Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  There were numerous joint outings with Howard and Athole. On the weekend beginning Thursday evening, August 11, 1927, they all attended a dinner party at the Biltmore Hotel at which Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer announced their engagement. On Friday night, the entire Hawks family assembled to celebrate Kenneth’s twenty-ninth birthday, and on Saturday, the quartet joined Victor Fleming and Arthur Rosson and the latter’s wife, Lou, for a weekend excursion to Santa Barbara, where Howard gave rides on his new Chris-Craft. On September 29, they all attended the Thalberg-Shearer garden wedding, where Kenneth uncharacteristically made a fool of himself by shouting, “Yea-a-ay!” when Herman Mankiewicz ceremoniously carried out the Cup of Life, which Kenneth took to be a giant champagne goblet.

  Finally, at the beginning of December, Kenneth received his new contract, at one thousand dollars per week, and set the wedding date for February 24. Kenneth and Mary rented a small house on Alcyona Drive on the hill above Vine Street and Franklin, not far from where Kenneth and Howard had lived together; furnished it beautifully; and left the evening of the wedding on the train for New York. Mary Astor loved Kenneth, but she knew something was amiss when her husband, on their wedding night, simply kissed her good night and repaired to his own berth to go to sleep. But the whole matter was, she said, “not a subject Ken and I could discuss freely. He possessed a kind of natural delicacy that seemed inviolable. In our own relationship we were happily comfortable, but I clearly sensed the existence of an intangible line that I could not, and did not want to, cross over.”

  During their honeymoon, they saw a play at nearly every performance time in New York; visited Ken’s alma mater, Yale; took the train to Florida and a plane to Havana; then sailed back to Los Angeles via Panama. During their monthlong trip, they never once had sex. In the coming months, Mary acknowledged, her “marital relations with Ken were, in effect, nonexistent; their infrequent occurrences were brief and unsatisfactory. Total abstinence was easier than this; but either solution caused me to be nervous and upset.” Mary eventually sought refuge in the eager attentions of a Fox executive, Russell Bradbury, who convinced her that Ken was more interested in making movies and playing golf than in developing any sex life. Although tortured from the beginning by her betrayal, the frustrated Mary finally gave in and started an affair. But she soon became pregnant—definitely not by Kenneth—and had an illicit abortion, which she somehow managed to hide from her husband. Mary’s mother finally told Ken what his wife was up to, and the couple was finally forced to clear the air about things, which in the end helped the relationship. The marriage became stronger, and they took a new, larger house on Appian Way at the top of Lookout Mountain and entertained quite a bit, although Mary Astor never did say if their sexual relations ever markedly improved.

  In March 1927, just after The Cradle Snatchers was finished, Fox extended Howard Hawks’s contract for a second year. He was to make three more films, for thirty thousand dollars per picture, and the studio included options for two years beyond that at a salary that stepped up by ten thousand dollars per picture per year. At once, Hawks was assigned to another exotic romance to which he felt he had little to contribute. Fazil was based on Pierre Frondaie’s 1922 French play L’Insoumise, which had been a particular hit on the London stage under the title Prince Fazil. The piece concerned an Arab prince’s disastrous marriage to a free-willed Parisienne and was adapted by Philip Klein, a World War I veteran whose father was the playwright Charles Klein, and written by Seton Miller. With its emphasis on decor, costumes, heavy breathing, and fatalistic romanticism, this was decidedly not Hawks’s cup of tea; nor did the director ever consider Fox’s all-American star, Charles Farrell, remotely credible as a volatile sheik. But Hawks still found many ways to make the best of a questionable situation, and while the film is indisputably artificial in the extreme, its sexual charge and numerous deft directorial touches make it a perfectly reasonable exercise in Romeo and Juliet–style tragedy.

  The film begins by contrasting the old ways of the Arab world with the new customs gaining wide currency in Europe. In a scene found terribly gruesome by some at the time, Hadji Fazil is seen ordering the execution of a runaway servant. Just before the huge sword is about to come down, it is time for prayers; but as soon as devotion to Allah is paid, the blade is raised again to complete the job. In vivid relief, Fabienne, played by the blond Norwegian star Greta Nissen, is seen “glorying in the freedom of the modern world” in Europe. At the outset, Fazil is a member of a particular Hawksian club: “Women do not interest me,” he says, upon being encouraged to continue his lineage.

