Even more mysterious than Hawks’s acceptance at Phillips Exeter is precisely what induced Cornell University, one of the leading schools of the Ivy League, to admit a young man with Hawks’s thoroughly haphazard and unpromising academic record; Hawks did not even apply to the university until August, a month before classes began. Once again, it can only have been his family’s social position in a well-to-do community, financial considerations, and, possibly but untraceably, his parents’ connections to old friends with influence back East; Helen, after all, had attended Wells College, the pioneering women’s school in central New York, and might well have been able to pull the right strings to have her son taken by Cornell, located in Ithaca, only twenty-five miles away.
In September 1914, Hawks entered Cornell at age eighteen as a mechanical engineering major. Unfortunately, all school academic records for the period Hawks was a student have been destroyed, so his grades and athletic affiliations are unavailable; but all indications point to an indifferent academic career there. In his freshman and sophomore years, he was a member of the Exeter Club, although he had not graduated from that school, and he eventually joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The secretary of Hawks’s graduating class, Ray S. Ashbury, reported that Hawks was referred to as Howie by his buddies, and remembered that the Californian spent much of his time shooting craps in Ithaca rather than studying. Little will ever be known about Hawks’s college career, but it seems clear that Hawks acquired more of a taste for gambling and liquor during his college days than he did for higher learning. It also appears that Hawks traveled to New York City on occasion and attended the theater, for he was conversant with the playwrights and some actors of the period. He also read a great deal, mostly popular American and English fiction, which came in handy a few years later when he went to work in the scenario department at Paramount. Nothing Hawks ever said suggests that his college years were decisive to him in any way, except for what he did during his summer vacations.
Around this time, shortly before his death, C. W. Howard bought his grandson a Mercer racing car, and the teenager was able to start tinkering with it and racing it, in an occasional, amateur fashion, in California. Auto racing in those days was a rough-and-tumble affair done on dirt tracks in machines that were far from precise in their handling or reliable in performance. The cars kicked up enormous amounts of dirt that made visibility almost nonexistent for the drivers behind them, and if it had rained, the resulting mud made conditions even more dangerous. As Hawks testified, “It wasn’t very polite racing.” For Hawks, it was rich boy’s fun, a form of sport slumming against young men who were mostly grease monkeys, not Ivy Leaguers. But one of these former auto mechanics, who several years earlier had been an actual barnstorming race-car driver in the days when the fatality rate for professional drivers was about fifty percent, soon became his best friend and a deep influence on his life. This was Victor Fleming, and the way Hawks described their first encounter is not only incredibly self-serving, with him coming out on top, as usual, but has the feel of a scene from a film that either of them could have made. As Hawks told it, they were driving against each other in a race, and “I put him through a fence and wrecked his car. I won the race and saw him coming: I thought I was gonna have a fight with him. Instead of that, he came up with a grin and he said, ‘That was pretty good, but don’t ever try it again, because I’ll just run into you.’”
True, false, or merely exaggerated, the story sets the tone for an enduring friendship that had a strongly competitive edge but that the men never allowed to become endangered by personal or professional jealousy, despite repeated opportunities over the years. Thirteen years older than Hawks and in his early thirties when they met, Fleming long served as an unacknowledged role model for Hawks. Everything Hawks considered himself or was ever known as—film director, macho sportsman, ladies’ man, auto racer, flier, tough guy—Fleming did first and, with the exception of directing, better, although many of their contemporaries would have differed even on that point. Fleming was the real thing, the genuine article. Tall, physically powerful, and described by one woman as “a composite between an internal combustion engine hitting on all twelve and a bear cub,” Fleming was also deeply, compulsively emotional in a way that Hawks never was, a man who agonized over work, often got himself into binds, and repeatedly pushed himself to the brink, and whose serious drinking, recurring ulcers, and other physical ailments were a direct result of his complicated, demanding, tumultuous life. If Hawks kept all his tension and anxiety wound up tight inside, Fleming let it all out. And if there was a real-life inspiration for the prototypical “love story between two men” that Hawks kept returning to as his ideal subject, beginning with A Girl in Every Port, it was his own relationship with Victor Fleming.
