Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (63 page)

Both Saville and Bergman claimed that Ingrid was cast as Jekyll’s virginal Beatrix, not Ivy; they said Lana Turner was cast as Ivy and that Bergman lobbied for the two to switch roles. Actually, Saville and Fleming handed Ivy to Bergman long before they cast Turner as Beatrix. (Bergman turns up on a January 28, 1941, cast list for
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
as Ivy; no one is listed playing Beatrix, and it further notes that both Maureen O’Hara and Ruth Hussey were testing for the role. A studio memo dated five days earlier complains, “No sketches can be made or wardrobe started for Beatrix until she is cast.”) Miriam Hopkins had scored a sensation playing “Champagne Ivy” against March’s Jekyll and Hyde in the 1932 version, and Bergman, as she wrote in her memoir, “loved this girl, this barmaid Ivy,” the opposite of “a Hollywood peaches-and-cream girl.” In Bergman’s account, she proposed playing Ivy to Fleming, who said, “That’s impossible. How can you with your looks? It’s not to be believed.” According to Bergman, she made a test “without telling” Selznick, and it won Fleming over. When Selznick said, “But she just can’t play that kind of role,” Fleming sent him the test, and “David pulled a face and said, ‘Well . . . okay.’ ”

Bergman
may have been, as Selznick put it, “the Palmolive Garbo,” but even in screen terms she was no virgin. She had broken through internationally in the Swedish and Hollywood versions of
Intermezzo
(1936, 1939), playing a young pianist who has an affair with her married musical mentor (Leslie Howard in the Selznick-produced American film). In the recently completed
Adam Had Four Sons,
none other than Hayward had stolen the picture from her as a bad girl. Bergman wasn’t going to allow any similar kind of theft on
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
(Of course, Bergman would reach her peak five years later as the heroic ex-slut of Hitchcock’s
Notorious.
)

Married since 1937 to Dr. Petter Lindström and with a three-year-old daughter, the twenty-five-year-old actress wrote that she fell in love with Fleming during filming (stories of her involvement with Spencer Tracy are apocryphal at best). Bergman, whose father died when she was twelve and whose first romance, at eighteen, was with the forty-one-year-old stage director Edvin Adolphson in Sweden, would, like Clara Bow, discover both a romantic focus and an inspirational father figure in Fleming. “Although I’d known many fine directors in Sweden, this man added another dimension to what I’d known before. As soon as he came close to me I could tell by his eyes what he wanted me to do, and this has happened with very few directors in my career; I could tell if he was satisfied, in doubt, or delighted.”

Turner, for her part, was the Sweater Girl, undeniably sexy but not yet, in the public mind, the platinum blonde adulteress of her iconic role in Garnett’s 1946
The Postman Always Rings Twice
or even the doomed good-bad chorine of
Ziegfeld Girl,
which didn’t come out till April 1941. (In fact, MGM’s publicists put out feature stories saying
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
would be the picture to help her shed that Sweater Girl image, even in the part of Beatrix.) In Turner’s memoir,
she’s
the one who wanted to exchange parts. She says she was cast as Ivy and implored Mayer to let her out of it, because “that role is so deep, I don’t know if I could trust a director enough to let me try to reach those emotions.” According to Turner, it was Mayer who said, “What about Beatrix? A nice, well-bred Victorian girl.”

The truth: before Turner entered the picture, MGM announced Laraine Day as Beatrix. Whether because retakes were needed on Day’s active project,
The Bad Man,
a Wallace Beery vehicle, or because the outré dream sequences scared off the proper Mormon actress, Day bowed out. Turner didn’t join the cast until February 3, the day before
shooting
began. The idea that Bergman and Turner swapped parts just made for a better yarn. But the yarn is plenty strong without that knot.

Detail obsessed as always, Selznick urged Fleming and the cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg to study how the cinematographer Gregg Toland had photographed Bergman on
Intermezzo:
“Toland did such wonderful things with her that you might as well all get the benefit of seeing the picture.” But Fleming understood without anyone’s help that Bergman could be the image of carnal purity. He and Ruttenberg did so well with Hyde’s monstrosity and her imperiled animal innocence that Cukor and Ruttenberg duplicated the gaslit effects of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
for Bergman and Charles Boyer in the cat-and-mouse games of
Gaslight
(1944). “He got things out of me that were different from anything I had done before,” she said of Fleming to a reporter for the
Times
of London. “What more can an actor want?”

