Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Set in pre-war Budapest, the story contains such startling elements as the sadistic hero’s seduction of a beautiful dancer while she is strapped into his prize possession, a torture chair from the Spanish Inquisition.

  But after a very strong start, Hawks’s and Miller’s treatment becomes overly melodramatic and contrived, lacking the irony, the intellectual distance on human behavior that made the dramatization of similar stories by Stroheim, Sternberg, and others so distinctive. Fox didn’t bite on the project in 1927, nor did it when Hawks and Miller resubmitted it for consideration in May 1928. Later that year, however, the studio assigned eight different writers to take a stab at it, asking them to keep the title but jettison Hawks’s and Miller’s characters and story line; none of the subsequent outlines or treatments, including one in late 1929 that was intended as a musical, bore any relation to the original idea.

  Hawks often claimed that he had everything to do with one of the most famous pictures to come out of the late silent period, Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld, which was heralded as the first real gangster film. He told Joseph McBride, “Ben Hecht sold a story to me. Ben and I worked on the story, and a friend [Art Rosson] was to be the director. He went up to San Francisco, as I remember, to go to the prison there, but unfortunately got tight, so they had to fire him. We had sketches made of every scene. We had sets built, and we had a cast. It was beautifully written. Then we got Joe von Sternberg to direct the picture, and out came this really good picture.” When Kevin Brownlow asked Hawks about Sternberg, he said, “We needed another director and I’d seen a little quickie that he’d made and said let’s give this guy a chance. And they said, if you watch him. And I said, sure, I’ll watch him.” The only problem with these stories is that Underworld, a Paramount production, was prepared with Rosson in late 1926 and shot by Sternberg beginning in late March 1927, when Hawks had already been directing pictures at Fox for a year and a half and hadn’t been employed at Paramount for three years. To be generous, it is entirely possible that Hawks might have consulted with his friend Art Rosson about the project, may have first met Ben Hecht through him, and could easily, once Rosson was fired, put in a good word with Jesse Lasky and others at Paramount on behalf of Sternberg, whom he liked a great deal. But whatever he may have done, he did it privately, as a friend or adviser, not in any official capacity. And under no circumstances did Hawks “watch” Sternberg as anything other than a friendly spectator, since he was busy at Fox preparing Fazil at the time. This is not only a case of Hawks once again taking credit for making an important filmmaker’s career, but an instance of inverted influence: there is no question that Sternberg, Hecht, and a couple of the other writers on Underworld, the credited Charles Furthman and the uncredited Jules Furthman, had more influence on Hawks than he did on them.

  When Budapest didn’t proceed, Hawks suddenly inherited one of the studio’s most promising commercial projects. Fox had bought one of the most popular Broadway plays of the era, Russell G. Medcraft and Norma Mitchell’s The Cradle Snatchers, a farce about three wives who combat their husbands’ philandering by pursuing some college students. The play was the big comedy hit of the 1925–26 season, running for fifty-nine weeks beginning September 7, 1925. The playwrights were engaged to write an initial treatment, but the real screenwriting chore was turned over to thirty-year-old Sarah Y. Mason, whose husband, writer-director Victor Heerman, was an old collaborator of Mickey Neilan’s. At first, Allan Dwan was assigned the directing job, but abruptly, at the end of November, Dwan was off and Hawks, the older man’s money man just a few years before, replaced him.

  Fox and Hawks felt considerable pressure to make sure the film version lived up to the often hilarious play. It is very doubtful that Hawks ever saw the stage production, and even though the basic three-act structure was not toyed with, silent films often proved ill-equipped to deliver the virtues of dialogue-rich stage plays. It was an assignment unlike any Hawks had yet faced in his short career, in which comic timing and theatrical technique would be critical. But Hawks was up to the challenge, turning out another audience-pleasing comedy that met the approval even of critics who held it directly up against the play.

