Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (52 page)

Fleming’s handling of Lahr and Bolger is exemplary, especially in relation to their young leading lady. Lahr uses a repertoire of growls along with a variety of rumbles that sound like nasal events preceding giant sneezes. His tearful expressions break through the makeup, and his gestures alternate crude braggadocio and daintiness; at times, he could be knitting sweaters with his paws. He riotously exposes a feminine neediness beneath low-comic bluster. And when it comes to Dorothy, this “sissy” lion also is a kidding sister. His showstopping “If I Were King of the Forest” is a game of dress-up, with Dorothy acting (per the script directions) “as flower girl and train bearer.”

During filming, Bolger complained to Billie Burke, the movie’s Good Witch “I’m a professional dancer. That’s what I do. I’m a dancer. So of course I don’t dance.” But his long-legged lopes and stops and drops, and the perilous extended swings of his floppy arms, make for dances of uncanny spontaneity. He’s panicky around fire (after all, he’s made of straw), but his general affability balances Dorothy’s urgency. Her final line to the Scarecrow—“I think I’ll miss you most of all”—was the relic of a shorn subplot about her love for the farmhand Hunk. But it’s the perfect capper for Fleming’s melding of Dorothy’s intensity and the Scarecrow’s humming affection. Never had the director’s keen eye and ear for male and male-and-female bonding born more unlikely or affecting results.

Fleming once had to call “Cut” because the Wizard’s throne, surrounded by surging torches, caught on fire. Frank Morgan quipped, “Ah—the hot seat!” As Harlow’s grandiloquent hustling father in
Bombshell,
Morgan had cooked up a perfect piece of ham bone, but when he tried out burlesque routines as the Wizard, Fleming clamped down. Years later, at his Virginia Beach home, Noel Langley would regale visitors with his recollection of Fleming shouting, “Is everyone ready?” and Morgan invariably yelling back, “No!”

Fleming wanted the actors to pierce the fourth wall without breaking it. It’s something he had done as early as those silent Fairbanks comedies, with their humorous special effects and animation, their
inside
but open-to-the-public gags about Fairbanks as a personality, and their winking titles. Fleming’s point of attack differs drastically from the scattershot topicality of animation like
Shrek 2,
with its “Far-bucks” coffeehouse, or
Shark Tale,
with its transposition of Mob stereotypes onto undersea cartoons. He builds on the audience’s authentic affection for broad comics like Lahr, dancing clowns like Bolger, and dapper entertainers like Haley, whose casting as the creaking Tin Man was one giant in-joke—and also the foundation for a touchingly frustrated character.

As Dorothy’s friends attempt, with the aid of an intrepid Toto, to rescue her from the Wicked Witch’s castle, the film reaches giddy heights of humorous self-reference even in dire conditions. There are few funnier sights in movies than the Tin Man holding on to the Lion’s tail as they climb up a slippery mountain path, the Tin Man’s tug bringing out the block-like outline of the tail’s anchor in the lion costume.

That anchor was, according to Ambrose Schindler, “a thick hunk of shoe leather.” And he should know. He was Haley’s double in that scene, holding on to the tail of Lahr’s stunt double. Schindler was a junior at the University of Southern California and, when he wasn’t quarterbacking the USC Trojans, earned the odd dollar doing stunts and background work at MGM. “I was the only guy at MGM who still knew how to drive a Model T,” he recalls. “I had one all through high school, knew how to work the three pedals.”

Just before he did the Tin Man stunt, Schindler had been a ballroom dancer in a Joan Crawford picture,
The Bride Wore Red.
“They came over and took me off that,” and the following day Schindler found himself being fitted in a heavy costume made of tinny, metallic cloth, leather, and buckram, identical to the one Haley wore. Schindler practiced stepping on a trick two-by-two-foot boulder, scrambling for his life on the cliff when it gave way, and hanging on to the tail of the Cowardly Lion.

The Cowardly Lion splutters, “I—I—I hope my strength holds out.”

The Tin Man replies, “I hope your tail holds out!”

