Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Read online

  Howard Hawks

  HOWARD HAWKS

  The Grey Fox of Hollywood

  TODD McCARTHY

  Copyright © 1997 by Todd McCarthy

  For photo credits, see pages 755–756.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McCarthy, Todd.

  Howard Hawks : the grey fox of Hollywood / Todd McCarthy.

  p. cm.

  Filmography: p.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9640-8

  1. Hawks, Howard, 1896–1977 2. Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN1998.3.H38M33 1997

  791.43′0233′092—dc21

  [B]

  96–49075

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  TO SASHA AND MADELEINE

  Contents

  Introduction: The Engineer as Poet

  1 Origins

  2 Boy of Privilege

  3 Rich Kid in Hollywood

  4 Showtime

  5 The Sound Barrier

  6 A New Dawn

  7 The Criminal Code

  8 Tough Guys: Hughes, Hecht, Hays, and Scarface

  9 Back to Warners: The Crowd Roars

  10 Tiger Shark

  11 Sidetracked at MGM: Faulkner, Thalberg, and Today We Live

  12 Viva Villa!

  13 Screwball: Twentieth Century

  14 Barbary Coast

  15 Flying High: Ceiling Zero

  16 The Road to Glory

  17 Include Me Out: Come and Get It

  18 Big Spender: RKO, Gunga Din, and Bringing Up Baby

  19 Only Angels

  20 His Girl Friday

  21 Slim, Hemingway, and An Outlaw

  22 Sergeant York

  23 Catching Fire

  24 Air Force

  25 The Bel-Air Front

  26 Not in the Script: To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep

  27 The Urge to Independence: Red River

  28 Slim Walks, Money Talks

  29 Skirting Trouble: I Was a Male War Bride

  30 An Old Boss, A New Mate

  31 The Fox at Fox: Monkey Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

  32 In the Land of the Pharaohs

  33 Sojourn in Europe

  34 Bravo

  35 Fun in the Bush: Hatari!

  36 A Fishy Story: Man’s Favorite Sport?

  37 Fast Cars and Young Women

  38 The Last Roundup

  39 From Sand to Dust

  40 Posterity

  Filmography

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Howard Hawks

  Introduction:

  The Engineer as Poet

  Howard Hawks is the most important of the classical Hollywood directors of whom there has been no biography. Certainly, he has long since emerged from his status as the exclusive property of film cultists and buffs to become recognized as one of the half dozen great American filmmakers whose careers began in the pre–World War II era. At the very least, a dozen of his pictures are as universally admired as any produced by the major studios. He pursued the requisite colorful life filled with sport, drink, and women; befriended the rich, famous, and talented; possessed ego to burn; and lived long enough to, however casually, build and bend the facts of his life into legend.

  But the fact remains that Howard Hawks, despite having had his name above the title virtually from the beginning of his career, was never as well known as such contemporaries as Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, John Ford, Cecil B. De Mille, William Wyler, or Billy Wilder. He was only once nominated for an Oscar, which he did not win. Although between 1939 and 1949 Hawks enjoyed a remarkable unbroken string of hits that placed him in the commercial front rank, this success helped brand him as a reliable supplier of entertainment, discoverer of new talent, and director of big stars, not as an American artist of the first caliber. To become a brand-name Hollywood filmmaker in that era, one either had to appear in one’s own films (Chaplin, Stroheim, Keaton, Welles), win awards (Ford, Capra, Wyler, McCarey, Wilder, Kazan, Stevens), exclusively specialize in a certain kind of production (Hitchcock, De Mille, Lubitsch, Sternberg for a while), or cultivate a reputation as a social commentator of rare and bold seriousness (Stanley Kramer). Superficially, at least, Hawks specialized in diversity; and since every bone in his body opposed pretension, politics, and pompousness in pictures, the public has always had trouble automatically associating his name with specific films.

  Going one step further, the Hawks style is, at a glance, invisible. His films’ visuals are the least distinctive of any of the major directors, his work less immediately identifiable than that of most masters. Ironically, Hawks was one of the most stylized of all filmmakers, but the stylization had more to do with rituals, behavior, dialogue delivery, performance, and abstracting the action from the real world than with distinctive camera angles, editing patterns, a regular stock company, repeated settings, or anything else that would breed familiarity in the viewer. In other words, the stylization was disguised by a deceptive directness, by humor, by the openness of the characters and the liveliness of the players. This remarkable achievement meant that Hawks would not even be recognized as an artist for much of his career, but in this he was only the most prominent among many.

