Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  On June 28, four days after the completion of Tiger Shark and two other pictures, Warner Bros. closed its gates until August to consolidate and cut costs during a difficult period. Hawks’s films only helped the studio, however, as both of his 1932 films for the studio did very well at the box office. The Crowd Roars had opened in March to great figures at the Winter Garden in New York, and in May, just as Scarface was beginning to fan out across the country, the racing picture debuted in Los Angeles with strong results, which were repeated throughout the country.

  Tiger Shark, which opened a very big four-week run at the Winter Garden in New York on September 22 and was a strong attraction for the studio, stands as a fine example of Hawks’s talent for injecting unexpected comedy into inherently dramatic, even tragic, material. At least one critic felt that the milieu and narrative trajectory of Tiger Shark suggested Eugene O’Neill, and it’s easy to imagine the story played for heavy, somber effect. If less profound, Hawks’s approach of mixing moods and blending tones seems more modern and invigorating. It also planted a thematic seed that would be taken up in another, massively successful shark tale more than forty years later.

  11

  Sidetracked at MGM: Faulkner, Thalberg and Today We Live

  Everything except common sense dictated that Hawks should join Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The one studio that was sailing through the worst of the Depression with its head above water, MGM had, in a few short years, unquestionably established itself as the classiest shop in town, the studio with the biggest stars, the largest reserves of money, and the most glamour, power, and prestige. Although he still had to answer to Nicholas Schenck, Joseph’s brother and the head of MGM’s parent company, Loews, in New York, Louis B. Mayer was widely regarded as the most powerful man in the motion picture business. What other studio chief had spent a night in the White House, even if the president he had so avidly supported, Herbert Hoover, was almost certainly about to be voted out of office in November? Mayer still had the clout to turn the tide against the California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair by flooding movie theaters with scare-mongering propaganda shorts about what would happen to the state if the socialist-minded author actually gained power.

  None of this concerned Hawks so much as the fact that he knew Mayer, from his previous tenure at the studio seven years earlier, to be a blow-hard, a phony, overemotional, hypocritical, unrefined tyrant whose taste in films—sentimental, gilded, weepy, family-and-country-oriented—couldn’t have been more antithetical to his own approach.

  Tipping the scales in the other direction was the best motivation of all in Hollywood: nepotism. With Hawks’s stock so dramatically increased over the past two years, Irving Thalberg was more anxious than ever to have his brother-in-law on his roster of directors, and it seemed only logical to him that bringing Hawks in would keep the family closer together. Knowing Hawks’s literary values, Thalberg also felt that Hawks could only benefit from MGM’s superior lineup of writers and vast trove of source materials, the most extensive in the industry. After his trip around the world, Vic Fleming had rejoined MGM, and his best friend’s presence on the lot was something they would both enjoy. For Hawks, it would also mean ultimate prestige after his pairings with the maverick Howard Hughes, the crude Harry Cohn and Jack Warner, and the rough-and-tumble Darryl Zanuck. But most of all, it would mean big, and much needed, money.

  Although he spoke of it to no one except Fleming, Hawks was often in debt and in constant need of cash. Because he was born to it, inherited more, married into Hollywood aristocracy, and was now making more than most directors in town, Hawks had little sense of the value of earned money. His sporting hobbies and taste for planes, cars, the yacht, guns, country clubs, fine clothes, parties, and more were par for the course in Hollywood and within reason considering his position. His decisions to build beautiful homes in the best parts of town were astute, but he never kept an eye on his earnings and, increasingly, he tossed away money gambling. Just as Hawks acted as though he were oblivious to his producers’ money during production, so he was with his own cash. “Howard borrowed large sums from Victor Fleming at various times,” Wells Root said, most often to cover gambling debts to shady characters that could have walked straight out of Scarface. “He was a man of extraordinary courage because he wouldn’t let the underworld or anyone else phase him.”

