Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Due to all the mishaps and lack of organization, the film went wildly over budget, and the problem fell directly into Hawks’s lap. In fact, the situation became so bad, and relations between Neilan and Hawks so strained, that it resulted in a major lawsuit, which revealed that, contrary to Dwan’s impression, Hawks was directly involved in the financing of at least some of Associated Producers’ films and may have been wealthier than Dwan thought. Hawks’s complaint against Neilan, filed in June 1923, stated that Hawks had loaned Neilan a total of $95,490 (roughly $2 million by today’s standards) toward production costs on Bob Hampton. To cover the rest of the budget, Hawks arranged a bank loan of $125,000. However, as the costs grew, Neilan, supposedly without telling Hawks, borrowed an additional $50,000. When Neilan delivered the picture to First National in February 1921, he was reimbursed for the agreed-upon budget $200,000, but this still left a large gap, since the actual costs came to $287,066.

  After much equivocation, in 1924 both sides met and agreed upon a settlement by which Neilan would pay Hawks everything he owed plus interest; but shortly thereafter Neilan reneged and denied that he had ever agreed to pay interest. At the end of the year, the case was finally dismissed with prejudice against the defendant, suggesting that Hawks was reasonably treated in an out-of-court settlement. Allan Dwan said that Neilan also owed him a great deal of money during this period, although it apparently never led to a lawsuit.

  Hawks, in turn, was sued by one of his lenders, William Shea, for failing to pay back five hundred dollars he’d borrowed in January 1923. When Hawks did not respond to a summons, a writ of attachment was issued for Hawks’s bank account as well as for that of a company called Hawks-Morosco Productions, in which Hawks was partnered with Walter Mitchell, also known as Walter Morosco, presumably to help finance the Associated Producers features. It took two years, but the court finally removed $531 from Hawks’s bank account to satisfy Shea.

  Once the company took this costly wrong turn in 1921, it was never the same again, although, remarkably, Hawks and Neilan continued working together on five more pictures. On the heels of Bob Hampton, Dwan contributed A Broken Doll, a contrived, sentimental tale about the farfetched misadventures of a ranch hand (Monte Blue again) who tries to replace the favorite doll of the owner’s crippled daughter. For his part, Neilan followed up with another commercial disaster but a film Hawks actually liked a great deal, Bits of Life, featuring Wesley Barry and Lon Chaney, an ambitious attempt to tell four unrelated stories in a single feature. As a group, they were remarkably grim and depressing, following seedy characters to gloomy conclusions. This is precisely what impressed Hawks, who found it “a very good picture—very bitter, downbeat.” Still, he admitted that it had no chance of success because “it left you feeling very bad.”

  But despite the film’s failure, Hawks remained highly intrigued by the challenge of telling multiple stories in the same picture and was directly inspired by Bits of Life when he was preparing Red Line 7000 more than forty years later. The results then, however, proved no more popular than they were in 1921, leading Hawks to conclude that the problem with such a film was that “just when you get people interested, you have to drop one story line to go on to start another.”

  Remarkably, Neilan was able to finish yet another picture for the company that year, The Lotus Eater, a curious story in which John Barrymore played a young man who stumbles upon a deserted island inhabited by some shipwrecked folks who have fashioned a free-thinking society far from civilization. Despite the dashingly romantic figure cut by Barrymore, the film was not one of his more popular attractions. It is doubtful that at the time Hawks even met the actor, then at the virtual pinnacle of his celebrity, since the picture was shot off Miami and in New York.

  In 1922, Allan Dwan moved on to make the enormous and enormously successful Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks, which launched the most important phase of the director’s long career. But Neilan kept on with three more pictures for Associated Producers and First National. Penrod, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel and play, relied heavily on the antics of Wesley Barry and other child actors. Much more interesting was Fools First, a prime example of what Hawks described as Neilan’s rare ability to switch moods, lay in unexpected business, and subvert audience expectations. Co-starring Richard Dix and Raymond Griffith, the latter to become a friend and favorite of Hawks, it was fundamentally a Hell’s Kitchen story and an account of a bank robbery, but one elaborated with unusual character motivations, themes of redemption, and plot twists. Neilan paused, for example, to show the human side of the gang leader by having him sensitively tend to a lost child. Neilan also laced the more grisly elements of the story with black, macabre humor. Hawks, who was making a point of studying his directors very carefully, was impressed most of all by Neilan’s approach. “He always had a good foundation for a story,” he told Peter Bogdanovich, “but his method of treating it lightly crept in, or of stopping in the middle of something very dramatic to get a laugh. He always worked that way and it looked like a good idea to me.”

