Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (62 page)

The repercussions of Steinbeck’s non-negotiation with Fleming rattled through MGM for several months. Mayer wouldn’t permit Tracy to voice the narration for
The Forgotten Village,
the Steinbeck-
written
documentary about modernization encroaching on a rural Mexican hamlet. When Fleming and Tracy returned to the idea of making
The Yearling,
Steinbeck spoke of taking court action if
The Yearling
movie used Rawlings’s name for her boy hero, Jody, because the boy hero of
The Red Pony
was called Jody, too. (When Milestone filmed
The Red Pony,
the boy’s name became Tom; Steinbeck’s son, Thom, was born on August 2, 1944.)

After years of wrangling, Fleming signed his first long-term contract with MGM, to start on January 1, 1940, and last until December 31, 1944. To get his signature, the studio had to guarantee that he could terminate his contract if Eddie Mannix, Mayer, or Loew’s president, Nicholas Schenck, left the company, pledge not to loan him out to other studios, and remove morality and insurance clauses that Fleming found insulting (he thought these clauses were “directed against troublesome actors and actresses, and he feels that he does not fall in this category as a troublemaker or drunkard, etc.,” an MGM functionary reported). And, as summarized in a studio memo, “On pictures directed by Fleming, we agree there shall be
no producer credit
(this in lieu of his request that he be permitted to produce and direct every second picture if he so desires).”

Fleming kept operating much as he had before. He did prep work for
The Yearling,
including sussing out locations in Florida. He shot retakes of Tracy and Gable in Conway’s
Boom Town
and laid plans for a Gable vehicle based on the nineteenth-century Western con man and outlaw Soapy Smith. ( Jack Conway made it as
Honky Tonk,
with Gable playing a fictionalized version of Smith named Candy Johnson.)

That June, Fleming helped Gable buy a five-hundred-acre cattle ranch in Arizona. Hedda Hopper reported that they spent a week “putting up in tourist camps, and nobody recognized them.” Fleming and Tracy looked at test shots for a potential Jody for
The Yearling,
then took their daughters (Tracy’s son, John, stayed home with his mother) on a sailing vacation in British Columbia, where they visited Fred Lewis. Mannix wired a request for Fleming to okay the characters’ wardrobes for scenic shots. “We should prepare immediately to get the best of all scenic beauty to be shot before the first September,” wrote Mannix, but preproduction on
The Yearling
would stumble on for months.

Something about this career plateau made Fleming meditative with the press, and he gave a frank interview to Sheilah Graham. Her
lover,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, had written the 1939 speech for her that coined the comparison between Fleming as a “man’s director” and Cukor as a “woman’s director.” But when she asked Fleming about that label (apparently she was the only person ever to ask him directly), he quickly tore it off, saying, “I like directing women, too.” He discounted reports of his fights with Vivien Leigh. He painted himself, proudly, as one of the silent-film directors who “were thrown out on their ears and told they were through,” naming others such as John Ford, King Vidor, Frank Borzage, and Henry King, then drily noted that only two of the stage directors brought in for sound had stayed on top, Cukor and John Cromwell. The way Graham quoted Fleming, he portrayed the end of his tenure at Paramount melodramatically: “After six months of idleness they decided to give me another chance. I made
The Virginian
(one of the most successful pictures of all time) and then walked out on them!” He also said he considered
Reckless
his worst picture. He acknowledged his new contract, and said, “But I was paid just as much fifteen years ago. The only difference was, you could save most of it then; now you give it to the government.”

Back home, Lu’s daughter with Arthur Rosson, Helene, divorced from Jaime del Valle and with a six-year-old daughter, began dating a young MGM contract player, Lee Bowman. Fleming emphatically did not approve—yet Helene’s view of Fleming as an elegant man-about-town might have bled into her passion for Bowman. Helene revered her mom’s husband. “I was practically in love with [Vic],” she told David Stenn. “Women just fell all over themselves to get at him, he was so attractive: tall, dressed beautifully.” Helene regarded the debonair six-foot Bowman as a similar catch, but Fleming took an instant dislike to him. Bowman cut against Fleming’s goal to keep his household out of the Hollywood limelight and untouched by phoniness and glamour.

