Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  As usual, the family passed the 1930–31 holidays at Frank and Helen’s in Pasadena, and so much had changed from the previous Christmas. Little David, their first real grandchild, was over a year old, while Peter was now five. Athole was feeling well, not having had the slightest sign of a relapse since her son was born. Howard, thanks to his break with Warner Bros., was officially out of a job, even though he had directed one of the biggest hits of the year. Bill, celebrating the first anniversary of his marriage to Bessie Love, who had appeared in five pictures that year, told the family that he would soon be starting his own finance-management company, with show-business personalities as his prospective clients. All in all, the Depression had not hit them particularly hard, compared to most families in America; Frank’s investments and orange groves were solid, and Howard was thriving and building a big house in Beverly Hills. But none of this could make up for the void that was all too obvious and still painfully felt, the absence of Kenneth at Christmas dinner for the first time.

  The day after New Year’s, Hawks bid farewell to Victor Fleming, who, with buddies Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and John Monk Saunders, set sail for Japan on the first leg of a ten-month journey that would result in a larky semidocumentary film, Around the World in Eighty Minutes. The Criminal Code opened the next day, and in the middle of January, just as Warner Bros.’ Little Caesar was opening like gangbusters around the nation, Hawks signed his deal with Hughes to direct Scarface for $25,000.

  The two recent adversaries and new partners had quite a bit in common. Tall and rangy, with somewhat drawling ways of speaking and a craftiness lurking behind their reserve, the two Howards loved planes, golf, and dazzling women, although Hawks’s taste in the women tended toward the classy and well-bred, whereas Hughes preferred brassy starlets. Although more of a Hollywood insider than Hughes, Hawks privately viewed most of the town’s potentates as fools or clowns and could easily play into Hughes’s own contempt for the studio bosses from a more informed and experienced vantage point.

  At the time they teamed up, Hughes had already produced seven movies in just four years. In 1926, two years after inheriting a vast fortune, the twenty-year-old Hughes had come to Hollywood thinking it would be fun to make pictures. To the town’s amazement, he started off with a surprise hit, Everybody’s Acting, which went out through Famous Players– Lasky. Aligning himself with United Artists, Hughes next made Two Arabian Knights, a buddy comedy not unlike A Girl in Every Port that also scored big and won Lewis Milestone an Oscar for direction. While immersing himself in his three-year labor of love, the aviation epic Hell’s Angels, much of which he directed himself, Hughes also produced the comedy The Mating Call, the early gangster melodrama The Racket (which contained some seeds of Scarface), and three appallingly silly flops—Cock of the Air, Sky Devils, and Age for Love, the last two starring the petite former Broadway showgirl Billie Dove, whom Hughes was trying to make into a star and who most people felt would become his wife. Having lost money overall in the motion picture business, Hughes decided that gangster pictures provided the nearest thing to a guaranteed profit. He figured that if he made the greatest underworld saga the public had yet seen, it would stand a good chance to be a smash. To this end, he put his own directorial aspirations to the side, swallowed his pride, and pursued the man he had decided was the best director in Hollywood.

  The erroneous assertions of Ben Hecht’s biographer to the contrary, Hawks preceded the writer onto Scarface. Both Hawks and Hughes had had prior dealings with the cynical, prodigiously talented former Chicago newspaperman. Hawks and the writer had hit it off when they met in connection with Underworld four years earlier, and Hecht, not known for his generous opinions of movie folk, had fond feelings for Hawks: “I like him,” he wrote to his wife. “He is one of the few half humans—to whom movies are a pleasant sideline, a thing to be done as work, not to be lived as a career.” For his part, Hughes bought Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s great 1928 play The Front Page in the fall of 1930 for $125,000, and had Lewis Milestone filming it by late January of the following year, when the team for Scarface was just coming together.

