Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  In addition to becoming good friends with Mickey Neilan, Hawks learned a great deal from the boisterous, irreverent Irishman that was pertinent to his own work later on. “Neilan had a great sense of humor,” Hawks noted. “He had a very opposite sense … he could get fun out of odd, quick little things, he could get fun out of stress and duress. And he taught me how to do it.” It was the cue he got from Neilan that inspired Hawks to always look for a different way of doing something; to try to make any story a comedy if possible; to reverse a situation from what an audience expected; to realize the comic potential in frustration, hazard, and embarrassment; to cast, perhaps, a woman in a man’s part; and to maximize the potential of intimacy and compression instead of going, à la De Mille, for broad strokes and general effects. Hawks would work with Neilan again numerous times before beginning his directing career, and Neilan’s impact was so strong that he remained a conscious influence on Hawks as late as the 1960s, in Red Line 7000 and El Dorado.

  By the summer’s end, Hawks, now twenty-one, was obliged to join the armed services. Distressingly, Hawks’s military records appear not to exist; it is overwhelmingly likely that they were among the 80 percent of all army personnel records for the years 1912–59 that were destroyed in a fire on the top floor of the St. Louis National Personnel Records Center on July 12, 1973. All there is to go on regarding Hawks’s World War I service is his own testimony, which is scant. Hawks began his stint in the Army Air Corps with fifteen weeks of ground training in a special program at the University of California at Berkeley, which prepared him to be a squadron commander even though he didn’t yet know how to fly and only got to spend a token amount of time in the air. While Hawks was there, Mary Pickford visited the Bay Area on a war-bonds tour, and Hawks’s friendship with her astonished his superiors. He was then sent to Texas, where he was finally taught to fly, although he said, “I think I got about an hour and three-quarters flying, and they made me an instructor.” Hawks’s army experience appears to have been frustrating and relatively uneventful, since his evident skill at teaching flying amounted to a sentence to continue doing so, which reduced his chances of going overseas to near zero. Hawks said that his time in Texas, which spanned roughly the first half of 1918, was a grindingly dull period “because there were two or three thousand cadets down there and about seven or eight airplanes. They didn’t even have enough airplanes to train people. So we applied for almost anything we could do to get out of there.” Hawks’s application for a transfer was continually held up, but he was finally sent to Fort Monroe, Virginia, where he was briefly trained in spotting big guns and artillery shelters from the air before the Armistice was declared in November 1918. His rank upon his discharge was second lieutenant.

  Despite the lackluster character of Hawks’s military career, it had an indisputable influence on his life and film career. He continued flying for personal pleasure, for more than a decade, and aviation was the central preoccupation of six of his films, which made it the subject, more than any other, that the public most readily associated with Hawks through the early 1940s. In Texas he met a number of fliers who would later work for him in that capacity in Hollywood, and his limited Army Air Corps experience facilitated his friendship with the future Major General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, without whom Air Force would never have been filmed. And even though he never went overseas, the kinship he developed with many fliers gave him a strong feeling for the World War I Lost Generation characters who populated The Dawn Patrol and Today We Live, as well as for the intrepid pioneers who figured in Ceiling Zero and Only Angels Have Wings.

  3

  Rich Kid in Hollywood

  Hawks’s activities in the immediate post–World War I period are more difficult to pin down with certainty than those in any other part of his life. Hawks said that he built cars and planes and raced the former, although he did neither on more than an amateur sport basis, never for a living. He indisputably developed a taste for the most expensive automobiles early on. In fact, the first two of the countless lawsuits in which Hawks became embroiled during his life concerned cars. In the first, a man who in 1919 sold a new twelve-cylinder Packard touring car to Howard and Kenneth had to go to court to collect the final five-hundred-dollar payment, forcing the sheriff to attach Howard’s bank account after one of his checks bounced. In 1923, Hawks was sued by the Walter M. Murphy Motors Company of Pasadena for nonpayment of $316 he owed for repair work performed on one of his cars, which led the police to seize the car at his home. For similar reasons, the city impounded Howard’s Buick the following year.

