Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (81 page)

Time stopped when I got aboard that train. It became dark and in the darkness I was lost. Why I did not think to do some drinking I don’t know. I went to bed for fourteen hours and I slept fourteen minutes, forgot to order breakfast on the Century, and had no food or coffee until 1 p.m. That much I remember. Someone met me at the train. I’m very much afraid she found me crying. A hundred years old and crying over a girl. I said, “There’s no fool like an old fool.”

The first Antoinette Perry Awards (or Tonys) were given on April 6—Easter Sunday. So it was either sacrilegious or fortuitous that Ingrid Bergman was one of two best-actress winners that year; the other was Helen Hayes, who presented the younger woman with the award.

Anderson enjoyed listening to Ingrid and Sam Wanamaker on the radio that night, but found writing the script a long haul. From the moment the movie became a real possibility, it was conceived as a straightforward historical drama, not a Pirandello-cum-Brecht hybrid like the play, and even though he’d worked on major movies years before, the scope of this epic was formidable. Attached to a package of revisions he sent Easter weekend, he wrote, “Just how long it’s going to take to finish, I can’t be sure. I’m trying to cover ground fast
so
that you’ll have a script to work from. At the same time I’m trying to do a good job, and so I can’t hurry too much.” Anderson did relax for a few hours and paid a congratulatory call to Bergman and the cast at the Alvin on April 11. Three days later Wanger fired off a telegram asking Anderson to move to California forthwith. Wanger might have made the call, but Fleming’s dissatisfaction fueled it. To Ingrid, Vic wrote:

Angel:

About the script. It is not good. Much too long. Max has not done what he said, has not stayed on the story line, keeps on
Joan of Lorraine.
What’s wrong? Walter Wanger and I have talked to several writers—we are going to put someone on at once. Yesterday I spent with Walter trying to bring him up to date on the story and the business. Today I came to the Roach studio. Our gang are all hard workers, like beavers, and all seem happy. Monday we have—or rather you have our new corporation business manager to see. He comes very well recommended having had charge of Columbia Studios. Walter and I hope he will keep the Corp on their toes and get the picture started on time.

Angel—Angel—why didn’t I get a chain three thousand miles long with a good winding device on the end. Better quit now before I start telling you I love you—telling you Angel I love you—yes—yes—yes—it’s ME.

Bergman saved her frank reactions for notes back west to her friend Roberts:

I get so angry when I read Fleming’s letters. He seems to have to spend day after day with business people; everyone trying to find out where and how to get the last dollar out of the picture. I know Victor has talked business much more than story, but it is important I guess to get these things organized after all. He said, last time we spoke on the phone, that now he is only concentrating on story . . . I’ll be the bridge for everyone who wants to come to Victor with ideas. Don’t think for a moment I believe I can turn Victor round my little finger, but I’ll try to talk like an angel, be strong like a god, and dangerous like a devil. Forward my friends. Now starts the battle for Joan!

Though
Bergman quotes Fleming’s letters in
My Story,
they are not in her collected papers at Wesleyan University; her letters to him, which he tied up in ribbons, didn’t survive his death. Sally recalls her mother telling her father that she’d found the letters. He snapped, “I am aware of your awareness.” Lu mentioned the contents of just one of them. She told Sally, “Ingrid wrote that she adored [him] so much she’d gladly sleep in some hay—or whatever you call those things you keep hay in—at the foot of his bed.”

On Anderson’s first day back in Los Angeles, when he still had the energy to fulminate over an improperly worded press release, Fleming took the playwright to dinner at Wanger’s house and introduced him to the screenwriter Andrew Solt. Since the war ended, Solt was on a hot streak that included a hit comedy,
Without Reservations
(1946), starring John Wayne and Claudette Colbert, for the director Mervyn LeRoy. In the course of that movie, Colbert’s character, the author of a visionary and best-selling novel, was dubbed a contemporary Joan of Arc, and the search for an actor to play her hero was compared to Selznick’s hunt for Scarlett O’Hara.

Whether any of that caught Fleming’s attention, Solt was the man he hired to help Anderson learn (or relearn) the ropes of movie writing. (In the early sound era, Anderson had written
All Quiet on the Western Front
and
Rain.
) Solt earned his equal credit, and the two writers, and Fleming, had an amiable partnership, despite some obvious miscues between Anderson and his director. Anderson thought Fleming “agreed to the opening.” That would have meant using actual voices for the saints, as Anderson had done on the stage. If Fleming entertained the notion of keeping the voices, it was because of
The Song of Bernadette,
which both pictured Bernadette’s vision of the Virgin Mary (an uncredited Linda Darnell) and gave the Virgin a voice.

