wanted to wreck the camera rather than the operator, but that didn’t prevent me from flattening on the ground, and I wasn’t alone.” The culprit, Neilan decided, was somebody who “wants to put us out of business”—and not necessarily an agent of Edison’s patents group. “There was war among the independents in those days and on some occasions it filtered on down through the ranks.”

Nevertheless, the company put out two pictures a week so efficiently that many casts and crews ended up with four free days out of every seven. That left plenty of time for Fleming and Burton to savor Santa Barbara’s balmy hills and beaches or take that three-hour train ride to Los Angeles.

Despite, or perhaps because of, some scrappy filmmaking conditions, the pioneer cinematographer Overbaugh spoke of his Flying A years as a lark. Before the California outpost got a lab of its own, the film was edited on the camera negative, then sent to Chicago for printing. During one period of economic squeeze, the moviemakers could use only four-hundred-foot rolls of film instead of thousand-foot rolls (one thousand feet—roughly ten minutes’ worth of film—was the standard length of a one-reeler). When the action outlasted a four-hundred-foot roll, the actors would “play statue” until the cameraman could reload and let the director finish the scene. “There were quite a few incidents,” Overbaugh summarized, with amusing understatement. When a planned collision of two cars—one filled with dummies—went awry, the impact caused mannequins to “skyrocket” into State Street, where onlookers fainted dead away.

Dwan, the top man on the lot, said the corporate officers in Chicago were hands-off and congratulatory. “They didn’t make any comment except ‘Fine, keep them coming.’ ” Of course, Dwan made it easy for the company to be appreciative. He was a thrifty, all-business filmmaker. “We never shot over two thousand feet. I was very sparing with film—all of us were. Very often, if I had gone out and hired twenty extra horses and men for a chase, I’d make two or three extra chases since I was paying these men for a certain period of time, and so I accumulated a library . . . That was economical and saved us from doing it over and over.” Dwan even married within the company, to the leading lady Pauline Bush, in 1915.

“In the ‘middle ages’ of silent pictures,” Fleming once wrote, “a director concentrated on telling his story through action and pan
tomime.
It wasn’t particularly important what an actor was thinking while walking—or running—through the scenes. By makeup and broad ‘mugging’ plus explanatory titles, you established your player’s type and let it go at that.” But as he said in
Action,
“There was some fine acting in those old flickers on occasion and always there was the gamble of hardship and danger against fame and fortune.”

One of the few Flying A players to make a lasting impact was J. ( Jack) Warren Kerrigan—“a tremendous figure in those days. He was a wonderful individual, big, handsome, had a Roman-type nose,” said Harold Lloyd, who watched him from afar when Lloyd was an extra and Kerrigan was a star at Universal. “He was certainly the star of that lot,” said Lloyd. Fleming recalled, “He was known as the Gibson Man, because he seemed to be the masculine type which served as model for the drawings by Charles Dana Gibson, who was then America’s foremost illustrator . . . When he came to us at American Films, Kerrigan still considered pictures as a temporary medium, good enough to join between theater engagements. He became the idol of the screen.” Jack Kerrigan was also gay. “Quite a lady himself” is how Allan Dwan described him many decades later.