Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (95 page)

VERY truly yours,

FRANK CaPrA,

Chief DirEcToR FoR CoLuMbia PiCtUrES CoRpOrAtIoN

221
“I thought she could do well by it”: Behlmer,
Memo from David O. Selznick.

223
“a real gentleman”: John McCabe to Kurt Jensen, 2003. McCabe added, “This, coming from gentle, gentle Rosina, who hated the profanity she heard everywhere on the sets of her films, was genuine tribute.” She was,
he
said, “an observant person” and one “not given to idle prattle or politeness for its own sake.”

223
“falling out all over the place”: Machu to David Stenn.

223
“was working with Franchot Tone”: Allan to Stenn.

223
“Harlow was fun, and nice”: Light to Stenn.

223
“Pursuant to an understanding”: F. L. Hendrickson, of the contracts department, Nov. 2, 1938. “There is no card or contract on Victor Fleming; he has been working pursuant to an understanding he had with Mr. Mannix.” MGM legal files.

224
“very fortunate in my director”: This quotation and Fonda’s anecdote about mugging are in Shay,
Conversations.
Fonda rejiggered this tale several times. To Howard Teichmann in
Fonda: My Life,
the actor emphasized how green he was—he didn’t know what a “dolly” referred to when he read the script—and how genial Fleming was, even allowing Fonda to use his adopted saloon cat, George, as the canal boat cat. In
Hollywood Speaks,
however, he told Mike Steen that Fleming and the film editors didn’t recognize that a stage pause could produce a laugh on-screen; he then repeated the dolly and the mugging stories and gave Fleming credit for steering him toward “total naturalness.”

224
“I was in love with him”: “An Interview by Curtis Lee Hanson: ‘Henry Fonda: Reflections on 40 Years of Make-Believe,’ ”
Cinema
(Calif.) Dec. 1966.

226
“putting some realism”: United Press, June 13, 1935.

226
“a very big and rugged man”: From the Reminiscences of Janet Gaynor (1958) in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University, p. 26.

227
“set up unlawful housekeeping”: Brooks Atkinson review in
The New York Times,
Oct. 31, 1934.

227
John Ford
wanted
to include: Bogdanovich,
John Ford.
“For example,” said Ford,

I had a lovely scene in which Lincoln rode into town on a mule, passed by a theater and stopped to see what was playing, and it was the Booth Family doing
Hamlet;
we had a typical old-fashioned poster up. Here was this poor shabby country lawyer wishing he had enough money to see
Hamlet
when a very handsome young boy with dark hair—you knew he was a member of the Booth family—fresh, snobbish kid, all beautifully dressed—just walked out to the edge of the plank walk and looked at Lincoln. He looked at this funny, incongruous man in a tall hat
riding
a mule, and you knew there was some connection there. They cut it out—too bad.

228
“The narrative starts slowly”:
Variety,
Aug. 14, 1935.

228
“an affectionately amusing photoplay”:
The New York Times,
Aug. 9, 1935.

229
“seems subject to a jinx”:
The New York Times,
April 21, 1935.

17 Bagging Game on Safari, Losing
The Good Earth

230
Cotton’s safari diary: Provided by Charles Cotton Jr.

231
A
Hollywood Reporter
review: June 10, 1935.

232
“250 cases of film,” Under the direction of General Ting-Hsui:
The New York Times,
June 3, 1934.

233
“It is a story”: Associated Press, Nov. 16, 1935.

233
“Throw ’em all out”: Thomas,
Thalberg.

233
air race publicizing a casino:
Los Angeles Times,
Nov. 24, 1935.

233
“the most nonchalant”: Associated Press, Dec. 2, 1935.

233
Lewin’s reports: MGM Collection (“The Good Earth”), USC Cinema and Television Library, casting test memos from Albert Lewin.

234
“Here was a great picture”: MGM publicity, Kevin Brownlow files.

234
“too Occidental”: Franklin’s account of
The Good Earth
is in his unpublished memoir, “We Laughed and We Cried.”

234
“his usual lack of imagination”: Kael,
5001 Nights at the Movies.

18 Spencer Tracy and
Captains Courageous

235
“Vic’s parenthood”: Undated note, Lighton Family Papers, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

236
“perhaps because he had no children”: Kazan,
Life.

236
“a happily married lady codfish”: Kipling,
Something of Myself.

236
“A good actor”: Kazan,
Life.

237
“cinema’s no. 1”:
Time,
April 25, 1938.

237
“Spencer always thought”: Hepburn,
Me.

237
unsatisfying five years at Fox: An excellent overview of those films is John C. Tibbetts, “Pre-MGM Spencer Tracy,”
Films in Review,
Nov./ Dec. 1995.

237
“arranging introductions”:
Variety,
June 23, 2006.

237
“a great and bitchy gossip”: Cukor to Ruth Gordon, Nov. 12, 1941, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Cukor was referring to Lawler’s reaction to a screening of
Two-Faced Woman,
saying that “he condemned it lock, stock and barrel,” but “it represents a point of view that many of his ilk will have—and with some justice.”

238
he ordered the studio’s security chief: Berdie Adams, interviewed by Eyman in
Lion of Hollywood.

238
“I would get drunk”: Granger,
Sparks Fly Upward.

238
“I was lying there feeling like death”: Ibid.

