Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (76 page)

In the MPA, ideology mixed with bile and professional envy. Wood’s daughter Jean thought her dad’s right-wing furor derived from his bitterness over losing the best director Oscar for
Goodbye, Mr. Chips—
though he lost to his MPA colleague Fleming!—as well as his hatred of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Wood became possessed by anti-Marxism, listing suspected communists in a black notebook. “He was such a charming man—gentle, generous, dear . . . until ‘It’ came up. ‘It’ invariably transformed Dad into a snarling, unreasoning brute; we used to leave the dinner table with our guts tangled and churning from the experience.”

In FBI memos, Fleming’s name appears solely on the roster of MPA officers. But he cast a giant shadow on men like Vidor, who also was a founding member of the MPA and part of its executive committee. In 1971, Vidor said it “did me harm for a while,” but that he had joined “simply because [Fleming] came in [and said] ‘You’re going with me tonight’ and we went to some sort of meeting and our name got in the paper. Not that I wouldn’t have done it, probably, but I wasn’t prepared to know what was going on and maybe I would have decided not. [We] got banned for being anti-Semitic and anti-everything and they got banned right and left from the radicals . . . They hopped on everybody.”

William Ludwig, the screenwriter of Vidor’s
An American Romance,
was an SWG steward at MGM in 1944 when, in one frantic day, he was invited to join the Communist Party in the morning and recruited by Vidor for the MPA that afternoon:

I said, “What are they for, King?” and he said, “We’re against this and against this, and against this, and especially against the Communists.” I said, “I know what the Alliance is against, but what are they for?” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “King, I have made up my mind that I’m not going to join things just because they are against something. I want to find, if there is such a thing, something that’s for what I’m for. What is your organization for, King?” There was a long pause, and King said, “I’ll have to talk to Sam Wood about that,” and he got up and left the office.

No
wonder the
New Republic
wrote, “Possibly nowhere but in Hollywood could a group of eminent and representative creative workers form a quasi-political organization and [say] ‘as Americans we have no new plan to offer. We want no new plan.’ ”

The MPA’s ringleader, George Bruce, was a legendary, prolific creator of pulp novels in the 1930s, specializing in aerial adventures. He’d also published a couple of adventure-story magazines and briefly had his own radio series. In 1938, he boasted that by his own estimate, he had written more than twenty million words since 1920, “more words than any other author, living or dead, who wrote in English.” But in that first meeting with Baumeister, Bruce didn’t have anything to tell the FBI. Instead, he and other MPA founders fantasized that they could use the FBI as their own investigative force to vet potential members. Bruce knew that the agency had stepped up its surveillance of subversive groups after the outbreak of the war and, Hollywood being a gossipy place, also knew that the FBI had a list of Communist Party members. Los Angeles agents had first submitted that list, along with membership lists of other groups deemed subversive, to the FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover, in August 1942.

The FBI’s men hadn’t learned that the few directors who had the power to make socially conscious films were often right-wingers like Vidor. “I did
Our Daily Bread
for King,” the blacklisted actress Karen Morley told me a few years before her death, “and that made me popular in Russia; King was amused by that.” Why? I asked. “He was con-ser-va-tive.” But in a 1942 agency report, the Los Angeles bureau chief, Richard Hood, described Vidor as “beginning to show left-wing tendencies” because he had praised Russian films for not being dependent on the box office.

Still, the agency “was very, very effective in those days,” Baumeister recalled. “Hoover was just fantastic. The boss was just loved by practically all the agents, because he stuck up for us, and defended us.”

Officially, the FBI kept its distance from the MPA, suspecting that its leadership would zealously exploit any tie to the agency. But Hoover had a close connection to Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela Rogers (a story editor at RKO), and to Hedda Hopper. In May 1944, a typical Hopper passage ran, “If trying to be a good American citizen is harmful, then I’m gonna hang onto that. Sure, the MPA attacks petty parlor pinks and all fellow travelers. When it accused some picture writers of being commies, it didn’t mince words.”

While
Hopper was extolling the MPA, however, Hoover was ordering his agents, “You should avoid becoming involved in any sort of controversy and at no time should the Bureau be permitted to be put in the position of taking any sides in this matter.”

Baumeister, who joined the FBI in 1942 straight out of law school, received several visits from MPA organizers, who either registered complaints about attacks on them by Hollywood communists or provided minutes of MPA meetings. Six decades later, the affable Baumeister says, “I can’t remember the details of any of the reports I made. I made most of mine to Hoover personally.” But, he cautions, “a lot of things did not go into the record. That was done deliberately.”

