Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (25 page)

Creating Gary Cooper

On July 14, 1928, Paramount announced that Fleming would direct Paramount’s “first all-sound picture” from the hit show
Burlesque,
with Nancy Carroll signed for the role Barbara Stanwyck created on Broadway as the long-suffering mate of a drunken dancer. Fleming left the picture because the studio delayed production, reluctant to cast the stage lead, Hal Skelly. Two months later, Fleming heard Paramount
was
shooting its first all-sound picture, but it wasn’t
Burlesque.
The studio had mandated Roy Pomeroy, its despotic special-effects boss, to move Paramount into talkies, and the first film designated to get the Pomeroy treatment was a William Powell vehicle called
Interference.
(The director Lothar Mendes had already done the silent version.)

Fleming told Henry Hathaway, “Come on. Let’s go and see what the hell this is, making a sound picture.” When a cop at the soundstage door barred their entrance, under orders not to let
anyone
in (it was “guarded like the Bank of England,” quipped Hathaway), Fleming marched straight to B. P. Schulberg and asked, “Are you only going to have one director for sound? What the hell is this, Ben?We’re all going to have to know about it. This son of a bitch [Pomeroy], he can’t direct all the pictures.We’ve gotta make more, we’re all going to have to get into it; it’s here to stay. So let’s find out about it.” ( John Cromwell made
Burlesque
in 1929—with Carroll and Skelly—under the title
The Dance of Life.
)

Fleming’s next Paramount film at least had singing interludes, but even without them
Wolf Song
(1929) would have been a smash. For the first time since he worked with the Fairbanks team, Fleming molded a fresh male performer for maximum star impact, doing for Gary Cooper what he did for Shearer in
Empty Hands
and Bow in
Mantrap
and Pauline Starke in
The Devil’s Cargo.
In
Wolf Song,
Fleming’s eye deto
nates
Cooper’s sensuality while giving him a nude bathing scene like the one he gave Bow in
Hula.
It helped turn Cooper into the It Boy.

Cooper had blamed Fleming for his breakup with Bow. Asked why he didn’t marry her, Cooper said, “Too late,” then muttered that she had “a fellow [Fleming] she’s flipped for.” Lupe Velez, Cooper’s co-star, had been the lover of both Fleming and the crooner Russ Columbo, who also appeared in the movie. Of Fleming, she had said, “He’s on everybody’s love-list!” Cooper was on everybody’s love list, too—and Velez fell for her leading man. Cooper admired Fleming as a director. “Coop loved him,” said Joel McCrea, a friend of Cooper’s and a wily cowboy and comedy star himself. “I know he adored Victor,” said Cooper’s wife, Rocky. The ever-professional Fleming, without hesitation, turned Coop into a sex object.

Fleming understood Cooper without being much like him. Victorian gentility was a big part of Cooper’s background. The son of British transplants to Montana—a lawyer from Birmingham who became a judge, a mother from Kent who yearned for the old country—Cooper had hoped to be an editorial cartoonist, but newspapers didn’t accept his work. He stumbled into movies as a stunt rider. In person, he shared Fleming’s immediate sensory impact. Like Fleming, he was a womanizer and
not
an exploiter.

Playing a cowboy, he stole
The Winning of Barbara Worth
from its stars, Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman. He did a couple of quickie Westerns, including one for Fleming’s pal Arthur Rosson, before Wellman gave him an attention-getting bit in
Wings
as a fatalistic cadet who nibbles a chocolate bar and announces, “Got to go and do a flock of figure eights before chow.” He tells the heroes (Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers), “Luck or no luck, when your time comes you’re going to get it,” then saunters out of their tent—and crashes. This cameo alone made him a romantic hero. Imposingly lanky, with a long, thin face and features whose impassivity intensified any inkling of thought or emotion, Cooper didn’t need a female co-star for women in the audience to go crazy for him. He had a torrid liaison with the camera.

