Which is when I certainly should have quit. Here’s a story Bud Lighton told me; I recalled it as I sat there in the flickering light. It’s about Victor Fleming, the director whom Lighton held up to me as a model. He’d agreed, Fleming had, to direct a film to be made from the novel The Yearling. He approached the job as he did every job, intensely; he knew the emotion he wanted to capture for the audience. He searched all over the South for the right locations, selected a fine cast (including Spencer Tracy), got the best technicians, and prepared to give the project the kind of devotion for which he was known, the kind that made him worry so painfully that sometimes he’d throw up his lunch. He shot scenes of the film for three days on that far-off location, then suddenly left and went back to Culver City. “How can I make a picture,” he explained to the outraged executives, “whose essence is that people love each other, when no one in the cast loves anyone or loves being down there or loves making the picture? They only love themselves. The kid wants to be a goddamn star and thinks of nothing except his vanity. Tracy is only thinking how he can get away for a few days to go up to New York and see Hepburn. And the mother part is always between a shit and a sweat about something, but never about the goddamn picture.” So Fleming said the hell with it and quit. He was fighting what it seemed to me I was up against, organized indifference—but he had more experience and more guts than I had; he walked away.

I stopped unreeling the ten thousand feet of the greatest stuff Pandro had ever seen and sat in the dark. This was it, yes or no, on or off, stay or go, now or never. But it took more courage than I had at that time to walk away. Molly was coming out in a couple of weeks with the kids; they were all looking forward to it, California, Malibu, the house on the beach, and so on. And so on!