Mahin’s script sets a bold context for the story. It begins in church, with a minister (C. Aubrey Smith) praising Queen Victoria for her righteous example. The pews include Beatrix and Jekyll and his prospective father-in-law, Sir Charles Emery (Donald Crisp)—and also a heckler (Barton MacLane) who scoffs at Victoria for taking all the fun out of life. When other parishioners hustle the heckler out, Jekyll follows and learns that he’d been a model citizen and devoted husband before an explosion rocked his mind. Jekyll decides he’s the perfect test case for separating good and evil in the soul of man. Unfortunately, the poor bloke dies before the doctor can put him to the test; Jekyll has been too busy juggling the demands of scientific research, free clinical work, an upscale practice, and a high-society catch like Beatrix. He reckons the only way to advance his research is to become his own guinea pig.

All the major
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
films—Barrymore’s, the March-Mamoulian production, and Fleming’s—illustrate the Achilles’ id of Jekyll’s psyche in exactly the same way: the doctor encounters a demimondaine who makes him feel temptation without acting on it. In both Fleming’s and Mamoulian’s versions, Jekyll and his friend Dr. Lanyon rescue this lower-depths flower, Ivy, from an assault, then take her to her modest flat, where Jekyll briefly checks her aches and pains. Ivy doesn’t know that Jekyll is a doctor and takes his examination as a proposition. In Mamoulian’s version, the scene becomes a striptease, staged to the director’s written specifications. Hopkins’s Ivy, a saucy wench, makes a frontal assault on Jekyll. As soon as he checks out her bruised thigh, she grabs his hand and presses it down on her flesh. She
asks
Jekyll to turn his back as she gets ready for bed, then slithers off her stockings and undoes her dress and the rest of her underthings. When Jekyll turns his head, he sees what we do—her naked profile between the sheets. She pulls him to her for a kiss, her bare back to the camera, just as Lanyon enters and interrupts the scene. She keeps flashing her comely leg, rocking it back and forth on the side of the bed, as she asks Jekyll with a croon to come back “so-o-o-n.” After he exits, the words seem to whistle through his head.

Ten years later, the Production Code put any similar streak of nudity out of the question. Fleming gives Ivy’s come-on to Jekyll the even hotter glow of love at first sight. As we find out later, this Ivy isn’t an entertainer like Hopkins’s “Champagne Ivy,” just a barmaid at the cabaret known as the “Palace of Frivolities” who amuses the customers when she sings along with the stage show. After Jekyll and Lanyon (Ian Hunter) chase off her attacker, Bergman’s Ivy lifts her head to see Dr. Jekyll standing there appraising her, with a half smile. She beams at the sight of this calm gent. She’s an embattled innocent with a sexual readiness and an instinctive, premoral integrity that make her difficult to resist. Every instant in the sequence becomes erotic from the moment Jekyll lifts Ivy to keep her off her twisted ankle. He carries her to her upstairs room and drops her on the bed and turns up the gaslight. He asks, “You want me to have a look at you, don’t you?” Ivy reacts, “I don’t know. Yer looking, ain’t you?”

In Mamoulian’s version, March reacts lightly and gaily to Hopkins’s unrestrained lust. In Fleming’s, Bergman’s ardor deeply affects Tracy. Who wouldn’t succumb to Bergman’s Ivy? Everything about her is erotic and touching, from her voluptuous form to her Scandinavian-cum-Cockney vocalizing. Saville said he coached Bergman “most mornings to perfect her accent—we decided on the very posh upper-Tooting style—‘Ouw, yereversonice, aren’t yer.’ ” Bergman’s Ivy is delighted that Jekyll asks to look at her side. “Yer aren’t half the fast one, aren’t you?” she asks, taking down her blouse. At that point, Jekyll could be another literary doctor, Tomas, in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(1988), telling his lovers, “Take off your clothes.” He makes clear to Ivy that he and Lanyon are physicians. When she can’t pronounce or comprehend the word “physicians” and is startled to learn he’s a doctor, Tracy becomes more distant and comical in his demeanor. But she continues to come on to him. He’s the one who’s over his head when Bergman bares her ankle and leg for his inspection.

In a bit of business that Fleming and Mahin pick up from the ear
lier
version but imbue with more sensuousness and gravity, Jekyll warns Ivy that her garter is too tight; it could impair the circulation. She offers it as partial payment for his care, then kisses him. She’s mortified that he might think of her as a whore and not as a woman in love. “You’re a girl with a heart just where it ought to be,” he reassures her, “maybe a little too generous, that’s all.” He tells her that if she knew him, she’d know he didn’t want to be there; they were just being “foolish.” Ivy retaliates for the insult: she declares
she
knows that their kiss “wasn’t all in fun”—and Tracy’s sudden sober expression suggests Jekyll’s agreement. Under Fleming’s direction, these two robust performers manage liquid emotional shifts.