  Neilan’s final contribution to the company was a picture he directed with Frank Urson for early 1923 release. A rather standard romantic comedy, Minnie is about an ugly girl who pretends to have a secret admirer but then not only wins the heart of a newspaper reporter but is transformed into a beauty at the end through plastic surgery.

  Allen Holubar weighed in with two further pictures, beginning with Hurricane’s Gal, a large-scale adventure in which his wife, Dorothy Phillips, played the orphaned daughter of a high-seas smuggler who tries to continue his rough, illegal dealings, only to see the error of her ways. The 1922 film concluded with a spectacular sea battle that attracted considerable attention. Associated Producers’ last venture, which came out in the spring of 1923, was Holubar’s Slander the Woman, a melodrama in which Phillips reappeared as a Montreal society girl who is branded the “other woman” in a murder case and retreats to her father’s hunting lodge near Hudson Bay, where she becomes involved in further intrigue before her name is cleared. It was, from all accounts, a real dog, an ignominious end to a company that started out strongly but had, at best, an erratic artistic and commercial track record. Hawks simplistically blamed the failure of the company on the fact that all three of his directors were led astray by women, which in his mind somehow clouded their judgment and prevented them from making any more good pictures. He told Kevin Brownlow that “each one of them ran into some girl he thought was Sarah Bernhardt. And they started to make pictures and that was the end of us. Oh, brother, we made some stinkers. I decided no more other directors, I was going to direct myself. And that I was never going to get mixed up with any girl—that can be done outside of office hours. Because it was very strange. All three of them went the same way. Just that quick.… Mickey Neilan was by far the better of the three of those, but he went the fastest.” Holubar died on November 20, 1925, of an internal disorder and gallstones, while Dwan and the Hawks boys drifted apart, their careers taking them in separate directions, although Hawks retained his admiration for Dwan. “He was a pro—tough and hard with a good touch,” Hawks later said. “He didn’t dwell on things—he just hit ’em and went on.”

  Once he had decided he wanted to direct himself, Hawks began seeing as many movies as he could, often two or three a day. When he saw a picture he particularly admired, he would sit through it a second time to study the storytelling techniques and the director’s approach to the camera and actors. Above all, he appreciated the work of John Ford, who, in 1923 was still Jack Ford, a director of Westerns, but was on the verge of breaking through with the monumental production The Iron Horse.

  But wanting to direct and actually doing so were far different things, so Hawks had little choice in the short term but to continue as a producer, although this time with the added creative role of screenwriter. He came up with an efficient story for a modern Western, about a young army officer posted along the U.S.–Mexico border to crack a major drug-
smuggling ring. The officer falls in love with the daughter of one of the U.S. Customs Service investigators but comes to suspect that she is in league with the gangsters. It turns out that she is an undercover agent, and when the father, daughter, and officer are captured by the smugglers, the U.S. Cavalry must ride to the rescue.

