Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (65 page)

Shall I ever be happier in my work? Will I ever get a better part than the little girl Ivy Petersen, a better director than Victor Fleming, a more wonderful leading man than Spencer Tracy, and a better cameraman than Joe Ruttenberg? I have never been happier. For the first time I have broken out from the cage which encloses me, and opened a shutter to the outside world. I have touched things which I hoped were there but I have never dared to show. I am so happy for this picture. It is as if I were flying. I feel no chains. I can fly higher and higher because the bars of my cage are broken.

On
March 6, Selznick wrote Fleming that he found the scenes he’d seen from the movie “enormously exciting” and “as for Ingrid, she’s everything that both of us hoped she would be under your direction. I am delighted and very happy about it.” Bergman wrote, “By the time the film was over I was deeply in love with Victor Fleming. But, he wasn’t in love with me.” Bergman concluded, “I was just part of another picture he’d directed.”

So was Saville. In June, as the producer began the final dubbing and prepared to give orders for the main title, he sent a night letter to Fleming at the Meadowlark Ranch and copied it with a message to him at Moraga Drive. Saville begged that Fleming grant permission for MGM to give him a producer’s credit—as only the director could do, based on his new contract. “I am certainly only human enough to wish for a recognized credit on
Jekyll and Hyde
on which I so willingly labored as producer. Believe me, working with you was both great pleasure and profit. I should not like my memories to be disturbed on such a pleasant association with regrets of the lack of recognition of my work.”

Fleming didn’t bend. Saville later said, “To tell the truth, I did not give a damn; I knew my contributions to the picture, and anyhow, my name stands on the Academy records as producer.” But he added, “Both Fleming and Sam Wood died at a very early age from heart attacks; having listened to both for hours on end on their tirades against the Establishment about the amount of income tax they had to pay, I am convinced they died of Franklin Roosevelt!”

24

The Yearling
That Wasn’t

While Fleming was wrestling with
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
preparations for
The Yearling
were stumbling ahead. Fleming had juggled projects before, with
Red Dust
and
The White Sister.
But
The Yearling
would ultimately stymie him.
The Yearling
would eventually be made not by Fleming but by Clarence Brown, starring not Tracy but Gregory Peck. Fleming’s reputation as a ruthlessly efficient fixer of faltering productions had taken on mythic proportions; that’s why everyone was stunned when he aborted his production of
The Yearling.

The director’s link to the project dates back to MGM’s acquisition of radio, TV, and motion picture rights for the book for $30,000 in May 1938. “I got them to buy it because I loved it so,” John Lee Mahin said. “I was taken off because I ‘didn’t realize the sensitivity of it.’ ” It was always slated for Fleming, and it was a natural to follow
Captains Courageous.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel, like Faulkner’s classic “The Bear” and Steinbeck’s
Red Pony,
chronicles a youth conquering the natural world and growing into manhood. The hero, Jody Baxter, and his father, Penny Baxter, share a long-standing vendetta against a bear, Old Slewfoot. The focus of
The Yearling,
though, is on Jody’s love for an orphaned fawn he adopts and names Flag. Jody’s struggle to keep Flag after the pet wreaks havoc on the Baxters’ modest spread in the Florida Everglades exposes the strictures of a hardscrabble life and the schisms of a family.

The problems started at the script stage. Because Fleming was working nonstop in 1938 and 1939, Mahin had to consult instead with the producer Sidney Franklin, who decreed, “Oh, of course, we can’t kill the deer”—to which Mahin responded, “What? You can’t kill the deer? That’s the
story
! This is the story of a boy growing up. He grows up because he’s got to kill the deer!” Franklin replied, “We buy lots of
things
that we change”; Mahin retorted, “You’re a fucking idiot and you’re going to fuck up this picture.” So Franklin decided whatever he was doing with the picture, he’d do it without Mahin. When Fleming’s back-to-back rescue jobs on
Oz
and
Gone With the Wind
conflicted with
The Yearling,
Norman Taurog got the assignment to make it with Fleming’s initial cast—Tracy as Penny and Gene Reynolds as Jody—but Taurog, too, moved on (he made four pictures in 1938, including
Boys Town
), and the project languished. But Fleming put it back in motion after saving Tara. Marc Connelly, having worked so well with him on
Captains Courageous,
took one run at the script. The playwright Paul Osborn, who’d recently penned his first screenplay,
The Young in Heart,
for Selznick, did the final version and got sole credit. He
did
retain the scene of the boy delivering the coup de grâce to the deer after his mother wounds it. That didn’t satisfy Mahin, who told Franklin years later, “But you had him dreaming of the deer at the end instead of dreaming of digging the well, of killing the bear, of being a man.”

