Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Hawks broke the news to Faulkner by saying, “That’s the picture business, Bill,” and Faulkner quickly determined that the best way to shoehorn Crawford into the story was to make her an ambulance nurse. On August 6, however, Faulkner’s father, Murry, died, at the age of sixty-two. Returning to Oxford, the writer promised Hawks he’d finish the rewrite at home, which he did, delivering it within a week. Crawford would play Ann, Ronnie’s sister. Upper-class children, they had grown up like siblings to Claude, their closest friend, who always thought he would marry Ann. Ronnie and Ann also seem so close as to recall the incestuous feelings of Scarface, so the arrival of the dominant American, Bogard, into this mix takes on the dimension of a major disruption of apparent destiny among these altruistic English kids. At Crawford’s request, Faulkner gave Ann the same sort of exaggeratedly clipped, low-on-pronouns style of speech that the two English male characters had, hoping to reduce the sentimentality MGM would invariably want to emphasize. To build up the special friendship of Ann, Ronnie, and Claude, he also wrote a childhood prologue, and later a section showing how Bogard and Ronnie had been classmates at Oxford.

  In a very short time, and under the terribly adverse conditions of family tragedy, Faulkner did a remarkable job in reconfiguring “Turn About” to the studio’s specifications. Still, it was felt that the script needed more work, and there were unresolved casting questions. MGM wanted to use Phillips Holmes as Claude, a choice Hawks, after The Criminal Code, was not crazy about. But the main concern was who would play Bogard. Currently shooting Red Dust with Vic Fleming, Clark Gable was on the verge of becoming MGM’s biggest male star, and the studio had any number of properties waiting for him. First up, as it happened, was a goofy little story Hawks had had a hand in writing, The Prizefighter and the Lady, which was designed as a follow-up pairing of Gable and Jean Harlow after Red Dust. However, the suicide of Harlow’s new husband—and Hawks’s friend—Paul Bern in early September put an end to that idea. At one point, MGM even considered “doubling” Gable, working out his schedule so that he could act in two films at once. But Hawks, although friendly with Gable, had his eye on Gary Cooper, whom he had found so effective in Sternberg’s Morocco. Cooper, who was currently starring in A Farewell to Arms, was under contract at Paramount but might be available at the right price. Waiting for Cooper would mean waiting until December, however, and in the meantime, MGM had some other ideas about how they might employ Howard Hawks.

  Even if MGM was having an easier ride through the Depression than the other studios, there was still a sense of foreboding. The threats of strikes and the organizing of Hollywood labor were gaining force, and no one was more opposed to these left-wing notions than Mayer and Thalberg. Barring some miracle, it seemed certain that Mayer’s friend Herbert Hoover would be out of the White House come January, replaced by the dreaded Franklin D. Roosevelt. Within the studio, Thalberg’s always-frail health had taken a turn for the worse; under doctor’s orders to rest and cut back his schedule, Thalberg had no option but to look for some people he could trust to help him do his job, and for him, Hawks was a natural choice. In Thalberg’s view, just about anyone could direct, but it took a special talent to recognize stories that had real screen potential, as well as to the work with writers and directors to help realize that potential. Thalberg had always felt that Hawks possessed the talent to cut through to the most fertile dramatic essence of a story, and Hawks definitely knew both how to communicate with writers and how to get them to produce. Toward the end of September, with “Turn About” on hold, Thalberg asked Hawks and another director, Sidney Franklin, to become his lieutenants. Franklin wound up going on to a very comfortable career at the studio for another twenty-five years, but for Hawks, the whole thing, a disagreeable reminder of his short stint at MGM eight years earlier, represented a step in precisely the opposite direction from where his career had been building ever since. Nonetheless, Hawks felt obliged to accept, with the proviso that he still be allowed to direct, and the appointments were reported in Variety: “In realigning the production forces at Metro, and to relieve himself of considerable burden, Irving Thalberg is assigning Howard Hawks and Sidney Franklin, directors, to supervisory powers. Both men will continue to direct pictures in addition to handling four productions a year. At the time Hawks, who is Thalberg’s brother-in-law, joined Metro it was figured that he would become the latter’s chief aid. His new duties may shortly bring him to that position.”

