Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  The first picture on which Hawks and Fleming were jointly associated was Empty Hands, the story of a scandalous flapper who is swept down some rapids in a canoe while visiting the Canadian Rockies and survives in the wilderness thanks to her father’s brawny engineer. Jack Holt portrayed the man, while the flighty girl was played by Norma Shearer, a Canadian actress whose career had slowly been taking shape for several years. A former advertising model in New York, Shearer left her married sister, Athole, behind and traveled with her mother, Edith, to Hollywood. Shearer was charming and pretty, if slightly wall-eyed and horsey, and also very proper; and she was now, after a period of struggle, seemingly on her way up the ladder to stardom.

  The mountain portions of the film were shot at Lake Arrowhead, a couple of hours east of Los Angeles, and Shearer immediately fell hard for her director, to the distinct disapproval of her ever-hovering mother, Edie. In her unpublished autobiography, which tends to put a polite finish on the events of her life, Shearer as much as admits that Fleming was her first lover. “His few silver hairs and kind gentle ways attracted me enormously,” she wrote. “I suppose psychiatrists would have said my love for my father, whom I was missing so much, expressed itself in my romantic yearning for this mature man—this undoubtedly was the basis for my tender affection which must have overwhelmed me one moonlit night as we sat in a hammock on the terrace of the hotel overlooking the beautiful lake. I found myself saying, for no reason at all, ‘Mr. Fleming, would you kiss me?’ And to my surprise he did and I loved it.’” Enthusing about “his amazing hands” and his talent for little endearments, Shearer revealed that, “I had a lovely time courting this mature man—the first I had known.” She added that, “Sport cars were his passion and he drove a beautiful dark grey Dusenberg too fast—except when Edie was in the backseat—because she would scream ‘Victor’ and hit him on the back and he would pretend she had knocked him off the seat onto the floor.”

  As it happened, Howard Hawks was also quite taken with Norma Shearer, but not in a romantic way. Hawks first noticed her in a picture Jack Conway made at Warner Bros. in 1923 called Lucretia Lombard, which he claimed to have improved by retitling it to favor Shearer, who played the second female part, over the leading lady, Irene Rich. Hawks took credit for signing her for Empty Hands over the objections of Jesse Lasky, who found her unattractive. After he saw the finished picture, Lasky realized his mistake and wanted to sign her for further films, but she was already under contract to MGM. Thalberg had had his eye on her for three years and, by 1925 Shearer was a star at MGM. In 1927, she married Thalberg.

  But the romance with Thalberg was slow to catch fire, and for some time Shearer continued to see Victor Fleming while he made three more pictures that Hawks supervised: The Devil’s Cargo, a dubious story of sinners and redeemers during California Gold Rush days; Adventure, an action-and-romance-packed adaptation of a Jack London novel set in the Solomon Islands; and Lord Jim, a superficial but impressively physical telling of the Joseph Conrad tale.

  Among Hawks’s other projects were two more Zane Grey Westerns, The Code of the West and The Light of Western Stars, both directed by William K. Howard, as well as a picture on which Hawks shared a story credit with Adelaide Heilbron, The Dressmaker from Paris. The picture, directed by Hawks’s friend Paul Bern, tells of an American soldier, played by Allan Forrest, and a French maiden, portrayed by Leatrice Joy, in a comeback role after time off for motherhood, whose romance is thwarted when the Yanks go home. Some years later, the young man, stuck managing an old-fashioned clothing store in a sleepy Midwestern town, decides to shake things up by inviting a famous Parisian designer to put on a fashion show at the store. It turns out, of course, that the couturiere is none other than his long-ago love, and the two surmount the shocked protests of local prudes by putting on a successful show and heading for the altar. Although the predictability of the story was criticized, the fashion show sequence was incredibly lavish, loaded with beautiful models and an endless succession of gowns, furs, and revealing outfits. Despite his credit, Hawks absolved any real creative input on this film, telling Joseph McBride, “I just thought of the title and gave a writer the idea for a story, and she wrote it.” Hawks liked Leatrice Joy, however, and through her met her husband, John Gilbert, whom Hawks also liked a great deal. The actor’s contract with Fox was up, and Hawks pushed both Lasky and Cecil B. De Mille to sign him up at Paramount. But Lasky missed the boat, and Gilbert shortly became Hollywood’s most romantic leading man at MGM.

