Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (55 page)

The influence game has been a complicated one to play with every aspect of the movie or Baum’s book. One academic reading presents Baum’s story as a testament to the lure of urban life and the machine
age.
Another interprets it as an intricate allegory of nineteenth-century populism, with the magic slippers (silver in the book, made ruby in the movie so they’d show up better in Technicolor) representing the Populist cause of silver coinage. The historian David Parker put it best when he said these conflicting interpretations stem from Baum’s success at writing a “modernized, American” fantasy. Baum produced “not only the first real American fairy tale, but one that showed American society and culture in all its wonderful diversity and contradictions, a story so rich, it can be, like the book’s title character, anything we want it to be—including, if we wish, a parable on Populism.”

With a cultural stew as eclectic as
The Wizard of Oz,
the wisest path may be the one J. R. R. Tolkien took with fairy stories: “We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.” Tolkien, translating the view of the Icelandicist George Webbe Dasent, proscribed: “By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by ‘the bones’ its sources or material—even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered. But I do not, of course, forbid criticism of the soup as soup.”

As soup,
The Wizard of Oz
is not beyond criticism, but its flaws scarcely mar the flavor. You can see why MGM executives got antsy during the Kansas episodes. Vidor’s pacing is erratic, especially in the scene with Professor Marvel, though Morgan is so wonderful you wouldn’t want to part with any of it. (Morgan also is brilliantly bogus as the Wizard, though not so much as a gatekeeper, a guard, and a coachman in the Emerald City.) Munchkinland is arguably more eye-popping than the interior of the Emerald City, but who cares when you’re gazing at the Horse of a Different Color?

Despite his prominence in the credits, and his tireless work on the film, the chef of this inimitable soup hardly figured in its national publicity. A May 1 letter from the MGM publicist Teet Carle to the writer Grover Jones, who had done the story adaptation for
The Virginian,
pushes Fleming as a possible subject for a national magazine piece. He “is certainly one of the early-day screen directors who has still retained the color that directors used to have a long time ago . . . It occurred to me that since you were one of those also in the birth of motion pictures that Fleming might be used by you as an example of a director who has grown up in the business as compared with the influx in recent years of stage directors.” Of course, there was a caveat: “I don’t know how interested a magazine would be in a yarn on a director.”

Or
maybe just this director: after all, Frank Capra had been on the cover of
Time
in 1938. But Capra was both an endless self-promoter and a creator of his own easily recognizable blend of whimsy, uplift, and melodrama. Fleming was, as Steven Spielberg says, “one of the great chameleons . . . We honor his movies and don’t know him, because he did his job so well.” And rarely had he done it at a higher pitch of inspiration than in
The Wizard of Oz.

22

Saving Tara and
Gone With the Wind

The bond between a reformed rake and a headstrong woman is the imperfect union at the core of
Gone With the Wind.
If
The Wizard of Oz
crystallized Fleming’s feelings for the resilience of children,
Gone With the Wind
drew out his understanding of the traumas of matrimony. The Civil War and the destruction of antebellum Georgia provide the film with its breadth—at its widest reach the movie is about how people react when social upheaval rends a settled way of life. The wedding of the dashing, piratical Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) to the Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) gives it the snap and heartbreak of a romantic tragicomedy.

Lu Fleming was no Scarlett. She was an affable housewife, not a grasping minx who thought she was in love with someone else. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she didn’t seek social advantage as the wife of a powerful director. As a traditional spouse, she was happy to be “Mrs. Victor Fleming.” Yet the marriage contained enough wrenches and twists to give Vic and Lu advanced degrees in emotional mechanics. She may have been the pursuer in their love match; Fleming had never before been intimately involved with a married woman, much less the wife of a friend. When it turned sour, he would charge that she tricked him into wedlock by claiming she was pregnant. Fleming’s grip on the heated sentiment and harshness that romance can funnel into domestic life gives
Gone With the Wind
a shrewdness verging on wisdom.