  In short, Hawks had a golden opportunity for a career countless others in Hollywood might have killed for: to become, if he wanted, the third most powerful executive at the world’s most eminent film studio. But he had backed away from such a position twice before, at MGM and Paramount, and he would back away from it again now. He knew a full-time office job wouldn’t suit him temperamentally: he liked the breaks between pictures to pursue his sporting interests, and he was loathe to give up a schedule that, when he wasn’t shooting, left his Wednesdays free for golf. He certainly didn’t want to have to report to Louis B. Mayer and deal with him daily. But most of all, even if he never said it in so many words, he was an artist; he needed to create, he needed the thrill that came from working with actors and writers on the set, of being out on a limb and cleverly working out how to get down. Even if Hawks agreed to his brother-in-law’s plan, he would simply continue with his directing projects. Sooner, rather than later, the impracticability of his double role would certainly become apparent.

  One of the reasons that coming to MGM had looked appealing to Hawks was that Vic Fleming was there. But such close proximity also made the competition between them very direct and apparent for all to see. Therefore, Hawks’s own vicissitudes at the studio stood out in even greater relief against Fleming’s terrific career upswing. Fleming had just directed Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Red Dust, and the chemistry was in place for one of the more scorching box-office blockbusters MGM had during that period. The first preview took place at the Alexandria Theater in Glendale, and John Lee Mahin, who wrote Red Dust, vividly remembered how tremendously its reception bothered Hawks. “Howard was always very jealous of Victor. He went to the preview of Red Dust with us. I rode home with him to Vic’s house, and Vic drove with somebody else. It had gone over very well. Howard was silent for a long while; then he said, ‘I wonder where Vic got that story.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, where did Vic get that story?’ Howard said, ‘Where’d he steal it?’ I said, ‘It came in a fifteen-page treatment of a story to MGM called Red Dust, and it was a very purple melodrama about a poor little slaving whore—she got whipped by the heavy, fell in love with Gable from afar, and that’s all that happened. So, we decided to turn it into a comedy-drama.’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I think I’ve heard that story somewhere.’ He just couldn’t face the fact.”

  With nearly three months to go before “Turn About” would be ready for the cameras, Mayer saw no reason why Hawks shouldn’t direct a film in the interim, so he was assigned to take over The Prizefighter and the Lady. When he was at the studio briefly in 1925, Hawks had written a story called “The Roughneck and the Lady,” which was earmarked for Norma Shearer but never used. Although the credits of Prizefighter attribute the “original story” to Frances Marion, the film bears a strong resemblance to Hawks’s earlier yarn, which concerned a lowlife woman who transforms herself into a “lady,” only to take up with a boxer while hiding from the police after her gambling establishment has been raided.

  Hawks claimed that he developed the story with Josef von Sternberg as a kind of lark. As it emerged years later, it was a silly but workable story about a boxer who becomes involved with a big gangster’s lady, and it might have amounted to something with the original Gable-Harlow pairing. But then the studio had the idea of casting real boxers, starting with Max Baer in the Gable role and supported by Primo Carnera and Jack Dempsey. As the moll, the irrepressibly classy Myrna Loy was as implausible a choice as Norma Shearer would have been. This was definitely not the sort of f
ilm Hawks came to MGM to make, and he tried to refuse. But Hawks couldn’t play games with Mayer the way he had with Warner and Wallis, so, for the second time in three months, he had no choice.