  Just after the holidays, Hecht and MacArthur boarded the train from New York to Los Angeles, bringing with them a clean-cut young Midwesterner named John Lee Mahin, a Harvard graduate and former reporter who had just quit his job as an advertising copywriter on the strength of Hecht’s promise to add him to his writing stable at two hundred dollars a week and find him a job in Hollywood. Ostensibly, Hecht and MacArthur were headed west to write the third act of Twentieth Century, the play they had started in the fall, and Hecht hoped Mahin would prove up to performing as ghostwriter on The Unholy Garden, which Hecht had recklessly agreed to write for Sam Goldwyn on the basis of $10,000 for the story and the lure of $125,000, an unheard-of sum, for the finished script. Paying rent of $1,200 per month, Hecht and MacArthur installed themselves at the sprawling Youngworth Ranch, a seventy-five-acre avocado ranch in the hills of Culver City overlooking MGM, where they hosted brawling parties and became easily distracted from the task of finishing Twentieth Century.

  In mid-January, with Hecht recently arrived on the Goldwyn lot to cope with the unwanted Unholy Garden and Hawks just installed in offices Hughes had rented from the producer, Hawks bumped into the writer and called him into his office. The way Hawks told it, “I wanted Ben Hecht to write on [Scarface], and he said, ‘Sure, what are you going to make?’ I said, ‘A gangster picture.’ He said, ‘Hell, you don’t want to make one of those things.’ I said, ‘Well, Ben, I’ve got an idea that the Borgia family is living in Chicago today. See, our Borgia is Al Capone, and his sister does the same incest thing as Lucretia Borgia.’ And he said, ‘Well, let’s start tomorrow morning.’ We did the script in eleven days.”

  Hecht remembered the encounter quite similarly, admitting he didn’t like the idea of writing another gangster film, but that he was talked into it by Hawks. There was no mention of the Borgias, however, and Mahin adamantly insisted that “Ben said that to Hawks. I heard him say that. The Borgias have always been Ben’s favorite characters. Howard, bless his heart, probably knew who they were, but I think he looked them up in the encyclopedia. Howard was such a liar! That’s a typical example.”

  Hecht said that when he jumped off The Unholy Garden Goldwyn “was in a state of epilepsy for about two days.” He also recalled, “I met with Mr. Hughes, who told me the story he had bought and I didn’t think it was any good. It was about two brothers, one turns out to be Capone and the other’s the Chief of Police, and they have a great struggle. So I didn’t trust Mr. Hughes, because he looked kind of goofy. He had a very weak face. He was deaf, couldn’t hear anything you said, and he couldn’t talk, and he was lanky, and he seemed to be a messy-looking fellow all around. So I couldn’t imagine he had any money, so I made him pay me every night at 6 o’clock a thousand dollars, and then I would work the next day. I told Hughes I would make up a different story, and he said ‘What’s the plot?’

  “I said, ‘I haven’t got any plot, but there have been several gangster pictures made, and I will double the casualty list of any picture to date, and we’ll have twice as good a picture. The Secret Six killed off about eight people. I will kill off twenty, and we’ll have the audience right in our hands.”

  Prior to Hecht’s arrival, several other writers had tried to knock out a screenplay for Scarface. None had succeeded in pleasing Hughes, although two of the initial scenarists, Fred Pasley, a former Chicago reporter and crimeland expert, and W. R. Burnett, ultimately received screen credit. Burnett, a hard-boiled fiction writer hired because of his 1929 mob novel Little Caesar, was paid two thousand dollars a week for five weeks to write a script for Scarface. “I don’t say my script was very good. I don’t say anybody could write a good script under those circumstances. It was a mess. Nobody really knew what the hell they were doing—except for Howard Hawks apparently. But I never got along with Hawks, and I didn’t work for Hawks when I was working for Hughes. I wen
t in and talked to Hughes, and he gave me an office down the hall, and they started bringing in scripts. Pretty soon I had twelve scripts piled on my desk, until I said, ‘What the hell’s all this?’

  “Hughes had the book as a sort of skeleton—with an incest theme. I didn’t know what it was with Hughes and incest. So I wrote a whole script, and after I finished it, Hughes set a starting date. But Hawks didn’t like my script. So they brought Ben Hecht in ten days before shooting.… I think Hecht was responsible for getting that picture made. He tightened it all up. He was an absolute pro, when he wanted to be. And he managed to tell the story, such as it was.”

