Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (60 page)

“Get off those dummies!” Fleming snarled at the extras through a loudspeaker at anyone stepping on the mannequins as the eighty-five-foot construction crane began its ascent, with the camera operator Art Arling, the cinematographer Ernest Haller, and, of course, Fleming on the camera platform. To Leigh, he rasped, “Slower, dear—slower!” as she was “threading her uncertain path among them—past the stretcher-bearers, the nurses and the huge soup kettles.” Wrote another observer, “The camera swings up and back, up and up until the lens embraces the whole scene with the small figure of Scarlett moving from upper right to lower left through the mass of men. Finally, the camera, high in the air, shoots past a Confederate flag. ‘Cut!’ yells director Victor Fleming. And that’s that.”

The same day Fleming doubly earned Leigh’s nickname for him, “Mr. Boom-Boom.” As for his nickname for Leigh: Arthur Tovey, a Civil War extra who also doubled for Leslie Howard, enjoyed saying that when the shot was finished, one of the amputees asked, “Is her name really Fiddle-de-dee?” He especially enjoyed telling that to Leigh.

It was Selznick who declared to Sidney Howard, “I, for one, have no desire to produce any anti-Negro film,” and labored with the writers “to be awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger.” When two bottom-feeders try to drag Scarlett from her wagon as she passes through a shantytown, it’s the “big ragged white man” (Canutt) who poses the urgent physical threat, not, as in the novel, a black man with “shoulders and chest like a gorilla” who “fumbles between her breasts” inspiring “terror and revulsion” as she’d never known. And when Scarlett’s second husband, Frank Kennedy, Ashley, and others ride out to avenge her, they’re not cloaked
in
the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, as in the book. Selznick noted, “A group of men can go out to ‘get’ the perpetrators of an attempted rape without having long white sheets over them and without having their membership in a society as a motive.” Fleming kept a rugged feel to the sequence in which the men return home from their raid feigning drunkenness. When Gable, Howard, and Harry Davenport (as Dr. Meade) began rehearsing “Massa’s in de Cole, Cole Ground,” he berated them for not sounding properly stewed: “That’s entirely too good! Why, you sound like a college glee club! It won’t do! Mess it up, get off key!”

This film’s Old South is full of happy slaves contented with their lot. We’re introduced to the New South with a disdainful shot of a jolly, rotund black carpetbagger singing “Marching Through Georgia” next to the evil Jonas Wilkerson, who attempts to grab Tara when Scarlett has difficulty paying her tax bill. But the actors imbue their characters with individuality and consciousness—especially McDaniel. Thomas Cripps observes in
Slow Fade to Black
(1977) that the result of these compromises and contradictions is a “confused ideological view that made it conservative and somewhat avant-garde at the same time.”

Cukor, Wood, and Menzies all did sublime work with the Kansas-born McDaniel (like the white actresses, she had to learn to drawl), but it was Fleming who shot the pivotal scene when Rhett and Mammy share a drink over the birth of Bonnie Blue Butler. It’s a testament to the film’s marvelous sense of characterization—and a tribute to Selznick, Howard, and the other screenwriters, as well as Fleming—that the scene celebrates the growing respect of Mammy for Rhett as much as it does the birth. “Who wants a boy?” Rhett asks drolly. “Boys aren’t any use to anybody. Don’t you think I’m proof of that?” A riptide of affection and approval surges through Mammy’s laugh. Maybe some of her joy springs from an offscreen practical joke sprung by Gable, who substituted real Scotch for her fake bourbon. “Had anybody else perpetrated such a stunt as Gable had managed,” Myrick later recalled, Fleming “would have hit the ceiling. As it was, he and the cast and crew had a ten-minute laugh and shooting was begun again.”

The much-maligned Butterfly McQueen, a Broadway actress who later said, “I hate listening to that silly, stupid handkerchief head when I see the movie,” also conceded that Prissy’s signature line, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies,” gave her a sort of immortality. Even Prissy has her moments of revolt: as the Union soldiers approach
Atlanta,
she turns a spiritual into a covert expression of rebellion, singing to herself, “Jes’ a few more days fer to tote de weary load.” McQueen fought against stereotypes and demeaning on-set behavior. “I didn’t want to eat the watermelon”—she didn’t—and “I didn’t want [Vivien Leigh] to actually slap me.” (In the slap, filmed by Cukor, no direct contact is shown, but there is a mighty thud on the sound track.) She later recalled that during filming, “Everyone was wonderful. Olivia made us laugh . . . and Clark Gable was such a considerate gentleman.” McDaniel said, “When I’m working, I mind my own business and do what I’m told to do.” Was that a statement of compromise or artistic discipline, or both? McDaniel told McQueen, “It was better to earn $1,250 a week playing the part of a maid than $12.50 being a maid,” and urged her to be more cooperative.

