Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Toward the end of March, Hawks and Athole and Wells Root and his wife boarded the President Lincoln for the trip home. “Howard said, ‘We’ll work on it on the ship,’ but then he didn’t want to work on the ship either. We got back to San Francisco and we still hadn’t done anything.

  “I said, ‘I can’t go back to Zanuck and say that nothing’s been done.’ Howard had this big, marvelous Dusenberg that he had driven to San Francisco, and he proposed putting our wives in back and discussing the script on the drive back to Los Angeles. So when we got to the car, he asked Athole to get in front. We got all the way back to L.A. and still hadn’t done anything. We had a date to see Zanuck the next morning, and Howard said, ‘I’m going to call Zanuck and tell him we have the story but we had a new idea on the boat and we haven’t had time to write it up yet.’ He managed to put off Zanuck for about a week, and I went to Howard’s house and we worked like slaves.”

  During this compressed time, Root and Hawks “came up with basically an original story,” the only similarities to Houston Branch’s outline being the “Little Portugal” setting in San Pedro and the romantic triangle among the immigrant fisherman Miguel “Mike” Mascarenas, a woman, and a younger, better-looking man. What Branch had written was a vivid example of the sort of Depression era, proletariat-versus-exploitative-capitalist-owners story to which Warner Bros., far more than any other studio, was partial at that time. Inspired by a real dispute in the tuna industry at the time, the tale centered on a “fish war” in California between the fish canneries, with their big fishing boats, and the traditional, independent Portuguese fishermen who struggled just to make a living. His own boat sunk, Mike accepts a job from a local big shot and helps him bring in a record catch, but he can only stand by as the Portuguese crew members are screwed out of much of the money they’ve earned. The workers then decide to buy their own big boat, but must recruit an American citizen, Cardan, to purchase it. The wireless operator on the boat, the San Christofero, is a clean-cut fellow named Sparks, whom Mike subsequently saves from drowning. Still up against the cannery interests, Mike decides to become a U.S. citizen. When Mike correctly predicts that Cardan, too, will incite a disturbance to justify cheating the poor fishermen out of their share, he locks Cardan in the freezer, but the workers are shortchanged anyway. Finally, when Mike becomes a citizen and the captain of his own boat, he throws a party and “buys” the permanent companionship of Bobbie, an L.A. taxi dancer.

  Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for Bobbie to fall for Sparks, whom the trusting Mike has made captain of his supply boat, nor for Cardan to inform Mike of his girl’s affair. Enraged, Mike gives Cardan a time bomb to place aboard the supply boat. In the meantime, however, Mike’s boat is split in two by a passenger liner in the fog and Mike is forced aboard the supply boat. Revealing what he’s done, Mike sets out full throttle for home and throws everything overboard, attracting a swarm of sharks. After Mike himself ends up in the water and one shark is shot, the men all madly swim for shore, with Sparks helping Mike make it. Mike relinquishes his claim to Bobbie and, discredited among the other Portuguese, leaves town. The final scene finds him at the end of Santa Monica Pier, where he borrows a line to catch a fish. He sells it for a dime and buys a dance ticket, saying to a little blonde, “Didn’t I tell you I’d be right back?”

  Clearly, Hawks and Root had a lot of work to do if they were to make anything worthwhile out of all this. While his friend Bill Wellman might have been attracted to a hard-hitting attack on the ruthless cannery- and fishing-industry bosses, Hawks could never credit that sort of simplistic, ideological thinking; outside of the pro forma propaganda of his World War II pictures, there are virtually no overt politics, polemics, or even politically aligned characters in any Hawks film, except in incidental cases where the object is satiric, as in I Was a Male War Bride, or when the characters are soldiers or Western lawmen. His films are positively brimming with a philosophy of living and behavior, but this is never placed in a context that could be called political except in the most general of senses. Root said that not once during their several months together did Hawks ever mention politics. “I guess he just didn’t have any,” he surmised.