When Helene and Bowman became a match, she’d been divorced for five years, and he’d just appeared in his finest picture by far, Leo McCarey’s
Love Affair,
the apex of the “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry” kind of movie. (It’s Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne’s film.) Helene and Lee first met at the West Side Tennis Club in August 1939. Lee’s younger brother Hunter says, “Helene was a good tennis player and she was not stupid, by the wildest stretch of the imagination. She set her sights on Lee, and got him.” His meticulously publicized romances had included Joan Bennett, Lucille Ball, and Joan Crawford, but Hunter discounts that second Joan. “We were a pretty snobbish family,” he says. “He
might
have laid her a few times, but no way would Lee have married someone like that.” Snobbery—and the ambition that went with it—provoked Fleming’s immediate disdain. “Daddy thought [Helene and Lee] were social climbers and kind of phony, you know, although [I thought] Lee was a wonderful man,” Victoria says.

The director of
Bataan,
Tay Garnett, a hardy filmmaker like Fleming who’d been a Navy aviator and a silent-comedy gag man (and also, like Mahin, had been married to Patsy Ruth Miller), said Bowman “looked as if he were a young ambassador to the Court of St. James.” Bowman’s cultivated aura wasn’t put on—he wasn’t that good an actor. His thrice-married mother, Elizabeth “Bessie” Pringle Brunson Fauntleroy Bowman Clyde, grew up as Southern aristocracy on Kingstree, the Brunson family plantation outside Charleston, South Carolina. (They also had timber and hunting properties as well as farmland in Georgia and Florida.) But there was a hex on Bessie’s private life. Both her mother and her grandmother would fatally burn—in accidents with a fireplace and an overheated stove, respectively. And her first husband, a dentist and mineral-water entrepreneur from Staunton, Virginia, contracted a debilitating illness.

Bessie bore her second husband, Luther Lee Bowman, three sons: Lee, Pringle, and Hunter. Luther, also from a wealthy Staunton family, was a handsome go-getter who tried to establish a brewery in Cincinnati with his brother; when it failed, he became an income tax collector. After that marriage fell apart, Bessie married a wealthy distant cousin, William Clyde, who supported Lee’s pursuits of singing and dancing at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music as well as varsity athletics (gymnastics and track) in public school.

Lee befriended the Cincinnati native Tyrone Power, and in state track meets challenged the future fastest man in the world, Cleveland’s Jesse Owens. When Bowman entered Columbia University in 1932, he was bent on lawyering. Fred Astaire movies changed his life. “He saw the improvement Astaire had made [from film to film], and said, hell, if he can do it, I can do it,” says Hunter. He enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts; a talent scout noticed him in his graduation play. At age nineteen he had a Paramount contract. Bowman drove to Hollywood in a Chrysler convertible with red leather seats. Even before he landed his first movie, in 1937,
Internes Can’t Take Money
(the first film adaptation of a Max Brand Dr. Kildare story), he was popping up in Louella Parsons’s column. But the Bowman hex continued. In
January
1937, Pringle, the middle Bowman brother, died of peritonitis after a Puerto Rican gang attacked him and his roommate, William Chatfield, an art student and old friend from Cincinnati, in Harlem. Neither had been robbed; both had been drinking.

Bowman’s mottled family history might have rubbed Fleming the wrong way, and his behavior spurred the director’s distaste and distrust. When the actor tapped a cigarette against the back of his hand to pack its tobacco—in front of King Vidor, no less—Fleming erupted, “Don’t do that. I hate anybody who does that. That’s really cheap and effete and that’s awful to do that in front of somebody.” (He, of course, was a roll-your-own kind of guy.) Winnie Weshler, a childhood friend of Victoria and Sally’s, says Fleming used to call Bowman “that half-assed talent.” Victoria says, “My father had certain ways of thinking about life, certain standards, certain ways to operate, as we all do. The Bowmans had another. And their way of operating was never approved of by my father, because he would consider that sort of phony. They were movie stars and getting into the movie magazines, and, you know, all that bullshit. Daddy did his best to keep us away from the movie scene.” The Bowmans inflamed Fleming’s frustration because they showed him that he
couldn’t
keep his household at Moraga Drive distant from the movie scene. How could he? He’d become the biggest director at MGM. In February 1941, Helene eloped with Bowman to Tijuana. The idea of Bowman—who had just climbed from a Paramount contract to one at MGM—as part of his extended family sent Fleming into emotional orbit.

