Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (54 page)

The
choreographer Bobby Connolly’s assistants, Dona Massin and Arthur Appel, had more contact with the Munchkins in rehearsals than Fleming and his directing team, and even that was limited. Olga Nardone, at three feet four the tiniest Lullaby League dancer and the first Sleepy Head to emerge, had been part of her own vaudeville act in Boston as “Little Olga,” with a six-foot partner who was the brother of her dancing teacher, Mildred Sacco, one of Bolger’s many terpsichorean friends. She says there were so many Munchkins, “We didn’t get any individual attention. You had to learn by yourself,” and Sacco helped prepare her and the others as much as the choreography team. As for being a Sleepy Head, she shrugs and says, “We [Karl Kosiczky, Pellegrini] were the only ones who could fit in that little nest they built.”

Joan Kenmore, another of the child performers, says even when she was seven (and the youngest actor in Munchkinland), she wondered why the choreographers picked a signature step that was particularly difficult for little people: “They had to kick their legs up to execute that step.” But Ruth Duccini speaks for most of her peers when she says that being among dozens of other little performers made it “exciting and fun.”

Raabe says that they knew it was Fleming’s voice that rang out at shooting time and when “something didn’t look right, he’d say, ‘Cut!’ We had so many big arc lamps that as soon as he’d say, ‘Cut!’ an electrician would say, ‘Save your arcs.’ We’d say, ‘Save your arches,’ and squat wherever we would be, so we wouldn’t lose our positions.” A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Raabe had worked for the Oscar Mayer company both as an accountant in the Chicago office and as “Little Oscar,” their tiny trademark, “the world’s smallest chef.” Says Raabe, “I had done a lot of public speaking, and was used to enunciating clearly. So when it came time to cast the Munchkin Coroner, I knew how to speak, shall we say, appropriately. I did it once, and the casting director said, ‘Okay, you’re the Coroner.’ ”

Karl Kosiczky (he took the last name of Slover in 1943), who played one of the three Munchkin trumpeters, declares Fleming “a sincere gentleman, well liked by the Munchkins” because he was direct and approachable. When the lead trumpeter, Kayo Erickson, missed three cues, “I, Karl, suggested to put me in first. Mr. Fleming said, ‘Change.’ ” Kosiczky, at just over three feet tall, was a movie veteran whose credits already included
They Gave Him a Gun
and Hawks’s
Bringing
Up Baby.
Not only did he play multiple roles (including a townswoman), but Fleming also asked him to sing “We’re Off to See the Wizard” for set visitors. He remembers Raabe making too much of a song out of the Coroner’s report. “Mr. Fleming said, ‘Don’t sing,’ this is serious.” The verdict was, of course, “As Coroner, I must aver, I thoroughly examined her, and she’s not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead.”

When Fleming was advising them on line readings, though, it was really to bolster their physical performances. Before he shot Munchkinland, the MGM sound chief, Douglas Shearer, and the musical arranger Ken Darby devised a system of recording the dialogue and songs at a slow speed, with performers seasoned in radio and/or cartoons, including members of the singing groups the King’s Men Octet and the Debutantes. When played back at normal speed, the voices had the soprano electricity of the high-pitched Munchkin sound. The speaking voices of only two little people ended up on the final sound track.

Raabe is certain that Fleming signed off on individual casting choices for featured roles such as his Coroner. But it’s unclear how much the director had to do with the intricacies of the recording or, for that matter, the specifics of the choreography. And more legendry abounds: The whimsical and hyperbolic Munchkin Mickey Carroll once boasted, “Vic Fleming would stand there and say, ‘Mickey, the marching soldiers don’t look right. Go in there and make it right.’ So I’d go in and make it right.” However, Swensen says that Fleming gave the soldiers their marching orders directly for “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” and guided their steps throughout while maintaining an air of “kindness.”

MGM’s top-tier stars visited Munchkinland; in 1938, there was no more elaborate Yuletide fantasy park. Norma Shearer, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, and Mickey Rooney toured the sights; Greta Garbo peeked in, too. Joan Crawford brought her niece, and Wallace Beery his daughter.

The kids’ visits often ended in disillusioned pratfalls. Warner LeRoy skipped down the Yellow Brick Road only to crash into a painted backdrop after about twenty feet. “That is when I learned the difference between fantasy and reality,” he used to say. Victoria Fleming took one look at the talking apple trees and grew so scared she had to be taken out. Edward Hartman declared Garland “the ugliest thing
I’d
ever seen. Her head seemed to be too large for the rest of her body.” These visitors might have stoked Fleming’s good-humored yet unblinking view of childish perceptions and behavior.