  While on a business trip to Venice, however, Fazil finds his interest aroused when he spots Fabienne. In one of Hawks’s most arresting inventions, the two future lovers see each other in big open windows across a canal, and the remainder of the scene is shot from the point of view of a gondolier. The comic undertones here and elsewhere demonstrate the strong influence Lubitsch had on Hawks at this stage, as he did on so many other directors. Fabienne, displaying her modern temperament, readily sleeps with the prince, and the morning-after scene is particularly lovely: beautiful shots of Fabienne awakening and smiling rapturously, while Fazil is seen bowing in prayer toward Mecca. To keep himself amused, before one of the lovemaking scenes Hawks told both Farrell and Nissen privately that the other performer was very shy and that they would have to do something provocative to bring the scene alive. “Well, they were two of the busiest beavers you’ve ever seen in all your life,” Hawks chuckled, and it is true that no Hawks film ever again featured nearly so much heavy kissing, touching, holding, and general overt physical sex as this one.

  But the East-West rift soon asserts itself. Fabienne can’t bear the traditional role she is expected to play, and Fazil is so miserable that he considers killing himself. Instead, however, he takes a harem, and when Fabienne visits it there are some imaginative shots, courtesy of cinematographer L. W. O’Connell—of one concubine, for instance, shaving her armpits, as well as some silhouetted nudity—that foreshadow the fetishism of Sternberg, although with Hawks it is less extreme. Fazil shuts down the harem, save for the sexiest member of it, who is kept on as Fabienne’s servant, but Fabienne quickly becomes miserable being cooped up at her husband’s compound. As with Romeo and Juliet, there is no way out except death. Mortally wounded, Fazil uses his suicide ring on Fabienne so they will be together always and, after being unable to utter the crucial words throughout their entire relationship, finally says “I love you” just before she dies. He follows quickly, to join her in another, better world.

  On the one hand, this is the sort of melodramatic Hollywood hokum that Hawks saw fit to avoid for the remainder of his career, the end of his flirtation with the sort of sophisticated, European romance that was in vogue at the time but was never something he could make his own. On a more personal, psychological level, Fazil, coincidentally or not, dealt directly with issues Hawks was facing in life at that very moment. As Fabienne says, “I am afraid of marriage, afraid of anything that might take away the freedom I love.” One needn’t take it too seriously, but Fazil is a worst-case scenario about marriage, a horror story about the fearsome consequences of taking the plunge, something that was very much on Hawks’s mind when he was making the film. Faced with this story later in life, Hawks would undoubtedly have made a comedy out of it rather than such a serious piece. On the other hand, throughout the rest of his career, he chose to virtually never make any more films about marriage at all.

  Hawks provoked studio executives by going seriously over schedule and budget on Fazil, shooting from June 5 through August 3, 1927, about double the time it usually took to film a normal silent picture, and spending a great deal more than the allotted $125,000. Sol Wurtzel, who had already been irritated by what he saw as Hawks’s poky work habits, even considered shutting the production down at one point rather than squandering more money. Hawks’s extravagance on Fazil put a black mark next to his name in Wurtzel’s book, which made
the studio keep a close eye on him from then on and represented the beginning of the director’s lifelong adversarial relationship with his bosses.

  Inexplicably, Fazil wasn’t released until June 4, 1928, long after the picture Hawks would make next. That film, A Girl in Every Port stands as the first defining work of Hawks’s career, the first that announced a great deal of what its director was all about. It is not a great film, or even one of the most significant American pictures of the silent period, but it is the Hawks silent that connects in the most crucial ways to the work he would do later.

  Hawks himself wrote the original story, in late summer or early fall of 1927. The immediate instigation was Fox’s desire for some sort of follow-up to its smash hit What Price Glory?, Raoul Walsh’s adaptation of Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson’s World War I play about two soldiers who are great friends as well as romantic rivals. The film, which heavily played up the comedy, opened in December 1926 and made a star of Victor McLaglen, the brawny English former boxer and soldier. Hawks’s story simply made the characters merchant seamen and dispensed with the war, allowing the characters to concentrate full-time on boozing, brawling, and womanizing.