  Recasting the experience in retrospect to his own advantage, Hawks claimed that he began directing the film only as a favor, to “do a couple of weeks’ work” with Baer to “teach him a little about acting.” Hawks said he “made two or three good opening scenes and then [W. S. (Woody)] Van Dyke stepped in and shot the rest.” John Lee Mahin, who wrote the film with John Meehan and Frances Marion, remembered things a bit differently, stating that Hawks “was two days on that, and he was six days behind schedule. He probably thought he could get away with it at Metro. But Mayer just put his foot down and said, ‘This has got to stop.’” In Mahin’s view Hawks didn’t fit in at MGM because “he wouldn’t take the regimen. He wasn’t used to it. You know, he wouldn’t allow Hughes on the set.… Even at Warners, I think he got away with it. And that’s pretty tough to do when you’re talking about Jack Warner. But he couldn’t get away with it at MGM.” Of course, it is entirely possible that Hawks deliberately slowed down to the point where he knew he would be replaced, all the better to go hunting with Faulkner, who was now back in town, and return their attention to “Turn About.”

  A hunting trip that fall gave birth to one of Hawks’s favorite stories. It is impossible to verify, of course, but definitely belongs to the “print the legend” category. Hawks: “Faulkner and I were going dove hunting down in Imperial Valley. Gable called up and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I told him. He said, ‘Can I go?’ I said, ‘Sure, if you get over here in a hurry.’ So we hired a station wagon, and we started down with a couple of bottles of bourbon. We were coming through Palm Springs, and the talk was about writing. Gable asked Faulkner who the good writers were. And Faulkner said, ‘Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself.’ Gable looked at him and said, ‘Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?’ And Faulkner said, ‘Yeah. What do you do, Mr. Gable?’ I don’t think Gable ever read a book, and I don’t think Faulkner ever went to see a movie. So they might have been on the level.”

  Still working for $250 per week, Faulkner completed writing several new scenes for “Turn About” in October, notably the stilted opening interludes in which Bogard comes to rent Ann’s opulent home and stays for an awkward tea. Toward the end, Faulkner was joined by the young screen-writer Dwight Taylor in making revisions. Although both Howard and Bill Hawks urged the writer to stay in Hollywood, Faulkner had done all he could on “Turn About.” Beyond that, his wife was pregnant, his mother wanted to go home, and Paramount had just picked up its option on Sanctuary and was about to move into production of the film. This meant more than six thousand dollars for Faulkner, more than he had ever had in his life. Although he was typically dubious about its prospects, Light in August was published to ecstatic reviews. Sam Marx asked the writer about the book’s motion picture possibilities, but Faulkner doubted its potential. “I told him I didn’t think they could use it. It would make a good Mickey Mouse picture, though Popeye is the part for Mickey Mouse. The frog could play Clarence Snopes.” Instead, he worked out an arrangement with MGM to continue working from Oxford, which he did until the following August.

  With “Turn About” now on track to start by mid-December, the script still needed some improvement in the writing of Ann’s character, so the studio assigned Anne Cunningham to write a treatment charting the drama from the woman’s point of view. Her sentimental suggestions were rejected out of hand, and the veteran writer Edith Fitzgerald was brought in to strengthen Ann’s character, which she did in part by creating more scenes of her working as a nurse. She also did some emergency surgery when the youthful actors engaged to play the leading roles in the childhood scenes couldn’t master British accents, making Hawks decide to eliminate the sequences entirely and work references to their childhood into the dialogue.

  Retitled Today We Live, the film went into production in December without a leading man. Gable wouldn’t take on two films at once. MGM offered Gary Cooper a thirteen-thousand-dollar bonus but with A Farewell to Arms about to open and promising to further boost the actor’s standing, he held out for twenty thousand and got it.