By the time he directed the picture, Fleming was no longer automatically linked to his leading ladies, not even knockouts like Mary Astor, Harlow, or Loy. He had been faithful to Lu; it would take Ingrid Bergman’s allure and more than a dozen years of household strains to break his resolve. The marriage was built on teasing as well as tender emotion; their mutual goading was part of their relationship. Vic and
Lu
knew what they were getting into when they tied the knot. They seemed to know what they wanted.

With his daughters, his playfulness was caring and serene. Sally once saw him retrieve a hummingbird’s nest and try to hatch the eggs with the warmth of a lightbulb. He doted on Victoria as Rhett does on his daughter, Bonnie Blue, and, just as Rhett took Bonnie with him to London, Fleming took Victoria with him on fishing trips on their good ship
Missy Poo.
(Many years later, she became a crack skeet shooter like her father.) His discipline was often silent, swift, and surgical. Victoria recalls that when she was five and Sally three (just after
Gone With the Wind
), “We were going down to Balboa in the car. And I was in the front with Daddy, and Sally was in the back with Mother. But we got into some sort of fight, anyway. And Daddy didn’t say anything. He just turned the car around and drove us back home.”

Fleming wasn’t keen on directing
Gone With the Wind,
but he hadn’t been in the mood to make
The Wizard of Oz,
either. He missed flying, and he’d had no time for one of his usual long vacations. In an interview with Sheilah Graham a week before he left
Oz
for Tara, and
before
he’d been asked to take over
GWTW,
she found him “nervous as a thoroughbred horse.” He told her, “I’ve been working too hard.” When she pointed out that his last picture,
Test Pilot,
had been months ago, he corrected her: “
Test Pilot
was my last credit, you mean,” then listed
The Crowd Roars, Too Hot to Handle, The Great Waltz,
and
The Wizard of Oz.
“After this, I’m going away where no one can find me—not even me.”

Still, find him they did. The how and why of it remain matters of conjecture. But Gable’s preference for Fleming to direct
GWTW
instead of George Cukor was not only well-known; it was also reported before principal photography began. And ever since he joined the production, Gable had been out of sorts. He shot his first scenes in January 1939, two weeks after Leigh and Olivia de Havilland. Doubtless he felt uncertain in a new studio, acting with women who already had a close rapport with Cukor.

After Selznick fired Cukor, John Lee Mahin recalled, Gable made a late-night visit to Fleming’s house to beg him to come onto
GWTW.
Mahin was probably thinking of the events of the early-morning hours of Sunday, February 12: a coup de théâtre straight out of screwball comedy and at odds with Selznick’s denial that he consulted with Gable about the directorial change.

In
this version, Selznick, Gable, and Eddie Mannix, after viewing
GWTW
rushes at Selznick’s house, paid a 3:00 a.m. visit not to Louis B. Mayer but to Mervyn LeRoy at his Santa Monica beach house. The ruckus stirred LeRoy from slumber. He looked down from his bedroom window and demanded: “I’m in bed—what do you mean by busting in at this hour of the night?” Selznick shouted in return: “We want your director—we’ve got to have Victor Fleming!” It took a series of phone calls—including at least one to Mayer—but a few hours later LeRoy had released Fleming from
The Wizard of Oz.
Selznick announced Fleming’s hiring two days later.

“My God, imagine picking up a project like that at this stage,” Fleming was heard to muse that week on the
Oz
set. “Still, if Clark’s going to sulk, I guess I’d better do it.” As soon as Selznick made the switch, Norman Webb of
National Box Office Digest
wrote the producer that he was glad Fleming was taking over, because, unlike Cukor, “Victor Fleming has one of the very best box-office records in the industry.”

So what did happen to Cukor, and why did Selznick summon Fleming? Contemporary columnists as well as latter-day analysts, trying to make sense of Selznick’s decision, have often placed the onus on Gable. But several eyewitnesses contradict the notion that Gable catalyzed the crisis, no matter how central he was to its outcome. Susan Myrick, the film’s Georgia dialect coach and technical adviser, provided an intimate account in a letter to the book’s author, Margaret Mitchell. She wrote that Cukor told her he had “looked at the rushes and felt he was failing. He knew he was a good director and knew the actors were good ones; yet the thing did not click as it should.” He demanded that they return to the original script by Sidney Howard. Selznick balked and offered his own ultimatum: “OK, get out.” In 1954, Ed Sullivan wrote that Cukor reached the point of no return when he clashed with Selznick on how to film a scene of Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) walking down the stairs to meet Scarlett: “I think Ashley, at that moment, would be scared to meet her,” Selznick said. “I disagree wholeheartedly,” Cukor replied.