What did go into the FBI’s L.A. office and its records from late 1943 throughout 1944 was nearly as much foot traffic as went through the Hollywood Canteen—the Bette Davis–founded entertainment center for visiting GIs that the FBI, in its initial overenthusiasm, branded “a possible Communist front” because it employed labor unions. (Walter Wanger would drop by to complain to agents about the MPA’s attacks on him.)

With the FBI not budging on revealing its list of Hollywood communists to the MPA, the group leadership tried a reckless gambit that could have landed Fleming and others in prison for receiving classified information. For the previous two years, the group’s secretary at its Beverly Hills office, Maribess Stokes, had worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence, then the nation’s premier spy agency. (George Bruce evidently took pride in telling this to the FBI, unaware of the warning flag he raised.) The FBI had shared the communist list with the ONI and other agencies to ensure that communists weren’t getting sensitive defense jobs.

A Navy officer, Lieutenant Dan Goodykoontz, in civilian life a special agent for the Treasury Department and in war an expert in counterespionage, gave Stokes access to the names. She took shorthand notes and planned to send mimeographed copies of them to all twenty-four MPA officers, including Fleming. Whether he actually received a copy of the FBI’s communist list is a matter of conjecture. But the FBI quickly learned of the security breach, and Hoover made it a priority “to recover all copies of Stokes’s transcribed notes, based on a list of outstanding copies assigned by one of the MPA officials.” What happened to Stokes is not reflected in FBI memos, but Goodykoontz was transferred to the naval base in Keflavík, Iceland. Before he released
the
list to HUAC in 1947, Hoover knew some names had escaped, because in 1945 Wood boasted to a newspaper, “We even know their [party] card numbers.”

The MPA was a launching pad for Lee Bowman. He later became TV’s first Ellery Queen, but he couldn’t maneuver himself into any decent big-screen parts after
Smash-Up
(1947); in 1948, he failed to parlay an appearance on the pilot episode of Lucille Ball’s radio-comedy series,
My Favorite Husband,
into a regular role. ( Jack Paar, then acting with Ball in
Easy Living,
recommended Richard Denning to replace him.) Gregg Oppenheimer, the son of the series writer Jess Oppenheimer, says he’d heard “Bowman was not a guy born to comedy; there was not a humorous bone in his body.”

Politics was another matter. In the fall of 1946, George Murphy, the song-and-dance man who became a Republican senator from California, invited Bowman to make a speech in Whittier for “some young guy named Dixon or Nixon” running for Congress from a district that included San Dimas. “Murphy suggested he take my mother along and make a day out of it,” Lee Bowman Jr. recalls. “My mother replied, ‘Go to Whittier for a speech? You’ve got to be out of your mind! Call up
your
mother, she’ll go anywhere to listen to you!’ So he and my grandmother went, Richard M. Nixon defeated Jerry Voorhis, and the rest is history.” Bowman’s freshman congressman of choice became an influential member of HUAC. The lifelong friendship that ensued between the actor and the politician culminated in Bowman taking emcee jobs at the 1968 and 1972 Republican national conventions and subsequent inaugural balls, and a 1969 media consulting post with the National Republican Congressional Committee that gave him use of a Capitol Hill office. “He was acknowledged as a real pioneer in what is today a complete media-training industry,” says his son, a media-training consultant in London. “He used his work with politicians to develop a corporate clientele. He advised all the Republicans in the House and Senate on how to deal with appearances in front of TV cameras and in radio interviews . . . with the objectives of having their key messages come through loud and clear as well as having their real personal attributes.”

By contrast, the MPA did no good for Fleming and did lasting damage to his reputation because it opened him to charges of anti-Semitism. Both the communists and the anticommunist David O. Selznick used the known anti-Semitism of many MPA members to
inveigh
against the entire group. The MPA leaders attempted to defuse the issue, offering up Morrie Ryskind and other Jews as evidence of the organization’s innocence. But the issue wouldn’t go away, not with the likes of McGuinness and Mahin on the team. According to the FBI, “The attacks against the MPA have been successful to the point that the top figures in the motion picture industry such as Louis B. Mayer . . . and Jack Warner are both interested and worried.” In February 1944, an informant reported that John Howard Lawson had labeled King Vidor and Fleming “notorious” anti-Semites. In March, an informant reported a conversation between Lawson and Yip Harburg, who was active in the Hollywood Democratic Committee. Harburg, according to the informant, said, “I have got a bunch of cowering, cringing big producers in this business who are worried that the opposition is going to say, ‘You see, the Jews don’t let the Christians organize.’ Now that’s what they were worried about.”

