Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (80 page)

Fleming called Wanger almost immediately to push Bergman as Joan, and his enthusiasm made Wanger move quickly. The next day Wanger phoned Anderson’s office to open discussions on optioning his stage work and hiring Anderson himself to do the film script that became
Joan of Arc.
Fleming was on the train to California, heading back to Moraga Drive to attend Victoria’s birthday. By the end of the week, Wanger and Fleming called Anderson to tell him they had a deal. Bergman was, as Anderson put it, “now 100 per cent on my side,” and even Petter put his weight behind the film. Anderson wrote in his diary, “Wonders will never cease.”

Fleming wrote a letter to Bergman from California:

This was in my pocket when I arrived. Several more I destroyed. The
Lord
only knows what is written here, and no doubt His mind is a little hazy because he had not a very firm grip upon me at the time I was writing—we were slightly on the “outs.” I was putting more trust in alcohol than in the Lord. And now I am putting all my trust in you when, without opening this, I send it, for you may think me very foolish.

Then he folded another note inside the letter:

Just
a note to tell you dear—to tell you what? That it’s evening? That we miss you? That we drank to you? No—to tell you boldly like a lover that I love you—cry across the miles and hours of darkness that I love you—that you flood across my mind like waves across the sand. If you care—or if you don’t, these things to you with love I say. I am devotedly—your foolish—ME.

With Bergman fever heating up both coasts, the star herself “wore a simple gray suit and the usual Bergman glow” at a February 2 bash thrown in her honor by the artist Bernard Lamotte at his Manhattan atelier, Dorothy Kilgallen reported. Fleming hustled back to New York on February 6. The next day Wanger announced that he’d hired the designer Richard Day for a screen version of
Joan of Lorraine
to star Bergman under Fleming’s direction. This public declaration had the desired effect of stomping out Pascal’s
Saint Joan
and nullifying Wyler. (Lindström turned him down formally on February 9; “William Wyler’s disappointed,” wrote Hedda Hopper on the nineteenth.) A note from Bergman to Anderson read simply, “Max—come to me!” She and the playwright “made up formally, with embraces,” he recorded. Anderson referred to Lindström as “the stupid ass” for wanting Walter Winchell to break the news of the film on his radio show. Louella Parsons was the columnist who did the honors. And Bergman announced that she would start the film as soon as the play’s run ended in May.

The movie would be neither an En Corporation film nor a Walter Wanger picture but the product of a new entity, Sierra Pictures, whose principal corporate directors were Wanger, Fleming, and Bergman. Wanger was the biggest investor; he spent $50,000 of his own money for five thousand shares, purchased another forty thousand shares through Wanger Productions, and borrowed $200,000 to underwrite Bergman’s twenty thousand shares. Fleming was in for $150,000. All deferred the major portion of their production salaries. (Wanger had to finance the costs of script writing and preproduction.) In a letter to J. Arthur Rank two years later, Wanger commented, “As poor Victor Fleming used to say, ‘Everybody in Hollywood is worrying about making deals instead of making pictures.’ Never a truer word was said.”
Joan of Arc
was a gamble for all concerned. But they were each, in his or her way, fanatically devoted to the movie.

Fleming
plunged into independent filmmaking—but he may have had more power with his ironclad contract at MGM. He was about to experience the dangers a director faced outside the studio system when partners had their own strong ideas and the star system was ascendant. Wanger, an Anglophile, was so enamored of Laurence Olivier’s
Henry V
that he attempted to hire Olivier’s costume and set designer even before Sierra was legally established. When the craftsmen themselves weren’t available, Wanger tried to lease
Henry V
’s sets and costumes.

Still, Fleming
should
have been wary of Bergman. He was confident that he could direct her to a career-high performance. He didn’t recognize the destructive potential of her intense identification with the role. Wanger and Fleming ended up hiring Barbara Karinska as the costume designer and Dorothy Jeakins, then a sketch artist, as her associate. Bergman told Karinska her Joan should wear red, since a red skirt was common to Joan’s class and tradition held that she wore one when she made the rounds of French royalty. “What peasant wears red chiffon?” Karinska snapped. She had total faith in Fleming, not Bergman, even when Bergman was correct. (She did, in fact, wear red in the opening scenes.)