  Hawks shot the picture between January 17 and February 15, 1927, and it opened at the giant Roxy in New York City on May 28, nearly two months before Paid to Love debuted at the same theater. Joseph Striker’s Joe is the campus “sheik,” and Nick Stuart’s Henry Winton is stuck on one girl, while Arthur Lake’s Oscar, the “Swede,” is another of Hawks’s comic leads who is desperately afraid of women. The fortyish women played by Louise Fazenda, Dorothy Phillips, and Ethel Wales are seen dealing with their errant husbands in different ways, and Hawks gets in a personal joke when an insert of a business card for an establishment called The Club 400 reveals the name “Victor Flemen” scribbled on it.

  Part of reel three and all of reel four of the seven-reel picture are missing from the print Peter Bogdanovich salvaged some years ago from Fox, this after years of the film having been thought lost. But it all builds to a climax in which the society women decide to punish their husbands by consorting with the spiffy college boys, in the hopes of teaching them a lesson. It is a boisterous, energetic Jazz Age film, sprightly paced and fresh-feeling despite its obvious theatrical origins. Like Hawks’s other early work, it hardly stands as a major silent film, but it did just what it set out to do and certainly bolstered Hawks’s confidence in his ability to direct comedy and achieve desired effects. As Leland A. Poague points out in his critical book on the director, The Cradle Snatchers can be seen “as a paradigm instance of role reversals and role playing in Hawks,” and while it may indeed forecast more of the same in his films over the years, the overtly theatrical origins of the piece have more than a lot to do with this. At this point, Fox had every reason to believe that its new director, after a year and a half on the job, had found his niche in comedy.

  All through this time, Kenneth Hawks was quickly establishing a great deal of credit for himself at the studio as a supervisor, the equivalent of a contemporary line producer, or the studio’s administrator and organizer on a particular production. Kenneth’s intelligence and amiability stood him well in this job, which he performed on Albert Ray’s More Pay—Less Work and John G. Blystone’s Ankles Preferred before dabbling in editing on Sydney and H. A. Snow’s Arctic documentary The Great White North, in story writing on Albert Ray’s A Thief in the Dark, and even, it seems, in cinematography on Richard Rosson’s bootlegging melodrama, The Escape, al-though his shared camera credit is somewhat questionable. In any event, Kenneth received a very well-rounded education in the various aspects of filmmaking in a very short time, and soon went back to supervising.

  From the second half of 1926 through 1927, romance bloomed for all three Hawks boys. The Mayfair Society was an elite social institution that held formal white-tie dinner dances once a month at the Ambassador Hotel. Several friends of the Hawkses, most notably Mary Pickford, were among the frankly snobbish group’s prime movers, and it was at one of these elegant affairs that both Howard and Kenneth Hawks had their first dates with the women they would marry.

  Victor Fleming was still seeing Norma Shearer sporadically in 1926, and when she agreed to accompany him to a Mayfair ball that summer, she asked if he knew anyone who might escort her younger sister, Athole. Howard Hawks, always quite fond of Norma, readily agreed to fill out the foursome. According to their daughter Barbara, it was “romantic love at first sight” between Howard and Athole. Physically, there was no mistaking that Athole was Norma’s sister; both were pale-skinned brunettes with very English good looks, but most people considered Athole the greater beauty of the two. Even Norma admitted as much in her unpublished autobiography: “I wasn’t nearly as popular with the boys as my sister—she was two years older and much prettier.” Norma, who had the bluest of eyes, added that Athole had “an unusual pair of brown eyes that caught all the beaux”; Norma, in her pre-Hollywood days, got only the hand-me-downs. At
hole was not driven professionally the way her sister was, and she had impeccable grace and manners that appealed greatly to Howard’s sense of propriety and good breeding.

  Born on November 20, 1900, Athole Dane Shearer was at a curious stage in her life when she met Howard Hawks. Athole, Norma and their brother Douglas had enjoyed a spoiled upbringing in suburban Montreal, with Athole often tutoring her younger sister, who rarely attended school. But their pampered lives began to be threatened when their father Andrew’s lumber company and investments went bad during World War I. In reduced circumstances, they had to sell their large house in fashionable Westmount and move into a modest apartment, and family life was strained further by the constant philandering of Andy, a “sport,” as Norma put it, who “was a gay blade and had sown plenty of wild oats.”