  After his military service, Kenneth returned to Yale, where he had enrolled before the war, and graduated in 1919. Kenneth had become a terrific tennis player, much better than Howard, who didn’t continue playing very long into his adult life; even his oldest child, David, doesn’t remember ever seeing him play. According to Howard, Kenneth was good enough to beat Bill Tilden a month before the era’s greatest player won at Forest Hills, and Howard said that he and his brother would often hustle other guys on local courts, deliberately playing poorly while warming up to sucker some doubles team into a hefty wager, then clobbering them in the actual match. Howard also said that he and Kenneth were the only Los Angeles players who could hold their own with two other top players of the time, Maurie McLoughlin and Tom Bundy. If so, Kenneth must have been an extraordinary player to make up for Howard’s more average skills; if Howard had been exceptional at all, he surely would have played in school, and there is no record of this anyplace he attended, making it virtually impossible to believe his boast that he was once national junior champion in the sport. However, Howard did use what sporting talent he possessed for social advancement, securing a place for himself as part of Doug Fairbanks’s weekend circle by becoming adept at a rugged sport invented by Fairbanks himself, a particularly strenuous form of badminton played with heavy, oversized racquets.

  Kenneth’s athletic abilities were attested to by Allan Dwan, the pioneering director, who met the boys in 1919, when they were hanging around the Famous Players–Lasky studio on Vine Street, where Howard had worked before the war. Dwan’s strongest initial memory was that “Kenneth Hawks had the most amazing right arm. He could throw a football further than any man I ever knew. They knew that I was a Notre Dame football player, I’d just come out of Notre Dame shortly before then, and so Kenneth came around one day on the lot and looked me up, and I was a kicker, so I’d kick it back and he’d throw it to me. And he actually could throw a football eighty yards, and I have never seen anybody able to do that.” Dwan had not only starred for Notre Dame but coached there briefly after his graduation in 1907. Even in the late 1920s, May McAvoy, who starred in Howard’s first film, would see Kenneth heaving a football to anyone he could find on the Fox lot.

  “They were all tennis players, all typical society boys from New England,” Dwan said of the Hawks brothers. “They lived like New Englanders in Pasadena. The family had that quality—lace trimmings, mahogany furniture, silver—they were quite New Englandy. The old man was sedate and rather stiff. We saw the boys occasionally, we took short motor trips here and there. The sister was floating around, we sort of didn’t pay much attention to her, as boys won’t.”

  Even Dwan, one of the few other college graduates in the motion picture world at that time, felt there was something odd about these two upper-class boys from a genteel family trying to break into the knockabout silent film industry. They wanted very badly to get in, Dwan remembered, “and none of us could figure out just why.” In Dwan’s eyes, Kenneth, never having had a job before, was the more eager and interested of the two, so the director took him on as an assistant. Howard, already seeing himself as a seasoned pro after having worked on a handful of pictures with the likes of De Mille, Fairbanks, and Pickford, had no interest in returning to the property department; more likely, he wasn’t welcome back, since Dwan recalled that he developed a reputation for “borrowing” props and never returning them.

&nbs
p; But it didn’t take Howard long to figure out an angle. The one advantage he had over other newcomers and wannabes was money—his own and access to that of others—so why not buy his way into the business? This way he could enter near the top, control the purse strings, and be his own boss.