He did, however, need a decent script and an ounce of inspiration. After a half-dozen or so forgettable vehicles,
Wolf Song
gave him both. Under Fleming’s direction, Cooper displayed elemental ardor. Soon, he began to base his acting career on stoic power, on holding in more than giving out. Fleming helped him perfect that style, too, in their subsequent film,
The Virginian
(1929). But before an actor can make
understatement
eloquent, he must learn the power of direct statement. That’s what Cooper did as Sam Lash in
Wolf Song,
“the tall silent boy from Kentucky,” who heads out for St. Louis instead of marrying a girl back home and raising a family on his father’s land. Sam thinks he’s not “the marryin’ kind.” It’s 1840 when we meet him picking his way down from the Rockies with two other trappers, Rube Thatcher (Constantine Romanoff) and Gullion (Louis Wolheim). In a flashback, we learn that they met at a St. Louis bar when Thatcher and Gullion got into an eye-gouging, bottle-breaking fight over a girl, and Sam made away with her—which impressed rather than antagonized them. By now they’ve traveled together for three years. When the two grizzled older guys talk about the pretty gals in Taos as they head into that town, they wonder whether Sam will get in trouble with a woman just like he did in Albuquerque.

Fleming introduces Taos with a turbulent vignette—elders of the Spanish elite interrupting a cockfight when they nab a peasant boy and girl rolling in the hay. Lola Salazar (Velez), the local don’s daughter, bites her knuckles in excitement as she looks on from her window. The other trappers decide to “likker up” before they attend the town ball. Instead, Sam goes bathing in a river. The sun glints off the water, and the camera frames him low on his waist to show that he’s not wearing anything. His pals warn him that one of these days a girl will get him and drag him down. At the ball, Sam proclaims, “
I want a gal to dance with me.
” Lola, smoldering, volunteers.

Edith Head was almost a decade away from becoming Paramount’s chief costume designer. In her posthumously published autobiography, she recalled that Fleming “wanted Lupe to be so sexy that most of the time her bosom would be hanging out. I went to Mr. Fleming and said, ‘Don’t you think that’s a little inconsistent? Women did not uncover their bosoms in those days.’ He told me, ‘Edith, if no woman had ever shown her bosom in those days, you wouldn’t be here.’ ” And Fleming didn’t stop there: his camera comes up so close to Velez’s Lola that we see her heart heaving in her chest. (Off-screen, Fleming didn’t take Velez so seriously. Tom Mix, the cowboy star who was Velez’s current lover, phoned her nightly—perhaps guessing she was changing from “his Mexican spitfire to Coop’s little lamb.” Velez demanded quiet whenever Mix called her, but Vic would cry out, “Kees Tony for me, Tom!”—referring to Mix’s horse. One observer noted, “Lupe never complained.”)

Sam
wins Lola against her father’s wishes, but the film’s real contest is waged between their love and the call of the wild. The Western writer Harvey Fergusson’s novel drew on frontier New Mexico and the author’s own troubled marriage; John Farrow’s script follows the book, dramatizing the explosive consequences of a mountain man settling down and exchanging male partners for a wife. The key creative ingredient, though, was Fleming’s mastery of ambivalence. Sam leaves Lola to hunt and trap again, but he feels her against him when he tries to sleep on the trail. Fleming deploys slow dissolves and superimpositions to conjure her ghostly presence next to Sam’s body.

The guy can’t take it; he heads back to his wife, only to be wounded in an Indian ambush. His painful trek to Taos takes on the feeling of a sexual mortification. Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, but at significant cost. Fleming and his cast are adult enough to mix ecstasy with anguish, and romantic victory with personal defeat; Sam is not the same man at the end, and if he’s more open and vulnerable, he’s also scarred and weakened. Reviewers damned the picture as an attempt to broaden the base of a routine Western with florid amour. But Fleming’s movie is
about
the clash between a trapper’s wandering ways and his love life.
Wolf Song
anticipates Peter Fonda’s marvelous
The Hired Hand
by forty-two years as it captures confounding erotic fluctuations.

The print of
Wolf Song
at the Library of Congress contains the nude bathing scene, not the musical score and sound effects or the sequences of Columbo, Velez, and Cooper singing—which made Cooper perhaps the first singing cowboy, and definitely the first singing mountain man. But
Wolf Song
was never an all-out sound movie. Fleming had not yet broken into talkies, and he was growing impatient. His blowup at Pomeroy and Schulberg helped persuade the studio to open up the new technology to all directors and crews, and that decision paid off with Fleming’s next collaboration with Cooper (and with Hathaway)—a milestone in movie history.

