Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  But by the time the family moved in, in 1904–05, the first signs were appearing that the Hawkses wouldn’t be staying in Neenah much longer. Already rather debilitated after delivering William and Grace, and devastated by the loss of Theda, Helen was brought to the limit by the birth of a fifth child, and second daughter, also named Helen, in 1906. After having borne so many children, she became “professionally ill,” in the opinion of a friend, and needed to find a way to recapture her health. Helen’s doctor advised her to leave Wisconsin, particularly during its brutal winters. Frank didn’t have to work, so they spent the winter of 1906–07 in Pasadena, California, a town northeast of Los Angeles that had recently caught on as a popular destination for well-to-do families from the East and Midwest. Initially, the Hawkses returned to Wisconsin during the summer, but by 1910 they left Wisconsin behind for good. C.W., who took to wintering in Pasadena himself, said, “It was too damn bad they didn’t know this before they built the house,” but they shortly rented it to C. B. Clark Jr., Theda’s brother, who later became mayor of Neenah. In 1912, Frank finally sold the house.

  In the early 1900s, the ranks were thinning in Goshen as well; Frank’s very successful uncle Joel P. Hawks died on April 8, 1905, at the age of eighty-three, while his aunt Sarah died a little more than a year later, at eighty-two.

  As for old C. W. Howard, he finally sold, at great profit, his interest in what had become the Island Paper Company; retired from active work; made investments, such as one in a hotel across the river in Menasha; devoted considerable time to the Winnebago Humane Society and the Mason Lodge; traveled extensively in Europe with his wife; and gave his eldest grandson whatever he wanted. When Howard, barely old enough to drive legally, showed an interest in auto racing, C.W. bought him a Mercer race car. And just as he had indulged his daughter Bernice’s interest in flying, C.W. arranged for the teenage Howard to take flying lessons in California so that he could qualify as a pilot; Kenneth soon followed suit. Partly because of his family’s wealth, but even more because of the way his grandfather catered to his every whim from the earliest age, Howard was accustomed to getting what he wanted. C.W. always told him he was the best, that he could do anything, and why shouldn’t the boy believe him? Howard also learned the art of the tall tale from his grandfather: if you told it often enough with a straight face and didn’t permit contradiction, it became part of your personal lore, if not simply taken as the truth. America, at that time, was made for an adventurous young boy of privilege like Howard Hawks, and his family’s position gave him the means to take advantage of it. At the same time, every man on both sides of the family as far back as anyone could trace had been engaged in very traditional business; they had pioneered, worked hard, been good farmers, fighters, cattlemen, millers, builders, and furniture makers. Except for C.W.’s amateur theatrics and Helen’s interest in music, no one in the family had ever shown the slightest inclination toward the arts, for branching away from the practical into the realm of the imagination.

  In the early-morning hours of Wednesday, January 5, 1916, the temperature in Neenah reached 12 degrees below zero, a record low for the winter. The west wind bit fiercely, but by that afternoon, as C. W. Howard walked to the Neenah Club downtown for a couple of drinks and some chat with the boys, the thermometer nosed slightly above zero. In the dark of the late afternoon, he boarded the 5:30 P.M. streetcar for the short trip east on Wisconsin Avenue. Euphemia had not been well of late, and C.W. went directly up to his wife’s bedroom to check on her. It was there that he suffered a stroke. He was semiconscious at first, with his right side paralyzed, but he “soon lapsed into a stupor from which he never emerged,” according to the front-page story in the next day’s Neenah Daily Times. “Death came quietly and without the least suffering according to those at his bedside.” C. W. Howard died at 2:30 A.M. on January 6, 1916, at the age of seventy. The official cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, with a secondary cause of arteriosclerosis.

  As befitting a man of his stature, C.W. had a large funeral. In ill health already, suffering from cancer of the uterus, Euphemia could not easily absorb the shock of her husband’s sudden death. She died just three months later, on April 13, also at seventy.

  In the distribution of C.W.’s estate, which finally took place in October 1918, it was revealed that his net worth, after the sale of his home, other property, and stocks, came to $264,090; this would have made him a millionaire many times over in 1990’s adjusted dollars. The great bulk of it went to his already very comfortable daughters, with Bernice receiving a lump sum of $115,315 and Helen getting $57,657 immediately and an equal amount to be apportioned out in stages to her monthly. Helen’s children each received $5,736 (about $120,000 in current dollars), perhaps not enough to set them up for life, but plenty to send them into their adult lives in high style and without need of mundane employment.

  The story of C. W. Howard had a bizarre postscript. Some years later, after his daughter Helen had become a confirmed, perhaps even fanatic, Christian Scientist and adherent of cremation, she returned to Neenah. She had her father, mother, and brother Neil dug up and cremated (in Milwaukee, as no one closer by would do it). After mixing the ashes in an urn, she went out to Riverside Park and threw it in the river, where it was discovered decades later, with the names and dates still legible, by scuba divers. The grave marker, a big red marble ball six feet in diameter that C.W. had bought for himself at the 1896 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Helen sold to the Abenschein family, whose grave it still marks today.

