Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (67 page)

BOOK: Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)
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“We’d have big barbecues,” Sally says. “And Fourth of July parties which were huge. I remember Hoagy Carmichael singing to me on the piano.” Cookouts at the Flemings’ were memorable for the Hawks kids, too. “Jimmy Durante was there a lot,” says Barbara. “You’d go home to sleep and go back over for breakfast. Uncle Vic had dinner for breakfast; chops and steaks and things like that.” Jules Furthman, now Hawks’s (not Fleming’s) steady writer, was still a social standby. And Tracy visited occasionally with his son, John. “He neither spoke nor signed, but we would try to play with him,” says the girls’ pal Winnie Weshler. “And Clark Gable came once in a while, and like every other
movie-
struck teenager we were hiding around corners trying to get a good look.” Other regulars included Mahin, Lighton, “Uncle Hal” Rosson, and Douglas Shearer. Ward Bond “practically lived there,” says Sally. “There was no ostentation. Daddy protected his family . . . from the sleazy people. We didn’t even know what he did until we got older.”

Barbara Hawks never went to Fleming’s movie sets with his daughters as she did to the sets of her father’s other friends. “Family was separate from business with them,” she says emphatically, “one of the best ways to keep a family life.” The Fleming girls rarely even went out to the movies or restaurants. When the servants were off, the Flemings ate dinner at the Bel-Air Country Club. Victor intended to give his daughters security and normalcy.

“He wanted us to be regular kids, and we were,” says Victoria. To make sure of it, “he got involved in every detail of our wardrobes, down to our socks.” Sally says, “We were always wearing shorts and T-shirts, and [we were always] in the garden, so that we were cloistered, and we were protected maybe a little too much . . . and our life was very plain. We were always within the bounds of the house, or the grounds, or we were in a car going to school. We were never, you know, out and about.” Although not a churchgoer himself, Fleming sent the girls to Sunday school at a Methodist church and later enrolled them at Mary-mount, a Catholic school. “He wanted us to get some spiritual background and stay away from show business,” says Victoria.

When he came home, he would sit in a swing on the lawn “and give the children some time that was just time,” says their friend Weshler. “I remember making daisy chains and putting them around his neck.” If problems dogged him at the studio, he dined with Lu and the girls at 6:30 on the dot, then returned to MGM that night. Lu, an accomplished cook, grew her own bean sprouts for Chinese meals. Weshler says dinners were “disciplined”: “If we were eating Chinese food, we had to get it with the chopsticks; they would not let you eat with anything else.” Fleming’s daughters knew how to read him. Sally says, “He’d just fix you with a glare, and you knew. Whatever it was you were doing that you weren’t supposed to be doing, you stopped. That was all he ever had to do.”

Fleming stayed in constant touch with his mother and sisters, made occasional visits, and always arranged for them to have tickets to previews of his films if they wanted them. But he never sought their
approval
of Lu, and she never made much of an effort to be close to his family or make them feel welcome at Moraga Drive. Lu’s mother, who had remarried, and her two sisters, Georgiana Kohler, a seamstress, and Evelyn Wenchell, a bill collector, all lived in Los Angeles by the 1930s but were kept at a similar chilly distance. “I never saw my aunt Georgie at the house, never saw any of my mother’s relatives, never saw any of my father’s relatives,” says Sally. One Easter, Eva sent Fleming’s niece Yvonne over with a gift of two baby chicks. Slocum took them at the door but didn’t invite Yvonne inside. Whenever Edward Hartman was helping his father with repair work or performing some small jobs himself, “Lu was never around. I’d talk to Slocum, and if Clark Gable was visiting, I’d talk to him, but I never saw Lu. She was always out somewhere.”

Fleming seldom took Lu and his daughters on his annual Christmas visit to his mother’s house, but the always practical Eva demonstrated her own brand of hospitality. The Flemings wrapped their gifts to her in wide satin ribbons. Eva took the accumulated ribbons, shaped and sewed them, and gave them back to her son as a quilt. For the holiday, she would always make her son what she called a “sunshine cake” because of its multicolored sugar dots.