The two grew up very near each other, although too far separated in years for it to have mattered. He lied about his age later on, but Victor Fleming was born in Pasadena on February 23, 1883. His father, W. R. L. Fleming, of English stock, was an engineer in charge of installing Pasadena’s first water-supply system, but he died when his son was four. Victor’s mother, the former Evelyn Hartman, who was Pennsylvania Dutch, remarried and moved to Los Angeles. As an adult, the handsome, dark-haired Fleming always boasted that he had Cherokee blood, but there is no trace of this in his official lineage. For unknown reasons, Victor was separated and placed with Evelyn’s brother Edwin Hartman, who ran a ranch in San Dimas, a small rural community immediately south of Glendora, where Frank Hawks would purchase his orange grove some twenty years later. A “holy terror” at school, Victor quit at fourteen and took a job at a Pasadena bicycle shop. The shop also had agency rights for one of the new cars then gaining popularity, the Oldsmobile, so the teenager quickly turned his attention to automobiles and got to know them inside out. By the turn of the century, Victor Fleming was racing cars at fairground tracks; he rode as Charley Soules’s mechanic in the first Vanderbilt Cup race in Santa Monica. Fleming got to know Soules’s longtime partner, Barney Oldfield, and worked on Oldfield’s famous Blitzen & Peerless Green Dragon racer in addition to continuing to barnstorm on his own on the standard mile-long circular courses, winning plenty of trophies in the process. In addition to having been in on the ground floor of automobile racing, Fleming was the 5,912th American to be certified with a pilot’s license, logging fourteen hundred hours in the air long before World War I began.
In Pasadena, Fleming had known a brash kid eight years his junior named Marshall (Mickey) Neilan, who likewise had lost his civil-engineer father at a very young age. A carouser and a vagabond of sorts, Mickey Neilan came into films as D. W. Griffith’s chauffeur in 1911, and by the following spring he was acting in Westerns for the American Film Company (or Flying A) in Santa Barbara under director Allan Dwan. In 1912, Dwan bought one of the biggest and most luxurious cars then in existence, the Mitchell Six, which Neilan taught him to drive, but one day it went on the blink. When none of the mechanics in Santa Barbara could fix it, Neilan remembered that Vic Fleming from Pasadena was working as a chauffeur and mechanic for a rich family in Montecito. With some difficulty, they found him at an estate up in the hills, and Fleming supposedly fixed the car, on which the timing was off, in ten minutes. Seeing some photographic equipment in the garage and learning that Fleming was an amateur photographer, Dwan asked if Fleming could repair his old English Williamson camera. Fleming knew nothing about that brand, but after he noticed that the brass aperture plate was scratching the film, he solved the problem by replacing it with a steel plate. The conventional, but incorrect, version of what happened next is that Dwan offered him a job; Dwan did not. Fleming, anxious for work in the fledgling industry, had to beg Flying A owner Samuel S. Hutchinson for any kind of job. He began by developing negatives, then moved to the set by carrying film and helping with props, all this when he was nearly thirty years old. Impressed by his dedication, Dwan soon made him an assistant cameraman, and Fleming was, by 1916, around the time he met Hawks, the cin
ematographer of the Douglas Fairbanks films Dwan was directing for producer D. W. Griffith at Triangle.