Luckily, another MGM purchase from Paramount put Fleming back into the director’s chair. In March 1940, MGM announced that it had bought Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
from the rival studio, including rights to a stage adaptation that had grafted two contrasting female characters onto Stevenson’s sexless story. The studio saw it as a showcase for Robert Donat, the critical and popular favorite who beat Gable’s Rhett Butler for the 1939 best actor Oscar with his moving performance in
Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
Donat doubted the story’s dramatic possibilities. He also worried about Americans messing with its Englishness and asked an MGM executive whether the studio could hire a British director or “fly a first-line American director” over there. Mannix planned a London production in May, but by then German submarines were blocking commercial Atlantic crossings. The Battle of Britain began in July.

Victor
Saville, head of MGM production in Britain, had commanded back-to-back successes with Sam Wood’s
Chips
and King Vidor’s
Citadel
(1938). Saville was vacationing in Hollywood when Mayer closed down his British office. The mogul persuaded him to stay on in America and handed him several prestige assignments, including
A Woman’s Face,
a remake of a Swedish Ingrid Bergman vehicle, starring Joan Crawford as a woman whose facial disfigurement and its surgical cure mold and alter her behavior. So it was eerily natural for Saville to segue to
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

When executives started looking for a Hollywood actor’s actor to take Donat’s place in the double role, the obvious choice was Tracy—and Tracy’s favorite director was Fleming. As with many of Fleming’s singular achievements,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
was an assignment that became personal. (It helped that Mahin had been writing the script for Donat.)

Fleming told the movie’s publicists that he set out to make a version more realistic than the 1932 Rouben Mamoulian production that won an Oscar for Fredric March or the 1920 silent (directed by John S. Robertson, shot by Fleming’s mentor Roy Overbaugh) that garnered raves for John Barrymore. Fleming meant he wanted his version to be
emotionally
more realistic—and he succeeded, thanks to his gut understanding of conflicting drives and his nose for the contemporaneity of classic tales. Yet the film would be more realistic physically, too. Tracy wished to play Hyde without any makeup or prosthetics. The filmmakers settled on a compromise: Hyde’s makeup merely exaggerated Tracy’s features. It was light-years removed from the ape-man look of March’s Hyde or the bullet-headed bogeyman of Barrymore’s. This
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
makes you believe that Hyde
could
bring a pretty girl under his sadistic sway.

In an underrated performance, at once trenchant and sensually alive, Tracy combines his gifts for tortured nobility and raffish urbanity. As Jekyll, he conveys the frustration of being a “good” man in Victorian times. In polite company he can’t be affectionate with Beatrix, his betrothed; even in the demimonde he’s not supposed to receive and return a kiss from Ivy, the good-hearted barmaid. His frustrations become concrete in flamboyant hallucination sequences more effective than any of the suppressed-memory dream sequences in Hitchcock’s
Spellbound.
Best of all,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
has Ingrid Bergman as Ivy, in full bloom. Bergman was under personal contract to Selznick, who ran footage of her for Fleming while they were working on
Gone
With
the Wind.
Selznick knew that for his protégée, this director’s interest would reap professional dividends.

George Sidney joked that in his early days at MGM he had “a secret service” arrangement with Fleming to prepare sets and conduct screen tests. The most memorable audition was for Ivy. He was shooting a redheaded starlet named Edythe Marriner when Fleming crossed the soundstage, crooked his finger at Sidney to come over, and asked to talk to Marriner for a moment. In a terrific illustration of what Hecht meant by “aloof and poetical,” Fleming tried to make her understand the scene by telling her a parable. She should think of herself as a lady whose man “comes back from traveling around the world. Everybody else has brought their women big presents of satin and silk and jade and beautiful jewels. And all this boy has brought you is a precious vessel containing sacred waters from Africa and the Orient.” As Sidney remembered, “Victor asks the woman if she understands, and she says, ‘Oh yes, oh yes.’ Then I tell the cameraman to get ready. I see Edythe’s finger prodding me, come here.” He goes over and she pleads: “Tell me, what the fuck did I say I understood?” Ingrid Bergman, as Sidney said, got the part instead, but right after that Edythe “broke loose”—under her screen name, Susan Hayward.