Sally says she and Victoria learned “constancy,” also “friendliness, outdoor living. We all had little boats to go in, and we all learned to fish. We had bicycles and motor scooters.” So did their father. In the years when gas rationing prevented Hollywood’s sailors and pilots from exercising their wanderlust in yachts or planes, he and Hawks anchored a loosely organized Bel-Air motorcycle gang, the Moraga Spit and Polish Club. The bikers would gather at Fleming’s place on Sundays for jaunts on local hills and canyons and across the San Fernando Valley, or for road trips as far away as Malibu or Las Vegas. Members included a third great director, William Wellman; Zeppo Marx; Gable, Robert Taylor, and an up-and-coming heartthrob, Van Johnson; the stalwart character actors Keenan Wynn and Andy Devine (who’d appeared in
The Farmer Takes a Wife
); the stunt driver Carey Loftin, who later worked on such milestones as
The Wild One
(1953) and
Bullitt
(1968); Bill Lear, who went on to create the Learjet; Vance Breeze, the pilot who tested the P-51 Mustang; and the aircraft manufacturer Al Menasco, also a close friend of Gable’s.

Fleming never saw motorcycling as a men’s-only activity. He took Judy Garland up and down the Bel-Air canyons in 1939; unfortunately,
she
nearly upended the actress Jean Parker and her husband, who were riding on horseback. And despite the Moraga Spit and Polish Club’s macho aura, several wives rode with the bulls: Dorothy “Dottie” Wellman, Dorothy “Doagie” Devine, and Zeppo Marx’s wife, Marion. Barbara Stanwyck occasionally came along, too, on the back of Taylor’s bike. The Devines and the Wellmans made a fabled drive to Vegas, sending club clothes ahead; white-jacketed waiters served them a catered lunch behind a billboard in the Mojave Desert. Slim Hawks designed Moraga Spit and Polish Club sweatshirts and jackets. She was the one who named the group to mock the men as motorcycle dandies. “They spent more time fussing with [the bikes] than they did riding them, really,” said Dottie.

The Harley-Davidson riders bought their bikes in Pomona from Ben Campanale, a Daytona 200 champion. “It was not what you think of today, in Harleys and black,” Hawks’s son, David, recalls. “They were mostly into English and foreign bikes.” Fleming owned a turquoise Harley, but his favorite motorcycle was British, black with pinstripes, called the Ariel Square Four because of its unique engine design. “It had a cigarette lighter custom-mounted on the handlebars,” David notes. The general wisdom of the club, says Devine’s son Tad, was that it was engineered like a Swiss watch and hummed like a sewing machine.

It was “just a group of guys who like to go out and ride motorcycles on Sunday,” said David. “Not ne’er-do-wells looking for people to bash—or a bunch of thugs, quoting the rumors.” He compares it to “the camaraderie and clubbiness” of drivers in the early days of sports cars. Motorcycling hadn’t won the notoriety that it would after
The Wild One.
Cyclists who passed each other would give each other a friendly wave or a thumbs-up. “We’d do it to motorcycle cops, too,” said Dottie, “’cause they’d wave back to us unless they were in a mean mood, you know—and then they’d see there was a girl on a motorcycle!” Dottie had a Harley of her own. During one Sunday barbecue and tune-up session, Dottie told Fleming and Gable that her bike sounded “kind of funny.” They “started pulling things out and testing and fussing.” When Dottie asked, “Hey, do you guys know what you’re doing?” they simultaneously said, “No!” They kept on fooling with the Harley until they put it back together, saying, “Now try it.” “Scary,” she thought. But it worked: “Oh, yeah, they knew what they were doing.”

A
score of bikers might take off from the Flemings’ house, then stop at the Devines’ five-acre “ranchette” in Van Nuys. Because the Flemings and the Devines farmed their land, they earned extra gas-ration coupons during the war and maintained their own gas pumps. (Fleming was always generous with his friends: “Howard [Hawks] borrowed large sums of money from Victor Fleming at various times,” said the screenwriter Wells Root.) Taylor sported a leather jacket, which protected him when he fell after his bike hit gravel rounding a curve. But David Hawks says most of the guys showed up as if dressed for a tailgate party, wearing “Levi’s or nice shirts or sweaters or jackets—sporting clothes, like you’d [wear] to go to a football game.” At the Devines’, they congregated under a walnut tree that spread between the house and the garage; carved on top of a large bench in the middle was “Liar’s Bench, Moraga Spit and Polish Club.” Tad Devine remembers that it would “take sometimes the better part of an hour for the group to assemble. Actors, directors, stuntmen, cameramen, grips, and electricians. It wasn’t just an elite group.”

Even though Mahin and Patsy Ruth Miller didn’t like motorcycles, the group would sometimes stop at the Mahins’ place in Encino, dubbed “the Farm.” (“It wasn’t exactly a farm,” Miller wrote, “but we did have a cow, some chickens, a large, mean rooster and some horses in addition to a few fruit trees. Sometimes, with any luck, we had a few ears of corn and a cucumber or two.”) Fleming would “exchange some studio gossip” with Mahin, Miller wrote, and tease her about her haircut, her woefully undisciplined dogs, or her “very conservative” politics—a session that might have shed some light on his own conservative but elusive politics. He was godfather to Mahin and Miller’s son, Timothy, who most vividly recalls being deposited on Fleming’s Kodiak bear rug: “I was put on a bear rug with a genuine bear head attached, fangs bared, and I was scared!”

