Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (68 page)

Lu didn’t have Jewish parents. Her father’s family was Protestant, and on her mother’s side some ancestors were German Catholics who had emigrated from Russia. But as with stories about Fleming’s Cherokee ancestry, the nickname stuck. Slim “gave Mother a gold bangle, something you’d wear on a bracelet,” says Sally. “On one side was engraved ‘L the J,’ and on the other side, ‘I love you, Miss Schmaltz.’ ” Lu, whose real opinion of the nickname is not known, was outwardly accepting of it and attached the bangle to a gold bracelet that Clark Gable had given her.

Like many a rhyming nickname, it spread quickly. Fleming’s relatives, who barely knew Lu and disliked her, anyway, found in it an explanation of her disdain of them. “You mean True Blue Lu, the Little Jew?” asked Yvonne Blocksom. “I always called her Truie. I never really liked her very much, and she didn’t like me. She put me down as much as she could.” Rodger Swearingen recalls being told that Lu really was Jewish.

Edward Hartman offers a gentler explanation for the family antagonism. “Lu literally blew Vic out of our lives when he married her. He just dropped Yvonne and Newell [Morris] after supporting them all their lives. It was a real blow to them.”

Of
course, in that era, even sophisticated adults found it difficult to sort out prejudice from banter. Some ethnic and racial goading derived from xenophobia and snobbery, some from the spirited give-and-take of a melting pot that was still bubbling. Leonora Hornblow, Arthur Hornblow’s wife, thought Slim was purely affectionate, not anti-Semitic at all, when Slim told her, “I’m having lunch with Lu the Jew.” Fleming’s daughters said that whenever they heard him and his friends complain about “the goddamn Jews,” it was about studio politics. Hornblow agrees. “David O. Selznick just ate up directors. Darryl Zanuck
wasn’t
Jewish, and he could be appalling, and Harry Cohn
was
Jewish, and
was
appalling. Ben Hecht was a passionate Jew and he really liked Victor. It wasn’t the place to be an anti-Semite.”

More than her ethnic humor, Slim’s chic would have rubbed Fleming the wrong way. Jane Greer did remember him playing croquet at the Hawks house. But Hedda Hopper reported that when Slim made a list of best-dressed women in 1945, he called Hawks to “razz him about the money it was going to cost him for her to live up to that reputation.” Dottie Wellman recalled, “I know the first party we went to there, Slim said, ‘Oh, we’re going to barbecue.’ I said, ‘Fine, so it’s casual.’ And I go over there to barbecue, [and] the gals all have on—like a uniform—black pants, gorgeous satin blouses, with lots of jewelry. And this is barbecue dress?”

Not surprisingly, the ambitious Bowmans became Slim’s fast friends. Slim was godmother to Lee junior. Bacall recalled a 1943 bash at Hawks’s place where the luminaries included Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael. She spent the evening dancing with Lee Bowman “and flirting, of course . . . I wanted something of my own, and, failing that, was willing to flirt outrageously with a man like Lee Bowman. I went a bit far that night and Helene Bowman was less than thrilled with me, for which I could not blame her one bit. Lee took me home—somewhere along the way it was daylight, and I remember sitting on a diving board in my evening dress and then dancing with him. Harmless, and I enjoyed it completely.”

Nothing, however, not even Slim’s friendship with the Bowmans, soured Fleming on Howard Hawks. “They were the very closest of friends,” recalled Hornblow. “Howard was an ice cube, cold; Victor was not cold. Howard was a wonderful director, but they were different, and their work was different.” Their boyish bond endured despite slashing contrasts in psychology and temperament. For reasons known only to themselves, they persisted in calling each other Dan or Ed.
“
They used to make each other presents,” Sally says. “He made Daddy these silver things that go around a casing for matches. He engraved it ‘Ed and Lu.’ ”

They’d goad each other deliberately and playfully. Edward Hartman recalls, “Hawks had dogs over there that barked at night. They woke Vic up and it really pissed him off. So he had me collect tin cans, and he hung them up on a string on the fence between their properties. And he had a wire that ran into his bedroom, so the next time the dogs started to bark and howl, he’d yank the wire, rattle those cans, and make even more noise. That situation lasted about two weeks, and finally they found a way to shut their dogs up.” Fleming may have found Hawks’s notorious yarn spinning funny. Vidor said he and Jules Furthman “just told stories about Hawks” the way other Hollywoodians would tell stories about Sam Goldwyn.