  2

  Boy of Privilege

  Pasadena in the first decade of the twentieth century was a garden grown of imported privilege and prosperity, an enclave of wealth and immaculate conservatism populated mostly by well-to-do former Midwesterners, like the Hawkses, seeking the year-round comfort of one of the most ideal climates in the country. Vast orange groves surrounded impeccably manicured estates and a prosperous but unhurried downtown on Colorado Boulevard, and to the north and east soaring mountain peaks, which were topped with snow during the winter, formed a spectacular backdrop to the intense green of the city.

  During the winter visits, Frank Hawks had installed his family at the ultrafashionable Maryland Hotel, and that is where they lived when they came out to stay in 1906, before renting a house for a short time at 408 Arroyo Terrace. Frank, still only in his early forties, didn’t need to work. But he and C.W. made some hotel investments along the West Coast that gave Frank the excuse to travel occasionally, and he bought some orange groves in Glendora, less than twenty miles to the east, that engaged his active interest.

  One of the most distinguished academic facilities in southern California at the time was the Throop Polytechnic Institute, which later became the California Institute of Technology. Founded in 1893, the school was just down the street from the large, comfortable house Frank found for the family at 998 San Pasqual, which has long since been torn down. Throop, pronounced “Troop,” at the time encompassed all levels of classes, beginning with grade school, and that is where Howard attended the sixth grade. But when the Throop trustees decided to concentrate all their effort on advanced education, the Grammar School Department was reorganized into a separate entity.

  The new Polytechnic Elementary School opened on October 10, 1907, and Howard, Kenneth, William, and Grace Hawks were among the 106 pupils enrolled. Frank Hawks soon became a trustee and remained on the board for a decade. The school was, and still is, a coed, nonsectarian establishment that, in addition to the usual grade-school curriculum, gave special attention to industrial arts; this marked the beginning of Howard’s lifelong hobby of wood and metal crafting. The average class size was sixteen students, and the school prided itself on the special attention given to the children, who advanced to the next level in each class not according to the calendar but by virtue of their success in the current grade.

  Howard Hawks was a thoroughly average student at Poly. His standard courses were English, arithmetic, geograph
y, German, art training, manual arts, penmanship, music, and gymnasium; he later added French and substituted history for geography. Four grades—excellent, good, medium and low—were given, and in his sixth-grade year, Howard received seventeen Ms, thirty Gs, and six Es. In the seventh grade, his grades dipped slightly; he got thirty Gs, twenty-four Ms, and no Es. In the eighth grade, his marks slipped further, with four Ls, including two in arithmetic, only two Es, in English and art training, twenty Gs, and twenty-three Ms. He scored better in German than in French, did not excel at gym, was good in the reading section of his English classes.

  School photos of Howard at the time—one of which shows him in a typical pose, holding a tennis racquet and slouching against a building—reveal him to be slim and on the short side compared to most of the other boys, always with a very serious, rather suspicious air that was accentuated by his tight little mouth. Howard was not among the winners in the school’s tennis tournaments, nor was he among the many contributors to the year-book of Poly’s first eighth-grade graduating class in 1910. It is likely, however, that he participated in one of the local boys’ favorite sports: “coaster” racing, in which large but motorless race cars were piloted downhill on dirt roads in nearby Altadena. Fifteen boys, including Chuck “Roughhouse” Hunt, the son of Myron Hunt by his first marriage, and five girls made up the class, and the inscription beside a portrait of a grim-looking fourteen-year-old boy in a double-breasted suit reads, “Howard Hawks—‘Our English descendent.’”

  During the same period, three other Hawks kids were following right behind Howard. Despite being two years younger, Kenneth entered Poly in the fifth grade in 1907, and after a rough start he made solid Gs. William, who was three years behind Kenneth, performed similarly well in school, getting Gs all around. Grace entered in 1907 and was by far the best student among the Hawks children, earning many Es and being singled out on her third-grade report card as “A fine worker.”

  In May 1911, the most horrible of tragedies hit the Hawks family, the first of three to befall the children of Frank and Helen Hawks. On May 4, Helen Bernice, their youngest child, then five years and four months old, ate a bad piece of fruit and suddenly died. The cause of death was officially listed as acute enteritis, but it seems likely that the fruit, described as “unripe” on her death certificate, was actually somehow infected or poisoned. In accordance with her Christian Scientist beliefs, the girl’s devastated mother instructed the funeral director to cremate the remains, and the ashes were interred at Mt. View Cemetery two days later. Typically, the family kept its grief subdued and as controlled as possible, and what happened to Helen was rarely spoken about subsequently.

  For his freshman, sophomore, and first quarter of his junior years of high school, from September 1910 through December 1912, Howard went to the public Pasadena High; decades later, the facility evolved into Pasadena City College, which currently occupies the same site at Hill and Colorado. Freshman year, he earned “good” marks across the board in English, algebra, wood shop, freehand drawing, mechanical drawing, and gym, though only a “medium” in French. Sophomore year, when the grading system was changed to percentages, he managed a ninety-one in mechanical drawing, an eighty-seven in English, an eighty-five in geometry, an eighty-three in shop, and a seventy-seven in French. During the first term of his junior year, he scored an excellent ninety-six in German, a split ninety/eighty-six in English, a ninety/eighty in algebra, but a failing sixty in chemistry.