His conquest of
Oz
was so complete that it may have helped take him off the film: when Selznick fired Cukor from
Gone With the Wind,
Fleming was now more than ever, in the eyes of the producer and his MGM partners and distributors, the number-one choice to replace him. And when he did go to Tara, he never left
Oz
completely. He hiked over to the fantasy’s cutting rooms from the sets of the Civil War epic. With the editor Blanche Sewell, he kept looking for ways to both tighten the movie and temper the Wicked Witch’s villainy without defusing it; for example, he took the skywriting message—“Surrender Dorothy or Die WWW”—down to “Surrender Dorothy.” He chopped off a montage designed to accompany Dorothy’s return to Kansas. (Luckily, even before filming, the image of “a Negro baby in a bathtub” was cut from the list of joke sightings in the twister.) After three to five sneak previews, Fleming and Sewell had winnowed the rough cut from 121 minutes to a release print of 101. (Almost all movies then were 90 minutes or under.)

Before Fleming left, he oversaw the special-effects squad’s creation of a Kansas cyclone from a muslin stocking. Fleming didn’t get to guide Garland through the farm version of “Over the Rainbow.” Once Selznick and Mayer whisked him off to Tara, Twelve Oaks, and Atlanta, King Vidor came aboard to direct all the Kansas scenes. “Victor was a good friend, and he took me around to all the sets that had been built and went through the thing,” Vidor told Richard Schickel. But he told Harmetz, “Instead of telling me what I wanted to know, he’d say, ‘Oh, you know what to do.’ I’m not even sure that he took me down to see the sets.” Vidor didn’t take credit for any of his
Oz
work while Fleming was alive, but after his death he even took credit for “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” which he didn’t shoot.

Vidor often said he was particularly proud of the way he handled Garland singing in the barnyard. “Previous to this,” he told Harmetz, “when people sang, they stood still. I used ‘Over the Rainbow’ to get some rhythmical flow into a ballad.” He did film the number with supreme limpidity. He fixes his camera on Garland as she ambles around the yard, reclines on a hay bale, tugs at a wheel, and comes to rest on some farm equipment with Toto sitting just above and behind her and touchingly holding out his paw. Nonetheless, Vidor’s depiction
of
his staging as a movie-musical breakthrough for the mobile camera is mistaken. Even in Fleming’s train wreck
Reckless,
the title number starts with the camera following Jean Harlow down a bar. And through all the musical numbers set in Oz, Fleming and Rosson keep the camera roaming.

In this era of CDs and DVDs,
Oz
fans have become familiar with its deleted musical snippets, which include a Busby Berkeley–choreographed extension of the Scarecrow’s “If I Only Had a Brain” number with Bolger bouncing off fence posts as if they were billiard bumpers. Also, Dorothy reprised “Over the Rainbow” as she cowered in the Witch’s tower, and the Emerald City staged a triumphal procession to “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.” One jazz-infused song was excised in its entirety: “The Jitterbug,” about “a goofy critter” who “injects a jitter” that “starts you dancing on a thousand toes.” The first number Arlen and Harburg wrote for the film (demonstrating their grasp of Freed’s jazz concept) was performed in part of the Haunted Forest populated with “Jitter Trees” that grabbed at Dorothy and her friends.

At a Santa Barbara preview, Harburg said the scene had audience members dancing in the aisles. But this was not a plus for MGM’s conservative executives. According to both Harburg and Hamilton, they feared that number tied in too closely with the jitterbug dance craze and would date the film. (When told Metro anticipated a decade-long life for
Oz,
Hamilton snorted, “You’re out of your mind.”) All that survives of the number is Arlen’s home-movie footage, which is too haphazard to provide much evidence of how it might have worked, since the jitterbug itself was animated. Fleming wanted the number kept; he was even providing the jitterbug’s owlish hoots on the dialogue track the way Walt Disney (back then) was lending his voice to Mickey Mouse. But Freed thought it pointless and distracting, and he won.

On the other hand, Harburg put Fleming on the side of the devils during the controversy that arose from “Over the Rainbow” being cut at the preview stage. In Harburg’s version, “Mr. Fleming walked into the office and he said, ‘I’m sorry to say that that whole first part of that show is awful slow because of that number . . . We gotta take it out.’ Now, when a man like that comes in, who doesn’t talk but makes pronunciamentos, you’ve got to listen.” LeRoy, according to Harburg, “became little Mervyn Levine again,” and “Harold ran to shul.” For the moment the song was out of the picture.