  Humorously emphasizing the phallic from the outset, Hawks named his characters Spike (McLaglen) and Salami (to be played by Robert Armstrong, a future screen tough guy who had appeared in only a couple of films previously). Hawks’s initial nine-page treatment has the men putting into seven different ports of call—Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Panama, Fiji, Cavite, Bombay, and Hong Kong—and is based on the premise that everywhere Spike goes, the girls he encounters have all been tattooed with “The Mark,” a heart-and-anchor insignia that tells him that somebody is consistently beating him to the clinch. In Panama, the men finally meet and come to blows, but, faced with a common foe in the police, join forces to fight the cops, which lands the duo in jail. Once released, they resume their battle, but when they fall into the sea and Salami realizes Spike can’t swim, he must rescue his rival, and the two become friends over a smoke.

  In Hong Kong (or Singapore in an alternate version—it didn’t matter), Spike genuinely falls for a café entertainer. But when he finds out that she’s got Salami’s mark on her too, Spike takes pleasure in watching Salami get beaten to a pulp in a saloon brawl. He ultimately takes pity on him and mothers his pulverized pal, and when the cops arrive, they join forces again before fleeing. Hawks’s final scene has the buddies meeting two attractive girls; before they all go off together, Spike checks to make sure that his choice doesn’t have Salami’s mark on her.

  The first writer brought aboard was James Kevin McGuinness, who had just that year arrived in Hollywood as a Fox contract writer on the basis of his considerable reputation as a sportswriter for the New York Telegram, a columnist for the New York Sun, and a contributor to “Talk of the Town” in the New Yorker; much later, he became an MGM executive, a writer for John Ford, and one of Hollywood’s most virulent anti-Communists. McGuinness, who was ultimately credited for the adaptation, added the plot business of treachery on the part of the girl Spike falls for, with her trying to set the two men against each other as she double-crosses Spike and robs Salami of his cash. He also wrote a credo for the two men that could stand as a definition of Hawks’s ideal for a love story between two men throughout his career: “If they occasionally outwit each other to gain a private assignation with some particularly appealing girl, all that follows between them is the broad humor of triumph on one’s part, and the unconcealed chagrin of defeat on the other’s. No bitterness remains when the affair is over, never a smouldering resentment.”

  McGuinness also came up with a clever final scene in which the men, after escaping overwhelmingly poor odds in an enormous brawl, stumble into the street and find two girls, one very pretty and the other “terrible looking.” After each one offers the other the attractive one, they flip a coin. From this point on, we see the women only from the waist down: one male arm moves around the pretty girl’s waist, another arm surrounds the ugly one; then the arm around the cute girl moves down a bit, while the arm around the unsightly one tries to move down but can’t go through with it. That’s the last we see of the sailors. “Who got the pretty girl and who the ugly one, we never know. But we do know that the two men went off together … friends.”

  Several uncredited writers, including the well-known Mack Sennett gag man Reginald Morris, Marion Orth, and Philip Klein, did further work on the story, but Hawks called upon Seton Miller to write the actual scenario. To streamline the action and meet Fox’s demands to cut down on sets, the number of ports was reduced to five and, perhaps in deference to the influence of Dupont’s Variety, the girl Spike falls for was transformed into a circus high diver. When Spike announces that he won’t be sailing any further because he’s in love, Salami replies, “You’re not in love—you’re just broke out all over with monkey bites,” a line ace title writer Malcolm Stuart Boylan came up with and which Hawks attributed to Ben Hecht on Twentieth Century.

  The actress Hawks cast in the film’s largest female part had attracted attention for her beauty in the dozen or so pictures she had made since changing professions from showgirl to actress two years before, but she was by no means considered a serious actress. Louise Brooks was married to Hawks’s friend Eddie Sutherland, and Hawks, liking her direct, irreverent manner as well as her striking looks, asked Fox to borrow her from Paramount to play the high-diving Marie. Brooks’s boyish figure is shown to maximum advantage in her tight-fitting swimsuit, and Hawks resorted to a fancy shot from beneath to highlight her dramatic dive from a tower into a small tank. With her black hair worn in her distinctively sharp bob and her bangs trimmed just above her eyebrows, Brooks stood out in her brief appearance as the double-dealing conniver who tries to take Spike for his money and two-time him with her old beau Salami.