  As it turned out, Hawks’s stint at Paramount was also near an end. On September 1, 1924, he signed a contract to work for one more year as a production editor at the studio, at $650 per month for the first six months and $750 per month for the remainder. Within a matter of weeks, however, he abruptly quit and took a similar position with Thalberg at MGM. Although he felt he was overworked, Hawks’s ostensible reason for leaving was that Lasky offered him no prospect of moving out of the scenario department and into directing. Thalberg, on the other hand, promised that if Hawks spent a year as a story executive, he would then let him direct. It was a promise not kept, however, and a year wasted as far as Hawks was concerned. Granted, Hawks admired Thalberg and learned a great deal watching him analyze scripts and first cuts of films, figure out what was wrong with them, and then create new scenes that would sometimes dramatically improve the pictures. Hawks worked with dozens of writers, met many of the stars, and had an affair with at least one of them, the newly arrived Joan Crawford. But by late 1925, he could tell nothing was about to change for him at the thriving studio. When Hawks complained to Thalberg about it, he remembered the executive saying, “‘Howard, Christ, we can get all the directors we need. I can’t get anybody to do your work.’ I said, ‘I just quit this morning.’ He and I were very good friends, and he said, ‘Nothing could change your mind?’ I said, ‘Nothing can change it.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I could let you direct.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want you to do that. You can let me direct some time after I show you what I can do.’ And I went off to play golf.”

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  It took balls for Howard Hawks to walk out on Irving Thalberg, but it wasn’t the first and it was far from the last time Hawks would tell a boss what he could do with his job; it got to be one of his most endearing habits. Every day he spent at MGM represented an additional day of frustration and treading water, to the point where he was beginning to get depressed. Still, the way he told it, Hawks left MGM one morning and was all set to direct a picture at Fox the same afternoon. According to him, when he went to play golf after kissing off Thalberg, he ran into Fox’s general studio superintendent, Sol Wurtzel, who, when apprised of Hawks’s availability, invited him to write and direct a picture on the spot. There is no way to confirm or refute the story, of course, but it is true that Hawks was launched on his directorial career with incredible speed; he was signed by Fox at the end of October 1925, and his first film was finished by February.

  Hawks joined Fox at a time when the studio, under the stewardship of its vice president, Winfield Sheehan, a longtime associate of William Fox’s, was gearing the company up to unprecedented levels of production in a determined effort to become a dominant force in the industry; its enormous 1926–27 program called for spending $10 million on at least forty-nine features and fifty-two comedy shorts. Part of this surge involved beefing up the studio’s directorial roster, and Hawks signed his contract on October 28, 1925, at the same time as Harry Beaumont and Irving Cummings. Among the other top directors on the lot at the time were John Ford, Frank Borzage, Raoul Walsh, Allan Dwan, Alfred E. Green, Roy William Neill, and John G. Blystone. Hawks’s deal called for him to receive $5,000 for his original story, $7,500 to direct, and an option on his services for three more pictures to be produced within nine months, the first of which would pay him $10,000, the next two $12,500. Fox included a further option for four more films to be made during a one-year period. Hawks celebrated the attainment of his lo
ng-elusive goal by taking an ad in the year-end issue of Variety that stated, “Happy New Year—Howard Hawks—Now Directing for William Fox.” Early in the new year, his brother Kenneth, who had been working steadily as an assistant director for Clarence Badger at Paramount, followed him to Fox, where he quickly became one of the studio’s top production supervisors.

  Fox needed product immediately, which put Hawks on the spot to come up with a story that could be written, cast, and put before the cameras within a matter of weeks. The inspiration for his proposed picture, drawn from real life, was exceedingly poignant. As he told Joseph McBride, “It was taken from a little incident that happened once where a beautiful girl went blind from drinking bootleg liquor at my house. While we were waiting for the doctor, she said, ‘Just because I’m blind it doesn’t mean I can’t perform pretty good in bed.’” Hawks said he “loved the attitude she had,” as most men would.