  Hawks said he made Quicksands because a colonel he knew, presumably from shared army days, offered him the use of the Tenth Cavalry, “a Negro cavalry that chased Pancho Villa,” along with food and lodging in Texas. In exchange, Hawks made a short filmed history of the Tenth, including a reenactment of its pursuit of the outlaw Mexican leader who would serve as the subject of one of Hawks’s feature films twelve years later. Financing the production himself, Hawks cut every corner, arranging that his stars, Richard Dix and Helene Chadwick, could finish their scenes in the minimum amount of time to keep costs down; pulling in favors; and generally paying everyone next to nothing. It remains difficult to believe that he brought it in for eighteen thousand dollars, but it may not have been much more. The director was Jack Conway, another member of the rugged circle to which Hawks was drawing closer, which included Vic Fleming, Eddie Sutherland, and Harold, Richard, and Art Rosson. Conway, nine years older than Hawks, had previously been an actor and an assistant to D. W. Griffith; he had already proven himself, through a decade of experience, to be a versatile director. Sutherland, an actor and production assistant who was a year Hawks’s senior, shared Hawks’s Eastern prep school background, and the two became frequent golf companions. Sutherland, who in the mid-1920s became a very busy director, was also an amusing bon vivant whose home at the Bachelor Lodge in back of some buildings on Hollywood Boulevard was the scene of a constant party in the postwar years. Subsequently, he and Jack Conway shared a penthouse at the Hollywood Hotel, where the carousing was only partly interrupted by Sutherland’s marriage to Louise Brooks between 1926 and 1928. On Quicksands, Sutherland was one of two stuntmen, along with Richard Arlen, a sportsman and pilot who began acting the following year and would later costar for Hawks in Tiger Shark. Shot in late 1922, the film was made hectically and very quickly. When it was finished early the following year, the American Releasing Corporation picked up distribution rights, but despite a solid cast and good reviews, the picture did only fair business. In 1927, it was bought by Paramount Famous Lasky, cut from seventy minutes down to an hour, and briefly rereleased. No print is known to survive today.

  After living in Pasadena for some time after the war, in the early 1920s, Howard and Kenneth rented a house at 7125 Hillside Avenue, a tiny street just off upper La Brea north of Franklin. Hawks said that Victor Fleming once asked if he could put up at his place for a short time and ended up staying five years; while the length of time seems unlikely, it was definitely during this period. In early 1924, the two Hawkses moved to a house at 6626 Franklin Avenue, just two blocks up from Musso & Frank’s restaurant, on the spot where the celebrated show-business apartment building the Château des Fleurs would be built in 1927. Living with them for a good deal of this time was Jack Conway.

  A man who came into Hawks’s world in the early 1920s and had a profound effect on both his personal and professional life was Irving Thalberg. It is unknown who might have brought Thalberg (who shared Hawks’s May 30 birthday but was three years younger) into the group, but occasionally Hawks would find this “little red-cheeked Jewish boy, very bright guy,” at his home or at one of his friend’s. Although Hawks admitted that he wasn’t initially sure of the identity of this fellow, whose frailness and retiring nature contrasted markedly with the exuberant, macho personalities of most of the others, he endlessly told stories about him. Thalberg, of course, was Hollywood’s boy wonder, the fellow who had commandeered production at Universal at age twenty, wrestled Erich von Stroheim to the mat over the director’s prodigious excesses, and, in early 1923, left Universal to join Louis B. Mayer in a partnership that bloomed at MGM the following year. A very protected mama’s boy who was forced to leave Universal when he decided he didn’t want to marry boss Carl Laemmle’s daughter, Thalberg was earnestly trying to be one of the boys by hanging out with the likes of Fleming, Conway, Sutherland, and the Hawkses, all of whom Mother Thalberg considered wayward young men whose wild ways could only have a pernicious influence on her sensitive child.

  In fact, the influence worked much more in the opposite direction. Fleming and Conway became two of the most important directors at MGM under Thalberg, while Hawks entered a significant new phase of his career thanks to the young executive. Early in 1923, Hawks got a call out of the blue from Jesse Lasky, vice president in charge of production at Paramount Famous Lasky. Of course, Hawks had worked at the studio some years before, but he was a lowly prop boy then and scarcely had a nodding acquaintance with the boss. The way Hawks magnified it in later years, Lasky started by flattering him, saying that, “Thalberg says you know more about stories than anybody else that he knows, so I’d like to have you.” Offering him, according to Hawks, unlimited funds and direct access to his office, Lasky asked him to take charge of the production of a slate of forty pictures, to be responsible for literary purchases; choosing directors, writers, and cast; and cutting and titling the films. Hawks added that he didn’t have an official title at the company by his own request and boasted, finally, that his office was “really doing all the producing.”