  It was an aristocratic, foolhardy way to approach things, but he was only twenty-three and ready to jump in, and it wouldn’t matter all that much if he had to learn the hard way for a while at his own expense. Although it is unknown how they met, Hawks’s first, and fortuitous, plunge into the Hollywood financial arena was to loan some money to Jack Warner. Four years older than Hawks, Warner and his brothers had been variously involved in the movie business since 1903, but it was only in 1918 that they had had their first significant success, with a picture called My Four Years in Germany, a propaganda piece designed to rally American support for the war effort by spotlighting the conniving, duplicitous ways of Kaiser Wilhelm. The next year, however, Jack Warner was in a pinch again and Hawks was in a position to bail him out. So, in exchange for a loan, which Warner paid back shortly thereafter, Hawks was assigned to oversee a new series for Warner called the Welcome Comedies, one-reelers starring an Italian comic dancer named Mario Bianchi who had come to notice playing small parts in Fatty Arbuckle shorts under the name Monty Banks. A former Mack Sennett director, Frank Griffin, was hired to make a comic star out of Banks, but he didn’t last long, leaving it to Hawks and Banks himself to make the films. The first of these was His Night Out, which was distributed by CBC Distributing Company. The scant scholarship devoted to Banks includes no record of who directed his early one-reelers, which no longer exist and probably ran no directorial credits anyway, so it is impossible to verify or deny Hawks’s contention that he directed three or four of them after Griffin’s departure. Hawks’s rather disparaging remarks about Banks, saying that the comic “began to feel as though he was kingpin” after just a couple of pictures, suggest discord between the two men, and his claim that he fired Banks over his temperamental behavior and that the actor “got down on his knees and begged to be allowed to come back” smacks of the usual Hawks oneupsmanship. His too-big-for-his-britches characterization of Banks also seems unfair, in that Banks was soon successfully directing himself in comic shorts before moving on to a directorial career that embraced twenty-three features, suggesting at least some competence. Hawks said he quickly got bored with the series and left with a handsome profit, but he also had the audacity to suggest that his ever-so-brief stint in short-form, gag-oriented comedy gave him “thorough comedy training” on a par with that earned by the likes of Frank Capra and George Stevens, each of whom put in years in silent comedy.

  Emboldened by his success as a financier in his first time up to the plate, Hawks hatched a grander scheme to finance feature-length films with first-rate directors and important actors. Working quickly and cleverly, Hawks got together Allan Dwan, Mickey Neilan, and Allen Holubar, the latter an up-and-coming director then working at Universal with his wife, the actress Dorothy Phillips, and told them that he could raise the financing for pictures that each man would direct, produce. and, if he so chose, write himself. The films would be distributed by First National, a company formed two years before by several exhibitors fed up with the monolithic block-booking practices of some of the major companies. The business arrangement represented an early form of a negative pickup deal, with First National reimbursing the new company, called Associated Producers, upon delivery of the negative, then sharing a portion of the revenues when they came in. One of Hawks’s schemes for making immediate profits was to try to come in under budget; if there was an agreed-upon cost of, say, $200,000, the company would try to bring it in for $20,000 to $30,000 less than that and keep the difference when First National paid the $200,000.

  Dwan recalled that Hawks obtained the money to get Associated Producers off the ground from a man in Pasadena. “He was quite wealthy, and quite interested in films. The first time I met him, it was in his house, and he wanted to talk about films.” Dwan’s ulterior motive in meeting him was to use his lavish house as a location for a picture, “and that was shocking to them, and to the man’s wife. But we learned that he wanted to be an actor, of all things. I immediately employed him, I employed him as an actor, and I got his house. And after we had done that a couple of times, he signed up with Universal and got himself a job.”

  Hawks also arranged for some bank loans to cover production costs before First National paid him back, and it was Dwan’s impression that Hawks didn’t use his own money. “He never put a nickel up,” said Dwan. “They weren’t wealthy. They were well-fixed, but not wealthy by any means. As a matter of fact, I know they weren’t, because knowing the old man, he used to ask me very pointed questions about what guarantee there was in getting a nickel out if you put a nickel into motion pictures. He didn’t act like a financier.… They knew percentages, but this fellow was blind as a bat, and I think Howard was, too. He’d just keep his head in the sand and spend.”

  Early on, Hawks and Dwan went to Honolulu, partly for vacation and partly to size up the possibility of shooting a picture in Hawaii, something no one was yet doing. When word got out, Dwan recollected, “We were invited to the Chamber of Commerce, to a luncheon they gave in our honor. And Howard is peering into the pockets of every guy there, to see if he can try to make a picture. I don’t remember whether he got anything out of Honolulu or not, but I know we came back home very shortly after that and he found money someplace and we were making a picture.” Hawks’s role in Associated Producers was strictly financial. At the time, Dwan said, Hawks “thought that’s the good end of pictures. He wasn’t thinking story.… He never got down to that for years.”