  In the late 1960s a small film magazine published a cover article called “Who the Hell Is Howard Hawks?” The very title of Robin Wood’s piece, which appeared in advance of his seminal critical book on the director, mocked the lack of serious appreciation of Hawks’s work, a situation that was to be rectified over the following few years. Ironically, “Who the Hell Was Howard Hawks?” could easily serve as the title for any investigation of Hawks the man. It is far easier to read Hawks, to get a strong sense of what he was all about, through his work than it was in life even for those closest to him. Many people are conveniently called enigmas, but even Hawks’s friends referred to him that way. He was Sphinxlike, remote, cold, private, intimidating, self-absorbed, a man with eyes like blue ice cubes. He was, like any director worthy of the profession, crafty and controlling, and he never lost self-control. At the same time, the frigid blue eyes could quickly turn warm and impudent. He was invariably a gentleman of impeccable elegance, taste, judgment, and style, a director of infinite generosity to his performers and crew, a friend of great loyalty, a man of intelligent discrimination. But that there was always a sense of distance, of not really knowing this man, was freely admitted even by those who spent months and years with him.

  This distance alone could be enough to discourage any biographer, as could the fact that Howard Hawks was not a man of letters. The few literary exchanges that do exist are remarkably unrevealing and unconfidential, generally dotted by Hawks’s apologies for not being a better correspondent. Nor did the director keep dia
ries, memos, or even helpful datebooks. Simply put, Hawks left no contemporaneous record of what he was thinking, feeling, or doing throughout his life, and the material he did leave behind was spotty and virtually accidental.

  For the most part, Hawks’s legacy exists in the form of the interviews he so readily granted late in life, in which he expounded to acolytes about his career and accomplishments. To anyone with an interest in his work, or in American films in general, these testimonies are fascinating not only for their anecdotal richness but also as a revelation of Hawks’s innate intelligence, of how much thought and theory he put into what were long regarded variously as examples of Hollywood escapism, star vehicles, and assembly-line products. In their own way, however, the interviews create yet another barrier to an accurate view of Hawks’s life and career, for they go beyond ego in their self-aggrandizement into an advanced realm of imagination and fantasy. Many people have taken Hawks’s beguiling stories at face value, and many of Hawks’s tall tales involved people who were already dead for twenty-five years when Hawks related the incidents in which he was, coincidentally, the only surviving witness. When cursory research proved Hawks’s versions of events to be exaggerations at best and blatant lies at worst, it served notice that just about everything he ever said would need to be doubted, investigated, corroborated—when possible.

  But this detour provides its own reward, in the sense that it leads one to the substance of Hawks’s nature. That Hawks was a natural storyteller may be a handicap to objectifying his life but a linchpin to defining his character. His disinclination to keep a record of his life anywhere other than in his own head did not represent a deliberate attempt to frustrate later chroniclers, as it has been with certain self-conscious, self-tailoring artists; nothing could have been further from his mind. Hawks’s account of his own life—in which everything revolved around him, in which he was always right, in which he told Hemingway, Faulkner, Cooper, Grant, Bogart, Wayne, Hepburn, Bacall, and Monroe what was best for them and told Mayer, Warner, Cohn, Goldwyn, Hughes, Wallis, and Zanuck where to get off—was merely the fantastic flip side of the imagination that went into his film stories.

  The other happy truth is that while he may not have done everything he said he did, Hawks also accomplished a great deal. As the photographer Robert Capa said, “There are two kinds of mythomaniacs: The ones who are that way because they have never done anything, and the ones who have done so much they can never be satisfied with anything. Howard Hawks is the prototype of the second category.” It remains impossible to know why Hawks felt compelled to insist that he was the one who told Josef von Sternberg how to dress Marlene Dietrich or that he instructed his friend Victor Fleming how to direct Gone with the Wind or that he was once asked by TWA to take the controls of a commercial airliner when the pilot took ill midflight. Such preposterous claims were laughed off by his friends during his lifetime but tend to be taken more seriously when put down in black-and-white by interviewers and film scholars who didn’t choose to challenge Hawks on most of his improbable assertions.

  Howard Hawks was born to wealth and privilege. The oldest of five children, he was told he could do anything he wanted to do and was pampered and endlessly spoiled by his maternal grandfather. As a very young man he was among the first Americans to race cars and fly planes. It was his grandparents, and not his genteel parents, who had boldly sought opportunity in the Midwest and built the family fortune on both sides, and it was with them that he identified most strongly. Outside of his spectacle of antiquity, Land of the Pharaohs, and the second half of Come and Get It, and except for some individuals in his comedies, the characters in his films are essentially classless, working men and women who establish their personal worth by how well they do their jobs and how they relate to one another. Many writers and several of the greatest filmmakers have made of their work a sweeping autobiography, disguised to greater or lesser degrees. Hawks’s oeuvre does not represent an autobiography; rather, it constitutes a massive self-projection, a portrait of his fantasy of himself as a great flier, racer, soldier, explorer, pioneer of industry, detective, criminal, lover, hunter, and sheriff. All these purposeful men of action served as good characters for the movies, but they were also ideal vehicles for Hawks to explore his own notions of excellence.

