Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (56 page)

The most up-to-date, politically correct theory about why Selznick let go his good friend and frequent collaborator Cukor has to do with sexual politics. Although Cukor’s circle spread this explanation of his firing for years, it came to light only after his death and entered film history when Patrick McGilligan included it in his provocative 1991 biography of Cukor, based on what McGilligan calls a “precise contemporary account of it” from the papers of the screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. The theory hinges on the story that Gable, in the 1920s, had a brief erotic encounter with the openly gay star William Haines—a friend of Cukor’s and a sometime visitor to the set of
Gone With the Wind.

Supposedly, during the early weeks of shooting, Gable heard reports that a member of Cukor’s circle, the actor Anderson Lawler, had said during a party, “George is directing one of Billy’s old tricks”—infuriating the star. But Haines’s own biographer, William J. Mann, can’t conclude anything about the original Gable-Haines incident other than “it’s clear
something
happened between the two men.” (He doesn’t entertain the possibility that
nothing
happened.) And Mann qualifies his interpretation of the
Gone With the Wind
snafu: “It would
be
too naïve to assume that gossip about Billy and Gable had nothing to do with the antagonism of the director—just as it would perhaps be too simplistic to say it caused Cukor’s ultimate dismissal. Lawler’s wagging tongue, however, might just have been the proverbial straw that broke the back of an already strained, angry, and frustrated star.”

Leigh and de Havilland had bonded with Cukor; they didn’t share Gable’s elation. “I was not aware, when the change came, that Victor Fleming was a particular friend of Gable’s and, in fact, knew nothing about him at all,” de Havilland says. “My fear was that with a change of directors, I would lose my grasp of Melanie [Hamilton]’s character.”

When they learned the news on February 13, each was costumed in black to grieve for the death of Melanie’s brother and Scarlett’s first husband, Charles Hamilton. De Havilland wrote of confronting Selznick immediately: “In our garb of deep mourning, Vivien and I stormed his office. For three solid hours, we beseeched him not to let George go. As tears rained on David, he retreated to the haven of his window seat, and when we unfurled the forlorn banners of our black-bordered handkerchiefs, he nearly fled out the window.” According to Selznick, the two actresses were so “sore” they also went to his brother (and Leigh’s American agent), Myron, and asked “if Fleming [was] a good man.” He couldn’t stave off sarcasm. “No,” he shot back, “David’s going all over town looking for a bad director.” (Myron later threatened Leigh: he said were she to quit the picture, he’d see that she never worked in Hollywood again.) De Havilland took some comfort from her then-beau, Howard Hughes, who, “to my surprise, said something both perceptive and reassuring: ‘Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right—with George and Victor, it’s the same talent, only Victor’s is strained through a coarser sieve.’ ”

To her actor friend Anthony Bushell, Leigh protested Cukor’s replacement with a man she called “a mere workaday hack.” She expressed her anxiety more politely in a letter to her mother:

Everyone is hysterical about this film, with the consequence that everything is disorganized—after two years they are still writing the script which means I don’t know where I am. They have changed the director, which has upset me a lot, as I loved George Cukor (who was here before). I like this man alright, but the poor wretch is exhausted as he hasn’t stopped working for ages, & he did not really want to do this film, as he was
so
tired, & has not even had time to read the book! Then the photography is appalling, they all say. So
how
can I have any confidence.

Figuring out who had read the novel became a parlor game for columnists throughout filming. One reported, with authority, that neither Leslie Howard nor de Havilland had done so. When Fleming took the job, he had not, but he eventually did, as his well-thumbed copy indicates. He and Mahin worked nights “for about a week” on script revisions, Mahin recalled. “Every night, Vic would say, ‘Now look on page so-and-so.’ He knew the novel by heart.”

At the time of Fleming’s hiring, the cast was working from revisions by Oliver H. P. Garrett, who was rewriting the playwright Sidney Howard’s screenplay. Fleming quickly got down to business with Mahin after bluntly telling the producer, “Your fucking script is no fucking good.” Selznick ended that arrangement. He was determined to be as independent from Mayer as possible—but Mahin had been spotted meeting with Mayer to discuss his new assignment, and Selznick suspected the writer was behind a
Hollywood Reporter
scoop crediting the MGM talent pool with rescuing his chaotic production. Next at bat was Ben Hecht—one of the most fecund minds in Hollywood and a fan of the director he called “aloof and poetical.” (Hecht may have met him in 1934 when writing
The Prisoner of Zenda
for Selznick, who wanted Fleming for that picture; it was filmed in 1937 with John Cromwell directing John L. Balderston’s script.)