  The truth, not surprisingly, was rather more prosaic. Hawks was hired, at a cushy salary of about five hundred dollars a month, as one of the scenario department’s four production editors. (The other three were Lucien Hubbard, Hector Turnbull and Walter Woods.) The production slate under way when Hawks came onboard was publicized in the trade as Paramount’s Super Thirty-Nine, the second half of its lineup for the current year. Hawks later claimed that he bought about thirty stories for the studio—two Joseph Conrads, two Rex Beaches, two Jack Londons, two Zane Greys—as if no one had ever adapted these writers’ works for the screen before. Tossing it off as if it were nothing, he said that, “In two weeks’ time, I had forty pictures and had ’em cast. Then all I had to do was to get people to write ’em. That was the most successful year Paramount ever had.”

  But Hawks shared these duties with three others and was worked fiercely by Lasky, one of the more benevolent bosses as Hollywood executives went and a man who appreciated Hawks’s intuitive smarts and mainstream literary tastes. Hawks claimed that Lasky agreed to give him Wednesday afternoons off to play golf, and that he was sometimes able to persuade his boss to go with him so they could talk about work while enjoying themselves; if true, it was a clever ploy on Hawks’s part, not only for selfish reasons but as a way to get Lasky’s ear for a prolonged period, apart from everyday distractions. With only two title writers on staff, Hawks was able to persuade Lasky to hire two more, Malcolm Stuart Boylan and sportswriter Beanie Walker, both of whom became top names in the field. Hawks even insisted that he saved Cecil B. De Mille’s contrived 1925 melodrama The Road to Yesterday by rewriting its titles. The picture, according to Hawks, had turned out badly, with the director having approached the story “very, very heavily,” so Hawks told De Mille he could improve it. “I made, not a comedy out of it, but at least in a lighter vein,” he bragged to Kevin Brownlow. “I changed the whole tenor of the story. So it didn’t take itself seriously, it took itself in a semi-humorous way. He took it out and previewed it and he was very pleased with himself that he’d gotten laughs and he decided he was going to make comedies.” Hawks also admitted, “I started the evil of the ‘associate producer’ because I had so much to do I had to hire a couple of fellows to help me.”

  Because of Hawks’s shared responsibilities on the Super Thirty-Nine slate, it is difficult to say with certainty which properties he bought and which projects he supervised. He himself took credit for several. Among the ones to come out in 1924 were George Melford’s adaptation of a Frances Hodgson Burnett play, the crime drama The Dawn of a Tomorrow, featuring Hawks’s friend Raymond Griffith; two Westerns by Irvin
Willat, a Zane Grey story called The Heritage of the Desert and North of 36; and Open All Night, also with Griffith, a sophisticated romantic comedy that was writer Paul Bern’s second film as a solo director. That first year Hawks himself received a writing credit on a George Melford film, Tiger Love. Based on an opera called El Gato Montes, it was a Robin Hood–like tale of romantic intrigue and derring-do in Old Spain. It starred Antonio Moreno and Estelle Taylor and was judged good, if formulaic, fun.

  Then there were the films directed by Victor Fleming. Hawks actually claimed that he was responsible for Fleming’s directing career, telling Peter Bogdanovich, “Then he became a cameraman, which he was until I became a producer at Paramount and made him a director.” This is one of Hawks’s most blatant pieces of one-upsmanship on his more experienced friend, simply because it is so outrageously false, a weak attempt at building himself up when, in fact, his friend was way out in front of him, doing what Hawks really wanted to be doing. After spending the war in the Army Signal Corps, Fleming had sailed with President Wilson in December 1918 to attend the Versailles Peace Conference, where, as chief cameraman for the American delegation, he had filmed the assembled world leaders. He had shortly thereafter become the first American to shoot movie film inside the Vatican, when Wilson visited St. Peter’s. Upon his discharge in 1919, he had begun his directorial career at once at the behest of Douglas Fairbanks, his roistering buddy. He’d arrived at Paramount in 1922, and had already directed five films there when Hawks joined the studio.