Slim Hawks’s family lived in Steinbeck country, but were hardly Steinbeck characters. She came from Pacific Grove, a fashionable spot at the top of the Monterey peninsula. Her father didn’t work on Cannery Row—he
owned
most of Cannery Row. They were the hoity-toity opposites of the hoi polloi in Steinbeck’s first best seller,
Tortilla Flat.

Fleming directed an adaptation of that episodic novel during the winter of 1941–42. Other projects had come his way; MGM had started to develop Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
for Fleming while he was in the midst of
The Wizard of Oz.
But after the storms and strains of
Oz, Gone With the Wind, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
and his aborted
Yearling, Tortilla Flat
promised to be (and was) idyllic. It fit this easygoing moment of his life. For Steinbeck, writing the novel was a lark, and it reads like one: a relaxed comedy of bad manners set among the
paisanos
of Monterey, California. Steinbeck presents this mixed-Hispanic people as the salt of the earth—make that the tortillas and beans, since their children astonish authorities by achieving health with that staple diet. The novel teeters on the brink of condescension toward
paisanos
but never becomes a Monterey version of Erskine Caldwell’s pandering
Tobacco Road.
( Jack Kirkland had adapted both books for the Broadway stage;
Tortilla Flat
proved as big a flop as
Tobacco Road
had been a hit.)

Building on anecdotes provided by Monterey friends as well as Monterey cops and others who lived and worked with
paisanos,
Steinbeck makes them figures of fable as well as earthy fun. A rascal named Danny sets the novel in motion when he inherits two houses in Mon
terey
from his grandfather. What underlies the sprawling content is the idea that owning property entails life-altering risks. Steinbeck’s madcap variation on Marxism pales before the secondary idea that when Danny, Pilon, and the rest of their friends adopt one house as their base (the other goes down in flames), they grow akin to Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But their code, as well as their camaraderie, rests on slackerdom, not chivalry.

It’s sad and funny to read in literary studies that the movie softens the book or muddles its intentions. There’s nothing softer or more muddled in either book or film than the novel’s ending, which strains to turn Danny’s house into a ruined Camelot by having him go mad. Aside from Steinbeck’s sometimes ironic but always real attachment to its characters, what unifies the book is the
paisanos
’ ability to believe in their own lies or illusions.

At best, Steinbeck’s
Tortilla Flat
is a merry chaos. Fleming’s movie is one, too. Fleming may have considered an all-Hispanic ensemble; he tested Desi Arnaz and Ricardo Montalban for Danny and tried to borrow Rita Hayworth from Columbia. But with Tracy as Pilon, Fleming needed a commensurate star, like John Garfield, for Danny, and Hedy Lamarr became a natural choice for Sweets: she and Tracy had scored a giant hit in
Boom Town
(1940). The picture’s ultimate urban-ethnic cast, with its maelstrom of accents, would have suited a grown-up version of a Dead End Kids comedy. The whole movie is full of jolly incongruities. The collection of hangdog character actors mirrors the collection of reformed mutts and strays that follow around the most likable character, the Pirate, a dog lover and cutter of kindling. When the Pirate and his dogs witness a miracle, the scene itself is a miracle—the kind of far-fetched fantasy that Fleming pulled off repeatedly throughout his career.

The movie’s genesis was haphazard. A former story editor at Paramount, Benjamin Glazer, persuaded the studio to buy screen rights for the novel in 1935, the year of publication, for a mere $4,000. Despite its best-seller status,
Tortilla Flat
acquired Hollywood heat years later, from the prestige of two other Steinbeck properties,
Of Mice and Men
(1939) and
The Grapes of Wrath
(1940), both best picture Oscar nominees and the latter a great popular success. By then, Glazer had left Paramount and bought the rights back from the studio, then sold them to MGM for (reportedly) $65,000. Steinbeck had no love for that studio. During his most recent attempt to launch a film of
The Red Pony,
MGM
had refused to grant the author total script control as well as a ton of money and the right to work at home.

When an MGM story editor attempted to interest Steinbeck in helping adapt
Tortilla Flat,
Steinbeck proposed extortionate terms. The movie’s producer, Sam Zimbalist, set a meeting with Steinbeck at a Monterey bar. Mahin, who had already prepared a script from Glazer’s draft—in eleven days, he told one interviewer—came with Zimbalist. They put across the message that they needed assistance; Steinbeck remained noncommittal. Then Tracy joined in. He and Zimbalist said they’d try to persuade MGM to hire Milestone, who’d done a superb job on
Of Mice and Men,
to direct the picture. But it wasn’t to be; Milestone had long been in Mayer’s doghouse. Steinbeck read the working draft, pronounced it a screwup, and wrote to his stage and screen agent, “I’ve planted all the seeds of uncertainty I could and then got out. They must hate Milestone because they offered me John Ford and they hate him too.” In the MGM publicity account, Zimbalist and Mahin gave him the script one night in Monterey, “and when he returned it, to their amazement, he said it was all right.” According to Mahin, Steinbeck thanked him for taking “all the drama and message out of it,” expressing the wish that Kirkland had done the same in his flop play. And the final choice of directors suited him: Steinbeck felt friendly enough toward Fleming to socialize with him later in New York.

