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26 World War II with Tears: A Guy Named Joe Before his death in 1936, Billy Mitchell, one of America’s aviation heroes, had been predicting a Japanese air assault on the American fleet. The aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought Fleming some embarrassment along with the same fear of an impending assault on Southern California shared by everyone else. Sid Deacon, who had suffered a stroke the previous year, wrote President Roosevelt to offer his services at discovering Japanese submarines off the California coast. “I think he had a special tip on his witching rod for that,” Edward Hartman recalls. The White House didn’t take him up on his proposal. The year before, Deacon had asked the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors for permission to dig on the grounds of the Hollywood Bowl for the treasure known as the Patriot Cache, supposedly buried by Mexican families in the 1860s for use against the French-appointed Austrian emperor Maximilian. But the supervisors turned him down, too. “That was a shame,” Hartman says. “If they’d have let him dig, he may have found something. He was old, but he wasn’t crazy.” The military swiftly adopted more conventional means for defending the waters outside California, including the appropriation of large yachts. Fred Lewis’s Stranger had become a minesweeper earlier in 1941, and Frank Morgan’s Dolphin likewise was painted gray and pressed into service. Fleming did not throw himself directly into the war effort, but it is possible that, like many other watercraft owners, he proposed some help to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Any services he might have rendered remain secret. John Ford did do some amateur spying on Japanese trawlers before he joined the Navy, but at fifty-two Fleming was six years older than Ford and had more than a decade on the other top-rank directors who went overseas to shoot documentaries. Srag_9780375407482_3p_06_r2.z.qxp 10/13/08 10:37 AM Page 401 As America’s studios joined the information war, MGM enlisted its most consistent moneymaker in the cause. Fleming was preparing and shooting Tortilla Flat when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, then advanced to Wake Island the next day for a battle that raged until the twenty-third, forcing an American surrender. On February 25, 1942, even before they settled on the credits for Tortilla Flat, Fleming and Zimbalist began developing a project called Wake Island, using the battle as the background for “a Gable-Tracy” story. They assigned MacKinlay Kantor to write it. James Agee noted that Kantor was “beloved by some” for “boiled-and-buttered native corn, fresh from the can.” Indeed, MGM had found a berth for Kantor when he supplied the source novel for a successful dog picture, The Voice of Bugle Ann. (He would later garner acclaim as the author of Glory for Me, the verse novel that became William Wyler’s Oscar-winner The Best Years of Our Lives, and Andersonville, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historical novel about the notorious Confederate POW camp.) The Wake Island script went nowhere. But on March 5, Kantor and Fleming, in Kantor’s words, “drifted away from an unproductive story line” and “started talking about Buffalo Bill, since both of us remembered having seen him and his circus in our respective boyhoods.” Zimbalist (“who had a city-vaudeville-stage background”) blurted out, “Jesus Christ, why are we talking about this other silly picture when there is such a thing as Buffalo Bill?”—and Fleming “immediately stood up, roaring with enthusiasm.” Kantor, “digging deep into all Buffalo Bill sources available” and promising Fleming “a director’s field day if you ever had one,” delivered a treatment that had him “all ready to call up Central Casting.” For the lead role there was no question : they intended to use Gable. Zimbalist said, “By God, I’ll see Eddie Mannix tonight, kidnap him and take him to dinner if necessary.” But when Zimbalist called him back to the office a week later, he reported the sad news that MGM executives felt there was “no money to be made out of Buffalo Bill . . . They say that Buffalo Bill tried to make a picture about his own life, and it was a flop.” Kantor responded, “Good lord, everybody knows that; the old idiot even tried to get some of the same Indians against whom he had fought, and have them in the picture. The poor old guys...

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