Saunders claimed that his original story outline went largely unchanged, save for “minor suggestions, revisions and pieces of business,” and that the climactic episode of a pilot on a solo mission to blow up a German munitions dump under heavy artillery fire [which is what Hughes felt was plagiarized] “was original with me.”
Goldwyn eventually passed on the package, however. Instead, First National, a company owned and controlled by Warner Bros., agreed in October to produce The Dawn Patrol, with Hawks directing for a flat salary of eighteen thousand dollars. In Saunders’s original eighteen-page treatment, there was a prominent plot element that might easily have represented a Hawks contribution, since it turns up in films from A Girl in Every Port all the way through El Dorado and beyond. A veteran ace newly arrived at Camel Squadron 31 during the winter of 1916, Captain Guy Courtney is a wild loner who has been jilted by a beautiful peeress before the war and quickly moves in on Célèste, “the spirited little French godmother of the squadron.” After Courtney and the green Lieutenant Warwick Scott become close, they carouse together with Célèste, until Courtney learns that Lieutenant Scott is the man for whom Lady Mary Cambridge left him. When Courtney then loses Célèste to him as well, the men become estranged and Courtney heartily approves of sending Scott out on an almost certainly fatal mission. All women were eliminated from the final script, one factor that made the film so unusual at the time and so questionable to many executives. Hawks purchased the rights to Saunders’s “Flight Commander” story for ten thousand dollars, then promptly sold it to First National for the same amount while waiving all rights and credit for himself (thus cheating himself out of not only an Oscar but a substantial sum nine years hence when Warner Bros. remade the picture).
Saunders piled up quite a few more credits over the next few years, but by the mid-1930s his career was essentially finished. He and Fay Wray had a daughter scarcely a year before they were divorced, in 1938, and two years later Saunders was found dead, a suicide by hanging, in his beach cottage in Fort Myers, Florida. He was forty-two. No notes were found, although he had recently been under care at Johns Hopkins for a nervous disorder.
The fall of 1929 was an extremely eventful time for all three Hawks boys. On the domestic front, Howard and Athole’s first child, David Winchester Hawks, was born on October 9 at 10:30 P.M. at Good Samaritan Hospital; Howard was thirty-three, his wife twenty-eight. Athole delighted in her second son at the new house on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills while Howard worked six days a week at the studio. The entire family also busily anticipated William’s wedding to the actress Bessie Love, planned for December 27. At the time, William was working in a Pasadena stockbroker’s office, and it is impossible not to notice that all three Hawks boys, whether by design or coincidence, had married actresses—or, in Howard’s case, Hollywood royalty—better known than they were, women whose status could only improve the men’s standing in the industry.
A petite, very attractive Texas girl, Bessie Love, then thirty-one and never before married, had debuted in Intolerance in 1916 and had made some seventy silent pictures, including films directed by such Hawks family pals as Marshall Neilan, Victor Fleming, John Ford, and Frank Capra. By 1929, after several ups and downs, her career was in transition again, as she had just emerged as a potential musical star at MGM in Broadway Melody, The Girl in the Show, Hollywood Revue, and Chasing Rainbows.
The wedding was an elaborate High Episcopal affair. Marshall Neilan’s wife, Blanche Sweet, was the matron of honor, and the bridesmaids were Athole and Norma, Irene and Edith Mayer, and Bebe Daniels and Carmel Myers. A grand party followed that evening at the Biltmore Hotel.
Meanwhile, Ken and Mary Astor’s relationship seemed improved, although Ken was keeping her in the dark about his financial difficulties. Despite making a thousand dollars per week at Fox, where his star was quickly rising, Ken had lost all his money in the stock-market crash. He was also behind on his house payments and, without informing his wife, had been forced to discontinue his substantial life-insurance policy. On New Year’s Day, as usual, the younger Hawkses and their wives attended the Rose Bowl Game, followed by an early dinner at Frank and Helen’s home, within easy walking distance of the stadium. Ken then drove his wife downtown to the Majestic Theater, where she was working onstage for the first time, co-starring with Florence Eldridge and Edward Everett Horton in Vincent Lawrence’s comedy-drama Among the Married.