  In late 1912, the family left Pasadena and moved east to live a much more rural life among Frank’s orange groves, at 352 North Los Robles in Glendora. The reasons for the abrupt change are unknown, although they could conceivably have had something to do with a desire to leave behind the house at 998 San Pasqual, where little Helen had died, or might have been connected to either Grace or Helen’s health.

  When the family moved, Howard transferred schools and finished his junior year, from January through June 1913, at Citrus Union High School in Glendora, in the boondocks compared to the quiet elegance and refinement of Pasadena. He did relatively well there, so that Frank and Helen, hoping to set their eldest son even more firmly on an Ivy League course, decided to send Howard east for the most rigorous formal education available. It remains uncertain exactly how they got him into the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, the most prestigious prep school in the United States, although money may have played the decisive role in slipping a West Coast boy with respectable but hardly distinguished grades into a school in which the vast majority of the 572 students at that time were upper crusters from the northeastern states. Howard Hawks, at age seventeen, was accepted into Phillips Exeter but, inexplicably, only as a lower middleclassman, the equivalent of a sophomore, meaning he was two years older than most of the 165 other boys at his level and two years behind where he was supposed to be. After the long train trip across the country, he arrived in time to start classes on September 15, 1913.

  The small town of Exeter, founded by English settlers in 1638, lies ten miles from the Atlantic Ocean about midway along the short stretch of New Hampshire that separates coastal Massachusetts and Maine. The trip to New England marked Howard’s first visit to the area his earliest American ancestors lived in, although family and sentimental ties meant little to him then or later. Opened in 1783, Phillips Exeter had long been the most elite of secondary schools; among its alumni at the time were eight senators, twenty state representatives, twelve state governors, one associate justice of the Supreme Court, and hundreds of other successful men of academia, the law, medicine, and religion. The most famous graduate was Daniel Webster. The school prided itself on its adherence to fairness and democratic dealings with all students but insisted “first of all on honest labor. The day’s work must be done. Every boy, high or low, rich or poor, must show actual performance. Not to learn one’s lesson is a breach of trust.”

  Although at least half the boys lived in private lodgings off campus, Hawks took student facilities in large Webster Hall, a classical four-story, redbrick building in which he shared room 28 with a senior, Horace Alonzo Quimby, of Springfield, Massachusetts. All the evidence suggests that Hawks in no way entered into the spirit of life at Phillips Exeter, certainly not academically and not even in the expected extracurricular activities. Attendance at chapel was required of all students, and Hawks, as one of only three registered Christian Scientists at the entire school, was assigned to the menial position of church monitor for the Christian Science contingent. He automatically became a member of the California Club, of which there were just nine others. He also joined the Assembly Club, which was in charge of arranging social events and inviting outside speakers. Although Phillips Exeter had become very athletically oriented over the previous decade and boasted first-rate sports fields and facilities, Hawks went out for no sports teams. He did, however, keep a meticulously assembled scrapbook into which he pasted local newspaper articles highlighting the exploits of all the prep school and Ivy League sports teams.

  His academic record was grim. In the highly competitive and demanding scholastic environment of Phillips Exeter, Howard Hawks, never a notable student, simply couldn’t cut it. The academic year was divided into three terms; in the first of them, Hawks received Cs in mechanical drawing and physics; Ds in math, German, and history; and no grade at all in physical training. During Christmas break, Howard forwent the long trip back to California and, instead, stayed with a family in Brookline, Massachusetts. As the many ticket stubs and playbills obsessively pasted into his scrapbook attest, the young man attended nearly every theatrical production playing in Boston that season. Returning for the winter term in January, he managed a B in mechanical drawing, got Cs in physics and physical training, but earned Es in German and history. Such marks, indicative of a near-total failure to live up to his potential or to apply himself, were fatal at an institution with the standards of Phillips Exeter, and Hawks did not return for a third term to finish the year there. The school was designed for
“the boy of good ability, good character, and earnest purpose,” and not for “the careless, thoughtless, unambitious boy, who burdens so many schools with his deadening lethargy and lack of worthy ambition.” In the view of the administrators, there was no question to which group Howard Hawks belonged.

  With his tail between his legs, Howard returned during Easter break to Glendora, where the family was still living and where Kenneth, two years younger than Howard, was in his junior year—officially one class year ahead of his older brother. Through some clever card shuffling, it was arranged for Howard to reenroll in Pasadena High in April 1914 as a senior. Back on home turf, his performance improved immeasurably. He excelled in trigonometry, with a ninety-five, and did reasonably well in physics, with an eighty-five. On his official school records, Fs and Os in German and American history are strangely written over with eighties in both subjects. The meaning of this is unclear, but Howard, in any event, did not graduate with the rest of the students in June. He was forced to take summer school, in which he got a ninety in American history and an eighty-five in German, and he finally graduated on July 31. Conveniently, in May the family had moved back to Pasadena, where William and Grace reentered the Polytechnic School.