But for Schindler, it didn’t. “I was 185 pounds and I pulled the tail right off” and “fell like a hunk of lumber,” Schindler says. “No way could I do this. So they had to take time out.” He got a couple of extra paydays while the costume team made a lighter-weight outfit out of “some soft plastic material” and rejoined the Cowardly Lion’s tail to the rest of Lahr’s costume “with some kind of heavy leather belt. It was
a
real thick hunk of shoe leather down around the guy’s waist and around the guy’s tail.” (Schindler says he recognized himself in the scene by his straight, long, prominent English nose; his football-team nickname was “banana nose.”)

The characters are so full of fear, anguish, and self-mockery that the comedy and action—as well as the heartache—are intertwined. Someone is always breaking into tears or on the verge of them, and the effect on the audience is amusing, sad, and stirring. Haley said when he was working on
Oz:

I disparaged the work because I thought our roles were really just a quartet of people who were quaking all the time—a bunch of two-dimensional scaredy-cats. It wasn’t until years later when I realized that children connected immediately with the fear in the
Oz
story, that overcoming this fear was the greatest bravery and heroism a child could imagine. It is what a child must live through each time he wakes in the night and sees a horrific shadow on the wall. Victor knew all this as he directed us.

(“My dad had great regard for him,” Jack Haley Jr. confirmed.)

The director kept the actors primed in the midst of their chagrin or befuddlement. John Lahr wrote that his father “was flattered when Fleming would take him aside and ask his opinion for improving a scene.” Haley thought there was an ulterior motive to this questioning:

Fleming had a wonderful understanding of people. He knew that the makeup was wearing on us. After a couple of hours, it was depressing to have it on. In order for us not to lose interest in the picture, to try and keep our animation, he would call all three of us together and say, “Fellahs, you’ve got to help me out on this scene.” Well, I knew this guy was a big director, and he didn’t need actors to help him. He’d say, “You guys are Broadway stars, what do you think we should do here?” . . . But I always thought he was just trying to keep our interest.

These sessions most famously bore fruit when Dorothy and her friends fall into a stupor in the poppy field only to be awakened by a snowfall. Lahr came up with the tension-breaking laugh line, “Unusual
weather
we’re having.” He told his son, “Fleming couldn’t see it. I said, ‘Vic, I’m sure it’s a laugh.’ He trusted me. In that situation, I was right. It was a big laugh.” When our heroes are caught in the Wicked Witch’s castle, the Lion exclaims, “Trapped, trapped like mice!” Then, as if realizing he’s grown in stature since his cowardly days, he says, “Er, rats.” It crackles like an improv.

As the Wicked Witch, Hamilton turned her voice into a cackle and her cackle into a nails-on-chalkboard screech. She let makeup artists expand her nose and chin, and gave her expressions a fierce jut that made her profile as menacing as the taloned clutch of her hands. She had already worked with Fleming in
The Farmer Takes a Wife,
and she praised him as “a very good director, one of the best in his day. He did a great job and was delightful and very easy to work for.”

But she also noted that he could lose his temper when somebody was “wasting time, or making the studio lose time; or just being unprofessional . . . He could be very sarcastic. And his sarcasm could hit a little below the belt. He’d say something like, ‘Tell me, is your memory as soft as it seems to be?’ And this would be because you had stopped for a second or two to remember a line, or the sequence. And of course, at the time, I was much younger (thirty-six) and had no memory problems.” Fleming once told Morgan, a heavy drinker who’d lose his bearings when he went too long without alcohol, “Get back on your champagne kick so we can live together.” Yet Hamilton also said, “Fleming would sometimes tell you how good your performance was. And in my experience, many directors never tell you how you’re doing, or whether or not they like what you’re doing . . . But whenever I was unsure about my performance, Fleming would encourage and advise me.”

Considering that his swift, demanding pace nearly immolated her, Hamilton was more than fair. The calamity occurred in December, after Fleming shot the Witch threatening Dorothy in Munchkinland with “I’ll get you, my pretty—and your little dog, too!” In order to vanish in a scarlet puff of fire and smoke, Hamilton had to walk backward to an elevator platform without tripping on her billowing black skirt. Knowing a cut would wreck the illusion of her disappearance, Fleming wanted to capture the action in one shot. After several rehearsals, the first take was perfect. But he demanded another for insurance. The timing of the flames and smoke effects began to go awry. Fleming bellowed, “I want the shot done, and done right now!”

