In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

19 Test Pilot During all the tumult, illness, and complications of Captains Courageous , Vic and Lu conceived a second child. “The stork will stalk the Victor Flemings in February,” the Los Angeles Times announced on December 23, 1936, and their new daughter was born on February 16. But settling on a name took months. “They’re still trying names on the Victor Fleming baby. And after seven weeks they can’t find one that fits,” ran one column in April. Victoria’s sister was called “Little Bit” before Sara Elizabeth was settled on. But that quickly became Sally. Nearly twenty years after Fleming promised his mother that “some day I am going to have a house in California—wife and all that goes with it,” he finally did. That spring, he put $60,000 into buying property and building a ten-room house in Bel-Air, a still-expanding district of West Los Angeles. Designed by Kirtland Cutter, who also did the Balboa beach house, the new home sat on eleven acres of rough chaparral in Moraga Canyon. It was substantial and comfortable—the strong, silent type, built almost like a fort, with walls made with twoby -six studs, not two-by-fours, and bars on the daughters’ bedroom windows as a shield against kidnappers. In addition to a basement workshop and darkroom, Fleming installed a massive safe built to withstand the house’s destruction by a wildfire. The family had moved in by the time he started Test Pilot in December. The daughters say the products of the workroom were usually quite delicate. “He liked to have things to do,” says Victoria. “He made a big bamboo bank to hang on the wall. He made a round box that opened up, and a penguin out of a walrus tusk.” Sally says there was also a carved pelican with “a tiny fish in its beak” and her father presented them with “a mailbox with our address, 1050 Moraga Drive, engraved on it. A tiny silver mailbox. On the end of this teeny chain was this piece of silver.” Srag_9780375407482_3p_04_r2.z.qxp 10/13/08 10:36 AM Page 256 “It was a lovely house,” said their neighbor, the film editor Watson Webb. “Very warm and cozy and very attractive, sort of a combination of Early American and a California ranch house. And totally unpretentious , not like something you’d find in [contemporary] Bel-Air for somebody who was big and successful.” Of course, there was nothing unfashionable about it. The specialeffects whiz Jack Cosgrove (who would work on Gone With the Wind and Joan of Arc), the MGM composer and arranger Adolph Deutsch, and the singer Allan Jones (who’d appeared in Reckless) were already neighbors, and the Gary Coopers lived nearby. Lu had selected the spot. A pair of hundred-foot pepper trees attracted her, and Fleming had the house built around them. “One was close to the swimming pool, and another shaded the porch,” said Victoria. Vic and Lu had separate bedrooms, hers in wallpaper and chintz, his in knotty pine; his enormous bed included a carved headboard, and the Kodiak bear rug dominated the room. He lured a butler away from Deutsch: tall, dour, half-Indian, halfAfrican -American Osceola Slocum, who also doubled as a chauffeur for Lu and the girls. Slocum’s wife, Robbie, was the live-in maid. The daughters eventually also had a live-in governess; early on, their father quickly discharged a nurse after she slapped one of them and he discovered the handprint. Friends took notice of Fleming’s settling into traditional masculine maturity. Hawks’s biographer, Todd McCarthy, surmises that Vic’s fidelity to Lu prompted Hawks to continue womanizing, as if Vic had left the field to him; now Hawks could at last beat him at something. Fleming ’s circle embraced Lu. With small groups such as Webb and the Lightons, Vic and Lu made a lovable couple. He was affectionate and attentive toward his wife, and, Webb said, “Lu was very warm, very nice, very easygoing, not attractive by standards of Hollywood glamour, but attractive as one who made a contribution to a group of people.” Joan Marsh Morrill had a small role in The Wet Parade and is best remembered today as the poster girl who comes to life in All Quiet on the Western Front. She thought Lu was “a lot of fun, a great personality, and great around the house; I remember a copper bowl...

Share