Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (13 page)

Fleming became Wilson’s personal cameraman. In his footage are dozens of iconic images of Wilson in his top hat and one-of-a-kind winter coat—a calf-length fur piece made of kangaroo pelts, a gift from an Australian admirer. Fleming also was in the perfect place to photograph “the international actors of the theater of war.” He told an anecdote about Wilson reviewing the troops. At one point, Pershing blocked Fleming’s angle on the president and was so engrossed in conversation that he didn’t hear the cameraman’s request to move two feet
to
the right. Noticing a cloud about to cover the sun, Fleming roared, “Get out of the way!” Pershing smiled and moved three feet to the right.

Fleming’s stories fit the photographic evidence. At the reviewing stand at Humes, “Black Jack” Pershing betrays an attractive, unbuttoned sense of humor, laughing with the president, nudging him to look in the cameraman’s direction, then snapping a salute just for Fleming.

The day after Christmas the Wilsons crossed the English Channel. King George V, Queen Mary and Princess Mary, Premier David Lloyd George, and various other politicians greeted the president at Charing Cross Station. Two million people filled the sidewalks. Fleming shot the more regally paced British reception, with its fancy horse-drawn carriages, liveried drivers and riders, and row on row of cavalry, to provide a president’s-eye view of the parade, sometimes from within the route itself, the horses nobly clomping right in front of him. Nothing deterred the British crowds, whether in London or outside the Lowther Street Congregational Church, where Wilson’s grandfather had preached in Carlisle, Scotland.

Pope Benedict XV, who had helped inspire Wilson’s Fourteen Points—and who would canonize Joan of Arc in 1920—welcomed the president on January 4. There would not be another presidential visit to the Vatican until 1959, when President Eisenhower met Pope John XXIII. Fleming may have been the first person to shoot motion picture film at the Vatican; unfortunately, whatever he filmed has been lost. WhenWilson spoke on the balcony of the palace at Milan on January 6,
The New York Times
reported, “a tremendous demonstration took place . . . stretching as far as the eye could reach.” Fleming’s footage pictures a happy horde whose number seems to approach infinity. As Wilson, benign victor and peacemaker, orates next to a U.S. flag, Fleming pans from right to left and then from left to right. He takes in all of a crowd so dense, euphoric, and turbulent that it makes the classical architecture appear to float and bob on a squall-tossed sea.

Fairbanks had taught Fleming well about creating celluloid legends. In a peak of mythmaking, Fleming filmed Wilson standing alone in the prow of the launch that took him from Italy to the
George Washington.
Wilson, having shed the kangaroo pelts for a proper black overcoat, basks in the affection of the crowds onshore and beams back at them. He places his arms jauntily akimbo when he doesn’t use his right
hand
to tip and wave his top hat. For fleeting seconds, a viewer feels, as Wilson must have, that he
was
the American destined to unite Europe and prevent future wars and make the world safe for democracy. Then the smile fades; impatience, or maybe doubt, creeps into the picture; he turns and asks for a time-out or direction. But it’s a sensational example of one of the first staged photo ops.

After six days of preliminaries with the Great Powers—Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and Japan—the first plenary session of the Paris Peace Conference began in the Salle de la Paix of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay. Fleming’s task, though, was filming dignitaries in their limousines and carriages arriving and departing; he couldn’t bring his camera into the Salle de la Paix. He trained his lens appreciatively on the rare picturesque sight—the elegant costumes of some Asian delegations, or the dramatic mane of Poland’s President Ignacy Paderewski. But he must have felt stranded on the outside of these historic proceedings. He was ready to go home.

Wilson shipped back to the United States on February 14, returning to Europe at the end of the month. The two thousand soldiers and sailors on board the
George Washington
must have made Fleming feel as if he were on a mammoth, floating version of a Fairbanks set. Fleming shot them blowing off steam in athletic ways. There was a rope-climbing race, a slap match on a pipe eight feet higher than the deck (the loser was the one who fell off), and a mock boxing match funnier than Fairbanks’s in
His Picture in the Papers
and just as full of parody bravado. En route, Wilson’s private secretary, Joe Tumulty, suggested that the president disembark in Boston, not Hoboken, as a poke in the eye of his political opponent, the Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Ill prepared for the change, the skipper nearly stowed the ship between two large rocks until a passenger came to the rescue: an assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who recognized the spot, near Marblehead, Massachusetts, and adjusted the course to Boston.