  After a week during which Hawks and Root hammered out a new story line but put nothing down on paper, Zanuck would be denied no longer. “Hawks realized the spot I was in, and he was absolutely wonderful. First off, Hawks gave Zanuck the title Tiger Shark, which was the first time I heard it. He then proceeded in that quiet, convincing style of his to tell Zanuck the story, managing to fill in the holes, and he made it sound absolutely wonderful. He finished by apologizing for not having it all down on paper, saying we didn’t think we could do the picture justice because some of the ideas we’d just had in the last couple of days.”

  Awestruck by Hawks’s performance, Root promised to have the first draft ready within four weeks, a necessity because of the heavily committed schedule of Edward G. Robinson, who was set to star as Mike. “We hired two secretaries and I dictated to one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I had never worked that way before and never did again,” recalled Root. “Howard would come in and read every day, he worked right along with it.” Root hung around San Pedro to pick up dialect, and Hawks later enlisted a Portuguese fishing captain for the duration of the shoot to guarantee the authenticity of the dialogue.

  Root wasn’t the only one to notice a similarity in the story, as Hawks developed it, to Sidney Howard’s 1924 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, They Knew What They Wanted, about a homely middle-aged wine grower in Napa Valley whose mail order bride runs off with a younger, good-looking worker. Neither Root nor anyone else said anything about it, however, a tribute to Hawks’s stealthiness in his thievery. Years later, Hawks admitted that even while he was still in Hawaii, he “had figured on stealing They Knew What They Wanted.” He was smart enough to know that “you don’t just take a scene and paraphrase the dialogue. I doubt if you could find a scene in They Knew What They Wanted that was like one in Tiger Shark. It’s only a basis.” Picking up on Hawks’s methods over the weeks, Root felt that a particular kind of brinksmanship represented a “strange key to his character. He was, in a sense, so heartless about risking this whole thing for his vacation. We were right on the edge almost all the time. But he cared enough to see that we got it done when it mattered, so we didn’t really get in any trouble.”

  One of the key decisions Hawks and Root made, one derived rather obviously from Moby Dick, was to have, in the opening scene, a shark bite off Mike’s hand, which is then replaced by a hook. “Giving him a hook on his arm was a lot of help to the character,” Hawks maintained. “It removed him further from the girl, and it made him dangerous in an interesting way.” At first, Robinson challenged his director about the need for the device, but he quickly came around, as he did when Hawks suggested he wear an earring. Most crucial of all, however, was the advice Hawks gave Robinson on the first day of shooting. “We started the picture with a dour man, thinking it’d have more drama and chance of violence when he found out about his wife’s unfaithfulness. We shot until about three in the afternoon the first day, and I stopped things and said to Robinson, ‘Eddie, this is going to be the dullest picture in the world. We have nothing to relieve it. All we’ve got is a dour, unpleasant man.’” Hawks told the actor about a man he knew who talked quickly and constantly to cover up his shyness, and suggested Robinson make Mike a blustering, happy-go-lucky fellow whom “you felt kind of sorry for and who could also be pretty tough.” For Hawks, “the whole tenor of the picture changed” due to the alteration, much for the better, and it also made Mike something of a brother to Muni’s Scarface—brutal, insensitive, but also somewhat innocent.

  Robinson was initially wary of Hawks, who had all the Waspy qualities he frankly admitted made him feel insecure. “Howard seemed to be patrician, aristocratic, and I sensed he was looking down his nose at me,” the actor revealed. But he soon came around to like and admire the director, payin
g him high praise indeed when he said that, as a Broadway actor, he didn’t know anything about the difference between stage and screen acting until he worked with Hawks. “He instinctively knew that a movie had to tell its story pictorially. Screenplays in those days, particularly a Hawks screenplay, were very sketchy and vague scenarios rather than screenplays as we know them today. But in the abstract, Hawks had a good basic story. Hawks would describe what he wanted and rely on my stage experience to ad-lib and convey the feeling of a scene to the audience with more action than dialogue. Hawks’s development of a story was not unlike improvisation.” The latter was a term Hawks always scorned when it came into fashion years later. “They talk about ‘improvisation.’ That’s one of the silliest words that’s used in the motion picture industry. What the hell do they think a director does?” he asked sarcastically. “How do you expect that we can go out with a story that’s written up in a room, go out to the location, and do it verbatim? I have never found a writer who could imagine a thing so that you can do it like that.”