Hecht’s rollicking account in his memoir,
A Child of the Century,
told how he rewrote the first half of the
GWTW
script in a week for $15,000. (Sometimes he said he worked on the script for two weeks for $10,000; whatever the price, he did stay on to edit the second half of the script in week two.) Hecht’s tale, however rife with hyperbole and inaccuracies, captures the dynamic idiosyncrasies of Fleming and Selznick as well as the excitement of boy-on-a-burning-deck filming performed on a grand scale. Hecht insisted that all he was given to eat was peanuts.

Initially, as Selznick laid out the story to an uncomprehending Hecht (who had
not
read the novel), “Fleming, who was reputed to be part Indian, sat brooding at his own council fires.” Then, after Hecht gave his blessing to Howard’s distillation of the narrative into “treatment” (really, screenplay) form,

Selznick
and Fleming discussed each of Howard’s scenes and informed me of the habits and general psychology of the characters. They also acted out the scenes, David specializing in the parts of Scarlett and her drunken father, and Vic playing Rhett Butler and a curious fellow I could never understand called Ashley . . . After each scene had been discussed and performed, I sat down to the typewriter and wrote it out. Selznick and Fleming, eager to continue with their acting, kept hurrying me. We worked in this fashion for seven days, putting in eighteen to twenty hours a day . . . On the fourth day, a blood vessel in Fleming’s right eye broke, giving him more of an Indian look than ever. On the fifth day, Selznick toppled into a torpor while chewing on a banana. The wear and tear on me was less, for I had been able to lie on the couch and half doze while the two darted about acting.

Hecht also said, many years later, “Fleming was a much better director than Cukor ever could be.”

GWTW
devotees have long wondered which chunky, bespectacled, wavy-haired man was the better Scarlett: Selznick or Cukor, who had acted the role when de Havilland read for Melanie. The casting doubtless was better when F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on the script and played Rhett and Ashley to Sheilah Graham’s Scarlett and Melanie; Fitzgerald, not surprisingly, both understood Ashley and did his best screenwriting for this project on that character. (He edited the sequence of Ashley’s Christmas leave.) Hecht thought he forestalled any future demands by snaring Selznick into his script process and gaining the producer’s tacit assent, but more likely Selznick realized the wisdom of what Mahin had told him even before Hecht said anything: “For God’s sake, let’s get back to Margaret Mitchell’s book and Sidney Howard’s wonderful script.” And Selznick
did
get Hecht back to write seven title cards in September.

Most accounts of
Gone With the Wind
focus on everything Selznick did before Fleming arrived: the search for Scarlett that ultimately landed Leigh; the previsualization of the movie in the elaborate storyboards of the production designer William Cameron Menzies; the many early reworkings of Howard’s script; and even the burning of Atlanta (filmed in December 1938). But rewrites continued during filming, and as Fitzgerald wrote of Fleming for a 1939 lecture tour by
Graham,
“[He was a] fine adaptable mechanism—which in the morning could direct the action of two thousand extras, and in the afternoon decided on the colors of the buttons on Clark Gable’s coat and the shadows on Vivien Leigh’s neck . . . Like all pictures, it has been a community enterprise . . . but the tensile strength of this great effort has been furnished by the director.”

Fleming took up the gauntlet partly because Gable was a close friend and frequent colleague. Gable as Rhett presents a mature incarnation of the good-bad take-charge guy he and Fleming had been developing since
Red Dust.
That alone should derail the long-accepted narrative that Selznick was the sole artist and Fleming the hack following orders. Years after his judicious Selznick biography,
Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick
(1992), David Thomson concluded that Selznick “identified very much with the character of Scarlett O’Hara . . . He believed in her, he so much wanted her success, her survival, for himself.” Selznick’s director, though, identified with Rhett.