Even
Harmetz, hardly the president of the Victor Fleming fan club, doubts that story. Whoever gave the order to kill the number, Harburg and Arlen agreed that Freed earned an even bigger piece of the
Oz
legend by demanding its restoration. At the time, Arlen liked to tell newspapers that the unexpected controversy taught him that when doing a stage show, “it’s your show and everyone else’s,” but when working on a movie, “it’s never your picture. You’re just getting paid.”

The movie’s price tag meant that its impressive $3.017 million gross in its first release would register—because of opening costs—a three-quarter-of-a-million-dollar loss.
Oz
didn’t do better for a couple of good reasons: many of the movie’s admissions were at cut-rate children’s prices, and the flood of quality films in that benchmark year of 1939 prevented holdover runs. MGM publicity concentrated its efforts on a preopening push far different from the sustained, years-long build Selznick had already been giving to
Gone With the Wind.
What MGM gave
Oz
was more like a contemporary media blitz, and it may not have suited a movie that was meant for the long haul.

But with broad popular acceptance (even political cartoons adopted the imagery) and mostly ecstatic reviews nationwide—Russell Maloney of the
New Yorker
was a notable exception, labeling it “a stinkaroo”—MGM executives must have known that the investment would eventually pay off. And when it aired on CBS, on November 3, 1956, it became a pop-culture phenomenon, attracting well over half of that night’s TV viewing audience. The film’s network showings became hugely popular annual events beginning on December 13, 1959, when the network began airing it in a 6:00–8:00 p.m. time slot, often with CBS stars and their children as hosts, such as Red Skelton and his daughter, Valentina, and Richard Boone and his son Peter. Garland was set to introduce the film with one of her daughters in 1956, while she was performing at the Palace, but it didn’t happen. Either CBS didn’t want to lug its lights and cameras backstage at the Palace or the fragile Garland thought twice about juggling an introduction and her act. Bert Lahr and Liza Minnelli did the honors, with the help of an
Oz
expert. Color sets were so rare that CBS didn’t even broadcast
The Wizard of Oz
in color in 1961 and 1962. It proved Fleming’s contention that if he did his job right, children would accept the reality of Oz until the movie’s end; Oz carried just as much authentic emotional weight as Kansas, even with both in black and white.

The movie would garner its largest number of viewers—sixty-four
million—
on March 15, 1970, for its first broadcast after Garland’s death in 1969. Under Mervyn LeRoy’s direction, Gregory Peck introduced the film that year for NBC, calling it an “unquestioned classic” that “through theater engagements and telecasts may well have been enjoyed by more people than any other entertainment production in the history of the world.”

For her one-word capsule in the
New Yorker,
many years after Maloney’s sneer, Pauline Kael simply exhaled, “Heaven.” The production
was
a stairway to paradise—for the audience, and for Garland, Lahr, Bolger, Haley, Hamilton, and Morgan. And Fleming ushered them all in. Key contributions came from Freed, the design and special-effects teams, a slew of screenwriters—notably Langley—and, crucially, Arlen and Harburg. But the movie’s schedule was stop-and-go, its sets hazardous, and its collaborative history tortuous. Without Fleming’s exuberance, instinct, and strict hand—and his gifts for upheaval and excitement—the movie would have collapsed into campy chaos.

When a director goes full tilt, his or her greatest contributions are often spiritual, intangible. So in some ways it’s reasonable that Fleming, who worked in many different forms, would be slighted as a prime creator of a picture that ranks near the top not only of all movie musicals but of all movies. In other ways, it’s befuddling. In an enterprise like
The Wizard of Oz,
where the components are outlandish and the creative risks great, why wouldn’t the director get more, rather than less, credit for holding it all together?

Harmetz reserves high praise for Arlen and especially Harburg. The lyricist pushed Lahr for the role of the Cowardly Lion, edited the pre-Mahin scripts into a lucid entity, and contributed dialogue as well as lyrics, notably in the scene of the Wizard handing the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion their rewards. Understandably, Harburg’s biographers take Harmetz’s argument to its logical conclusion: that the movie “owes its coherence and unity—not to mention its lyrics—to Yip.” Yet Freed was the one who brought up the entwined songs and narrative and the emotional hook of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
in an exhaustive and influential memo. And it’s Fleming’s genius at setting and maintaining a robust tone that made it possible for the satiric and comedic turns and one heart-stopping ballad to score with equal zing.