The stars and directors generally left daredevil exploits to the stunt driver Loftin, the test pilot Breeze, or the roughrider Wynn, who later wrote, “I think [Vic] rode for the same reason I did—to hold onto the feeling of being still on the leeward side of forty.” Van Johnson, Wynn said, would just go “plugging along, enjoying himself, and leaving the hell-for-leather stuff to hotter heads than his.” David Hawks has “fond memories of nice calm cruises, and hill climbs up Topanga Canyon” when it was undeveloped. He says his dad and Fleming would “drive out and watch guys do the big hills; we’d do small hills.”

Gable
wasn’t the biker that Fleming was. As Wynn wrote in his autobiography,
Ed Wynn’s Son,
“He was converted into a steady rider, content to jockey along in the middle of whatever pack he was out with, just taking it easy.” But Gable was adept at improvising in a crisis. Wynn recalled a Fleming spill in 1946 that occurred when he was “twenty or thirty miles from his house, scrabbling up a deep rutted track.” Gable reworked his scarf into “a rough sling,” then offered to get “a Jeep or something” to bring him and the motorcycle home. Fleming would have none of it. “Forget it,” he said. “I rode this bike up here, and I’m going to ride it down.” The gang helped him on and got the motorcycle going as he “pushed off, making one hand work for two,” then endured “two hours of pounding” on what turned out to be a broken collarbone.

This bunch didn’t actively court danger, says David Hawks: “They just enjoyed going on local trips and had a good time and socialized.” Still, he wasn’t around when Fleming, Gable, and Loftin played motor tag at ninety miles an hour on fifteen miles of open road outside Los Angeles. Fleming was on his Ariel, Gable on his Knucklehead Twin Harley, and Loftin on a Rudge Ulster. “We opened them up, full throttle,” said Loftin. “Gable and Fleming didn’t think I’d be able to keep up with them on that Ulster. But they were wrong. I sat straight up like a farmer and moved to the head of the pack. As it turned out, my bike could easily go to 120, while Clark’s Harley could barely break 100.”

Slim didn’t ride motorcycles. Otherwise she was the perfect spouse to complete this picture. By the time Hawks married her, after a three-year wait for his divorce from Athole Shearer, she was competitive at manly sports. William Powell had called her “the Slim Princess,” and even though only the “Slim” stuck, she comported herself like royalty. Slim became the muse for Hawks pictures from
Only Angels Have Wings
to
The Big Sleep
that immortalized “the Hawks woman”—a gal who could talk as smart and tough as any man and dish out and take as much emotional punishment. Slim brought Lauren Bacall to Hawks’s attention after seeing her photo in
Harper’s Bazaar—
and Bacall perfectly embodied the Hawks woman when the director paired her with Humphrey Bogart in her first movie, 1944’s
To Have and Have Not,
then followed it up with
The Big Sleep.
Hawks even gave Bacall’s character the same nickname in
To Have and Have Not:
she’s billed as Marie “Slim” Browning.

With a homegrown sense of understated American high style, the
real-
life Slim decorated Hawks’s Moraga ranch herself. It would eventually include stables, barns, and a riding ring. “She was clearly very, very bright, very original in looks and thought, and very straightforward,” Bacall wrote of Slim. “And with humor.” Bacall found Lu at least “friendly.” Sally Fleming liked Slim’s occasional flamboyance. “She painted the toenails on Oliver, her poodle. She was very much that way, you know. Very clever.”

Before they made
To Have and Have Not,
Bacall was shocked when Hawks, over lunch, casually asked her, “Do you notice how noisy it is in here suddenly? That’s because Leo Forbstein just walked in—Jews always make more noise.” Slim told Bacall that her husband “didn’t want any Jews in his house” except for his agent, Charles K. Feldman—as if Slim and Howard didn’t know that Bacall was Jewish, too. Hawks’s anti-Semitism wouldn’t have upset Slim. Her father, Edward Gross, a prosperous German-born businessman, was an anti-Semite, also anti-Catholic and generally intolerant. Slim branded Lu with a tasteless nickname that reflected Slim’s own upbringing. “Mother was not a beauty,” says Victoria. “Her nose was not small and cute. And Slim decided this made her look Jewish. You know what she used to call her? Lu the Jew. All in love, you know.”

BOOK: Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)
5.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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