  To film the extensive fishing sequences, Hawks once again enlisted Richard Rosson, who, with cameraman Byron Haskin and a sixteen-man crew, sailed between Ensenada, Magdalena Bay, the Socorro Islands, and Mazatlán on Mexico’s Pacific Coast throughout most of April and May. Suffering just one minor casualty when a deckhand broke his ankle in an anchor line, this action unit filmed wonderfully evocative material, including the capture of sharks as well as nets full of tuna. They used a diving bell for some shots and were helped in other instances by an old flying squadron friend of Hawks’s equipped with an airplane that was used to fly out to look for schools of tuna. In the early 1930s it was rare for any director, let alone one of Hawks’s stature, to entrust someone else to film key sequences for him, but Hawks thought so much of Rosson that he gave him such authority and was confident that the material “would come back just as though I’d made it.” It was with work like this, which generated considerable comment upon the film’s release, that Dick Rosson almost single-handedly invented the job of second-unit director.

  By early April, Hawks and Root had revamped the story line to something quite close to what appeared in the finished film. In the initial script, which Zanuck liked for its story and atmosphere but criticized for having too much melodrama and action and not enough detailing of Mike’s “strange character and strange psychology of life,” numerous motifs favored by Hawks suddenly appeared: mutilation (Mike receives a facial scar, à la Scarface, in the opening scene, before his hand is bitten off by a shark), a painful extraction (Mike must pull a fish hook out of his buddy’s neck, pre-figuring a similar scene nearly twenty years later in The Big Sky), and a near suicide (Quita—formerly Bobbie—is about to kill herself over having been deserted by a married man when Mike arrives just in time). A song used to parallel Mike’s being cuckolded recalled the effective device from Scarface of Tony whistling the operatic tune just prior to committing a murder. Any mention of politics was now gone, and a final tag scene was written to give the film some uplift at the end, but it ultimately was not used.

  Root was hurriedly finishing the script, and trying out three different endings, when Hawks began shooting on April 28. Hawks was receiving his highest directing fee yet, $50,000, while star Edward G. Robinson drew $46,666. Feeling that a glamorous movie-star type would be all wrong for the troubled, working-class girl Quita, Hawks remembered Zita Johann, a Hungarian-born actress whom he had seen onstage in New York and who had an odd, off-center, interestingly ethnic quality, and borrowed her from RKO, where she had just signed, for fifteen hundred dollars a week. Paramount loaned Richard Arlen at the same price to play Pipes, and Hawks brought back Vince Barnett for a little pre–Walter Brennan comic relief. Zanuck had made Hawks’s whispery-voiced pal Raymond Griffith an associate producer at the studio as a payback for favors Griffith had done for him when Zanuck was struggling to find a toehold in the industry, and Hawks was glad to have him onboard as the production supervisor. The affable Bryan Foy, whom the director also liked, repeated as nominal producer for Zanuck, as he had done on The Crowd Roars.

  The first scenes shot were those between Robinson and Johann in Quita’s boardinghouse, and from the outset, it was clear Hawks’s pace was about half of what the studio expected. Zanuck respected Hawks immensely and tolerated the overages, but his measured manner of working infuriated nearly every other studio executive Hawks ever worked for, as did Hawks’s high-handed disregard for matters of schedule and budget and his refusal to work if a producer or executive so much as set foot on a set. Hawks virtually institutionalized rewriting and trying new things on the set, saying, “You’re not trying to photograph a budget or a cost sheet. You’re trying to make a scene that’s going to be good, the best you know how.” On the other hand, Niven Busch felt that “the reason he was slow was he didn’t want to make any mistakes.”