Ken was then shooting Such Men Are Dangerous, a melodrama based on the life of the late Captain Alfred Loewenstein, who either fell or jumped to his death from his private plane while crossing the English Channel on July 5, 1928. On January 2, Ken left the house early to drive across town to do some special shooting at Santa Monica’s Clover Field (named after a one-time roommate of Ken’s, Greer Clover, who had been killed flying). Ken asked Howard, a more experienced pilot, to come to the airport to help check things out and watch the parachute jump they planned to film off the coast. Normally, Howard would have gone, but Athole, who felt her husband saw little enough of her and their nearly three-month-old son as it was, prevailed upon him to stay home. The job at hand was pretty straightforward, but not without risk: in order to film a scene representing Warner Baxter’s Loewenstein character making a parachute jump into the sea near the coast of England, two planes carrying camera crews would fly close together, one slightly above the other, and capture the action as a stunt man jumped from a third plane. One crew would film close-ups, the other long shots. Ken had told his concerned wife, “If it looks as though there’s going to be anything dangerous about it, I won’t do it.” Everyone felt that the only person to worry about was the stuntman who would be making the jump into the ocean.
Howard, however, was not so sure. “Ken wasn’t much of a flyer, and I said, ‘You’d better look out, you’re liable to run into one another. Take care about it, and especially the man you’re flying with isn’t much good.’ When they called me and said there’d been an accident, I said, ‘Did they run into each other?” and they said, ‘Yes.’”
Howard was at home when he received the news, as were his parents. Mary Astor had just completed the matinee performance of Among the Married and was relaxing on a couch on the Majestic stage when Florence Eldridge sat down beside her and said she needed to speak with her. “There’s been an accident, Mary,” Eldridge told her. “The planes—we’ve only just heard—they’re not sure about anything yet—we’ve just got to wait.”
Encouraged with false hope, Mary was advised by Horton to skip the evening performance no matter what happened, and understudy Doris Lloyd was quickly called in. Mary Astor was in her dressing room removing her makeup when a Fox producer arrived at her door. “He was fighting back tears,” she remembered, “and when he started to talk he couldn’t; he just choked up. But he didn’t have to say anything. I looked at him, and I knew. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he,’ I said, and he could only nod.”
The two camera planes had collided in clear weather during a test run over Santa Monica Bay, killing all ten crew members. After Lieutenant Colonel Roscoe Turner, the pilot and a close friend of Kenneth’s, took off with the parachutist, Jacob Triebwasser, and crew members Fred Osborne and Bert White, the two camera planes—large, closed cabin, single-engine Stinson-Detroiter high-winged monoplanes carrying five men apiece—followed in V-formation, heading out over the bay into the sun and rising to three thousand feet. At 4:30 P.M. they were about three miles offshore and two miles south of Redondo Beach, above the spot where lead cinematographer L. William O’Connell and other crew members were waiting in several small boats to photograph the parachutist and then fish him out of the water. O’Connell was a flier himself, but his wife had asked him not to shoot any flying pictures, which is why he was not aloft. With the planes flying at virtually the same level, they were attempting to make quarter turns when one of the planes veered toward the other. The wings touched; then one plane lurched around and smashed head-on into the other at a forty-five-degree angle. T
here was an explosion, and the planes went down together, nose-locked and burning. Flying a bit ahead and beneath, Turner, the lead plane’s pilot, did not actually witness the crash, but Osborne saw it and said, “Look, they have hit each other!” At that, Turner said, “I winged over and turned around to get a look at them. They were tangled together, both afire, and plunging toward the ocean. Just as they were about to hit, two or three of the men either jumped or were thrown out of the burning planes. I saw the bodies splash into the ocean a little distance away from the point where the planes hit the sea.”
The crash and the aftermath were also seen by thousands of motorists along the Pacific Coast Highway, by fishermen and sailors in boats, and by passengers on the cruise liner Ruth Alexander, which was steaming off Point Vicente at the time. Speedboats and launches rushed out to join the camera boats, but the planes sank immediately, leaving in their wake gasoline and minor debris that blazed for two or three minutes on the surface of the water.