239
“Vic sat at one end”: Sidney’s story is confirmed by an item in Virginia Wright’s column, Oct. 1, 1936: “Victor Fleming and Jules Furthman not too mad at each other to continue lunching, although for a time it looked as if fisticuffs might interfere.”

239
“to capture a single”: Kazan,
Life.

239
“Spencer does it”: Andersen,
Affair to Remember.
On June 9, 1940, Howard Barnes, critic of the
New York Herald Tribune,
wrote, “It is not easy to catalogue Mr. Tracy’s acting gifts. For one thing, he is enormously direct, in a field where it is easy to get a showy effect by being oblique. For another he is aware of all those small clues to universal experience which gives the spectator the feeling of sharing in living rather than watching a reconstruction of it. Meanwhile he has the great talent of seeming at ease amid himself.”

239
“That business of not being typecast”:
Los Angeles Times,
Nov. 18, 1962.

240
“Fox had him playing villains”: Mayer quoted in “What Makes a Star,”
American Weekly,
June 8, 1958.

241
“pomp and respectability”: Daniel Selznick, interviewed by Eyman in
Lion of Hollywood.
Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple recalled Mayer’s attitude toward Catholicism in a 1975 oral history for the University of California, Berkeley. He said when he asked Mayer why he didn’t make pictures about Jews, his reply was, “Rabbis don’t look dramatic. A priest has all these trimmings and all this stuff.”

241
Cantwell . . . had summoned: This account is in the Archbishop John Timothy McNicholas Papers, Catholic University. “You will be glad to know,” Cantwell wrote a week later to McNicholas, “I was assured that there have been no bad pictures made in the last three months.” That June, Irving Thalberg visited Cantwell to complain about Father David Lord, who helped author the Production Code and headed the Sodality of Our Lady in St. Louis. Lord had written in his publication,
The
Queen’s Work,
that Thalberg “made of his wife a harlot in her pictures.”

241
“Most of the men and women”: Breen to McNicholas, March 1934, McNicholas Papers.

241
“The priests are all such superior men”: Kanin,
Tracy and Hepburn.

242
“America’s faults”: Seelye’s expansive essay on the book and film of
Captains Courageous
serves as the introduction to the 2005 Penguin Classics edition. Among the piece’s many felicities, Seelye calls the character of Disko Troop “a Puritan Ulysses, for whom the voyage out is the voyage home, the whole irradiated with a triumphant sense of a job well done.”

242
Luke 5:1–11: In verses 4–6 (King James Version): “Now when he had left speaking, he said unto Simon, Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught. And Simon answering said unto him, Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net. And when they had this done, they inclosed a great multitude of fishes: and their net brake.”

243
“backbreaker about heaven”:
New Republic,
June 16, 1937.

243
“the only one with which I was truly happy,” “Instead of the usual concoction”: From the Reminiscences of Marc Connelly (1959) in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University, pp. 11 and 12.

245
“Geez, this is a beautiful kid”: McGilligan,
Backstory.

246
“The film of a book”: Powell,
Million Dollar Movie.

246
“half Portuguese and half black”: Mahin in Marshall,
Blueprint on Babylon.

246
“in which white children”: Seelye, introduction to
Captains Courageous.

247
Rooney said he couldn’t resist: Rooney,
Life Is Too Short.

247
a contemporary profile states . . . a mere three days:
Los Angeles Times,
Nov. 16, 1937.

247
coaching from Fred Lewis: Witnessed by Thomas Jones, one of the Sea Scouts. Jones is the current owner of Fleming’s Bel-Air estate.

248
“iron egg”: MGM production notes detail the workings of this device and the “self-wiping windshield.” They describe the iron egg as “a heavy egg-shaped mass of solid iron suspended from a framework, and to which the camera is attached, permitting it to swing like a pendulum. The result will be stability within five degrees, no matter how a boat may toss.” And the “self-wiping windshield” is “a disc of plate glass, about eight inches in diameter, rotated before the camera lens at high speed, by a motor. Pressure plates about its circumference keep it wiped and polished at all times, so that spray, waves, or drops of sea water can never obstruct the lens.”

248
“You’ll never know”:
Los Angeles Times,
May 16, 1937.

248
“
Courageous
is all done”: Lighton’s Christmas letter to his family, December 1936, Lighton Family Papers.

249
“will not move the camera”: James Wong Howe interviewed by Alain Silver for UCLA Oral History Program (1969).

250
“Freddie always came in”: Mahin in Marshall,
Blueprint on Babylon.

250
“You never have to fake”: Gladys Hall, “You Can’t Put Spencer Tracy into Words,”
Motion Picture,
Nov. 1937.

250
“one long outing”:
The New York Times,
Jan. 24, 1992.

251
“When a man gets angry”: Kazan,
Life.

251
“I didn’t want to play Manuel”: Many articles about Tracy’s discomfort with the role were published. This one is from Hall, “You Can’t Put Spencer Tracy into Words.” But Tracy later wrote in his daybook, “Best picture ever made. Best part ever, too. Once in a lifetime . . .” (These lines can be seen in the 1986 documentary
The Spencer Tracy Legacy,
directed by David Heeley.)

253
one of his own top three: Ed Sullivan column, Nov. 10, 1938.

253
“in iced water”: Paul Harrison column, June 11, 1937.

253
“a corking yarn”:
New Republic,
June 16, 1937.

254
“One must be insensitive”:
Paris-Soir,
Oct. 29, 1937.