  Shooting through the new year until February, Hawks tried to make the best of a bad situation, but by now the film was hopelessly removed from what he and Faulkner had started out with six months before. Faulkner made a valiant effort to position Ann (now renamed Diana) at the center of a story of which she originally was not a part. But this resulted in opening sequences so laboriously expositional that after twenty minutes the film was in a hole so deep it had no hope of climbing out. Hawks and his actors seem so ill at ease in the early drawing-room and church scenes that these emerge as among the worst scenes he ever directed, and though the child actors were let go because they couldn’t get the hang of British accents, the professionals do no better. Hawks pushes the stylized, repressed line readings of The Dawn Patrol into the realm of parody, with Franchot Tone, cast as Crawford’s brother, Ronnie, almost never uttering a first-person pronoun and delivering stiff-upper-lip dialogue such as, “Glad. Been waiting,” and, to his sister, “Stout fella” and “Can’t help feelings.” This seems to rub off on almost everyone else, and rather hilariously led some observers to label Faulkner’s dialogue “Hemingwayesque.” Then there are the outrageous Crawford gowns by Adrian, one of which had an enormous pointed collar that Hawks said “stuck in everybody’s eye.” Perhaps topping all was the heavy irony that one of the best scenes in the picture, Bogard’s initial bombing raid, used a liberal amount of background airplane dogfight footage from Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels, the very film Hughes had accused Hawks of stealing from just two years earlier. As Variety sarcastically noted, on this film Hawks was only “in the air again by proxy.”

  The picture admittedly improves in its second half, which is where, not at all coincidentally, it converges most snugly with Faulkner’s original. But it must also be noted that, aside from the air battle, the only memorable scenes in the film, the two torpedo boat attacks, were actually shot by Hawks’s ever-reliable codirector, Richard Rosson. Despite the thematic familiarity of the final suicidal run, these scenes offered something visually new and were quite convincingly done, furthering Hawks’s reputation as an action director when, in fact, he never stepped off the Culver City lot during the shooting of this picture.

  Metro previewed Today We Live in Pasadena on March 16, 1933, at the then unheard-of length of 135 minutes. Although Variety gave it an upbeat advance review at the time, it was obvious that considerable footage had to come out. The film was cut to 110 minutes, still rather long, and William Faulkner traveled up to Memphis for the local premiere of the film on April 12 and saw his name on the screen for the first time. He never recorded what he thought, but his old interest in flying had been spurred by Hawks. Today We Live opened in New York on April 14 at the Capitol, and its big opening followed by a quick decline in business became the pattern around the country. The critical reception overall was lukewarm, with special ridicule reserved for Crawford and her costumes. The big winner on all counts was Franchot Tone, a stage actor in his first film. Tone was rightly singled out as the one actor in the cast who delivered the oddly clipped dialogue with authority. In real life, Tone also won the affections of Joan Crawford, who was married to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. at the time, and public interest in their romance was viewed as a possible boon to the film’s commercial chances. In the end, the film did just average business for an attraction with such big stars. Years later, Hawks acknowledged, “I thought some of it wasn’t bad,” but admitted that Crawford “had her limitations. She was a personality more than an actress, and there were things she just couldn’t do. How are you going to explain to these people that the addition of the biggest star in pictures is going to spoil your movie?”

  Despite the muddled results of their first collaboration, Hawks enjoyed working with F
aulkner so much that he was eager to continue their collaboration without interruption. Settled back in Oxford for the winter, Faulkner went to work on an adaptation of John McGavock Grider’s novel Diary of an Unknown Aviator. It developed into a highly personal effort intimately related to his fiction, possessing some of the same characters, concerns, themes, and complex narrative devices of his major novels. “War Birds” deals with the tarnished, corrupted nobility of several World War I veterans now living in America’s South and, during its war flashbacks, focuses on the fatalistic recklessness of the youthful soldiers as well as the erosion of the Old World aristocracy. Despite the strong echoes of The Dawn Patrol and even Today We Live, the script, which he delivered to Hawks in mid-January 1933, reads as the most thoroughly Faulknerian script the writer ever prepared, and it is probably his best. But the time-jumping narrative and complicated personal relationships were enough to make it uncongenial as material for the straightforward Hawks, so it is not surprising that he let it drop.

  Part of what may have put Hawks off of “War Birds,” were the “hillbilly” Southern characters Faulkner so often wrote about. With the prominent exception of Sergeant York, in his films set in the twentieth century, Hawks never gravitated to Southern or rural characters. “I got mad at him one day and told him I got so sick and tired of the goddamn inbred people he was writing about. I said, ‘Why don’t you write about some decent people, for goodness’ sake?’ ‘Like who?’ I said, ‘Well, you fly around, don’t you know some pilots or something that you can write about?’”