Indeed, on April 25, Fleming arranged for Anderson to screen
The Song of Bernadette
to see how a tale of tested faith, hinging on several rigorous cross-examinations, could have some narrative urgency to it. But
Bernadette
was about a very different country girl, halting and sickly, whose holiness became the foundation of a controversial healing shrine in France; the movie’s modest, respectful approximation of her visions gave her sanctity much-needed dramatic credibility.
Joan of Arc
was about a heroine who spoke forthrightly and sometimes merrily of Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret and who succeeded in inspiring followers as long as she projected certainty. No
wonder
that in
Joan of Lorraine,
Masters, the director, complains about how difficult it is to get the voices right. As part of the straight-arrow big-screen narrative of
Joan of Arc,
it’s hard to see how a director as tough, precise, and down-to-earth as Fleming could have gotten them right without shading into fantasy, horror, or bizarre comedy.

In his first pass at the script, Anderson simply lifted lines from the play as if they would work devoid of their old context. If he’d had his way, Saint Catherine would still have hectored Joan that it’s been “four years since you heard our Voices first in your garden. And you have not yet begun what you must do.” Well, what was it they wanted a girl to do? In Anderson’s initial version, Saint Margaret provided the answer: “You must go to Sir Robert de Baudricourt and he will give you escort to the Dauphin. You will rescue France from the English and crown the Dauphin at Rheims [
sic
].” Happily, as filmed, this mission statement plays out across Bergman’s face while a narrator summarizes her vision. And the Roger Wagner Chorale and the singing of eighteen-year-old Marni Nixon augment Bergman’s wonder-struck reactions with their holy warbling. Nixon would go on to sing for Deborah Kerr in
The King and I
and for Audrey Hepburn in
My Fair Lady;
a fourteen-year-old Marilyn Horne stood next to Nixon, and later dubbed the movie “a disaster.”

Fleming engaged yet another writer, Laurence Stallings, on April 26; Stallings had co-authored the 1924 play
What Price Glory
with Anderson, and Fleming thought he could pitch in on the battle scenes. Sadly, whatever rapport Anderson and Stallings shared in the 1920s had vanished. Anderson referred to him as “a headache” and chalked up Stallings’s knowledge of medieval warfare to reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s
White Company.

Fleming relieved his own stress with civilian sport flying, which had become legal again in early November. He applied for a student license, bought a tiny Navion two-seater, and, the following April, passed his licensing flight test in Burbank. Charles Cotton’s son—Charles Cotton Jr.—remembers flying to the Mojave Desert with his wife, Audrey, as well as with his dad and Fleming. They landed near a dive that the older men deemed unsuitable for the younger Cotton’s spouse. It was the barnstorming female pilot Pancho Barnes’s rowdy Happy Bottom Riding Club—the watering hole made famous in the book and film of
The Right Stuff.
(Barnes’s biographer states that this colorful aerialist deserved partial credit for the script of
Test Pilot;
there’s
no evidence for that claim, and it fits the pattern of friends horning in on Fleming’s successes.)

On May 11, the day after
Joan of Lorraine
closed in New York, Bergman returned to California. Consultations with Anderson began immediately, and the playwright swiftly grew exasperated, even depressed. He couldn’t lick the opening scene, which Bergman disliked; he couldn’t deliver the pastoral scene Fleming wanted and simply “gave it up.” On May 13, according to his diary, “Vic wanted Voices out”—and when Anderson talked to the star about it, he was chagrined to find “she wants Voices out,” too. The next day, at her first preproduction meeting, Anderson found Bergman “very simple and gracious.”

Stallings, however, in 1950, depicted everything negatively. From that initial meeting, Stallings wrote, “it was plain that Miss Bergman was not going to do Anderson’s play. She was going to do Ingrid Bergman’s play, not yet written, about Joan of Arc. This was not only a whacking surprise, but a very great pity. Do not think that Miss Bergman was the ordinary run-of-the-mill piece of temperament who wanted to have her own way. On the contrary, she approached the work with the deepest humility, the utmost desire to do the right thing. Soon, there came as many days of debate as there were in Joan’s own days.” (Of course, he was writing for an audience that had already condemned Bergman for her adultery and out-of-wedlock pregnancy with Rossellini.)