Blacks might have chafed privately at taking stereotype dialect direction from Myrick. But whatever the underlying prejudices of cast and crew, the making of the film appears to be an instance of melting-pot cooperation. The Atlanta native Evelyn Keyes wrote that when playing Suellen, “I never thought one way or the other about black actors sitting among us, that Hattie McDaniel even had a chair of her own, that they were earning more than I (easy to do).” In the most unaffected description of the whole production, Canutt acknowledged some friction with Everett Brown as Big Sam, in the scene where Sam saves Scarlett from the rapist Canutt played. But Canutt chalked up their trouble to the predictable tensions of a hard-nosed specialist teaching the ropes to a touchy performer. “I told him to quit behaving like a temperamental actor. Stunt work and staging fights was my business. If he’d just listen, we’d get the scene shot in such a way that we could both be proud of. Brown calmed down and, after a few more rehearsals the fight was filmed in one take with two cameras.”

The black extras didn’t automatically get that same respect. Early on, a group of them threatened a walkout unless the production removed signs marked “White” and “Colored” that had been posted over some portable toilets on an outdoor set. The pianist and singer Lennie Bluett, an extra marching with the Negro troops through Atlanta, says he and a friend kick-started the protest. He never knew whether someone put up the signs as some kind of sick joke.

“I got with the older guys about it, and they didn’t want to rock the boat, afraid we’d be kicked off the picture if we raised the stink. So I was the instigator—and a friend of mine, about eighteen or nineteen
then—
and we said, listen, we got to stick together.” They worked up the nerve to knock on Gable’s dressing-room door and asked the actor to inspect the offensive signs. “He followed me out and stepped across phone lines and cables, and we walked about twenty, thirty feet to where the toilets were.” As Bluett remembers it, Gable said, “I’ll be goddamned.” He got on the phone to Fleming, who called the prop master and told him, “If you don’t get those signs down, you won’t get your Rhett Butler.” The signs came off immediately.

Fleming was superbly caring in his direction of children—even babies. Phillip Trent’s second scene, nearly three months after he appeared in the Twelve Oaks “war room,” featured Melanie and Ric Holt as her now-eleven-month-old son, Beau. In the original setup, Trent, as a returning Confederate soldier, was eating on Tara’s steps with a fork and a wooden spoon. But Fleming, Trent recalled, gave the spoon to the baby to play with instead:

We rehearsed several times without the baby and it was okay, but when the cameras were rolling . . . he started crying when he was not supposed to cry. Four times Victor tried to shoot the scene, and each time the baby cried. Victor said, “He seems to think he gets a cue to cry from the camera.” He sat down on the steps next to us, he cooed and chuckled for the baby and even had orange juice brought to him because he thought the baby might be thirsty. Never once did I see Fleming lose his temper. I saw script changes brought to him all the time. I never once saw him act unprofessional.

“First they give me a forty-year-old Ashley Wilkes, then a British Scarlett O’Hara, and now, by God, a brown-eyed Bonnie Blue Butler!” So Fleming exclaimed in a memory related to Cammie King Conlon, who played Bonnie Blue, by her mother. “Supposedly, Selznick said if we light her properly and dress her in blue, no one will notice,” says Conlon. She had already performed in a Blondie movie. Most of her recollections come from her mother, who could curl her “stick-straight hair” and teach the young actress her lines. (Eleanore King, a journalist, married the Technicolor founder, Herbert Kalmus, in 1949.)

Fleming was usually direct and honest with child actors, but he felt compelled to pull some strings with Cammie. When she turned “bratty” one day, as her mother said, and kept muffing her lines, he
knelt
down to eye level and adopted a concerned parental tone: “I have a little girl your age. That’s why I come to the studio and work, so I can take care of my little girl. And you see all these men on the set? They have little girls and little boys, too. Well, when you don’t know your lines, we can’t do our work, and we won’t be able to take care of our little boys and girls.” She never blew her dialogue again.

As early as March 14, memos flew between Selznick and MGM regarding the director’s credit. Matters heated up in October when MGM insisted that Fleming’s name had to be placed on the last title card, following the cast of characters and immediately preceding the picture, according to the latest pact between the producers and the Directors Guild. Selznick ignored that rule, because his deal with Fleming predated the guild contract.