Selznick leveled his accusations directly, after meeting Wood at a
Life
magazine party on February 25 and going on to a meeting of the MPA. (If Fleming was present, it was not noted.) George Bruce, the apparent informant, wrote the FBI: “Selznick spent the evening making unsubstantiated charges against [McGuinness] of the Executive Committee, charging him with being the biggest anti-Semitic person in Hollywood. He also charged that [name redacted] of the Lakeside Golf Club (which is closed to Jewish membership) harbors a nebulous anti-Semitic organization known as ‘the Hundred Haters’ within the confines of [the club] and intimated that this club used the lockers, rooms and facilities of Lakeside to foster anti-Semitism.” (The Lakeside Country Club membership included Bing Crosby and the director Leo McCarey, and in 1944 provided the setting for the golf scenes in Crosby and McCarey’s
Going My Way.
) In the early 1930s, Fleming had joined the Bel-Air Country Club—which was, like most others, restricted. But if he was anything more than “a country-club anti-Semite,” it escaped the notice of Jewish colleagues and friends such as Ben Hecht and Zeppo Marx.

By 1947, Fleming was no longer on the MPA’s executive committee, and his name was off its letterhead. Whether because of disillusionment or lack of interest, his MPA involvement dwindled beyond paying dues. His reputation would always transcend his amorphous politics. The MPA veteran Robert Vogel, MGM’s director of international publicity under Mayer, recalled at age ninety-two, “Victor Flem
ing
was a pretty intelligent, broad-minded man, and so was King Vidor.”

Even a blacklisted director like Jules Dassin, who did his apprenticeship at MGM, never lost his admiration for Fleming and “the virility in all he did. And his self-assurance. He certainly was a master of his trade. This is the guy who had the muscle to handle Selznick. Not easy.” For Dassin, one phrase would always fit Vic perfectly: He was “a hell of a director.”

28

One Last
Adventure
at MGM

With Gable, the MPA catalyzed an embarrassing episode, one that betrayed him as a great star in need of great filmmakers. Upon his return from duty overseas, he became the featured speaker at an MPA gathering. McGuinness (who bore a broad resemblance to Gable) wrote a dunderheaded speech for him, which Gable dutifully read. “It has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes. There were no communists either in the foxholes where I was,” said Gable. “The boys sit around and talk about home and what they want to find when they get back—and it’s not communism.” Since Gable was still on active duty, his commanding officer had to face objections that the actor-soldier had, in the words of a protesting letter writer, “cast aspersions on the Allies.” At a meeting of motion-picture industry union officials in May 1944, Mary McCall, then head of the Screen Writers Guild, was reported to crack, “Put them wise to Gable, the foxhole flier.”

Gable left the service in June seeking a career tune-up. In July 1944, MGM announced a Gable-Fleming film called
This Strange Adventure.
The source material was way off base for his persona. Clyde Brion Davis’s
Anointed
was a wry, plainspoken novel about a walking tabula rasa named Harry Patterson who sets out to sea at age fourteen and makes it his quest to cross the Black Ocean and find “the reason for everything.”
The Anointed,
like other weird, wispy, and distinctive properties, might have turned into a magical big-studio fluke (à la the Lighton-Hathaway-Cooper
Peter Ibbetson
). The resulting film,
Adventure, was
mighty odd, but not affecting
or
true to the book. Aside from some character names and a quest to find the meaning of life, the script derives only a handful of scenes, subplots, and lines from the novel. There are bar brawls and a glamourized version of the book’s San Francisco librarian (Greer Garson) and a parade of romantic/marital
spats
between her and Gable’s long-in-the-tooth but also childish Harry Patterson. There’s a shipwreck; plenty of chatter about God, the final judgment, and the immortal soul; and a few scraps of Davis’s imagery (a lot is made of water, smoke, and vine curling clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, counterclockwise in the Southern). An understandably befuddled Gable went to Frances Marion for advice. She marched to her old friend Vic and berated him for casting Clark and Greer Garson in “a studio plot to kill off two stars.” She advised Fleming that
Adventure
was “a great title” with “a false promise.” Marion’s tale seems exaggerated when you learn that Garson fought for her role and that, during filming, the movie was called
Strange Adventure
or
This Strange Adventure
or
The Big Shore Leave.
But Marion was spot-on about the “mish-mash” quality of Gable’s role and indeed the entire production.