Fleming was the director of photography on the Fairbanks picture In Again—Out Again, directed by John Emerson, the husband of writer Anita Loos and the future director, not coincidentally, of the first screen version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Although Hawks never verified it for certain, all the circumstantial evidence points to In Again—Out Again, which was a sensation when it was released in April 1917, as the first picture on which Howard Hawks worked. It would also seem that Victor Fleming, as the one person Hawks definitively knew in the film business at that point, was very likely responsible for bringing him in. In Again—Out Again was Fairbanks’s first foray as a producer and his first film for Artcraft-Paramount. The most Hawks ever said about his motivation for entering the film business was, “I just wanted a job during summer vacation. Somebody I knew at Paramount got me one in the Prop Room.” He further explained that an emergency had arisen on the Fairbanks picture—the film needed a modern set built in a hurry at a time when the studio’s sole official art director was away. Hawks, with his limited architectural training, volunteered his services—or perhaps was recommended by Fleming. Fairbanks liked the work as well as the young man who did it, which led to further employment at the studio.
For Hawks at first, it was just summer work; he might more plausibly have found a job with an automotive shop or a construction company, the latter a logical choice for someone who was training to be a mechanical engineer. He never claimed to have been a film fan that early in life, to have been dazzled as an impressionable youth by the allure of motion pictures or the recent achievements of D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, or anyone else. And he certainly didn’t need the money. It was even more unusual for a film studio to employ a rich kid like Hawks in such a menial position than it was for an upper-class boy to take such a low-end job for the summer, for there was, as yet, very little glamour associated with an industry that still saw its members shunned from boardinghouses and apartment buildings, not to mention clubs, schools, and respectable institutions of all types. The vast majority of people entering the film business at that time came from distinctly humble origins, and more than a few assumed new names and rewrote their life stories. Allan Dwan compared Hollywood at that time to a circus, populated by “a pleasant gang of gypsy-like people.”
At that time, starting at the top meant working for either D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. De Mille; through recommendations from Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Hawks very quickly found himself working for the latter. Autocratic and a tough taskmaster even then, De Mille had come out to Hollywood from the East in 1914 and made his great breakthrough with The Squaw Man, the first legitimate feature-length American film; by 1916 he had already done more than anyone else to consolidate and promote the idea of Hollywood as a center for motion picture production. In the two years since The Squaw Man, he had produced and directed an additional twenty-five pictures and was quickly developing his reputation as the greatest showman in the young industry.
Hawks never specified which De Mille picture he worked on during the summer of 1916; it could have been Temptation, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, The Heart of Nora Flynn, Maria Rosa, The Dream Girl, or Joan the Woman. Those who knew the cool, unflappable Hawks of later years would have trouble imagining him as a fumbling, inexperienced underling, but Hawks told Kevin Brownlow that on this early job he was hidden in an adobe house with the responsibility of lighting a flare when he heard a bugle blow once and putting it out when it blew twice. “Well, the first time I lit the flare it caught all the other flares that were in there on fire and when a flare’s on fire it travels and I was running around thinking I was going to get burned up, but I’ll never forget all of the bugles blowing and blowing and I was saying, ‘Oh, shut up!’ I couldn’t put the flare out, I was trying to keep myself from being burned alive.”
Having failed in his attempt to transfer to Stanford University, the closest thing to an Ivy League university on the West Coast, Hawks returned to Cornell in September 1916 for his junior year. But when the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Howard Hawks’s academic career effectively ended. The great majority of students, including Hawks, would soon be called up for military service, with the members of Hawks’s class plucked out of school with just a year to go. What was done, in the end, was to graduate the servicemen of the class of 1918 in absentia. They received actual degrees, not honorary ones, even though they missed their entire senior years. This, then, is how Howard Hawks came to graduate from Cornell with a degree in mechanical engineering, despite his being far away when diplomas were handed out. But in the buccaneer days of the film industry, formal education counted for nothing; the last thing a producer or executive ever thought to ask a prospective director was where he went to college, since hardly anyone had. For Hawks, the prep school and Ivy League credentials, however undistinguished in achievement, gave him a certain aura, a polish that few others in his profession at that time possessed, which set him apart from the crowd in an impressive way. They also added, like medals, to his intimidation quotient, his forbidding talent to convince others, particularly those of more humble origins—that is, his bosses—that he just naturally knew more than they did, that he was smarter, more refined, and in every way more capable. This was an important key to his ability to so consistently get his way throughout the main part of his career.