Cukor was never specific in his own recollections. “David talked generally,” he said in 1968, recalling the day he was summoned to Selznick’s office. “He said something like, ‘It’s not coming along the way I want it to, I’ve taken complete responsibility and it has to be my way.’ ”

The way Selznick saw things—and remembered them, consis
tently,
year after year—the issues were practical and artistic: Cukor’s slow going on the initial scenes, the languid tempo and listless quality of his footage, and a clash over who had final authority over rewrites and on-set scene making. In 1947, Selznick told
The New York Times,
“We couldn’t see eye to eye on anything. I felt that while Cukor was simply unbeatable on directing intimate scenes of the Scarlett O’Hara story, he lacked the big feel, the scope, the breadth of the production.” Yakima Canutt, the stuntman hired to double Gable and to act a renegade in a bit part, backs Selznick up, writing that Cukor “didn’t seem to understand the action part of films.”

Selznick denied to Gable’s biographer Charles Samuels that any one incident precipitated Cukor’s ouster: “He was in disagreement with me on my concept of how
Gone With the Wind
should be done.” And when Bosley Crowther interviewed Selznick in the late 1950s for his MGM history
The Lion’s Share,
Selznick refuted the story that the firing was to please Gable. The producer said he “simply could not agree on points with [Cukor].”

Cukor was not an easy man when it came to brokering disagreements. Sid Luft’s experiences with him on the 1954 remake of
A Star Is Born
resemble Selznick’s. Tempo was a major problem—even the non-musical scenes ran a third longer than their exact equivalents in the 1937 original directed by William Wellman, a director far closer in his emotional and artistic makeup to Fleming than to Cukor. (The over-length—not entirely Cukor’s fault, since he had nothing to do with proposing the fifteen-minute “Born in a Trunk” showpiece with Judy Garland—led Warner Bros. to cut a half hour from the film after its big-city engagements.) Luft and Garland’s production company produced the picture. They were intent on providing Cukor with everything the director wanted, including George Hoyningen-Huene—in Luft’s words, “the photographic guru of his time”—as a special color design adviser. Still, the pugnacious Luft and the stubborn Cukor found themselves at loggerheads over Hoyningen-Huene’s attempt to frame Garland in a red dress against red walls (Luft had them painted gray) or the way Luft cut a long dialogue scene in a nightclub. “Cukor was tough, but good-natured underneath,” Luft said a half century later. “I think he had mellowed since
Gone With the Wind.
”

Getting Gable
had
been crucial for Selznick to put the picture together. He needed this star to satisfy the throngs who thought the King was destined to play Rhett Butler. In exchange for loaning out
Gable,
Selznick’s father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, agreed that MGM would distribute
GWTW,
put up half its production money (up to $1.25 million), and receive half the film’s profits for the first seven years. A critical goal for Selznick was keeping Gable confident and effective, if not happy.

The idea that Selznick thought Cukor was a “woman’s director” who threw the movie to Scarlett insults the producer as well as Cukor. Fleming later told Mahin, “George would have done just as good a job as I. He’d probably have done a lot better on the intimate scenes. I did pretty well on some of the bigger stuff. George came from the stage and taught us what directing a dialogue scene was about. He knew. And nobody could direct a dialogue scene like George Cukor. It’s bullshit that he’s just a woman’s director. He’s not. He can direct anybody.” Similarly, in a 1972 letter to Kevin Brownlow, Louise Brooks argued (albeit at Cukor’s expense) against Fleming as a “man’s director”: “The best performance Clara Bow ever gave was in Fleming’s
Mantrap.
And in
The Wizard of Oz
Fleming made Judy Garland the most adorable creature we will ever see in films. Yet Garbo allowed Cukor to destroy her in
Two-Faced Woman.
It is no more reasonable to think that pansies love women than to think that cats like birds.”