  Men express and play out their need for excitement and adventure in innumerable ways; for Hawks, it came in the thrill of the contest, of placing himself at risk and on the brink of losing, but knowing that he was “good enough” to pull himself out and prevail. There was nothing more consistent than this in Hawks’s character; it was true in the way he directed films, for the characters in his films, and in the way he conducted his personal life. Unlike some of his friends and colleagues, such as Bill Wellman and John Huston, who were wild and often irresponsible, Hawks was reckless but within a conservative shell. No one has ever claimed to have seen Howard Hawks lose his composure, his calm demeanor, or his sense of control, even when drunk, angry, or under severe pressure. By the same token, no one saw him deliriously happy or celebratory. “I suppose that, beneath that granite exterior, he must have had the same insecurities as other people,” Root speculated. But none that he ever showed.

  Moving from Warner Bros. to MGM, which Hawks did in July 1932, just after finishing Tiger Shark, was like writing his own prescription for frustration. He could convince himself that his relationship with Thalberg would accord him a privileged position, protection from the whims and dictates of Mayer. But Thalberg was no more a believer in the cinema of the director than his boss, and he had, in fact, been the instigator of the movement by producers and executives to retake control of the production process when he fired Erich von Stroheim from Merry-Go-Round at Universal in 1922. Since their bachelor days, when they had endlessly swapped film story ideas, Hawks, like so many others in Hollywood, had felt that Thalberg “was the great genius in the picture business.” But in the end, the forces of studio policy, the star system, and sheer accident proved far stronger than Hawks, Thalberg, or their friendship, and Hawks’s spell at MGM turned into one of the most unproductive detours of his career. Even so, it provided the beginnings of two of the most enduring professional and personal relationships of his life, those with William Faulkner and Gary Cooper.

  Hawks’s contractual obligations to various parties at the time he finished Tiger Shark were a bit fuzzy, even to the attorneys representing the companies he’d been working for. Technically, Hawks was still under contract to Howard Hughes’s Caddo Company under the terms of the multi-picture deal he’d signed in order to make Scarface. Though Hughes had decided to leave the film business, at least temporarily, his attorney Neil McCarthy wasn’t ready to just tear up Hawks’s contract, but he did agree that the director was free to work for others. As for First National, even though Hawks had directed The Crowd Roars and Tiger Shark under a new two-picture deal, the studio still took the position that Hawks owed it another film from his previous deal. In mid-June, upon finishing Tiger Shark, Hawks met with Hal Wallis to discuss possible story ideas, and the same old cycle started up again. Wallis proposed that Hawks direct Richard Barthelmess in something called Shanghai Orchids. Upon reading it, Hawks refused, whereupon Wallis, feeling it was within his rights, obstinately demanded that Hawks do as he was told. Whatever doubts, if any, Hawks had about absconding for MGM vanished in the face of Wallis’s intransigence, and it was arranged that First National would simply turn over Hawks’s contract to Metro, on the condition that Hawks return to First National to fulfill his contract there by directing one more picture by the following April. As it happened, it would be two years beyond that before Hawks would return to the house of Jack Warner and Hal Wallis.

  The precariousness of Hawks’s finances can be glimpsed in a lawsuit he filed at the beginning of 1932, which prompted a retaliatory countersuit. One of the low points of his career had been his firing by Fox after he had finished the unre
leasable Trent’s Last Case. From any reasonable standpoint, what happened on that forlorn picture was far from being entirely the director’s fault. But Hawks’s renegotiated salary had just kicked in at $50,000 per picture, so rather than continue to pay him, Fox decided to dump Hawks, even though the director owed the studio one more picture. Hawks did nothing about this for nearly three years. Finally, however, in need of more funds, he decided to sue Fox for the $65,000 he believed he was still owed under his contract, since he claimed he was “wrongfully discharged” by Fox.

  Insulted and annoyed, Fox fired back in May with a suit of its own, which stated that while in its employ in December 1928, Hawks had received a five-thousand-dollar loan from the studio, to be paid back on demand, or with the sum taken out of his salary if necessary. By the time of his firing in May 1929, Hawks had paid back just one thousand dollars and therefore still owed Fox four thousand. Deposed in the case on June 7 while still on Catalina shooting the final scenes of Tiger Shark, Hawks claimed that the five thousand was an advance on salary at Fox and denied that he owed it. In the end, both cases came to naught.

