Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (75 page)

“A very dour, sort of dry, charming fellow, but kind of a sour act,” is how King Vidor once summarized his buddy Vic. “Sort of gruff with everything and everybody. Like a big dog can be gruff or something.” One day in 1944, Fleming jumped into Vidor’s office and asked his old friend to go with him on a road trip to Arizona. Fleming said they had to meet at Ash Fork. Vidor could get there only by train. When he asked Fleming how
he’d
get there, Fleming replied, “Don’t start asking questions.” When Fleming met Vidor at the station, he was with his pal Sterling Hebbard, who sold ranches and was swimming in extra gas coupons. With Fleming and Hebbard in the front seat and Vidor in the back, they started east. Whenever Vidor asked where they were heading, Fleming would growl, “What are you, a woman or a wife? You want to know where you’re going? Why do you have to know where you’re going?”

Vidor thought these interchanges reflected how Fleming had come to relate to his wife. “He was very sort of tough with his wife, [Lu] Rosson, always.” Vidor was speaking after the fact, and reviewing his comments years later, Olivia de Havilland figures Fleming “may have been in a very tense state of mind” or enduring “a hangover.” Beyond that she notes, “Actually the words were droll—it was the way they were said that upset King. And obviously, Vic had not yet decided where they were going—the whole adventure having been conceived as directionless.”

Gradually, Vidor realized that Fleming and Hebbard “didn’t know where they were going either,” in a jaunt that stretched into a two-thousand-mile round-trip. They were “just going to look at ranches.” When they came to a town like Albuquerque, Fleming “always went in first and asked did they have a good Mexican restaurant in this town, that’s the first thing . . . I liked Mexican food about once a week or once every two weeks, but he liked it every night, every night and probably lunch if he could find it.”

After
Albuquerque they headed southeast to check out a ranch in minuscule Muleshoe, Texas. As they drove north, through New Mexico, they flirted with the idea of stopping at the ritzy Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, and Vidor got excited. He’d been to the town as a boy and wanted to see it again. But a hundred miles away Fleming decreed, “The Broadmoor Hotel—a lot of pimps and prostitutes lying around in short bathing suits around the pool. Who wants to see that? Let’s turn around and go to Taos.” They did Taos, then Santa Fe, where everyone seemed to have a good time. So when Fleming came to Vidor’s room the morning after their night out in Santa Fe and said, “Come on, get up, we’re going back to Phoenix,” Vidor stood firm: he was staying put. “But that was typical,” Vidor said. “Sort of gruff, ordering and bossy . . . But if you were a friend, that meant he could treat you this way.”

27

A Confounding Political Life

George Sidney, who knew Fleming only in studio settings, said, “I can’t tell you if he was Democratic or Republican!” Others assumed that he was conservative because he befriended men like the strident right-winger Ward Bond. He maintained a blunt and often confounding irreverence to the political turmoil of his day: Joseph L. Mankiewicz recalled him laying down bets in 1940 that Great Britain would tumble before the Germans in six weeks.

Although Fleming was well-read, and had acquired broad firsthand knowledge of the world as well as an idiosyncratic and elegant personal style, he retained some of the naïveté of a self-taught San Dimas boy. He couldn’t gauge when a gambler’s bravado could be taken for bias or malice, and he made some inane private political moves that he thought would have real repercussions. From age thirty-five until his death, Fleming registered as a Democrat for every election except two. But Lu told their daughters that he signed up to vote in the primaries for the weakest Democratic candidates and thus help the Republicans. His bogus party affiliation didn’t stop him from continually grousing about President Roosevelt’s tax policies or, in the mid-1940s, enlisting in a Hollywood crusade against communist infiltration. And it doesn’t reveal his connection to any ideology or political platform.

Fleming was proud of his independence, disdainful of bosses and bureaucracies. He was likely drawn to particular leaders and issues. Politics didn’t preoccupy him, but it wasn’t alien to him, either: His mother’s cousin H. H. Kinney had been the secretary to the corruption-prone Los Angeles mayor George E. Cryer. Kinney was the conduit for city jobs for the husbands of Fleming’s sisters Arletta and Carolyn, and in 1927 briefly embroiled the family in scandal when Arletta’s husband,
Ralph
Morris, attained a research engineer position even though he had failed the civil service examination.