Three bodies were recovered quickly, those of assistant director Max Gold, cameraman Conrad Wells and assistant cameraman Ben Frankel, all of whom had gone out the open door of their plane on the way down and hit the water apart from the aircraft. Gold was still alive when picked up, but he died on the speedboat heading back to shore, his bones, like those of the other two, badly broken in many places. O’Connell recalled that “the bodies had burned in the explosion before hitting the water. The assistant director’s body came up first because he had zipped his jacket all the way up.”
Back at Clover Field, pilot Roscoe Turner told reporters, “I don’t know how it could have happened unless the sun got in the eyes of the other two pilots. They were probably jockeying to get in position and one swung into the glare of the sun, hitting the other head on before he knew it.” Turner was so devastated by the tragedy that he broke down and went into seclusion at home. Other pilots at the airport agreed that blinding sunlight could be the only explanation for what had happened. After darkness settled in, a Coast Guard cutter flashing its searchlights cruised the area all night in the hopes of finding more bodies.
The accident was big news both in Hollywood and around the nation. Nothing like this had ever occurred in connection with the shooting of a motion picture. Three pilots had died filming aerial stunts for Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels, but this was something altogether different, ten men lost while flying on what should have been a routine, straightforward job. Gold, Wells, Frankel, and property man Henry Johannes were piloted by Ross Cooke, while Hallock Rouse flew the plane in which Kenneth Hawks, cameraman George Eastman, assistant cameraman Otto Jordan, and property man Thomas Harris died. Seven of the ten men were married, and six children were left fatherless. Captain Ross Cooke had flown in aviation camps in Texas during the war and had flown for movies, including Wings and Hell’s Angels, for more than ten years, while the other pilot, Hallock Rouse, was a former flight instructor who had also done a great deal of film work; it is unclear which one Howard did not trust, as he undoubtedly knew both of them.
As soon as he heard, Howard went out to the search site, but there was nothing he could do as night had arrived. While being driven from the theater, Mary Astor was subjected to the agony of having to listen, at intersections, to newsboys yelling, “Ten die in film accident. Mary Astor’s husband killed.” Edward Everett Horton went onstage before the evening performance of Among the Married to explain his costar’s absence to a subdued crowd, and Fredric March and Florence Eldridge cared for her at their home for more than a week. William Hawks and Bessie Love returned early from their honeymoon to be with the family in Pasadena.
The morning after the accident, with two minesweepers, eighteen Navy planes, five commercial aircraft, two speedboats, and three Coast Guard cutters participating in the search, the wreckage was found by the Navy minesweepers at fifty-three fathoms, or three hundred and eighteen feet down. Because of a winter storm, it was not until January 6 that a diver, Charles E. Smale, was able to get into one of the planes, where he recovered the bodies of Kenneth Hawks and Thomas Harris, which had been rammed against the instrument panel.
The bodies were taken to the Nolan Undertaking Company in Venice, California, where Howard identified the remains of his brother. Technically, the inquest concerning the case was conducted over the body of Kenneth Hawks, but it was extended to cover all the other victims. The coroner’s jury found no specific person or company responsible for the accident but criticized the way the job was approached. “We find that the collision was caused by the airplanes flying in too close formation, one of the planes turning at too short radius and possibility of sun glare. We believe that flying of such a nature is too hazardous and it in no way encourages commercial aviation and in too many instances seems unnecessary.” Sol Wurtzel made all the appropriate remarks of remorse and condolence on the part of Fox, which was completely insured for such a mishap, although it is unknown to what extent the victims’ survivors were compensated.
Kenneth’s funeral on January 8 at the Little Church of the Flowers at Forest Lawn Cemetery was conducted by the same Episcopalian minister who had married him and Mary Astor two years earlier. But while the service was attended by many prominent members of the film industry, Mary was conspicuous by her absence. Ken’s ashes were scattered into the Pacific off Point Vicente, close to where he died. Only after the funeral did Mary learn that Ken was virtually destitute: the sale price of their home would barely pay for back taxes; his $200,000 insurance policy had lapsed; Fox was declared, in a suit brought by some widows of the victims, not to have been negligent in the accident; and the stock-market crash had wiped out her husband’s cash assets. He even owed money on some gambling debts. Quickly deciding that it would be best for her to put her past behind her, Mary had little contact with the Hawks family from then on.