After doing reconnaissance on Florida locations and meeting Rawlings, Fleming wrote to the author, on February 9, 1940, “By the time
The Yearling
has been made into a picture you will probably wish that you had never sold the rights to a moving picture company. Besides having us in your hair . . . you are bound to be delighted by every boy’s mother and father who feel he would be a perfect Jody, everyone who has a pet deer and thousands of others who feel that they could in some way break into the movies.” Fleming added, “As to personal interviews, why don’t you inform your ‘Black Adreena’ to shoo them away with a studio address in their hand as they go out the front gate.” (“Black Adreena” more likely reflects how Rawlings, a southern lady of the old school, referred to her maid Adrina in private conversation, rather than Fleming’s own racial terminology.) He closed with a compliment to one of her lesser-known books: “By the way, I loved ‘Golden Apples,’ and you might as well know I’ve fallen in love with you.”

In December 1939, Rawlings inscribed a copy of
The Yearling
for Tracy: “Nothing finer could happen to Penny Baxter than to be brought to life by your great gift for the portrayal of man’s courage and man’s kindness.” Tracy remained on board as Penny, but Gene Reynolds had outgrown the juvenile lead. Howard Strickling sniffed a possibility for spectacular publicity: a talent hunt for Jody in its own
way
as elaborate as Selznick’s for Scarlett O’Hara. Strickling issued the announcement the following February: “Most extensive nationwide talent search ever conducted for motion picture role begins this week . . . Qualifications are that youth be between ages of ten and twelve of slight build standing approximately four and one half to five feet tall. All attempts to locate such boy in Hollywood have failed.” It’s hilarious to think “all attempts to locate” a youth of that age range and height in Hollywood “have failed,” but Strickling was aiming to bring unprecedented ballyhoo to a family adventure.

The ace MGM talent scout Billy Grady made stops in five southern cities, including, in April, Atlanta. In the
Atlanta Constitution
(as he did in the big papers at each stop), he placed an artist’s rendering of a sensitive, almost girlish-looking Jody cradling the head of Flag. Police had to control the mob that showed up to try out. “It seems every other kid had a harmonica and none of them knew anything but ‘Old Black Joe,’ ” Grady remembered. “There were kids who could double for Wallace Beery, and imitations of Jimmy Cagney and George Raft were common. Anything to get my attention.”

But twelve-year-old Gene Eckman—by his own account “skinny and weak-looking. A towheaded blond. And very sensitive”—really did fit the likeness. His mother took him to the open casting call at the Henry Grady Hotel—Eckman recalls, “It was like, you know, ‘you stay, you leave, you stay, you leave’ ”—and he became one of five finalists. His father, a Western Union electrician, stayed in Atlanta when Gene and his mom went to Hollywood, all expenses paid. Gene auditioned with Tracy on the
Boom Town
set. “You’re supposed to look at him like he’s your father,” the test director told him.

In late summer, after Fleming and Tracy spent three days looking at footage of potential Jodys, they took their daughters on a sailing getaway to British Columbia. On September 9, Eckman got the part. He went back to Georgia before returning to California for what turned out to be a two-year stay. “And my mother came out,” Eckman remembers, “and my brother Harold, who was four years younger than me, but we looked very much alike, and he was my stand-in. They gave him special shoes to make him look as tall as me.” His training included spending time with fawns at the studio zoo.

Memos flew between MGM and the advance crew in Ocala, Florida. The unit manager Jay Marchant sought the advice of “forestry men” to help his inexperienced troupe round up fawns. He shipped
sample
nipples to MGM so studio workers could learn to feed the fawns as they were herded into a studio pen. He gathered eighteen fawns, two does, and one buck from Florida and from Pennsylvania’s state game commissioner in Harrisburg and set out with them for the West Coast. From New Mexico, Marchant advised MGM that “2 sick fawn in crate should be moved separate from rest if they live today,” though “hot animals traveling okay so far.” A few days later, from L.A., he wired the Pennsylvania game commissioner, “All fawn arrived in fair shape with exception of 2 from your farm which died making a total of four delivered from you.”