  In the winter of 1917–18, Athole showed disturbing signs of some sort of emotional or psychological imbalance. As Norma described it, “my beautiful sister Athole became desperately ill—apparently the psychological effects of the war during our adolescence.” Athole had dated several young men who had gone off to war, and many schoolmates she knew more casually were in the trenches as well. Canadian casualties were disproportionately high, and when the inevitable word came back that some of her friends had been killed, the news hit Athole hard. The sisters’ bedroom was plastered with patriotic posters, and Norma remembered that Athole “began to look at them strangely one day—then she said quietly with frightened eyes, ‘I can hear them—they’re coming—up in the sky!’ We thought she was out of her mind!” Despite the fact that “screams from the upper window each morning turned my steps back from school,” no professional treatment was sought for Athole because of the embarrassing stigma attached to mental illness. “But she recovered one day, after three months, as suddenly as she became ill. We never knew how or why! Everyone was elated and breathed and ate and slept once more!”

  That was the way Norma remembered things. In fact, Athole withdrew gradually into her intense depression, becoming progressively worse whenever she learned of further deaths among her friends, until she finally stopped speaking. With this, the family physician ordered her confined to her bed, and she was sedated for a month, after which she suddenly returned to something resembling normal. The teenager suffered another attack of acute melancholia some months later, but by then doctors, who had seen numerous cases of similar female misery, had decided that the condition was specifically war-related and would disappear as soon as the conflict ended. For the moment, then, Athole’s problems were conveniently swept under the carpet.

  After the war, the family fell on hard times. Andy’s plant closed entirely, young Douglas became a chauffeur, Norma stayed on a friend’s couch, and Athole, who knitted sweaters for four dollars apiece, and her mother, Edith, moved into La Corona Hotel, where they could stay for very little since it was owned by a family friend. Soon Edith sold everything and, with four hundred dollars, took the girls to New York City with the intention that they would conquer Broadway. Living in a dump of a building, refused as showgirls by Ziegfeld but able to get representation with the Edward Small Agency, the two sisters found minor movie work with the Transatlantic Picture Corporation in Mount Vernon, in a two-reel comedy about a girls’ finishing school, and were extras in D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East and the Marion Davies film The Restless Sex, both released in 1920. But after a year they ran out of money and retreated to Montreal, where the girls became models for the city’s leading portrait photographer, Jimmy Rice. With a bit of experience under their belts, they were able to return to New York City, where Norma found regular work as a model for illustrators and photographers and had a little romance with Ben Lyon, an aspiring actor who would go on to star in Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels. Edith took a job in the blouse department of Franklin Simon’s on Fifth Avenue.

  For her part, Athole was happy to return to New York so she could see what might develop between her and a young man named John Ward. The son of a prosperous New Jersey textile manufacturer, Ward had left the security of the family business behind to pursue a career writing for radio but picked up money wherever he could. He and the Shearers had met the year before, when they were all extras in The Restless Sex. Eventually, John and Athole began seeing each other, and he abruptly proposed marriage. Edith was against the match, correctly sensing that Ward was a questionable prospect since, as Norma snootily put it, he “chose not to share in his father’s fortune.” Evidently, the Ward family’s feelings about the Shearers and their show-business orientation was mutual, for the two families met for the only time at the civil ceremony in New York City in early April 1923. The couple honeymooned in the Adirondacks and moved into a modest Greenwich Village apartment with, in Norma’s view, “not much money and a rather uncertain future.”

  During this time, Norma, with Eddie Small as her agent, had begun appearing regularly in films made on the East Coast, and shortly after her sister’s wedding she signed an MGM contract and moved with her mother to Hollywood, where she made eight films within a year. The following year she was loaned to Paramount and began her serious romance with Victor Fleming, just as she was being admired from afar by Irving Thalberg. On July 31, 1924, in New York City, Athole gave birth to a son, Peter John Ward, but this by no means indicated a happy marriage. According to Norma, her sister’s “life seemed somewhat dismal at this moment,” and about eighteen months later, feeling Athole needed both emotional and financial help, Norma and Edith brought Athole and little Peter out to Los Angeles, where she moved into the Shearer bungalow on Franklin at Whitley Heights, just a block from where Howard and Kenneth Hawks lived.