  Unfortunately, the story Hawks wrote had nothing to do with this episode except for the blindness. The Road to Glory, which was also tentatively titled The Chariot of the Gods during production, is one of two films Hawks directed that are not known to exist. As his first film, and one basically written by him as well, it is worth delving into the story and its development in some detail, since its inspirational, religious theme and gravely serious treatment stand at such odds with the majority of his later work.

  Hawks did very few extended pieces of writing of any kind during his life, and one of the longest is the thirty-five-page treatment he wrote for The Road to Glory. Although it doesn’t solve the question of what motivated him to create a story so squarely founded upon the importance of a devout belief in God, just as it doesn’t provide any sort of cogent summation of his philosophy or attitudes, it is pure Hawks at age twenty-nine, unfiltered by anyone else’s input or even, so it would seem, by commercial considerations, until the staggeringly unrealistic and unbelievable happy ending.

  The treatment’s first paragraph is the closest the work comes to expressing an outlook on life: “Chance brings a man and woman together. By chance they fall in love. A new element enters and thrusts them apart. Then comes coincidence to reunite them. Without coincidence, life would move in a preordained groove destroying genius and blasting ambition. The greatest coincidence is life itself.”

  The opening scenes shows two Jazz Age hedonists, Judith, “a speed-mad nymph,” and David Hale, of “muscular body and steady nerves,” racing at more than seventy miles per hour down a country road. When they suddenly come upon a wagon, David runs the car into a ditch and through a rail fence, throwing them both clear, although Judith suffers a bruise over her right eye.

  Judith shortly goes home, to a large suburban estate she shares with her father, Jim, a “big, youngish looking man” whom she loves “with a fierce passion” and calls “boy-friend,” as in “You’re late, boy-friend!” and “Not mad at me, are you—boy-friend?” Despite Judith’s blurred feelings for her father, Jim and David get along pretty well, although, on a walk with her, David admits, “Sometimes I’m almost jealous of him. I wonder if you’ll ever love anyone as much as you love ‘the boy-friend’?” “It depends,” Judith responds. “On what?” David asks. “On whether or not this other person loves me as much as ‘the boy-friend’ does.”

  Also living at the house is a fanatically religious Negro cook named Aunt Salina, a role written in thick black dialect. Judith feels increasingly severe head pains, and when Jim is abruptly killed by a falling brick on his way to his office, Salina laments that, “De good Lawd sho’ done sent perversity to dis house. Fust He took Mistuh Jim an’ den Miss Judy gits a complaint wid her haid.” But the news is worse still: a doctor who would rather be out playing golf informs Judith that her injury is going to make her gradually go blind.

  Deciding at once not to inflict this “pitiful curse” upon David, she rejects David’s marriage proposal, cuts off their relationship, becomes totally bitter, and comes to hate God. David decides to bury his grief in manual labor in a mine, while Judith, her sight ebbing away, cares about nothing anymore and accepts a invitation from her father’s old business partner, the fat, lecherous Del Cole, to a mountain lodge that happens to be near the mine.

  In a breathlessly melodramatic final section, David is seriously injured in a mine explosion and is brought, of course, to the lodge as a train is arranged to take him to a hospital. Judith forces her way onboard, but the trains loses its brakes and careens out of control down the mountain. Everyone jumps off except for the immobile David and an ecstatic Judith, who, knowing they are about to crash, at last tells David about her blindness and exults, “Soon it will all be over.”

  After the crash, Judith is seen, “miraculously unhurt,” in a hospital. Informing her that David’s condition is grave, the doctor urges Judith to “ask the Only One who can help.” Attempting to overcome her resentment of God and trying to remember how to pray, Judith recalls what a kindly old man told her once in a park: “God is Love.” Suddenly, David makes a remarkable recovery and, to top it off, Judith’s sight is fully restored, whereupon the medic says, “A doctor can only help a little. It is God who cures,” before heading off to play golf.