The composer Franz Waxman, in his potent, subtle score, uses the period song “See Me Dance the Polka” even before we hear it in Ivy’s saloon. This merry strain grows ambiguous as it follows Jekyll and Ivy through their bedroom scene and then comes up again unexpectedly as Lanyon scolds Jekyll for loose behavior. (“Polka” had been a giant hit for the songwriter George Grossmith, co-author of
The Diary of a Nobody
and a sometime Savoyard; Martin Savage played him in Mike Leigh’s
Topsy-Turvy.
)

The backdrop to the last temptation of Dr. Jekyll is the refusal of Sir Charles Emery to let his daughter Beatrix wed him soon. In Mahin’s script, Sir Charles doubts Jekyll as much for his public displays of affection as for his misplaced professional priorities and his heretical view that he can isolate man’s good and evil sides. As he locks horns with Sir Charles, Tracy’s solid, confident Jekyll represents adult independence from meaningless proprieties, not youthful ardor like March’s Jekyll, who urges his fiancée to push up their wedding date in their very first scene, and not innocence like John Barrymore’s. (In the Barrymore silent, Jekyll’s prospective father-in-law, a habitué of Victorian London’s sexual underworld, thinks Jekyll isn’t experienced
enough.
) Tracy’s Jekyll moves from accompanying Beatrix at church to mock-nibbling her knuckles in the carriage outside. Rather than a matinee idol jumping out of his skin, he’s a well-rounded grown man with a forward-looking sense of what it means to be well-adjusted. It makes more sense that when
his
cork pops—in one hallucination, literally—the effects are catastrophic.

Although Bergman said Tracy reassured her at the start of filming (“You know, I’m scared of my part, too, but then aren’t we all? I guess it’s the name of the game”), she thought he “wasn’t really very happy”
during
the picture. She surmised, “He didn’t like doing these two characterizations; the sane doctor and the monster Hyde. He wanted to play himself, his own personality, which of course was the warm and marvelous personality that made him a great movie star.”

But there were practical reasons for his grouchiness. An illness kept him out of the studio for most of January, delaying the tailor Eddie Schmidt from properly adjusting the costumes, designed to contrast the grotesque dandy Hyde with the understated gentleman and shirt-sleeved researcher Jekyll. And Tracy wanted to undergo the transformation not just without tricks or makeup but even without a mysterious potion. He wished to portray Jekyll as a good doctor and Mr. Hyde as a result of drugs and alcohol, carrying on depraved acts of hedonism and/or cruelty in a disreputable neighborhood or town.

In Tracy’s vision, Beatrix would still have been the virginal fiancée, but Ivy would have been Hyde’s dream prostitute, aching for debauchery. Hepburn said he wanted her to play both parts. According to Man-nix, “Mr. Mayer thought that if Spence flipped out when he drank booze and took dope, it would be too close to home for a lot of people, and besides, it would make a ‘message picture,’ which L.B. hated.”

But Tracy’s determination to steer Hyde away from out-and-out monstrosity persisted, to the ultimate good of the picture. “I even suggested that Hyde never be pictured, except maybe the back of his ear or something like that, but it never worked out,” he said. The relatively spare makeup adjustments that Fleming approved flare Tracy’s nostrils and sharpen his nose, give him devilish laugh-lines around unblinking eyes, and make his mouth more simian and his mane and eyebrows more ominously hirsute.

In the March-Mamoulian picture, the photographer, Karl Struss, revived a trick from the leper scenes in the silent
Ben-Hur
to depict what Vladimir Nabokov called Jekyll’s “hydizations”: Struss rendered jolting facial transformations in real time by shooting colored makeup with rotating colored filters. But MGM couldn’t duplicate the results and didn’t want to order special filters from the Corning Glass Company. And Fleming and his editor, Harold Kress, hoped to avoid imitating the previous picture, anyway. Kress observed that when Mamoulian and Struss shot the star’s entire face and body, “Fredric March dropped his hands down, they cut to the hand, hair started growing, cutaway, cutaway, all cutaways.” (In the pivotal scene, Mamoulian does, indeed, swing Struss’s camera down from Jekyll’s
face,
then jump-cut and move to one hand, then go back up and down and jump-cut again before descending to the other hand.)