  Norma echoed Barbara Hawks’s sentiments about the romance between Howard and Athole, at least as far as Athole was concerned. Hawks was “more fascinating than any man she had ever met,” Norma claimed. “My sister, to make the story simple, fell in love with him so deeply that it was to last a lifetime, although not their marriage.” Athole had her son to take care of and was with her mother and sister, but she was still quite lonely in Los Angeles when Hawks entered her life, and there can be little doubt that Howard, in addition to seeming like a terribly dashing and accomplished figure, benefited from reminding Athole of the father who had been so absent from her life. Like Hawks, Andy Shearer had gray hair and blue eyes. Very athletic, he loved horses and was a member of the Montreal Hunt Club. Raised in a very sporting environment, Athole was a fine horseback rider, swimmer, ice skater, skier, and sailor, better than Hawks in just about all these areas. She and Howard saw each other constantly through 1927, playing golf and making the fashionable social rounds, and Hawks didn’t take long to push the idea of marriage. But the acutely sensitive Athole was increasingly distraught over the prospect of telling Johnny Ward that she wanted to leave him, and it took months for her to work up the nerve to ask for a divorce.

  During precisely the same period, Kenneth Hawks saw his own love life take off. In the late summer of 1926, at the canteen at the Fox studios, Kenneth was introduced to the actress Mary Astor. Only twenty, this patrician beauty, also a Midwesterner by birth, had already acted in more than two dozen films and had been something of a star since appearing in Beau Brummel in 1924, opposite John Barrymore, with whom she had had a wild affair. For their first date, Kenneth asked her to the Mayfair Society ball, and by that fall they were dating regularly. She described their early time together in her autobiography, My Story: “I liked being with him; it was never hectically romantic, with the emphasis on sex. I liked his quiet good manners and his good taste. He had prematurely grey hair, very twinkling blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, and a grin a mile wide.”

  Mary was working constantly, and when she went away on location, Kenneth visited her as often as possible. He fell hard very quickly, and when she stunned him by confessing her recent passionate involvements with Barrymore and another man, he decided that her honesty made him think even more of her. When he proposed, she gently put him off for a while, uncertain as to w
hether she was ready for marriage, but Kenneth persisted. She liked Frank and Helen Hawks, her parents liked him, and by February 1927, Mary decided she would marry Kenneth. As she explained, “We had built a wonderful companionship. He was a very real, substantial person, comfortable to be with. Wherever we went together we had good times. We worked hard, both of us, but we also found time for fun.” They played golf and attended sporting events and premieres, and she was very impressed with his thorough knowledge of the moviemaking process. Distressed at how little money he was earning compared to the star salaries Mary was raking in, Ken refused to set a date until his new Fox contract was approved, but Mary, realizing what a “fair-haired boy” Ken was at Fox, had no doubt that her fiancé was a young man with a decidedly bright future.

  The couple spent a good deal of time at the Hawks family home in Pasadena, which she found warm but clouded by the dire illness of Grace Hawks, who, at twenty-four, was suffering from severe tuberculosis. Despite the intense objections of her three brothers, Helen Hawks’s staunch Christian Scientist beliefs prevailed, and Grace was not sent to a sanitarium. Grace slowly deteriorated, and the boys privately blamed their mother for what they saw as their sister’s unnecessary death, which came on December 23, 1927. The funeral was held two days after Christmas.

  In the spring of 1927, as Mary was starring in Lewis Milestone’s Two Arabian Knights, the first major film produced by Howard Hughes, she and Kenneth matched up the latter’s younger brother, Bill, with Mary’s friend the actress Bessie Love, setting another betrothal in motion. During this time, Mary and Kenneth decided to abstain from sex until they got married, even though the date still lay vaguely in the future. Although Mary agreed to the arrangement, it came to bother her as the weeks and months wore on. By contrast, “Ken seemed not to mind,” she allowed; “he was not a sensual person at all. He had none of the deep, fierce passion that I had known. He was very affectionate and demonstrative; often we sat in a big chair, with me curled in his lap, and read from the same book.”