  To achieve this within the structure of the commercial film industry, which became increasingly rigid, stratified, and dominant during the period he was building his position in it, Hawks clearly needed to establish a reputation and the power to steer his own course. In this line, he pursued a singular strategy with, arguably, greater success than any other director of his era. Hawks officially directed forty feature films, eight of them silents, far fewer than such contemporaries as John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, Frank Borzage, King Vidor, and W. S. Van Dyke, all of whom got a head start in silents by roughly ten years, but more than Capra, McCarey, Milestone, and Mamoulian, who began their careers at roughly the same time. But Hawks maintained a more resolute control over his projects than any of them, making a remarkably small number of pictures that were not of his own choosing and only occasionally finding himself on the losing end of a battle with a studio boss (usually Sam Goldwyn). Of the nonwriters among major Hollywood directors, only Cecil B. De Mille, Alfred Hitchcock, and William Wyler had as much or more say over their productions as Hawks did for as long a period, which in his case was nearly forty years. With rare exceptions, Hawks created or chose his stories, selected his writers and worked very closely with them, enjoyed decisive influence over casting, shot to his heart’s content while constantly reworking his scripts, and kept compromises with the studios to a remarkable minimum.

  What drove him to achieve this was an insistent, overpowering will to independence. What enabled him to do it was a potent mixture of arrogance, intelligence, wealth, antiauthoritarianism, skill at intimidation, impudence, and willingness to walk away. Few were able to play the studio heads better than Hawks; he could be as cagey as they were, and even though they were the absolute bosses in Hollywood, Hawks represented the refined, accomplished, well-mannered, Ivy League, blue-blooded WASP whose acceptance they craved. They must have felt Hawks’s condescension; they were dealing with a man who, from the beginning of his career, conveyed the impression of independent wealth even when he was virtually broke. In the tycoons’ minds, this guy could take it or leave it; he didn’t need them, which made his bargaining position with them all the greater. Little did they know that he felt so insecure as a director on his first few pictures that he regularly had to pull his car over on his way to work in order to vomit. Only later would the imperious confidence become entirely genuine, after years of practice and expert bluffing.

  But what gave Hawks his real ace in the hole with his bosses is that his aims were at one with their own. He wanted to make good films with big stars and bring in a lot of money. His idea of a great film story was one in which a handsome, tough, masculine man, in a risky predicament and normally at the center of a small professional group, performed valiantly and stoically under great pressure and won a beautiful young woman while doing it. What could be more appealing to a wide audience than such a story? For Hawks, there was something wrong with a picture if it didn’t go over with the public. Unlike John Ford, his drawer was not full of difficult, uncommercial, socially conscious scripts that he thought perhaps he would be allowed to make if he would play ball with the studios. No, the issue with Hawks was that he wanted to make his films his way and on his own terms. Very early on, he discovered that his own tastes and those of the public were remarkably in sync; if he liked an actor, audiences tended to like him; if he thought something was funny, other people tended to laugh as well. This conviction bolstered his position with the studio heads and fostered his belief that he should just be left alone to make his movies, that he would deliver something the studio bosses and the public would like. And he nearly always did.

  Hawks spent his entire career first forging, then trying to expand his ab
ility to make pictures within the system yet independently of studio surveillance and interference. His methods and variable success at doing so form one of the main themes of this book, and it was not for nothing that he always retained a special fondness for Scarface. The reason was not so much artistic as circumstantial; Hawks and Howard Hughes felt like partners in crime on that maverick production, which they made not only separate from but in defiance of the established industry. Making a film independently of the mainstream was an exceedingly difficult matter during the decades Hawks was active, and whenever Hawks managed to do so, he proved to be his own worst enemy in terms of fiscal responsibility. Objectively, the armchair observer can postulate that Hawks was better off working under conditions of creative tension with Jack Warner and Hal Wallis, or with Harry Cohn, than by his own devices. No matter: the point is that Hawks constantly strove to be as free from the bridle as possible; when he felt it at all, he bit and kicked. In practice, this led him to break contracts and jump studios with fearless regularity—in the sound era, only once did he direct more than two films in a row at a given studio, a rare occurrence in those years of long-term contracts.

  Hawks fought hard for the right to tell stories his way, to not be bossed or pushed or compromised. But to what end? Did he really possess the soul of an artist who simply had to create, an artistic urge that can be compared seriously to those of his friends Hemingway and Faulkner or to compulsive, self-consciously artistic filmmakers like Welles, Bergman, and Godard? Would Hawks even have entered the arts at all in another era, without the combined allure of fun, luxury, big money, elite status, beautiful women, social power, and, incidentally, self-expression offered by the movies? When assessing the early lives and biographies of most of the cinema’s pioneering artists, one develops the collective impression of a bunch of clever but somewhat aimless types who were lucky enough to stumble onto a good thing at the right time. Certainly, for people born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the cinema, such as it was, did not yet exist as something anyone would aspire to as a profession. In any event, one rarely, if ever, hears of an American who set out in the late 1910s or 1920s with serious artistic ambitions that could be achieved only in films.