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12 A Woman’s Film and a Man’s Adventure at Fox In 1927, six months after the spectacular success of Mantrap, Paramount raised Fleming from $1,750 a week to $2,000. But in the immediate wake of the sound revolution, the studio had neglected Fleming and other seasoned pros. His long-term contract expired before he shot Wolf Song and The Virginian. One Paramount producer who recognized Fleming’s worth was David O. Selznick. After those back-toback hits, the director let Selznick know that Fox had offered him $3,250 weekly and that he wanted to concentrate on “epics, not melodramas .” Selznick badly wanted to reteam Fleming with Cooper, Lighton, Paramore, and Keene Thompson to follow up their stellar work on The Virginian. Despite Selznick’s efforts, Paramount didn’t make a counteroffer, and Fleming did make a deal with Fox. When Cooper talked about Fleming being “old-fashioned” on The Virginian, he was being complimentary and, in his clipped way, ironic. Fighting to keep the movie alive visually as well as aurally, Fleming was ahead of his time. In a memo pillorying B. P. Schulberg’s Paramount regime, Selznick wrote that Schulberg mistakenly considered Fleming “old-fashioned” and “impossible for talking pictures.” (Selznick listed among Schulberg’s sins turning down Hawks “as an absurd incompetent ” and Wellman as an “incompetent, a has-been and a maniac.” Schulberg also fired Jules Furthman and mistreated other Selznick and Fleming friends and collaborators, past and future, including Lewis Milestone, George Cukor, Janet Gaynor, and Constance Bennett.) Selznick soon left Paramount to become West Coast production chief of RKO. Fleming’s long run at Paramount and lucrative two-picture agreement at Fox enabled him to indulge his passions and also to be exceptionally generous to his family. In August 1929, he flew Howard Hawks Srag_9780375407482_3p_03_r2.z.qxp 10/13/08 10:36 AM Page 159 and the Rossons to the Cleveland Air Races in his new Travel Air, a high-end luxury model with a closed cabin. (They became part of a search for a downed plane on the return trip.) In 1930, he gave his nephew Newell Morris his Cord roadster, though the lad was only fourteen. Then he startled and delighted his niece Yvonne with a Ford roadster. “I was fifteen years old in 1931,” she said, “and he thought it was high time that I had a car . . . He just rang the doorbell one day and there he was: ‘I got your car here. Come on, let’s go.’ Of course, I’d never driven. At fifteen, you’re not supposed to be driving. He hastily taught me, and I was so glad. He was a wonderful driver.” Thumbing his nose at Schulberg, Fleming brought Furthman and Bennett along with him and made a property as gabby as they come for his first Fox picture, Common Clay (1930). This proved to be a commercial trendsetter, creating a new pattern for (as Variety put it) “the tragedy of the sweet, trusting young thing who goes wrong.” With Common Clay, Fleming tuned up another breakthrough vehicle for a female performer , this time Bennett, daughter of Richard Bennett and eldest sister of Joan. Constance had achieved an early vogue in silent pictures, but she took three years off in the mid-1920s to marry a playboy, Philip Morgan Plant, and frolic in Paris and Biarritz. When the Plants’ union fell apart, Hollywood beckoned: aside from a marriage into wealth, acting was the only way Constance knew to make money. She was a natural performer, but not yet a star. Common Clay would make her one. In this update of a 1915 play first filmed in 1919, Bennett portrays the heroine, Ellen Neal, as a bright, lowborn gal who gets in over her head with the smart set. In one of Furthman’s contemporary twists, she starts the movie as a speakeasy hostess—and persuades the judge (and the audience) after a raid that she really was only a hostess. He convinces her that if she stays at that job, she won’t be a hostess very long. So she goes into service at the mansion of the fabulously wealthy Fullertons. There, even the butler paws her over. Hugh Fullerton (played by Lew Ayres), the heir to the family fortune, offers what she thinks is love and protection. But Ellen is a summer fling for Hugh (partly because he doesn’t realize the depth of his feelings). When she becomes pregnant...

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