  Wells Root was on the set every day trying to fine-tune the dialogue, and his proudest impromptu contribution came when Hawks needed a better comeback line for Quita after Mike challenges her with, “So you think you’re better than I am?” “So far,” Root had her say, which Hawks heartily approved. Nevertheless, the director still felt the dialogue overall left something to be desired and turned to his Scarface collaborator John Lee Mahin, who had since signed a two-hundred-dollar-a-week contract with MGM on the basis of recommendations from Hawks and Charles MacArthur. Mahin moonlighted on Tiger Shark, noting, “I’m sure Howard told Warner Brothers that he had rewritten it, you know. But that’s all right, I don’t mind, it’s just one of Howard’s charms.” All the scenes were set, so Mahin, who found the existing dialogue “very pedestrian,” felt that his main job was to “lighten it up,” mostly for Robinson’s speeches.

  Robinson no doubt believed that the modest dialogue changes he was getting were indeed coming from Hawks, while Root was unaware that Hawks had engaged another writer sub rosa to polish up his stuff. “There were no hunks of dialogue coming in from left field while I was on set,” Root maintained. “And when I saw the finished picture, I would have noticed if there were any major changes.” Root found that Hawks “was a man who favored great economy of dialogue,” and he figured that the director was always looking for ways to whittle scenes to their essence, especially in a script that, at 125 pages, was far too long for a film that shouldn’t run more than ninety minutes.

  After three weeks of studio work, in mid-May the company moved down the coast to San Diego to do seven days’ work on the wharf, where they ran into constant delays because of noise from boats, planes, and whistles. After a couple of more days back at the studio, on May 28 the crew moved to Catalina Island off Los Angeles for the duration of the shoot. Joined by Rosson’s outfit, Hawks then shot all the shipboard sequences with the principals. Hawks arrived at the Isthmus of Catalina on his own yacht and took to directing wearing a blue pea coat and captain’s hat. By chance, the film version of Somerset Maugham’s Rain (ironically, the play Tony and his henchmen go to see in Scarface), directed by Hawks’s friend Lewis Milestone and starring Walter Huston and Hawks’s old flame Joan Crawford, was being shot at the Isthmus at the same time. Every evening there were cocktails and lively parties onboard the yachts of the combined companies.

  Ray Griffith was on hand to represent the studio and engaged Hawks in almost daily conferences regarding the script, which was continually in flux. Root was still around to contribute his ideas, especially for the ending, which remained unsettled, and he initiated what became a lifelong friendship with Zita Johann’s husband, the future producer John Houseman, who stayed close to the production to be with his wife as well as to learn everything he could about the filmmaking process. Houseman claimed that for a short time, thanks to his wife’s agent, Leland Hayward, he “became one of the five writers whom Hawks kept in various hotel rooms writing different versions of the script, from which he would, each morning on the set, extract the lines that took his fancy. Not one word of mine was ever used and I soon stop
ped trying and spent all day on the pier watching him shoot.” (Who the other two writers might have been, if they existed at all, cannot be fathomed.)

  Shooting of the climactic shark attack involved using two giant sharks Rosson’s crew had caught and then frozen, which were subsequently wired to “perform” violent actions for the scenes. Finally, on Saturday, June 11, a day that stretched until 4 A.M. Sunday, when Hawks filmed Richard Arlen getting hooked in the neck, the production wrapped after forty-one days, seventeen days over schedule. Two weeks later, one more day of filming was required to enact the beach campfire scene among the three principals.

  Watching Hawks throughout the shoot, Root came away exceedingly impressed with his boss’s “supreme ego and self-confidence that, in a jam, he could pull it off.… He was magnificent in a pinch.” At the same time, “He didn’t play God or fling his ego about like some others. As a director, he was the ultimate pragmatist, who’d found out that certain things worked and others didn’t, which resulted in a simplicity that was impressive.” In other ways, the writer found Hawks a curious case. “He seemed to be more an observer as a director, more than the one who was making it happen.… He didn’t seem to give the actors much direction. He let the actors bring the scenes to life. He let the actors do it first their way, and he knew when he didn’t like something.… On the stage or story, you always knew where he was coming from, you always knew what he thought of something. This was certainly not true in his private life.”