On February 5, Griffith, Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks, and William S. Hart had announced the creation of United Artists, which promised to “protect the great motion picture public from threatening combinations and trusts that would force upon them mediocre productions and machine-made entertainment.” (Hart withdrew after three weeks.) Keen to join Fairbanks, Fleming, scheduled to return with Wilson on
his
second trip to Europe to ratify the treaty, looked for a way out of the military and back into his moviemaking life. Since he was still assigned only to Wilson, he was stationed at the White House. He wrote, “I took a chance and typed my formal discharge on a sheet of White House stationery. Admiral Grayson came down the stairs on some hurried mission and I met him. ‘Will you sign this, Admiral?’ I handed him the paper. He held it on the polished banister and scrawled his signature with my fountain pen. An officer of the Army had written his own discharge and an officer of the Navy signed it.”

Fleming didn’t stretch the truth too far. He did handwrite the first draft of his discharge, in standard military language on White House letterhead. But Grayson signed the typed version neatly, betraying neither rush nor the curve of a banister. Fleming received his official discharge on March 7 and headed for New York for a few days before returning to California.

For all his eagerness to wiggle out of the job, being Wilson’s cameraman had put Fleming at the top of the heap. As an observer, Fleming had sensed the story, and as a craftsman he had known how to get it. Without the evidence caught in Fleming’s camera, future generations wouldn’t be able to judge the potency of these epochal demonstrations for themselves.

6

The Importance of Directing Doug

Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was committed to exploring all the possibilities of movies. Charlie Chaplin remembered ruminating with him over life’s meaning or lack of it one night at the summit of a large water tank. “ ‘Look!’ said Douglas, fervently, making an arc gesture taking in all the heavens. ‘The moon! And those myriads of stars! Surely there must be a reason for all this beauty? It must be fulfilling some destiny!’ ” In the thrill of his epiphany, Fairbanks focused on Chaplin and asked, “Why are you given this wonderful talent, this wonderful medium of motion pictures that reaches millions of people throughout the world?”

“Why is it given to Louis B. Mayer and the Warner brothers?” Chaplin answered.

Fairbanks responded with laughter and a history-making idea. With Pickford and Griffith, Chaplin and Hart, Fairbanks founded United Artists, a movie production, financing, and distribution company that had everything except a back lot. It allowed its partners to operate like independent producers.

After he left the Signal Corps, Fleming shot the first United Artists release,
His Majesty the American,
for Fairbanks and the director Joseph Henabery. This 1919 action romp about a virtuous, mysterious New York adrenaline addict who finds fresh adventures in an Old World country called Alaine, the home of his long-lost mother, fires up a proven Fairbanks formula with throwaway bravura. In one of the New York scenes, Henabery and Fleming use a cutaway set of six rooms in a racketeer’s building to open up a hive of criminal activity as if it were an ant farm. ( Jerry Lewis would use a similar set for
The Ladies Man
four decades later, just as Jean-Luc Godard and Jean- Pierre Gorin would in 1972 for
Tout va bien.
) The Fairbanks humor never flags. When he takes a detour to Mexico, he lights his cigarette on the sunbaked earth.
And
the action in Alaine has a sweep and a cast of many hundreds (if not thousands) that dwarf the relatively modest dimensions of Fairbanks’s previous European frolic,
Reaching for the Moon.

Fleming moved briefly into his mother’s spacious new home, and as Fairbanks’s marriage fell apart and his romance with Mary Pickford thrived, Fleming grew close to Mary’s younger brother, Jack, who had a yen for fast cars and chorus girls. ( Jack died in 1933, at age thirty-six, of general dissipation from substance abuse and venereal disease; Vic was an honorary pallbearer.)