  A final scene repeats the circumstances of the opening sequence, with Judith and David zooming in their car along the same road. This time, however, they miss the wagon and continue uneventfully on. “Gee, that was a close call,” says David. “What was it?” asks Judith.

  To quickly flesh the story out into a full screenplay, Hawks suggested L. G. Rigby, the cowriter of Fleming’s Jack London adaptation Adventure at Paramount. The script went through three drafts in November, with shooting beginning in December and extending into the new year. The first change was to remove Aunt Salina and replace her with Graves, “a fat and amiable butler” whose main function is to comically hide and provide Judith’s bottle of Scotch. Diary entries from Judith were introduced to convey some of her inner thoughts. To emphasize the competitiveness between David and Jim, there was a scene at home in which the two youngsters dance the Charleston and Jim, unable to keep up, is forced to realize that he will soon be losing his daughter; later, at his office, Jim practices the dance so the kids won’t be able to make fun of him again. After she is informed of her oncoming blindness, Judith is overcome with horror as she passes a sightless soldier stumbling through a park, led by a small dog on a leash. Finding a pamphlet entitled God Is Love, she throws it in the fireplace; subsequently, she goes to a bookstore and furtively requests a book in Braille. When she discovers the shopkeeper has given her a copy of the Bible, she violently throws it across the room.

  Now feeling desperate and reckless, Judith accepts Del Cole’s invitation to a wild party at a club, where she runs into David. Judith’s vision is virtually gone, but neither man knows what the problem is, and David takes her erratic behavior as proof that she isn’t the angel he thought she was. Cole takes her home and puts the make on her but backs off upon discovering she’s blind. She responds by mocking him for no longer wanting her, and, expressing in a banal way the fears implicit in the remark of the real-life girl who inspired Hawks’s story, she says, “Nobody would want me!”

  The ending in Rigby’s adaptation becomes, if anything, infinitely more melodramatic than Hawks’s original, although Hawks approved the changes. Judith installs herself at the lodge with Graves and his wife, while David, not a mine worker in this version, races up the mountain through a storm to assert his love for her. The moment he does so, lightning strikes a huge tree, which crushes the cabin and knocks David out. The next day, the grim attending doctor issues the same religious imperatives to Judith, who, overcoming her qualms, takes to her knees, clasps her hands together, and prays for David’s survival. Before she’s even done, a ray of sun breaks through to fall upon her face, and not only does David instantly recover, but Judith can see again. The doctor tells her that even though the shock of the storm might have restored her sight, she should be thankful to God, whereupon she says, �
�Thank you, God—Thanks awfully.”

  The coda this time has the couple driving along in their car cautiously, at just ten to fifteen miles per hour, and the final shot shows the back of their car to reveal them as newlyweds.

  Contemporaneous reviews indicate that the finished film hewed very closely to the storyline as described, and Hawks’s suggestion to Peter Bogdanovich that he and former Mack Sennett comic Ford Sterling, who played the father, improvised the idea of his character being killed by a falling brick is completely contradicted by the incident’s full description in Hawks’s original treatment. Upon the film’s unveiling in April 1926, in both the United States and Britain, the critics’ comments were reasonably good, unanimous in praising May McAvoy’s performance as Judith as well as the film’s technical aspects. The London Bioscope found that “the story is a little bit morbid,” and Variety sarcastically suggested that the film might as readily be booked by church organizations as movie theaters, “since a half dozen or more morals and lessons are neatly sugar-coated.”

  The most extended commentary on the now unviewable results of Hawks’s first full-length piece of direction came from the British Kinematograph Weekly, which felt that Hawks “has achieved a notable picture very much ahead of its prototypes. Emotional to a degree almost too poignant at times, the overpowering pathos avoids ‘mush’ and is treated with ingenuity that is never laboured; the early reels have a delightful light touch in well-devised contrast to the double tragedy that swoops like a cataclysm and will grip even those who hate having their withers rung. Concessions to hackneyed banality—the super-dog, the cabaret, and the prayer—are mercifully restrained, and smooth treatment is very effective.”