Elia Kazan was eulogizing Fleming’s friend and partner Bud Lighton when he wrote, “He was against the New Deal of Roosevelt, believed that a real man would not accept relief, that it amounted to pity. He despised the East Coast, its ideology and the civilization there. He was for the frontiersman, who lived on a large tract of semiwilderness and asked no favors of his neighbor or of nature, the man who lived where he couldn’t hear his neighbor’s dog bark. Lighton despised communism but despised ‘liberals’ even more.”

Fleming’s own politics must have been similar—but just how similar, and how intensely they mattered to him, remain enigmatic. Unlike Lighton, Fleming enjoyed New York and sophisticated company and even the friendship of a known communist, Dalton Trumbo. Like Lighton, he believed in America as the country of the self-made man. “I have no use for a poor man, because he hasn’t got the guts or intelligence to make something of himself,” Fleming said in 1947 within earshot of Joseph Steele, Ingrid Bergman’s manager/publicist in the 1940s (who also wrote that the director “laughed uproariously” after saying so).

Apart from griping about the tax bite the New Deal put on his income (he was in the confiscatory top bracket), Fleming kept close counsel on politics with friends like Mahin, Gable, and Hawks. Even his daughters are hazy on the subject. “I used to hear Daddy complaining about the communists,” says Victoria. “He complained that Dore Schary was soft on them. Otherwise, I don’t remember him speaking in terms of individuals. It was always just the communists in general.” (Schary, production chief at RKO when that studio distributed
Joan of Arc,
was one of the few voices at the 1947 hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, to assert that communism was “not as great a danger as it is represented to be.” He opposed the firing of the Hollywood Ten before they were jailed for contempt of Congress.)

During his days with Fairbanks, that other Roosevelt, Theodore, was Fleming’s idea of a great man—and Theodore Roosevelt, of course, was a trust-busting, ecology-minded Republican, and later a Progressive. Fleming was equally hard to categorize. In the late 1930s, as a favor to Melvyn Douglas, he signed on as a sponsor of a benefit recital for war refugee relief given by Douglas’s wife, the actress-singer
Helen
Gahagan. She didn’t enter Congress as a liberal Democrat until 1945, but Fleming’s sponsorship is exactly the kind of well-intentioned activity that could have gotten him blacklisted or at least pegged as a fellow traveler of communists during McCarthyism’s height in the early 1950s. (In their 1950 contest for a California U.S. Senate seat, Richard Nixon dubbed Douglas “pink right down to her underwear.” The charge was scurrilous, but Nixon won. Douglas, in return, pinned Nixon with the sobriquet “Tricky Dick,” which followed him to his grave.)

The sole sight of Fleming in direct political action comes from the deft liberal screenwriter Philip Dunne. With a Harvard degree and no future on Wall Street after the 1929 stock-market crash, Dunne, a son of the renowned newspaper humorist Finley Peter Dunne, used a letter of introduction from the movie critic of the
New York World
(where his brother was the drama editor) to get a job with the Fox studio boss, Winfield Sheehan. Dunne wrote skillful adaptations such as
The Count of Monte Cristo, How Green Was My Valley,
and the version of
The Last of the Mohicans
that was Michael Mann’s inspiration for his politically aware 1992 remake. Dunne was present at the creation of the Screen Writers Guild (the forerunner of today’s Writers Guild of America). “It was officially non-political,” he wrote in his 1980 memoir,
Take Two,
“but inevitably it had a liberal bias, even though one of our most respected presidents, Charles Brackett, was a Republican. For one thing, the very right of labor to organize was in itself a major political issue in the 1930s; for another, the minority of ultraconservative writers had split off to form the rival Screen Playwrights, leaving us with a center and a left, but no right wing.”