“It was like being back in the Middle Ages,” wrote Stallings. Actually, it was like a vision of Hollywood yet to come, when superstars wielded unprecedented power as the most dependable draws in the business and the bosses of their own production companies. Fleming had been thought of as a wily pro able to get the best out of a variety of stars. But having Bergman as his business and love partner as well as his marquee player must have rattled him.

It didn’t help that Anderson, the man with the most stubborn artistic conscience on this project, was uncomfortable with the screenwriting form and producing prosaic results. Fleming complained that Anderson kept getting stuck on his old work in
Joan of Lorraine.
The playwright set the nettlesome voices in a sheepcote where Joan was tending to a sick little “ramkin”; Anderson was analogizing her to King David, the shepherd summoned by God’s own voice to rule Israel. But Bergman’s objection to the voices, and Vic’s, grew into a dislike for everything about the scene.

In
My Story,
Bergman depicted the success of
Joan of Lorraine
as a result of her cajoling Anderson into revising his modern/medieval structure to incorporate more of her favorite lines and episodes from the life of the saint.
Joan of Arc
would be even more her movie than
Joan of Lorraine
was her play, and her view of Anderson’s intransigence or film incompetence led her to draft some scenes herself, further alienating the playwright. (It may not have helped Anderson in Bergman’s eyes that Ruth Roberts’s brother, George Seaton, had written the script to an unsuccessful film based on Anderson’s
Eve of St. Mark.
)

On June 5, Anderson wrote in his diary, “I told Ingrid if the sheep-cote went out, I’d quit.” His partnership with Solt became a creative refuge. Solt liked the new trial and execution scenes, Anderson noted, and “says I’ve learned to write for pictures—or am learning.” But the issues of the voices and the sheepcote scene rankled Anderson, and on June 11 he told Wanger that “if it turned out we were doing a child’s Joan out of Ingrid’s little book [Willard Trask’s 1936
Joan of Arc: Self Portrait
], I wouldn’t be likely to write it. Said I wouldn’t rock the boat at the moment.”

He was sincere about the “moment” part. On June 15, the
Los Angeles Times
published an interview in which Anderson said “he had no choice” in the final shaping of the script but hoped “the idea that faith can meet the challenge of corruption will stand out strongly.” Four days later, Anderson elaborated his regrets to
The New York Times,
stating that Hollywood producers “feel compelled to take into account in whatever they do” the entertainment demands of the broadest possible mass audience. “We’ve had no quarrel with Max about these things,” Fleming said, for the public. “He knew when he came out here that he would have to make a lot of changes. In fact, he started making them before he came here.”

But in private, two days earlier, Wanger, at breakfast at the Polo Lounge, tried to persuade Anderson “to soft-soap Ingrid,” and at lunch Fleming said, even more ominously, “The reins have been snatched from my hands.” That afternoon Bergman presented her version of the script from Joan receiving that wake-up call from her voices right up to the Battle of Orléans. “I pointed out that she had taken out the little girl feeling from the script altogether,” wrote Anderson. On June 23, he turned in the introductory sequence of Joan at Domrémy in Lorraine, and Bergman read Fleming and Anderson her version of the Bat
tle
of Orléans. “I disagreed violently on two points,” Anderson wrote, “and she gave in on both.” But Bergman held her ground on the elimination of the voices and the sheepcote. The next day she came to see the writers in Solt’s office and “kissed us both for the ‘wonderful opening’—told us she knew now nobody could write like us.”

After so many pitched battles, Anderson had grown fatigued. The script had gotten away from him, and so had Bergman’s interpretation of Joan. Whatever faith he had in the production rested on Vic and an isolated casting coup or two. One was Fleming’s casting of José Ferrer as the Dauphin; Ferrer had acted in the original production of
Key Largo
and won a Tony for his
Cyrano de Bergerac
when Bergman won for
Joan of Lorraine.
Ferrer did prove to be one bright spot in the finished movie, creating a medieval weasel without resorting to camp mannerisms. Ferrer’s Dauphin is a small man in every sense of the word; what makes him piquant is that he knows it. Fleming said, “I chose him . . . not only because he approximates a physical resemblance to the character, but because I knew he would attack the part with more enthusiasm than some actor who wished to return home to the swimming pool.” As a matter of fact, he was taking a rare public swipe at Lee Bowman, who’d appeared in Wanger’s Susan Hayward hit
Smash-Up
and had tested for the Dauphin. For his part, Ferrer told the technical adviser Father Paul Doncoeur that he took the role “to earn some money” and would “not come back” to Hollywood. But
Joan of Arc
ended up launching Ferrer on a significant film career as an actor and an actor-director.