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23 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Before Fleming did his epic salvaging of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, he and Spencer Tracy, still flush with the success of their partnership on Captains Courageous and Test Pilot, planned on teaming up for an adaptation of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s superb novel The Yearling. After Gone With the Wind was finished, Fleming and Tracy approached John Steinbeck in December 1939 about filming The Red Pony, based on four linked stories set on a Salinas Valley, California , ranch early in the century. Its tale of a boy facing the death of a beloved animal and growing into a man made it close kin to The Yearling —with the added benefit of not requiring filming in Florida’s Everglades . But Steinbeck stunned Fleming and Tracy when he treated them as big-picture men to be exploited for his own ends rather than as fellow artists or craftsmen. No author fared better at the hands of Hollywood than Steinbeck with the back-to-back productions of Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), yet he proposed that the actor and director raise money by subscription and not offer anyone a salary—then he would give the story gratis as well as write the screenplay. He wanted the film distributed only where local governments could ensure that box-office revenue went to provide children’s hospital beds. Although Fleming told Steinbeck he thought the movie could pull in $2 million, he and Tracy didn’t respond to this offer, and Steinbeck took it off the table in January 1940. Instead, Steinbeck began discussing The Red Pony with his Of Mice and Men director, Lewis Milestone (who made it in 1949). The repercussions of Steinbeck’s non-negotiation with Fleming rattled through MGM for several months. Mayer wouldn’t permit Tracy to voice the narration for The Forgotten Village, the SteinbeckSrag_9780375407482_3p_06_r2 .z.qxp 10/13/08 10:37 AM Page 356 written documentary about modernization encroaching on a rural Mexican hamlet. When Fleming and Tracy returned to the idea of making The Yearling, Steinbeck spoke of taking court action if The Yearling movie used Rawlings’s name for her boy hero, Jody, because the boy hero of The Red Pony was called Jody, too. (When Milestone filmed The Red Pony, the boy’s name became Tom; Steinbeck’s son, Thom, was born on August 2, 1944.) After years of wrangling, Fleming signed his first long-term contract with MGM, to start on January 1, 1940, and last until December 31, 1944. To get his signature, the studio had to guarantee that he could terminate his contract if Eddie Mannix, Mayer, or Loew’s president , Nicholas Schenck, left the company, pledge not to loan him out to other studios, and remove morality and insurance clauses that Fleming found insulting (he thought these clauses were “directed against troublesome actors and actresses, and he feels that he does not fall in this category as a troublemaker or drunkard, etc.,” an MGM functionary reported). And, as summarized in a studio memo, “On pictures directed by Fleming, we agree there shall be no producer credit (this in lieu of his request that he be permitted to produce and direct every second picture if he so desires).” Fleming kept operating much as he had before. He did prep work for The Yearling, including sussing out locations in Florida. He shot retakes of Tracy and Gable in Conway’s Boom Town and laid plans for a Gable vehicle based on the nineteenth-century Western con man and outlaw Soapy Smith. ( Jack Conway made it as Honky Tonk, with Gable playing a fictionalized version of Smith named Candy Johnson.) That June, Fleming helped Gable buy a five-hundred-acre cattle ranch in Arizona. Hedda Hopper reported that they spent a week “putting up in tourist camps, and nobody recognized them.” Fleming and Tracy looked at test shots for a potential Jody for The Yearling, then took their daughters (Tracy’s son, John, stayed home with his mother) on a sailing vacation in British Columbia, where they visited Fred Lewis. Mannix wired a request for Fleming to okay the characters’ wardrobes for scenic shots. “We should prepare immediately to get the best of all scenic beauty to be shot before the first September,” wrote Mannix, but preproduction on The Yearling would stumble on for months. Something about this career plateau made Fleming meditative with the press...

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