In 1937, the SWG sent Dunne to a Directors Guild board meeting to test union solidarity. There he observed a telling scene starring Fleming. It gives Fleming the charisma and professional stature John Ford had when he berated the right wing of the Directors Guild, particularly Cecil B. DeMille, for trying to depose Joseph L. Mankiewicz as its president. But Dunne’s description puts Fleming in a comic, not heroic, light. “When we arrived before the meeting was called to order,” Dunne wrote, “the directors were discussing the Detroit sit-down strikes.” The CIO automobile workers had pioneered the strategy of going to their assembly lines and simply sitting down on the job—not doing the work. Fleming, “generally an engaging fellow,” had an extreme “reply to this new gambit of militant organized labor. ‘If I
were
running Ford or GM or Chrysler,’ he growled, ‘I’d get a lot of guys with machine-guns, poke them in through the windows, and mow the bastards down.’ He pantomimed firing a machine-gun and repeated, ‘Mow ’em down! That’s what I’d do!’ ” Dunne went to the meeting with his fellow SWG member Albert Hackett, co-writer of
The Thin Man
and later
It’s a Wonderful Life
and that tepid 1946
Virginian
remake. They noted that discussion grew heated only when it turned to the studios’ refusal to do business with the Directors Guild. “Vic Fleming jumped up and restored a semblance of order,” Dunne wrote.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, fellows,” Vic said. “Let’s not get excited. Let’s not go off half-cocked. No strikes or demonstrations or any of that Communist shit.” Fleming pointed to his fellow top-of-the-line directors, including Wyler, Capra, Ford, Milestone, and Mamoulian. “All you guys are working,” he said. “I’m working. Here’s what we do. Tomorrow morning we walk on the set as usual, sit down beside the camera—and that’s it. We don’t rehearse, we don’t roll the camera, we don’t do one goddamn thing. We just sit on our ass all day. Then we’ll see what those bastards of producers will do about it.”

After what Dunne called “reverent silence” from Fleming’s directing peers, the screenwriter Hackett, looking all “wide-eyed innocence” but with “a lethal wit,” responded, “That’s a great idea, Vic, but what do you do when Louis B. Mayer pokes a machine-gun through the window and starts mowing you down?”

Fleming delivered his only other recorded and explicit political statement a half-dozen years later when he became a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—an organization for self-styled superpatriots and anticommunist zealots that grew out of the Screen Playwrights. The group officially lasted just sixteen years, sputtering into obscurity under the belligerent Bond. At its peak in the early 1950s, when John Wayne and the labor leader Roy Brewer were its presidents, it served as a clearinghouse of sorts for those wishing to get themselves removed from the Hollywood blacklist of real and suspected communists.

When it began, in a display of high-powered presumption and naïveté, farcical in its details and tragic in its consequences, a small core of vitriolic right-wingers—all from MGM—attempted to enlist a federal agency in their effort to clean house and scour away any taint of
political
subversion or radicalism. On November 30, 1943, the MGM security chief, Whitey Hendry, and the screenwriter George Bruce invited Bruce Baumeister, from the FBI’s Los Angeles office, to a meeting at the studio. George Bruce mentioned (according to Baumeister’s report) that “persons in the various studios were grouping together to combat influences degrading the motion picture industry generally with particular emphasis being placed on fighting the communistic elements.” The following February the Motion Picture Alliance went public with its inaugural meeting at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Fleming was there; Mahin joined the group after he returned from service.

In the years just before America’s entry into World War II, HUAC had tried to gin up outrage about supposed communist infiltration of the Hollywood workforce—and had gotten nowhere. (In one notable misstep from 1938, the committee’s star witness implied that ten-year-old Shirley Temple was a communist dupe.) But despite a comical mixture of hubris and ineptitude more suitable for a Marx Brothers movie than an anti-Marxist movement—indeed, one MPA member, Morrie Ryskind, co-wrote
A Night at the Opera,
and another, James Kevin McGuinness, contributed to the story—the MPA created an environment of suspicion and fear in which political spite and paranoia flourished. It catalyzed the 1947 HUAC hearings, which brought on the blacklist of the 1950s.

Along with Gary Cooper and Donald Crisp (the only actors in attendance), Fleming was one of 75 directors, producers, executives, and writers (all Screen Playwrights) who gathered at that first session. MGM dominated the MPA leadership, with 13 out of 24 positions; in another month, when membership had grown to 225, the FBI estimated that 200 came from the studio. When Fleming participated in the MPA on its executive committee, in 1944, virtually all the organization’s activities originated at MGM. James Kevin McGuinness, an MGM story editor as well as writer, had earlier founded the Screen Playwrights with Mahin, Howard Emmett Rogers (
Tarzan and His Mate
), and Patterson McNutt (
Curly Top
). McGuinness organized private meetings for the MPA in late 1943 and 1944 and was the first chairman of the MPA’s executive committee. Sam Wood was the MPA’s first president. The three vice presidents were Walt Disney (who contended that communists tried to wreck his studio), the director Norman Taurog, and the MGM designer Cedric Gibbons; the secretary
was
Louis Lighton (then at Fox); the treasurer, Clarence Brown; and George Bruce was executive secretary. Fleming was named to a ways and means committee with Gibbons and Brown.