  Forty years later, Hawks told Kevin Brownlow why he chose Brooks: “I wanted a different type of girl.… I hired Louise Brooks because … she’s very sure of herself, she’s very analytical, she’s very feminine, but she’s damn good and sure she’s going to do what she wants to do. I could use her today. She was way ahead of her time, with that hairdress. And she’s a rebel. I like her, you know. I like rebels.… What I don’t like are these little curled-up things that all look alike, who are trying to be pretty and are not interested in being chic and smart and different.” Looking with Brownlow at a photo of Brooks, the director said, “Just think of how modern she looks. Oh, God, she was a good-looking girl.”

  Brooks was nothing if not brutally direct and honest in her assessments of her friends and coworkers, and she returned the compliment. “Howard Hawks admired me,” she told John Kobal. “He was the perfect director. He didn’t do anything at all. He would sit, look very, very beautiful, tall and graceful, leaning against anything he could lean against, and watch the scene; and the person who did all the directing was that big ham Victor McLaglen. I mean, when we were shooting, diving into the tank, it was a freezing cold night on the Fox lot, and Howard was walking around in a very smart tweed jacket, and I was shivering with the cold coming out of this damn greasy tank, and he smiled at me and he said, ‘Is it cold?’ He was just someone who had wandered on the set and was being sympathetic, but I liked him very much as a man and as a director.” On the basis of her appearance in A Girl in Every Port, Brooks was chosen by the German director G. W. Pabst to star as Lulu in Pandora’s Box, a role coveted by nearly every actress in Europe, including Marlene Dietrich. It was the film that would make Brooks a cult legend.

  A Girl in Every Port was shot entirely on the Fox lot from the end of October through December 21, 1927, with L. W. O’Connell, once again, and Rudolph Berquist manning the cameras. The future star Myrna Loy and the fan dancer Sally Rand appeared briefly as two of the many girls, and even though Fox executives were nervous about Hawks’s tendency to take his time, and with it their money, they kept their distance because they smelled a winner, and the director appreciated it. />
  It was on this film, his sixth, that Hawks finally felt that he got in the groove as a director and began to recognize what he could do and what he was good at. One of his talents was turning toward comedy with material that a routine director might just play straight or for melodrama. Given the importance of the female audience, many questioned the idea that a film would put male friendship above a traditional romantic attachment, but Hawks proved not only to others but to himself that such a theme could carry a film, and he continued to use it throughout his career; his last serious project, in the 1970s, was ostensibly a remake of A Girl in Every Port. This film was also, Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich, “the first time I had a chance to use the kind of people I knew. Up till that time, I was working with characters who were figments of other people’s imaginations. But on this film, the Westerns, the pictures with race drivers and things like that, I felt I was on familiar ground because I knew the people.” This doesn’t quite square with his having written the original stories to two of his previous films, but it is easy to see what Hawks meant, and easier still to observe how Spike and Salami link up with the competitive but friendly men in so many of the director’s subsequent pictures.

  The “love story between two men” motif appears in its crudest, most elemental form in A Girl in Every Port, and Hawks scholars have long argued over what one is to make of Hawks’s apparent approval of male camaraderie coming before heterosexual romance. A conventional reading finds Hawks’s insistence on positioning the women here as either disposable, interchangeable prey or threats to the men’s convivial status quo to show simple misogyny. Those tracing the homosexual subtext in Hawks’s work need only begin here, with the outrageous running gag, introduced by Hawks himself in the original outline, of Salami’s repeatedly asking Spike to pull his middle finger when it gets out of joint during a brawl. Robin Wood, a leading champion of Hawks, finds this picture hopelessly adolescent and unsatisfying because the resolution, “in which the characters remain arrested at an immature stage of development,” is offered up as a “happy ending.” Leland A. Poague, in his book on the director, sees it very differently, as a sort of ironic tragedy in which the men “are trapped, quite literally, in and by their own plans and values.” It is entirely likely that Hawks might have agreed with Wood’s conclusion about the characters’ arrested development, since, as he grew older, he gravitated toward more varied and complex resolutions of the tensions implicit between male friendships and heterosexual couplings, most maturely in The Big Sky.