Apparently, Hawks took the opportunity of the country’s declaring war to leave Cornell at once, before being called up for service, for in April 1917 he was back in California working for De Mille. The Little American was a big World War I romance in which Mary Pickford played an American girl whose two suitors, a German and a Frenchman, must return in 1914 to fight on opposite sides in the conflict. Surviving the sinking of the Lusitania on her way to Europe, Mary ends up in a château with the German when the French bombard it, which is where Hawks came in. Hawks was working props in the violent scene in which the château is demolished and, as he told Brownlow, “they had canvas all over the set and about six pails of flashlight powder that was supposed to go off. Well, nobody told me and I was up the top and when it went off I was supposed to drop a lot of cement and things. But all I got was all the fumes from six pails of flashlight powder, and I couldn’t breathe and instead of cement coming down, I fell down in the middle of the table in the middle of the scene. And when he [De Mille] saw who it was he just shook his head”—no doubt remembering the lad’s faux pas with the flares the year before. On this picture, which was in production between April 13 and May 22, 1917, Hawks became friendly with the eighteen-year-old Chinese-American slate boy, Jimmy Wong Howe, who was just entering the business.
Hawks claimed he and De Mille liked each other and always got along well, although he also paid him a backhanded compliment, saying that whatever approach De Mille would take as a director “I would work exactly the opposite, and do quite well doing it. If I tried to tell people to do some of the things he did, I’d laugh while I was trying to tell ‘em. But he made it work. I learned an awful lot because I did the opposite.” He also made the far-fetched claim that once, when the famous De Mille temper was unleashed in Hawks’s direction, the lowly assistant prop boy promptly “got him by the front of the coat,” said he didn’t like to be talked to that way, and promised to slug him if he ever did it again. In this fairy tale, which is identical to similar stories of how Hawks later manhandled Louis B. Mayer, Humphrey Bogart, and other tough guys, De Mille immediately apologized.
The Little American was well received upon its release in July 1917, and Hawks is known to have worked on two additional pictures before entering the armed forces, one of which gave him his chance to direct for the first time. In 1916, Mickey Neilan largely quit acting to take up directing full-time. Having appeared opposite Mary Pickford in numerous pictures, he became one of her most trusted collaborators. All the same he grew even more devil-may-care with success, and while directing
The Little Princess, an adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s famous children’s book, starring Pickford, Neilan went off on a drunk and simply didn’t show up one day. The way Hawks told it, when Pickford despaired of doing any shooting that day, Hawks said, “‘Why don’t we make some scenes?’ She said, ‘Can you do it?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ I made some, and she liked it very much.”
What Hawks and Pickford’s regular cinematographer, Charles Rosher, did were some trick shots, amusing double exposures that were basically in-camera special effects. The principle was that a shot could be taken of someone, for example, sitting in a chair, whereupon the film was carefully wound back to the same starting place and then run through the camera again, only this time showing the person getting up from the chair and walking across the room, which would effectively convey a dream or fantasy. Pickford said she wanted a scene in which she would, in effect, follow herself into a room, so Hawks and Rosher filmed her once in the room, rewound the film, and then took a shot of her entering the room. “And it happened that they matched,” Hawks said. “The cameraman was just sweating because he said it’s only one chance in ten that it’ll match.” They also executed a crude but charming stop-motion scene, the live-action equivalent of animation, in which they rigged a doll so that, by filming it one frame at a time in slightly different positions, it could be made to look as though it was moving of its own accord. These scenes, which rested entirely on cute little tricks, represented Howard Hawks’s directorial debut. After The Little Princess, Hawks worked on one more Neilan feature, Amarilly of Clothesline Alley, one of Mary Pickford’s less celebrated outings, in which she played a lower-class girl who comes close to being snatched up by a gilded youth but eventually realizes that happiness for her rests with one of her own.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 6