  Early in July, when an economically depressed Los Angeles was becoming swept up in the excitement of staging the 1932 Olympic Games, Hawks checked into his new offices on the MGM lot in Culver City. By chance, the six-week, five-hundred-dollars-a-week contract of a writer Hawks greatly admired was coming to an end. The writer was William Faulkner, and from a dry, businesslike meeting that apparently ended in a drunken bender grew a friendship that was central to the lives of both men.

  In fact, Hawks had been one of William Faulkner’s earliest American champions. Hawks was one of the few to have read the author’s 1926 novel Soldier’s Pay, which a few years later he recommended to some assembled literati at Ben Hecht’s home in Nyack. In the interim, the Mississippian had developed an ardent following within small circles for The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying but was known mainly for his notorious 1931 novel Sanctuary. This had made him something of a literary commodity, at least enough for Leland Hayward, then an agent with the American Play Company, to take him on for Hollywood representation. That winter, Sam Marx, the erudite head of MGM’s story department, inquired as to Faulkner’s availability, but the writer, expecting royalties from the unexpectedly popular Sanctuary, declined the offer. However, when his publisher, Harrison Smith, went bankrupt early the following year, Faulkner, on the hook financially for the new home he had just bought in Oxford, Mississippi, felt he had no choice but to undertake a quick mercenary expedition to Hollywood, where he arrived for the first time in May 1932.

  Literary lore is rife with stories—some true, some no doubt apocryphal or greatly exaggerated—of Faulkner’s initial misadventures in Hollywood: how his long, reserved silences and—when he did talk—often indecipherable Southern drawl put people off; his abrupt disappearance to wander around Death Valley; his legendary boozing; his suggestion that he would be best writing cartoons or newsreels; his disdain for most Hollywood films; and, most famously of all, his proposal that he be allowed to write at home, with the agreeable studio not realizing that what he meant by home was Mississippi, not his Los Angeles residence. Faulkner was hired at a time when the studios, still settling into the sound era, were eagerly looking for anyone who could write good, pungent dialogue, and while Faulkner’s loquacious tendencies and rural subjects ran basically counter to the sort of fast talk and urban material favored in films at the time, his reputation, however marginal and vaguely lurid, made him a plausible bet for a short-term tryout.

  On his initial tour of duty at MGM, Faulkner wrote four short treatments, none of which came to anything. After six weeks, the studio decided not to renew his option, then hesitated and offered an extension at $250 per week, half of what he had been getting. It was an offer the writer could refuse, since Paramount had just given Leland Hayward $750 for a four-month option on Sanctuary, at the end of which it paid almost seven thousand dollars to buy it (it was subsequently filmed as The Story of Temple Drake). On top of that, MGM had paid three thousand dollars for the rights to Faulkner’s short story “Turn About,” published in the Saturday Evening Post on March 5 of that year. By Faulkner’s standards, he was flush, with no need for a workaday job at a time when he was about to read galleys on his latest novel, Light in August. But he got a call from Howard Hawks, at whose request the studio had bought his story (Bill Hawks handled the transaction), and agreed to meet with him.

  Physically, the men were a study in contrasts, Hawks long and lean, his prematurely gray-white hair clipped almost to the skull, Faulkner a full foot shorter, compact, his dark hair a bit unruly, with an odd way of walking while seeming to lean backward. But people couldn’t help but note the far greater number of similarities. Just a year apart in age, with Hawks the senior, both were reserved to the point of noncommunicativeness; Nunnally Johnson was astonished by the sight of the two of them just sitting together not saying a word. When they did talk, they did so slowly, in a drawling manner. While very much of their respective regions, they were both Anglophiles, favored comfortable tweeds, and smoked pipes as well as cigarettes. The two had both served in World War I but had not gotten overseas, although this didn’t stop them from basing much of their work on the conflict, particularly the air war. Each was the oldest of three brothers, had stepchildren, and was in a marriage that already showed signs of fissure. They hunted and fished, and both liked to drink, although one rather more than the other.