Maybe the friendliness of the finished movie got to Steinbeck; its affable air is its most seductive quality. At 105 minutes, it goes on fifteen minutes too long, with one redemption too many. And Fleming by now had begun to overvalue his own studio wizardry. The re-creation of shantytown Monterey in Culver City generated reams of publicity: “Its single dirt street meanders down to the bay flanked by shacks and outhouses in exquisite disrepair. Here a rusted iron bedstead serves as a gate; there a porcelain washbowl, once planted with flowers, sprouts weeds; geraniums in tin cans and clusters of abalone shells cling forlornly to fences or sag to the ground with them.” But even with an infiltration of chickens, goats, and dogs, as well as pigeons that reportedly clocked themselves flying into a cyclorama, it never stops looking like what it is: a set. It’s sorry indeed compared with the seamless blend of studio and location work in
Captains Courageous.

Yet from the moment Pilon (Tracy) and Pablo (Akim Tamiroff) convince the jailer Tito Ralph (Sheldon Leonard) to parole Danny ( John Garfield), it shows off what Fleming could do without breaking
a
sweat. He frames groups of men so naturally that you can tell their emotional closeness by the slump of their postures and the tilt of their heads. He conjures a sense of real-life leisure through a mixture of shambling inaction and vivid action. The men perk up an already virile, bubbly atmosphere when they take off into song, regularly. Fleming draws a stripped-wire performance out of a normally impassive actress, Hedy Lamarr. And he fully realizes an outrageous episode that would give other directors agita: Saint Francis visiting Pirate and his dogs.

Garfield’s Danny enters marital bliss and Tracy’s Pilon cheers him on his way—a far cry from Danny’s descent into alcoholic depression and death in the book. But the film’s ending is not as crippling as the book’s, since Fleming and Mahin adopt a more emotional stance toward their characters. They embrace the slacker romanticism behind the Arthurian allegory. The Sweets Ramirez of the book, a Portuguese woman of highly variable charms, reacts with materialistic glee to Danny’s gift of a vacuum cleaner. In the movie she becomes an equally virtuous and voluptuous Lamarr (at her most high-Fahrenheit), and she does end up marrying Danny.
The New York Times
paraphrased the producer, Zimbalist, saying that Danny’s “fate in the picture is worse than death,” and that after he becomes a husband and “a solid citizen,” he “is as lost to his friends as if he had died.” But there’s no evidence of that in the movie: the wedding is unreservedly joyous. If Danny and Sweets drive toward a separate fate than Pilon and friends, the feeling is not sorrowful—just bittersweet.

Tortilla Flat
prefigures Italian movies like Federico Fellini’s
I Vitelloni
and Gabriele Muccino’s
Last Kiss
and Barry Levinson’s American classic
Diner
as tales of arrested adolescence. It’s a natural outgrowth of Fleming’s studies of male bonding from
The Virginian
through
Test Pilot—
not a summation, but in some ways a goodbye to all that. Fleming told the
Los Angeles Times
that it was something new for movies, a study more than a narrative, and that he even “tried to slow down his filmic tempo, proportionately.” He wasn’t blowing smoke. When Major T. C. Lee, a Chinese airman, toured the set, the “tall and patrician” Fleming vented his worries that the film “would fail critically and financially.”

For a studio picture of that time, or even
this
time,
Tortilla Flat
is refreshingly loose and anecdotal. Fleming and Mahin treat the
paisanos
as a mass character, as Steinbeck did. The moviemakers also build up two catalysts for change: Sweets, of course, and the Pirate—that
devout,
aging man who cuts kindling for two bits a shot and saves his money for a gold candlestick to dedicate to Saint Francis. Sweets and the Pirate expose the limits of a male commune built on cheerful irresponsibility. The filmmakers saturate the material with emotion, but don’t soften it—certainly not the cockle-warming story of the Pirate. He had promised Saint Francis that he would buy a gold candlestick if the saint saved one of his dogs from illness; then, the Pirate admits, a truck struck and killed the canine anyway. But the Pirate retains his gratitude while piling up quarters, and in his passion the film touches the sublime.