  Burnett’s figures of twelve scripts and ten days before shooting are exaggerations. But when Hawks and Hecht went to work they set about altering the basic story line, dropping the two brothers angle, working in the Borgias approach, borrowing liberally from Underworld (especially the triangular relationship and the trapped couple gunning it out with police at the end), and generally patterning the rise of their hero, Tony “Scarface” Camonte, on the most famous man in America, Al Capone. Hecht had met Capone and, as Hawks pointed out, “he knew a lot about Chicago so he didn’t do any research.” Mahin added that, despite all the other names on the screenplay, “the basic story was Ben’s. Without his material there was nothing because I saw some of the stuff Hughes had.”

  During this intense period, Hecht wrote to his wife back East of Scarface that, “I’m doing it as homework when I’m not with Goldwyn.… Hughes is out of his mind with delight over my first days work on Scarface. Says it is more than four authors did for him in two months time. Hawks, the director and a charming gent, a hero aviator is pleased.” As for the payment in daily, messengered thousand-dollar bills, it was carried out as advertised, although Hecht, having received a great deal from the young tycoon for The Front Page, knew better than to suspect that Hughes wouldn’t be good for the money due him. Rather, the whole thing was a publicity stunt concocted by Hecht and his film agent, Myron Selznick, to further Hecht’s legend as the most prolific and highest-paid writer in Hollywood.

  Hawks always boasted of having consulted with real mobsters while preparing the film, although his claims on this score are suspect because of his dubious insistence that Capone himself loved the film and owned a personal print; by the time the picture was released, the gangster was behind bars. More believable is Hecht’s story of having been visited by a couple of Capone goons who threateningly demanded to know who this Howard Hughes was who thought he could make a film about their boss. Hughes, Hecht assured them, was “just the sucker with the money” and in no way posed a danger to their boss.

  Still, even Ben Hecht couldn’t write a brilliant and fully dialogued screenplay in just eleven days, which is how long Hawks said it took. (Mahin claimed it was fourteen days, but the discrepancy might have stemmed from the conditions of Hecht’s contract with Hughes, which stipulated that the writer was to receive a thousand dollars a day for a maximum of fourteen days; if he worked any period beyond that, he had a salary ceiling of fifteen thousand dollars, which answers the critics who have always wondered why he didn’t drag out his writing schedule.) What Hecht produced during this period was a detailed sixty-page treatment, whereupon he booked his return trip to New York, telling Mahin, “Now you’ve got to fix it up.” The novice Mahin felt the text was great as it was, but Hecht said, “It’s so full of holes, this thing, John. There’s hardly any dialogue. This isn’t a script, this is a full treatment. You’re going to have trouble, but this is your job that we promised you.”

  Finding Hecht’s work “brilliant” but knowing better than Mahin how much work remained to be done on the script, Hawks hired his trusted collaborator and fix-it man, Seton Miller, to help Mahin out during the month of March for six hundred dollars a week. “Seton put all the numbers down, and I just redid the dialogue,” Mahin recalled. “We did the final script with Hawks. We started from page one, redoing the dialogue.” Miller and Mahin would work in intense sessions with Hawks, hammering out ideas for dialogue based on Hecht’s scene structure, then set it down on paper on their own.

  Even this wasn’t enough, however. Angry, according to Hawks, that he hadn’t milked as much as he might have from Hughes, Hecht, after his next trip to the Coast, arranged to travel with Hawks back to New York, where the director was headed to search for actors. The writer spent much of the trip honing and polishing the script in league with the director, the work interspersed with sessions of backgammon, which Hawks didn’t yet really know how to play. In the end, according to Hawks, Hecht put twenty days into the writing of Scarface and received his deserved amount of money, although it’s unclear whether the remainder was paid legitimately or by Hawks as a gambling debt.