Theodore Reed, another of Fleming’s close postwar friends, had worked his way up in Fairbanks’s creative ranks during Fleming’s Signal Corps service—and no wonder. He had the same breadth of experience that made Dwan and Fleming and the Signal Corps brethren such good company. Born in Cincinnati and reared in Detroit, Reed had a background that combined athletics, science, and storytelling. As a teen he’d been a semipro baseball player; he later earned a master’s degree in chemistry at the University of Michigan; he became an actor in a theater troupe that toured throughout the Midwest; and he did time as an efficiency expert. When Reed met Fairbanks in 1918, during a Detroit stop for a Midwest Liberty Loan tour with Marie Dressler and Chaplin, he was a reporter and publicist with the
Detroit Free Press,
married, and the father of three children. Striking an immediate rapport with Doug, Reed took a leave to join Fairbanks and company on the road; because he looked a lot like Chaplin, he could stand in for him on the tour when exhaustion waylaid the comic genius. (Reed renewed his partnership with Chaplin as the sound supervisor on 1931’s
City Lights.
)

After the bond-selling tour, Reed returned to the newspaper, but Fairbanks dangled a Hollywood job in front of him. The prospect of fending off a frigid, flu-bugged Detroit winter with rationed coal helped make Reed’s decision easy. What’s more, his wife Helen’s parents had moved from Wisconsin to Pasadena; when they heard of his prospective new employment, they bought Ted and Helen a house west of downtown Los Angeles. Reed began his decade-long stint with Fairbanks by editing scripts, writing titles, and helping Fairbanks cook up scenarios. A selection of his words for the silent Western
Arizona:
“Arizona: Where the burning rays / Of the noonday sun / Assay two men—/ And find—but one.” (In 1930, Columbia approached Fleming to remake
Arizona
as a talkie.)

Fleming
rejoined the Fairbanks production unit in March 1919. Reed, by now Fairbanks’s production manager, hit it off with Vic as quickly as he had with Doug. Reed’s fourth child, Robert, became Fleming’s godson. Robert says Fleming visited their house well into the 1920s, and he appears to have been a likable, rowdy god-dad. “On one of Fleming’s visits to our house,” Robert recalls, “we were playing a game of blind man’s bluff, and each of us was armed with a club made of rolled-up newspaper. We crawled around the living room floor, swinging our weapons wildly and hitting one another from time to time. I recall returning from the game after taking a hard blow and complaining to my mother, ‘Vic’s a rough guy,’ pronouncing it ‘wuff.’ ”

Like his creative partnerships and friendships, Fleming’s family was prospering. Late in 1918, Sid Deacon finally struck it rich in oil when some wells he had helped locate in Texas began to produce (given the timing, it was likely in Burkburnett, the scene of MGM’s 1940 film
Boom Town
). His initial payday was a stunning $100,000. With part of that money, he bought a large Swiss-chalet-style house, with a big front yard lined with palm trees, at 1618 Crenshaw Boulevard. He also invested in the Signal Hill oil fields. But wealth and a more upscale neighborhood didn’t change Eva Deacon. “She still was a farm woman, let’s put it that way,” Fleming’s niece Yvonne Blocksom said. “She was the only one with a chicken house. The chickens were fenced in on two sides of a three-car garage. When the old hens stopped laying, we’d have chicken for dinner. She’d chop the head off herself. She had a vegetable garden and grape arbor, too.” In Blocksom’s phrase, Eva “did not
live
wealth. She did everything herself—her own laundry, cooking, her own housekeeping, stuff like that.”

The only way for Fleming to keep going up in
his
career was to become a director. He made his directorial debut with
When the Clouds Roll By
(1919)—a comic masterpiece that expands its fan base every year at museum and festival showings. His ascendancy was a natural outgrowth of Fairbanks’s reliance on his collaborators and Emerson’s dependence on his cameramen and assistants for staging scenes. Ted Reed is sometimes credited as Vic’s co-director on
When the Clouds Roll By,
but with a bit of pre–Orson Welles panache, the art titles not only name the creators but also picture them—including Fleming alone as the director, sporting a jaunty cap and waving the camera out of his face with a jeer and some rolled-up script pages. Reed functioned as an assistant to Fleming on this boundary-busting movie, which attested to
Fairbanks’s
widening aesthetic reach. “An extravaganza of the most fantastic sort,” read the review in the
Los Angeles Times.
“Whether it will prove a strikingly popular film there is no denying the fact as far as the trappings of the story are concerned the conventional Fairbanks situations have been neatly covered up.”