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20 Salvaging The Great Waltz In April 1938, the Hollywood Reporter mentioned that Fleming “almost cracked up in his own cabin plane, a few days after Test Pilot trade raves.” Nothing else seemingly went wrong for Fleming in the spring of 1938. Test Pilot and Warner Bros.’ Adventures of Robin Hood were the only new hits packing theaters; throughout the first half of the year, exhibitors desperate to fill seats rebooked old favorites like Dracula, The Count of Monte Cristo, King Kong, and Fleming’s own Treasure Island. MGM was still pressuring him to sign a contract, but he continued working on a handshake deal with Mannix. His beloved Victoria, “Missy,” was three and Sally one. He was pouring more energy and effort into his Bel-Air home, including now a sizable pumpkin patch, which he was using to set up his land for an eventual orchard. Around this time he wrote: I am the only farmer in Bel-Air, which is supposed to be a rather exclusive residential colony in Hollywood. My neighbors are famous stars and executives. Carey Wilson, the writer and a studio colleague, is one. Gene Raymond and Jeanette MacDonald, Carole Lombard, Clark Gable and W. C. Fields are others. So far none of them has entered a protest against my own two acres under cultivation. Under the peculiar law of the state, I get special water rates as a farmer. It costs the rest of them more to sprinkle their lawns than I pay for irrigating my farm. And furthermore, if they want homemade pumpkin pie, they come to me for the pumpkins. Mine are the best in this section of the country. The one farmer in Bel-Air presented a formidable, stylish presence on the MGM lot. As he approached his fifties and his hair began to Srag_9780375407482_3p_04_r2.z.qxp 10/13/08 10:36 AM Page 270 gray, Fleming began dressing almost uniformly in shades of gray as well; perhaps his only outward sign of eccentricity, it made him look like a jaunty Southern California banker. Gable sometimes adopted the style for himself, but for Fleming it was virtually a daily look, one he kept for the rest of his life. “Flem was very conservative,” says the tailor Eddie Schmidt Jr. “He was not a wild man.” Schmidt’s father made Vic look natty, and his butler, Slocum, kept his wardrobe in perfect order. His niece Yvonne marveled, “[Slocum] would tidy them up and put them at the far right end of the closet. And then the next day he would get in the left-hand side of the closet, and those would be all ready to go. It was beautifully done and he looked like a model at all times. He was absolutely a perfectionist about quality. And he said to me, this was when I was quite young, ‘Don’t ever buy two of anything. Buy one good thing!’ Which I thought was a very good idea.” The actor Norman Lloyd remembers seeing Fleming at a distance and thinking, “Now that’s the way to look in this town!” Fleming dressed like the old-school swells Astaire and Cooper, wearing “a lot of Shetland jackets with two-button flaps and side vents,” gray trousers, “and understated ties,” Schmidt recalls. He wasn’t the man for “plaids or a bright white stripe on dark blue stripes.” One legend had it that “he demanded the choicest dressing room and, on location, the biggest trailer.” Actually, he got them simply for being MGM’s most prominent director, just as, because of his popularity with the stock company, “an extra quota of stars . . . appeared in tribute to him” at the premieres of his movies, though another legend had it that he never attended his own premieres. Even at his zenith, he may have felt some insecurity about rising from San Dimas into Hollywood aristocracy. One man who thought he saw a taste of this was the freelance director Edward Ludwig. He worked at MGM on The Last Gangster with John Lee Mahin around the same time Fleming and Mahin did Captains Courageous, and he later directed John Wayne in the anticommunist movie Big Jim McLain (1952). Ludwig had a secretary he brought from studio to studio, and he told his nephew Julian that “she would suddenly be close to tears or in tears when he came to check up on things at his office at MGM. She said this director who used to drive...

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