The producer had prized Fleming’s abilities at Paramount in the 1920s, and in 1933, during Selznick’s brief tenure at MGM, he argued to Mayer that Fleming should be made a staff director (with a longterm contract) precisely because “we would be better off with fewer supervisors and more producing directors.” (Fleming’s only long-term contract with MGM, negotiated before
GWTW,
guaranteed him the right to deny credit on his films to any producer.) They had enjoyed a close and respectful collaboration on
Reckless,
and Selznick hoped Fleming would direct the Carole Lombard–James Stewart marital soap opera,
Made for Each Other
(which John Cromwell directed while Fleming was in Oz).

Although they were never to be friends, Selznick gave a remarkably fair evaluation of Fleming to Gable’s biographer Samuels in 1961. Samuels asked whether Fleming was “tough, sadistic,” and Selznick responded, “I don’t think he was sadistic. He was another of that extremely masculine breed. The most attractive man, in my opinion, who ever came to Hollywood. Physically and in personality. He had a kind of Indian quality. American Indian, that is. Women were crazy about him, and understandably so.” Admitting that he never knew Fleming socially, he added, “I enjoyed working with him. A really expert craftsman. He had been a cameraman and he knew his cinematics thoroughly.” Naturally, he didn’t drop his refrain that other directors worked on the film, but he summarized Fleming’s contribution by
saying,
“Fleming did beautiful work on it.” (In an earlier interview with Bosley Crowther, Selznick said Fleming directed 60 percent of the picture, a higher percentage than anyone else gave him.)

Another disaster to be contained was “the terrible mess we have made of Gable’s clothes,” Selznick wrote in one of his fabled memos. Gable was told he couldn’t use his favorite tailoring firm, Eddie Schmidt’s in Beverly Hills. This fiat, Selznick concluded, “was an insane order to begin with. And it had the further effect of making Gable take a what-the-hell attitude.”

Schmidt recalled a tempestuous Saturday conference on the second floor of his Rodeo Drive store, with David and Myron Selznick, Fleming, Gable, Gable’s agent, Phil Berg, and the costume designer Walter Plunkett. It was not specifically about wardrobe: “It was an easy place for them all to meet with nobody else getting involved. And that’s when they started talking about it, and well, of course, they talked about the wardrobe, too, you know.” In Schmidt’s recollection, Fleming told Selznick, “I’ve seen what’s been shot, and if I’m going to do this picture, I’m going to start from the beginning.” Selznick replied, “My God, it’ll cost a fortune.” Fleming moved to leave and said, “You know, I have two other commitments,” and Gable chimed in, “If Flem walks down those stairs, I’m going to follow him, and you can replace me.” It was up to Myron to say, “For God’s sake, either let them make the picture or forget the subject.”

Fleming didn’t get to shoot the picture in continuity, as he’d wished, but Schmidt’s firm stitched all of Gable’s costumes. “We had about six people working on the weekend to make that red suit with the white stripe. I’ll never forget that one as long as I live.” Like Garland’s in
Oz,
Gable’s body needed restraint, but in a different area. Schmidt’s crew shaped Gable’s suits around a light corset he wore to maintain his heroic profile. “It was very short and tight,” Schmidt says. “He had a good-size fanny on him, know what I mean? He was a big guy, you know, and he did that purposely, just for that picture.” Schmidt’s tailors cut Gable’s trousers to fit snugly and his jackets to hang loosely as they fashioned nearly two dozen costumes. “We doubled up on the white outfit, because he’d get them soiled very quickly, and that one where he carried her up the stairs, we made a couple of those.”

Selznick completed his reorganization of the project when he replaced the cinematographer Lee Garmes with Ernest Haller; it would be Haller’s first color film, and he chose to light it as if it were
black
and white. The result is an overall look that’s delicately shaded except at its expressionist extremes. (Technicolor had developed a film twice as fast as the stock used on
The Wizard of Oz
and required only half as many lights.) Fleming and Haller worked well together. One reporter found the director impersonating an Atlanta streetlight so the cinematographer could line up a shot, causing a propman to circle Fleming’s feet in chalk and then advise the grips, “Here’s where she goes, boys—and try to make it look like Mr. Fleming.” (Fleming’s frequent cinematographer Hal Rosson shot retakes without credit that autumn.)