  In Hawks’s account of their first meeting, when he introduced himself upon the writer’s arrival in his office, Faulkner replied, “I’ve seen your name on a check.” “I remember that very well,” Hawks said, “because I wanted to kill him. And he didn’t say anything else. He just sat there, and the more he sat there, the madder I got and the more I talked.” Hawks basically told Faulkner that he wanted him to write the screen adaptation of “Turn About,” and that he wished him to follow the original story as closely as possible. “‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s all.’ ‘O.K.,’ he said, ‘I’ll go.’ I said, ‘Well, wait a minute. What are you going to do? When am I going to see you again?’ He said, ‘Four or five days.’ I said, ‘Oh, Mr. Faulkner, it shouldn’t take four or five days to digest what I’ve just told you.’ He said, ‘No, to write it.’ I said, ‘Are you serious?’ and he said, ‘Yes. You made it very clear what you wanted. I can remember it all. It won’t take me more than five days.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was looking forward to meeting you. Would you like a drink?’ He said, ‘I’d love one.’”

  In one account of what happened next, the two men went on a giant drinking tear that ended the following morning in a Culver City motel room with “Faulkner groping for cigarette stubs in a mint julep glass.” Hawks merely said, “By the time we’d killed a couple of quarts of whiskey, I took a real drunk man home and he got up the next morning and started to work, and in five or six days he had a script.” Hawks gave the novice screenwriter some basic guidelines, the most important being, “The first thing I want is a story; the next thing I want is character.” Stunned at the high quality of his new friend’s work, Hawks took the scenario to Thalberg and insisted that he read it at once. Thalberg concurred with Hawks’s assessment and directed, “Shoot it as it is. I feel as if I’d make tracks all over it if I touched it.”

  As originally written, “Turn About” stood a good chance of becoming a formidable companion piece to The Dawn Patrol, a terse, compelling look at young soldiers daily risking their lives on highly perilous missions during World War I, complete with a suicidal ending. Faulkner’s tale centered on an American pilot, Captain Bogard, who becomes involved with two British best friends, Claude Hope and Ronnie Boyce Smith, who run a small torpedo boat. To show them some real combat thrills, Bogard takes the boys up on a bombing mission, whereupon they take him out on one of their torpedo runs, which are highly dangerous as the torpedoes are released from the rear, requiring the speedboat to turn quickly to get out of the way. In the one signif
icant change requested by Hawks, Claude is blinded by head injuries sustained in the attack (yet another instance of mutilation or blindness in his films). In a subsequent attack on a German cruiser, the torpedo-release mechanism jams, so Ronnie, with the sightless Claude on-board, decides to ram the vessel. When he hears of his friends’ deaths, Bogard, in a rerun of the Dawn Patrol finale, undertakes a solo raid on an ammunition depot, then furiously continues on to bomb enemy headquarters, exclaiming, “God! God! If they were all there—all the generals, the admirals, the presidents and the kings—theirs, ours—all of them.”

  Fatalistic and enshrouded in a doom lightened only by booze and the camaraderie of beautiful young men, “Turn About” might well have become a noteworthy addition to the Lost Generation cycle of film and literature, and its streamlined structure and clipped dialogue are strong enough to make very clear what Hawks would have done with it. However, what happened to “Turn About” stands as an almost grotesque illustration of the studio system at its worst. It is also an exceedingly rare example of the fiercely independent Hawks accepting without complaint a demand that he had to know would ruin his film. He complied because he knew he had no choice, and because he was working for Thalberg now and wasn’t about to treat his brother-in-law in the high-handed manner he treated Jack Warner or Hal Wallis.

  Scarcely a week after Thalberg had told Hawks to shoot the script as it was, studio vice president Eddie Mannix, a tough Irishman with whom Hawks got along famously, informed the director that his all-male picture was now to be a vehicle for Joan Crawford. It was common practice at the studio to quickly revamp projects to tailor them for stars who suddenly became available, and Hawks knew that he had nothing to say about the matter. Hawks, who liked Crawford a good deal personally and, as he enigmatically put it, “used to go around with her,” went to talk to the actress and said he found her “sitting there with tears dribbling into her coffee cup.” She said, “‘Are they kidding, Howard?’ and I said, ‘No.’ Oh, she started to cry, and I said, ‘Now, look—you have to do it and I have to do it. If you’re gonna make drama out of it, it’ll all be hell. If we decide to have fun and do it, we’ll have a nice time. What do you want to do?’ She said, ‘We’ll have fun.’ I said, ‘O.K.’”