  Hawks and Dwan took another trip together, this time also with each man’s brother: Kenneth, of course, and Leon Dwan, a Chicago lawyer who came out to handle Allan’s business affairs. Ostensibly scouting locations for a picture, the four self-styled sportsmen, Dwan recalled, really just went off on a lark to see the Grand Canyon, “and if a fella was there in a Rolls-Royce we’d see if he had any money he wanted to put in pictures.” Dwan joked, “With my brother and me, we made a pretty good foursome. We could go out all day long and nobody would say a word. Can you imagine four people together, all silent? I’d generally break it up, I’d start blabbing and there’d be an argument. I could always start an argument. It didn’t matter. I’d say, ‘I think it will rain later.’ ‘Now why would it rain? It isn’t rainy season.’ And that starts the day’s conversation, and it could go all day long. Then, at dinner, at night, they’d say, ‘Well, I thought it was gonna rain, wise guy.’ Then the next day they’d say, ‘Well, you were right about the rain. I suppose it’s going to avalanche today.’ ‘Oh, sure.’” Surprisingly, Dwan said, “I don’t think we paid a damn bit of attention to women. We were doing sports, we were exploring, we were adventuring. We were looking for locations most of the time.” Neither of the Hawks boys were big drinkers then, and Dwan remembered noting in particular that “Howard was very slow-spoken. He always had that slow-drawl way of speaking. He always had that, as if he were thinking the next word he’d say.”

  There are no official production records for Associated Producers, but the best evidence suggests that the company was responsible for fourteen pictures between 1920 and 1923: eight by Neilan, and three apiece from Dwan and Holubar. Things got off to a promising start the first year with two big hits by Neilan. Go and Get It was an offbeat newspaper story highlighted by some daring aviation stunts and a notable appearance by a child actor named Wesley Barry in a secondary role as Dinty. Neilan, well known for his skill directing kids, immediately came up with a starring vehicle for Barry called, plausibly enough, Dinty, a heartrending rags-to-riches melodrama about an orphaned Irish kid on the streets of San Francisco. The company’s final entry for the year was Dwan’s warm melodrama The Forbidden Thing, about Portuguese fishermen and their women in Provincetown.

  Dwan followed up with a
commercially and artistically attractive entry for early 1921, A Perfect Crime, a sort of Jekyll & Hyde fantasy about a “pinhead” bank clerk played by Monte Blue who, at night, upon removing his glasses and straightening up his posture, becomes the dashing spinner of Münchhausenesque stories. The picture marked the screen debut, in a small part, of a twelve-year-old distant cousin of Hawks’s named Jane Peters, whom Dwan spotted playing baseball in the street. When she resumed her screen career several years later, it was under the name of Carole Lombard.

  With their next productions, however, Associated Producers got rather carried away. For his first contribution to the company, Allen Holubar made a pretentious spectacular entitled Man-Woman-Marriage, a study of man’s treatment of woman through the ages. Expensively appointed, it was not a hit.

  This was nothing, however, compared to Neilan’s superproduction Bob Hampton of Placer, an epic of the Old West that climaxes at Little Big Horn. Based on a 1910 novel, the film was confusing and misguided in the telling and was a mess both in production and on the screen. Hawks admitted that they used trip wires in the cavalry scenes, which made many horses fall onto their heads and necks, a practice that was later outlawed. Hawks was in charge of the second unit and, after two failed attempts to film Custer’s Last Stand, one in Montana and another in Arizona, the company announced that the battle would be filmed from a blimp. But when the blimp refused to leave the ground, Hawks had the brainstorm of shooting the sequence in the Arroyo Seco, a large ravine along the western edge of Pasadena very near the Green & Green house at 408 Arroyo Terrace, where the Hawks family had lived some years before. Not wanting to lose the publicity benefits of the blimp story, Hawks had a window washer–style platform dangled off the Colorado Street Bridge over the ravine; he then had the platform jostled so that it would still look as though the cameras were on an airship. In an unusually vicious review, Variety attacked the film mercilessly, advising that “What might save [Neilan] would be action on the part of his backers. Hand him $35,000 and no more. Tell him to make a picture with it. Then he would have to use his brains, not money. Then possibly we would get something again.”