This historical epic would be filmed without the years of planning that went into
Gone With the Wind
or even
The Good Earth.
Fleming had to hurry. He initially made his base at the Waldorf-Astoria; within days he relocated to a thirty-third-floor suite at the Hampshire House, eight floors above Bergman. Steele said he suggested the transfer “to better facilitate conferences with Ingrid.” (The $75-a-week rate put off the ever-practical Fleming; he managed to get a monthly deal.) As always a demon for physical authenticity (he shared that with Wanger), Fleming hired the costume artist Noel Howard, who sketched armor and period wear at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (a museum armorer would also work on the film). Then he commenced script prep with Anderson.

The playwright didn’t realize—or was too sophisticated to record—that his director and star were having an affair. On February 8, when Fleming was still at the Waldorf, Anderson, who lived thirty-six miles north of Manhattan in New City, waited for the director to call him, then rung him up after midnight only to be told that Fleming was out. He concluded, “Probably Petter is kicking up some kind of hell-dust” on the phone from California and Fleming was sweeping away the fallout.

“
I didn’t like it,” Anderson wrote after Fleming trooped him and Bergman off to see Carl Dreyer’s
Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
at the Museum of Modern Art on Valentine’s Day. This compressed black-and-white reenactment of Joan’s five cross-examinations, a masterpiece of the silent era, features a performance by Maria Falconetti as Joan that makes starkly physical the heroine’s tormented and exalted states of consciousness. It had little influence on Fleming, except in one regard. Dreyer shot most of the film in enormous close-ups. Fleming’s
Joan of Arc
would contain more sustained close-ups of Bergman than
Hula
or
Mantrap
did of Bow,
The Wizard of Oz
of Garland,
Gone With the Wind
of Leigh, or all of them combined. Unfortunately, this was infatuation, not direction.

Fleming found himself at the center of the action on a high cultural level. He shot craps in his suite with Charles Boyer while John Steinbeck and Erich Maria Remarque discussed European politics. About ten days after the excursion to MoMA and following a week’s delay created by a heavy snowfall, Anderson had lunch with Bergman and Fleming at the Hampshire House. Bergman told him she wanted to sing for him, and picked his hit from
Knickerbocker Holiday,
“September Song.” But when Fleming listened to the lyrics about the “long, long while from May to December” (and the days growing short “when you reach September”), he knew she was singing the song for her lover and director. He had just turned fifty-eight; Bergman was thirty-one.

Fleming was in thrall to Bergman. Yousuf Karsh had printed up a portrait of Bergman for Steele, who hung it on his wall. When Fleming saw it, he took it. “Marvelous, just marvelous!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got to have it—it’s mine!” Steele tried explaining it was unique and made for him. “You can’t have it, Joe,” Fleming insisted. “It belongs to me now.” And he sped away with it.

John Lee Mahin’s now estranged wife, Patsy Ruth Miller, got what was going on when she lunched with Vic at the Hampshire House:

I had assumed that we’d meet in the lobby and lunch in the restaurant, but when I called to tell him I was there, he told me to come up to his room. It was a suite, actually; a living room and two bedrooms. And guess who was there when I entered—Ingrid Bergman, looking very poised and beautiful. It was our first meeting and I was thrilled because I was a great admirer of hers. Victor said we would have luncheon served there as
Ingrid
didn’t want to appear in public; we could have a nice cozy chat without being interrupted by fans and autograph hunters. That certainly made sense. But it was hard to have a nice cozy chat under the circumstances.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a director having lunch with his star in his hotel suite, but when it’s fairly evident that it was not only his, it was also hers . . . it’s a bit awkward to talk about the old days back home. Victor knew that I was separated from my husband, John, and I knew that he was cheating on his wife. So we skirted around the subject of the old days in California and we made inane remarks about New York weather, about how the [USC] Trojans were doing, about God knows what. The most trivial of trivia. We parted with many assurances that we would get together again, but, of course, we never did.