Throughout the autumn, Fleming assisted in the editing, and in October and November, he filmed numerous insert shots, additions, and retakes. Greg Giese, seen in close-ups of both Beau and Bonnie Blue as infants, learned from his mother that after the first preview on September 9 in Riverside, California, Selznick decided “the babies they’d used just didn’t look newborn.” Fleming shared that perfectionism—and instinct for emotional reality—and oversaw fresh baby shots featuring Giese.

During this period, Selznick made the disastrous suggestion to Fleming that the credits should thank the directors who received no official titles on the film. He got no further than Cukor and Wood before Fleming interrupted and told him he didn’t think it was necessary. Then he huffed off to remake the night scene of Scarlett, Prissy, and Melanie and her baby hiding from Yankee soldiers in a swampy creek under a bridge during a thunderstorm.

Real rain began to fall. Fleming believed that the scene would be impossible to light. Klune disagreed, and Fleming (in Klune’s recollection) snapped, “You do whatever these Jews want you to do, don’t you?” This outburst has fostered Fleming’s reputation as an anti-Semite. But there’s an air of roughhouse workplace comedy to the gibe, more along the lines of anti-bossism than anti-Semitism. Only under Selznick’s obsessive hammering is Fleming known to have uttered an ethnic remark on a set. The Paramount executive Sam Jaffe contended that Fleming was anti-Semitic when he knew him in the 1920s but, as evidence, cited one instance of Fleming imitating his Jewish Harlem accent before falling back on hearing the director call Selznick “that goddamned Jew” during the making of
Gone With the Wind.

America’s
ethnic badinage before World War II was coarse and unabashed, but Fleming appears to have kept it out of his workplace almost all the time. George Sidney, who shot screen tests at MGM before becoming a successful director himself (
Annie Get Your Gun, Scaramouche
), knew Fleming well, and recalled, “I’m half-Catholic, half-Jewish—Irish-Hungarian—and I never got an anti-Semitic feeling from him. You have to be small to have that kind of feeling, and he was bigger than that kind of thing.”

While Selznick was juggling credits and vanity (including his own), he was also battling censors to retain the most famous exit line in the history of motion pictures: Rhett brushing off a now-repentant Scarlett with “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!” (Minus the “frankly,” he has the same line in the novel.) Fleming had shot that scene twice—first, as a backup, with the weak “I don’t care.” The prospect of that substitution could not have pleased him any more than Selznick.

It wasn’t the only “damn” spoken in the picture, but it was the only one heard. Under Fleming’s direction (and, for a retake, Wood’s), Frank Coghlan Jr. played the young soldier who collapses in Rhett’s face during the retreat from Atlanta. Coghlan wrote that when the scene continues and another soldier tries to pick him up, he responds, “Put me down, damn ya, I can walk”—and that the cussing was audible when he first saw the film that winter in Los Angeles. Coghlan thinks that Selznick expunged the line, believing his “damn” undercut Rhett’s. If you watch for Coghlan’s bit in the current prints of the movie, his mouth does move visibly but without a sound, and the camera cuts away.

Selznick won the censorship war based on Rhett’s “damn,” not Coghlan’s. He compelled the Motion Picture Association board to amend the Production Code. “Damn” and “hell” could now be used when they were “essential and required for portrayal, in proper historical context, of any scene or dialogue based on historical fact or folklore, or for the presentation in proper literary context of a Biblical, or other religious quotation, or a quotation from a literary work provided that no such use should be permitted which is intrinsically objectionable or offends good taste.”

In 1940, Leigh toted up Scarlett’s flaws and virtues with conciseness and lucidity. On the negative side: humorlessness, pettiness, and “selfish egotism.” On the positive side: “Her courage. She had more than I’ll ever have.” Leigh saw through Scarlett
and
identified with her:
“
While Scarlett wasn’t the most easygoing type, neither am I.” Just weeks before Leigh’s death, the actress declared, “I never liked Scarlett”; maybe that’s why she doesn’t sentimentalize her. Seconds after Rhett walks out on Scarlett, this indomitable dame returns to form and lets the thought of Tara cheer her up: “I’ll go home, and I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day!” Writing in
Esquire
in 1961, the skeptical Dwight Macdonald praised the movie’s pace and tough-mindedness. Preferring it to a couple of Tennessee Williams misfires, Macdonald observed, “At least there is some doubt as to whether the heroine is a bitch—or as to whether the heroine is only a bitch. That makes it more interesting, more grown-up. Adult entertainment, that’s what I like about
Gone With the Wind.
”