Cecil B. DeMille filmed Owen Wister’s 1902 novel,
The Virginian,
in 1914; Tom Forman directed it in 1923, and even Douglas Fairbanks considered it as a starring vehicle, but finally dropped it, apologizing to Wister: “I didn’t seem to myself to physically fit it. For more than a year I looked for an actor who filled your ideal and finally gave it up in despair. Suppose I admire the character too much to find anyone to satisfy me.” Fleming’s version wouldn’t even be the first large-scale sound Western:
In Old Arizona
beat it to the screen in January 1929. But in
the
spring of 1929, Fleming and his producer, Louis Lighton (co-writer of
Wings
), jumped off from the 1902 stage adaptation that Wister wrote with Kirk La Shelle and managed to breathe spontaneity, humor, and unpretentious complexity back into the story. Lighton and Hope Loring had written
The Blind Goddess
for Fleming, but Lighton’s service as the producer of
The Virginian
sealed their partnership and friendship.

They spoke the same plain language and shared tastes for similar experiences. Before his eyesight deteriorated, Bud Lighton, a college athlete, trained to be an Army flier. After World War I ended (he never saw action), he wrote for newspapers and did fiction on the side. His aviation stories caught Hollywood’s attention. Lighton and Loring collaborated on lucrative screenplays (including Bow’s career-defining
It
), but in her lively, bitter memoir,
The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood
(1999), Frederica Sagor Maas, who’d worked on several Bow vehicles, including
The Plastic Age
(1925) and
Hula,
heartily disparaged them. She called Lighton’s British-born wife Loring “a manipulator and fast talker” who, in Maas’s view, knew that the “tall, handsome” Lighton “looked like a producer,” then “got him elevated to play the role.” Even if Maas’s argument were true, Loring’s shrewdness alone couldn’t account for Lighton’s success as a producer.

The Virginian
showed the Lighton-Fleming team’s ability to revivify classic stories. Once again, a ranch foreman called only the Virginian must juggle his love for a New England schoolmarm named Molly (Mary Brian), his antagonism with a cattle rustler, Trampas (Walter Huston), and his tangled friendship with his all-too-affable friend Steve (Richard Arlen). The moviemakers rose to the challenge of introducing the Virginian’s frontier code to the burgeoning youth culture of the late 1920s. “The film is about the struggle of youth at the threshold of adulthood,” writes Richard Hutson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “for the young adults have, in effect, been left to themselves to work out their lives without much interference from a more adult world.” Children and babies are a constant presence in this film’s Medicine Bow, Wyoming; boys play rustler and enforcer instead of cowboys and Indians. But the main action traces what it means to “play the baby” as a man—and what it means to act, however cruelly, as a grown-up in this frontier culture.

The Virginian
never wears its meanings on its denim sleeves. Like
Captains Courageous,
that other Lighton-Fleming adaptation of a
beloved
novel,
The Virginian
is a piece of “traditional” filmmaking that contains more substance than most of its “revisionist” successors. From the moment the Virginian and his crew appear on-screen, singing as they herd five hundred head of cattle, Fleming makes the audience feel part of a vital, changeable way of life. In a feat that the Coen brothers would duplicate seventy-eight years later in
No Country for Old Men,
there is no background music in the movie. The sound camera takes in Cooper’s assured, easy manner on a horse (“Gary Cooper on a horse—that’s a scene,” said the Western director Anthony Mann) and lets us hear the animals low and the cowboys cluck and croon. In this universe, the competence of the workingman reigns supreme; proficiency and loyalty will be primary virtues.

James Drury, the star of TV’s
Virginian
(1962–71), hit on one element of this character’s appeal when he said that playing the part “was the most wonderful gift for an actor.”
Not
having a past allowed an actor to suggest, trailing behind him, “quotes of glory that you really didn’t deserve . . . It gave an aura of mystery to the character that was irreplaceable.” In Fleming’s movie, it’s a
sunny
aura of mystery. As he did in his lost
The Rough Riders,
Fleming harks back to the Teddy Roosevelt–Douglas Fairbanks brand of hero, the cheerful self-created man of action. Fairbanks had realized that he was physically too compact and temperamentally too jumpy to play the soft-spoken, laid-back fellow who embodies Roosevelt’s injunction to tread softly and carry a big stick. Under Fleming’s guidance, though, Cooper was perfect. And Arlen was ideal as the Virginian’s lovable, malleable buddy Steve. Cooper’s Virginian falls into a slouch. Arlen’s Steve keeps pulling himself into a stretch, as if to rouse himself—the way a man does waking up in bed, only Arlen does it fully clothed and standing up. The two pals share a signature hello-and-goodbye whistle that registers like a quail call. When they first exchange it in the movie, they haven’t seen each other for about four years.