MGM underestimated the complexity of the production from the outset. Although Mannix had wanted a second unit to shoot all “atmospheric” shots by September 1940, the preproduction second-unit team headed by Richard Rosson didn’t make it to Ocala until mid-January 1941. Once Rosson and his crew got there, what Mannix called Fleming’s “exacting” nature sabotaged their productivity. Fleming had grown to love Selznick’s use of Menzies’s storyboards and production sketches on
Gone With the Wind.
Based on his and Marchant’s location hunts, Fleming hired an artist to illustrate scenes in pastel colors. And he wanted Rosson to match this concept art precisely.

Fleming, like others at MGM planning the film, didn’t realize the roughness and unpredictability of the environment. “Central Florida had become a huge cattle ranch,” wrote the crewman Wally Worsley. “In cold weather [the cattle] would sleep on the highway at night because the pavement was warm. There were lots of smashed cattle, cars and people, and one learned to drive carefully at night.” Chain gangs moved beside them down the road or zipped along in their prison vans on the highway. Ocala itself was an impoverished small town, with one nighttime hangout, the Chicken Shack, where Rawlings would occasionally show up, “sit alone at a table, talking across to us, and tossing off shots of local whiskey.” Once she went deep into the Big Scrub to fetch the grown man who as a child had been the model for Jody. He kept the 250-watt ceiling lamp in his motel room on all night, because, he said, “I thought that’s the way it was supposed to be,” never having slept in a room with electricity.

Because Fleming was so specific about his requirements for atmospheric images, the crew had to wait, and wait, for each scenic shot. Sunrises required 4:30 a.m. wake-up calls; if the sun didn’t hit the earth perfectly, the company spent the rest of the day shooting snakes and
alligators.
It took two weeks to capture what Fleming had designated a must-have image of “two egrets in the foreground of a wide river with beautiful clouds.” Sidney Franklin sent his brother Chester to Ocala in March to serve as a second-unit action director. Franklin wrote that Chester “had had great experience with animals, and had made the beautiful picture,
Sequoia,
about a deer and a mountain lion.” He wanted Chester to take charge of “a great many animal scenes,” including “a bear fight with dogs, and a very important sequence, almost a ballet, in which Jody and Flag, the fawn, run through the woods while a herd of deer dance behind them.” But Chester, too, chafed under Fleming’s demand that his shots follow production sketches; he thought Fleming had diverted power from the directing staff. “After all, Sid,” wrote Chester, “when an art director comes in and tells the director to put the camera here or there, it’s all wet.”

The advance unit’s most ambitious effort was to film the confrontation between Old Slewfoot, the bear, and Jody and his father, Penny (with doubles for Eckman and Tracy). The bear playing Old Slewfoot, though, was “not interested in pictures from any angle,” Chester wrote Sidney, after the animal knocked his crew around. For the close-ups of Old Slewfoot, the filmmakers planned to use an actor who played plug-uglies, Harry Wilson, in a bear suit. By the time Wilson’s big scene arrived, spring had become oppressively hot. The handlers released the hounds, Wilson stepped toward them, “waving his forelegs menacingly” (wrote Worsley), and promptly collapsed from the heat. To discover how to build a better bear suit and bear head, Fleming wrote to a hunter friend, James L. Clark, who was knowledgeable about techniques used for mounting and preserving animals in museums. “He wanted more finesse in the actual shaping of the head,” wrote Clark, “and particularly the mouth and lips so that he could photograph a closeup of the head showing a wicked snarl.”

Back in Hollywood, Grady still needed to fill the role of Jody’s friend, the frail, magical Fodderwing, with a boy who could match Eckman’s accent. Fleming and Franklin hadn’t yet agreed on how to cast strict, grief-hardened Ma Baxter and the raucous Forrester men, partly because Fleming was intent on using fresh faces. Sidney joked, nervously, that Tracy “has been playing Mr. Hyde to such an extent that we’re afraid to out him with the boy for fear he would tear him to pieces. It seems to be affecting his disposition, so we have to leave the poor guy alone until he gets out of character.” Fleming settled on Anne
Revere
to play Ma Baxter. Educated at Wellesley College and acclaimed on the Broadway stage, she seemed an odd choice for a matriarch to Franklin. But she’d go on to give a full-bodied, Academy Award–winning performance as a heroic rural mother in
National Velvet
(1944) and a piercing, haunting performance as a warping mother in
A Place in the Sun
(1951). Franklin commented, “On account of Vic liking her so much better than anyone else we had, we all seemingly agreed it wouldn’t be a catastrophe.”