Never appearing romantic in public, Vic and Ingrid were old-school discreet. But when Bergman’s husband arrived without warning on February 28, Lindström’s own discretion shredded theirs. Rather than meet her in her dressing room, Lindström went directly to the Hampshire House and waited in the lobby. After her performance that night, Fleming and Bergman had gone to 21. Bergman told Steele, “When we came to the hotel we went directly to the elevator. I said, ‘Let me come up for a little while. I don’t feel a bit sleepy!’ ” She didn’t spot her husband sitting by himself in the lobby. And he didn’t want to intrude on whatever he sensed was happening between Fleming and his wife.

Already, Petter and Ingrid’s marriage had been turbulent. Petter had recently gotten wind of Bergman’s affair with the celebrated war photographer (and womanizer) Robert Capa when the three were vacationing on the Sun Valley, Idaho, slopes. Capa’s easy intimacy with Bergman and an impolitic remark he made about seeing her in New York suggested that their relationship transcended friendship—and Bergman didn’t deny it. But, in Bergman’s telling of the episode, when Lindström requested a divorce, she told him that she and Capa were through. And Bergman was sincere, writing Ruth Roberts that she and Capa had made “a clean operation so that both patients will live happily ever after.”

Now,
in Fleming, Lindström found a new and at least equally formidable rival staying with her in New York.

The morning after Lindström sighted Ingrid and Vic at the hotel, Joe Steele woke up to a phone call from Fleming in full bray:

“Joe! Goddamn it, who are you that you shouldn’t be disturbed in the morning?”

Fleming’s voice boomed against my ear like a trumpet blast.

“What’s the matter? Can’t you sleep?”

“Sleep, hell! You turned out to be a fine friend . . .”

“Hey, wait a minute—What’s eating you, Victor?”

“Why didn’t you let me or somebody know that Petter was coming?”

“Petter? What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you know that he was coming in last night?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, damn it, he did. Ingrid didn’t know he was coming, either. He went to her room and when he didn’t find her there, he called me. It was damn near two o’clock. ‘This is Petter,’ he said. ‘May I speak to Ingrid?’ Damn embarrassing, that’s what it was.”

“Then what?”

“She got on the phone and told him she’d be right down. Pretty rough, my friend. Pretty rough.”

When Steele and Bergman walked to the theater that night, he responded to her rare silence by saying, “Victor called me this morning and told me what happened last night. I want you to know I had no idea Petter was flying in.” Bergman said, “I am just sorry for Victor. He was terribly embarrassed.”

Anderson cryptically noted Lindström’s appearance at a script meeting in Fleming’s suite the next day: “No fireworks.” For a man like Fleming, who treasured privacy and his own brand of honor, such an encounter would be deeply jarring. He managed to funnel any anger, remorse, or anxiety into revising the script. Fleming, Lindström, and Anderson gathered in early March, but the meeting broke up because of a snowstorm. In his own gentlemanly way, Fleming hectored Anderson about the writing; they and Bergman met to go over revisions. On
March
19, Anderson recorded that Fleming “compressed the siege of Orléans.” Fleming returned to California on the twenty-third. Boarding the 20th Century Limited to Chicago, he called Bergman during his change of trains to the Santa Fe Super Chief. En route to California, he wrote a letter that he mailed upon arrival.

Dear and darling Angel.

How good to hear your voice. How tongue-tied and stupid I become. How sad for you. Then when you put the phone down, the click is like a bullet. Dead silence. Numbness and then thoughts. Thoughts that beat like drums upon my brain. My heart, my brain. I hate and loathe both. How they hurt and torment me—pain my flesh and bones. When they have had their fill of that, they quarrel and fight each other. My brain beats my heart into a great numbness. Then my brain pounds my heart to death. All this I can do nothing about.

In Arabian Nights it says: “Do what thy manhood bids thee do. From none but self expect applause. He best lives and noblest dies, who makes and keeps his self-made laws.”