Hardest hit, however, were Frank and Helen. Now three of their five children were gone, and they can only have worried about Howard, who was about to make a dangerous aviation picture himself.
Always closer to Kenneth than to anyone else, Howard was unquestionably as affected by his brother’s death as by any other event in his life. Already prematurely graying at thirty-three, his hair turned entirely gray thereafter. Publicly, however, he kept his own counsel, never even speaking about Kenneth to his wives and children. In later years he was only known to comment about his brother unsentimentally, in the manner of a professional evaluation. “I thought he had a good deal of promise,” he told Kevin Brownlow. “He had a great deal of warmth, much more than I have. I don’t think he knew as much about story as I do but he had his own little way, he had a very good sense of humor and he showed that in his first picture and they definitely thought he had talent.” Such Men Are Dangerous opened to tepid response at the Roxy in New York on March 7, 1930, with the Variety review carrying the credit “Directed by the late Kenneth Hawks.”
The Dawn Patrol provided vivid and daily reminders of Kenneth’s violent death, not only for Howard but for everyone on the production. Still, the temperament of the piece, with its projection of stoicism, bravado, and steel nerves under the constant threat of sudden extinction, as well as the breezy professionalism of the crew and many fliers employed on the show, created an atmosphere that encouraged setting aside cautious, sentimental considerations. Howard himself put up a philosophically pragmatic front. Of his group of six best friends who had enlisted in the Air Corps together in 1917, two had been killed on the airfield at Issoudun in France, two had crashed into each other pursuing a balloon in Italy, and now his brother was dead—all killed in planes. “So I was the only one left,” he realized. “I always thought of it as just the luck of things, you know. It never frightened me about flying.”
The Dawn Patrol represented a late entry in a cycle of phenomenally popular World War I films, which began in the silent era with The Big Parade and continued through Wings, What Price Glory?, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Hell’s Angels, which Howard Hughes had been making sin
ce 1927.
As The Dawn Patrol neared production, the main challenges were refining the script, casting, and securing sufficient airplanes to enact the aerial missions. Officially produced by the cultivated Robert North, the film was overseen by Hal Wallis, then just a year into his job as general manager of First National under the overall stewardship of Jack Warner. Wallis and Hawks took an immediate dislike to each other, and the mutual antagonism grew into a barely manageable stormy relationship that nevertheless produced eight mostly outstanding films over a period of seventeen years. Just as Hawks had no tolerance for overbearing executives who meddled in his business, Wallis had little patience for egotistical directors who fiddled with the script on the set and went over schedule. There was never any common ground between them except for the needs of the project at hand, and all their dealings over the years were marked by exasperation and mistrust on both sides.
As far as The Dawn Patrol was concerned, Wallis liked John Monk Saunders, whom he considered “a very interesting man … a fine writer in the Scott Fitzgerald mode. Saunders, like the people he wrote about, was never completely at ease in civilian life.” With The Dawn Patrol, Wallis felt, Saunders had written “a beautiful screenplay, authentic in every detail. His only weakness was a tendency to overwrite. We worked together, trimming and tightening, until we had a lean, workable script.” In this regard, Wallis ignored the contributions of two more writers. From Fox, Hawks brought over Seton I. Miller, the blond, facile scenarist of four of the director’s silents, including The Air Circus. Hawks wanted Miller to help him flesh out the original into a detailed screenplay. Dan Totheroh, who had seen combat in France and had just finished working for Victor Fleming on The Virginian, was later brought in to work on dialogue through the shoot.
With Hawks’s original choice of Ronald Colman now out of the picture, there was no question but that Richard Barthelmess, the star of Wings and one of the biggest names of the silent era, would play the ace, Captain Courtney. The other important role was that of his younger charge, Lieutenant Scott. Barthelmess recalled that Hawks “wanted very much to have Doug [Fairbanks Jr.] in this part. I’d known him since he was in short trousers and always thought of him as ‘Little Doug’ because his father was one of my great friends. I went to Doug and said, ‘Look, you must do this part, it’s going to be good for you.’ He said, ‘But Jack Barrymore wants me for a picture of his.’ I said, ‘Look, go to Jack and put it up to him, see if he won’t release you.’
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 15