Hamilton
backed away from Garland and landed on the platform—but the incendiary effects kicked up before she could get down:

At first, I didn’t realize I was on fire. But suddenly, my face felt very warm. Fortunately, when I was going down, I instinctively put my hands up to cover my face. When I got down I said, “Gee, they got it right that time!” The two men waiting for me thought I was getting hysterical. And they were very busy fussing over me. My skirt, my witch’s hat and broom were on fire. So one of them quickly knocked the hat off my head. The other grabbed the broom out of my hand. I said, “What’s the matter?” But they were too busy putting out the fire on my skirt to answer.

Her right hand, nose, and chin were burned, and her eyebrows singed; her green copper-based makeup seeped into her skin. She was out for six weeks, while Fleming shot around her. When she returned, she was wearing a glove on her right hand “because the nerves were still exposed.” Fleming asked to see the hand, so she took off the glove and he “grabbed” it. “Well, the pain was so unbearable that I almost passed out. ‘It looks fine,’ he said. But I begged him to please leave my hand alone. Fleming apologized and said, ‘Well, we have that scene and the shot was great!’ ”

Hamilton’s stunt double, Betty Danko, wasn’t so forgiving. During Hamilton’s first day back, a second unit prepared to film the Witch’s skywriting sequence over the Emerald City. Hamilton refused to do the whole sequence, reasoning that if the stunt were safe, as everyone was telling her, the studio would not have supplied her with a fireproof costume. She was willing to sit in a special steel saddle on a broomstick raised fifteen feet high on wires as a wind machine blew at her, but she wouldn’t allow the filmmakers to connect the smoke-spewing pipe to the broom while she was on it. So after a few close-ups, Hamilton gave the seat to Danko.

The special-effects team had planned to pin down the Witch’s cape so it covered both the saddle and the pipe, but when Fleming saw them and Danko making the shot, he decided, after two perfect takes, that the image would have more zing if the cape were flying freely. So the pipe was moved directly under the saddle, and the next time Danko pressed the button to release the smoke, the pipe exploded, blowing her off the seat.

No
one could figure out why that happened. “But Fleming was the killer,” Danko told Harmetz, blaming his ruthless pursuit of the clinching shot for the ordeal that left her grabbing the broomstick with both hands and one leg for dear life. The accident bruised her left leg from the knee up and broke the skin two inches deep almost all the way around the limb. The shot was never retaken Fleming’s way. An embittered Danko recalled working a stunt for Greer Garson on Fleming’s
Adventure
in 1945. “I felt a draft on my leg and I looked down and it was Fleming. He was trying to get a look under my skirt to see my scars.”

With his lead performer, though, Fleming was sensitive and considerate—and Garland developed a deep, lifelong affection for both him and the picture. When Guilaroff was doing Garland’s hair on
Oz,
he thought she already showed the nervousness and shrillness of amphetamine addiction and blamed MGM for assigning her an assistant makeup artist and dresser who doubled as a drug supplier. But everyone else on the set considered Judy a joy, maybe because Fleming calmed her down. He lovingly called her “Judalein” (which years later led Judy’s sister Jimmie to name her daughter Judalein). At the end of filming, he gave her a motorbike, and she gave him a black cocker spaniel bitch for Victoria and Sally. The Flemings named the dog Judy.

“Judy was very, very fond of Victor Fleming,” said Sid Luft, who in the early 1950s became both her husband and her business partner, producing her cult favorite
A Star Is Born
(1954).

She only had the nicest things to say about him. He was a genius, as far as she was concerned. And she really enjoyed making that movie. It was the most fun she ever had working at MGM. The spirit of it all; she was sixteen, seventeen, with no problems, and she was a very, very sharp teenager who knew who she was and had a lot of experience by that time. She was close to being a full-grown woman, but she could look and act like a child. And you have to trust her judgment about Fleming. Being in this business as long as I have, and knowing it like I do, I have to think he was probably the undiscovered genius of our business.

As always, Fleming maintained a rough-and-ready humor on the set. Garland told a reporter, “Once I lay down for a nap in my dressing room and someone—never mind who—had put smudge pots under my
bed.
They slipped in and lit them, then ran out and yelled, ‘Fire!’ When I stumbled out through the smoke, they threw water in my face.” Although she also told a version of this stunt that was set during the making of
Girl Crazy
and blamed Mickey Rooney, it has all the fingerprints of one of Fleming’s practical jokes.