  As a rule, the major studios were unwilling to loan any of their important players to the upstart Hughes, which limited the field considerably. Although Hawks said that his friend Irving Thalberg tried to push a young MGM contract player named Clark Gable on him for the title role, Hawks didn’t think he would do. “I’d seen his first picture, and I turned him down. We needed a fantastic actor, not just a personality. Nothing wrong with a personality; the camera likes certain people and turns them into something special and wonderful. But we needed actor actors, and I told Hughes I’d go to New York and look for some.”

  Given Hecht’s vast knowledge of the New York theater scene, it is highly probable that he gave Hawks plenty of suggestions on who and what to see while in town. He undoubtedly recommended that Hawks look up Osgood Perkins (Tony’s father), since the actor had originated the role of Walter Burns in The Front Page. Hawks felt immediately that he would be good as the selfish but ultimately weak gang leader Johnny Lovo, who gets rubbed out by his lieutenant, Scarface. “I always had the theory that heavies had beady eyes,” Hawks remarked, “and Osgood certainly had them.”

  As for Paul Muni, Hawks was hardly an aficionado of the Yiddish theater scene, and Hecht’s claims that he was responsible for Muni winning the lead seem plausible. At the very least, he probably brought him to Hawks’s attention. At the time, Muni was back in New York after a disappointing first stab at Hollywood in The Valiant and Seven Faces in 1929, convinced that his future lay on the stage, not in pictures. Hawks claimed, “I remembered seeing him in the Yiddish theater in a fine scene with his back to the camera [sic], where he was such a purist he’d even made up his hands to fit the character.” Another time Hawks said, “I saw Muni in a Jewish theater on 39th Street playing an old, old man.” As it happens, Muni was not appearing on any stage at the time of Hawks’s visit, but the director paid a call on him anyway. “He was very pleasant and smiled but said he couldn’t play that kind of man, he wasn’t that kind of person, he wasn’t physically strong enough,” Hawks explained. “Besides he protested that Cagney had made Public Enemy, and Robinson had made Little Caesar. What more could be done in Scarface that hadn’t already been done?”

  Hawks challenged Muni to make a test, and Muni’s wife, Bella, who found Hawks “charming and persuasive” and had great influence over her husband, helped talk him into it. While Hecht brought the actor up to his home in Nyack, where he “taught him how to throw a right hook punch to the belly, so he would seem like a fighter,” Hawks prepared to shoot the test in late April. He rented a tiny studio, designed a padded suit that would give the actor more bulk, hired other actors who were shorter than Muni, and even decided to put him on raised boards to increase his stature.

  The results of the silent test, in addition to his favorable opinion of the script and his faith in Hawks, convinced Muni to take the part. Hughes requested further tests, and while Jerome Lawrence, in his biography of Muni, stated that no further tests were done, Variety reported on May 17 that Hawks was finally leaving New York “after making further Muni tests.” As for salary, Hughes offered the actor $20,000, but Muni held out for $27,500 and began reading and learning everything he could about Capone.

  Once back in Los Angeles, Hawks quickly ca
st the other important roles. The story goes that Hawks noticed George Raft in the audience at a prizefight at a time when “he was carrying a gun for the gangs.” Actually, the former New York dancer and gigolo had already appeared in three films, including Rowland Brown’s excellent Quick Millions at Fox, which Hawks had seen. Raft said that Jules Furthman sent him to see Hawks. At the time, Raft was due to go to Florida to join his former boss, the gangster Owney Madden, on tour with the Primo Carnera boxing carnival, so Hawks, who sensed that Raft’s “unique look” and “marvelous impassive quality” would make him ideal as Scarface’s bodyguard and best friend, Gino Rinaldi, a role modeled on Capone’s bodyguard Frank Rio, signed him up at once, with Raft proposing to do it for a mere five hundred dollars. Hawks later hiked the amount when Raft ended up working more than fifty days.

  To celebrate, Raft went to a popular industry restaurant where Paul Muni happened to be dining. Muni noticed Raft, asked him to join him at his table, and soon told him he’d be perfect for a role in the new gangster picture he’d come out to do. “That’s really funny of you to say that,” Raft replied. “I just saw Mr. Hawks and got the job.” Muni and Raft became close during the shoot, with the highly trained thespian giving the novice more than a few acting tips.