Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  As it happened, Faulkner had attended an air show and met some fliers and wing-walkers who intrigued him, and he’d centered his short story “Honor” around them. Early in 1933, Harry Behn wrote a treatment of it for MGM, and by March Faulkner had turned it into a screenplay, with dialogue contributions from Behn and, later, Jules Furthman. A tart look at a group of daredevil aerialists and their equally risky amorous flings, it is a wonderful script, permeated by the full-blown Hawksian code applied to professionals performing a dangerous job. The leading character, a wing-walker named Mildred Churchill, is exceedingly well drawn; her need for thrills, in her work as well as in her men, is strongly etched.

  There is more than a trace of Furthman in the script, particularly in the characters’ sexual gumption and the sense of compressed lifespans. One is left aching to see the film as directed by Hawks at his best (that is, not at MGM) with a terrific, sexy actress (Carole Lombard, perhaps Stanwyck) as the spunky Mildred. Regrettably, it was never made. Faulkner’s eventual novel based on the material, Pylon, published in 1935, has never been considered one of his major achievements. For Hawks, its central character of an alcoholic newspaperman who becomes intrigued with these danger-loving flyers stemmed from a time when Faulkner “got drunk when he went down to an air show to see what it was like. He had kind of a hazy idea of it.” The result, he felt, “wasn’t an awful good book” The film made of it twenty-five years later, The Tarnished Angels, is impressive in its own right but certainly lacks the juice and hopping hormones of the original script, no traces of which were used.

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  Viva Villa!

  One more, even racier project Hawks was considering in the wake of Today We Live was a potentially wild comedy called “Moll.” Late in 1932, Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler sent Hawks a twenty-five-page treatment of this goofy gangster-themed comedy about a gun moll hiding out in Normandy who marries an ingenuous fellow expatriate. At the close of the story, he insists that she needn’t have concealed her past. “You shouldn’t have worried about my being upset about a gun-moll,” he declares. “I don’t want to brag but I killed about a hundred people in the war!” The story is casually amoral at the very least and written complete with nude scenes on the beach.

  Unsurprisingly, “Moll” was never made, but it did put Hawks back in touch with Hecht at a time when high drama was enveloping MGM. In December, Thalberg suffered his first heart attack. At the same time, David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law, quit his top production job at RKO, after a string of successful pictures, because of disputes over his forthcoming production slate. Baldly taking advantage of Thalberg’s illness to reduce the younger man’s power and consolidate his own, Mayer offered Selznick his own production unit at MGM, and Selznick installed himself at the studio on February 5, 1933, just after Thalberg had embarked on a long recuperative trip to Europe.

  Among the first projects Selznick took on was one about the Mexican peasant revolutionary Pancho Villa. Officially but loosely based on the book Viva Villa: A Recovery of the Real Pancho Villa—Peon … Bandit … Soldier … Patriot, by Edgcumb Pinchon and O. B. Stade, the picture was at one point envisioned as a two-part epic encompassing Villa’s rise and fall, until the executives realized that his nearly decade-long “fall” had been staggeringly dull and anticlimactic. Upon joining MGM, Selznick called Hecht to Culver City to do a major rewrite on the Garbo picture Queen Christina, then teamed him with playwright Edgar Selwyn on the comedy Turn Back the Clock, which starred Lee Tracy. The prodigiously prolific writer skipped over to Paramount to write Design for Living for Ernst Lubitsch, completely rewriting Noël Coward in the process, before returning for what was to have been a short stay in New York. However, while his wife, Rose, and Selznick were waiting for him in Los Angeles, Hecht became involved with another woman and in July impulsively left on a lengthy trip to South America with her and the future writer Ian McLellan Hunter, turning up at MGM only in late August, a month after Thalberg had returned from Europe. Even at that, Selznick put Hecht on a couple of other quick jobs before turning him loose on Viva Villa!

  During this period, Hawks was weighing his next project, deciding against the two Faulkner World War I stories, nominally filling in for Thalberg by reading material, digging his financial hole considerably deeper by betting ever-larger sums on horses, and supervising the construction of his new home in Benedict Canyon. It was around this time as well that he had his one-night stand with Jean Harlow, an event that didn’t do his reputation any good with Vic Fleming or the many others around MGM who heard about it. Hawks always maintained that Harlow’s problem was that she was always being bothered by crude, vulgar men. Therefore, she was particularly responsive when a man was nice and considerate with her, an insight he said he used to his advantage. According to his version, Hawks bided his time, becoming friendly with the actress so that she’d feel comfortable with him before he jumped her. He made it sound like a clever conquest, at a time in between the suicide of her husband, Paul Bern, and her marriage to cinematographer Harold Rosson, both of whom were good friends and former collaborators of Hawks’s.

  John Lee Mahin, who wrote Red Dust and Bombshell for the star, told the story rather differently. “I was good friends with Jean by the time Howard turned up at Metro. She used to see him around the lot but didn’t know him, and she asked me, ‘Who’s that good-looking man?’ ‘Oh, that’s Howard Hawks.’ ‘Oh, really, do you know him?’ I said, ‘Sure, I know him pretty well. Why, are you interested?’ She said she’d been in mourning for her husband for, I don’t know how long, three months or six months or some such, and she was beginning to get a little itch. So I arranged to bring him around on a Saturday afternoon. We swam and played and had a few drinks, and it seemed like they were getting along pretty well, so after awhile I made a discreet exit. On Monday morning it was pouring rain. I was just parking my car on the lot and I saw Jean holding an umbrella and stomping through the puddles. So I rolled down my window and yelled out, ‘Hey, Jean, how did it go with Howard?’ She just kept stomping ahead, turned and looked at me, squeezed her nose with her fingers and made the most awful face. I understood he made pretty quick work of it.”

  With Thalberg convalescing and Mayer’s son-in-law rising at the studio, Hawks was suddenly answerable to two of his least favorite people, Louis B. Mayer and David O. Selznick. The latter, however, worked to patch things up by admitting that he had made a mistake in assessing Hawks’s talents three years earlier when he tried to steal The Dawn Patrol from him, and decided to make it up by offering him Viva Villa! to direct. From a producer’s point of view, it was a shrewd move, reuniting two of the makers of Scarface on a project centered on another brash, sometimes childlike, but powerful figure of recent history. Biography was something Hawks had never before tried (and would only do so once again, with Sergeant York), but the prospect of tackling it with Hecht was too tantalizing to pass up. Another plus was that shooting in Mexico would mean that the always-vigilant Selznick would at least be nineteen hundred miles away, so Hawks considered it a good bet that he would be able to operate largely unsupervised, unlike all of his experiences at MGM thus far.

  Selznick offered Hecht ten thousand dollars to write the script, with the lure of a five-thousand-dollar bonus if he finished it within fifteen days. Hecht readily agreed, anxious to further his reputation as the quickest writer in screendom. Mayer was less sanguine about the deal but was placated by a memo from Selznick: “I do not think we should take into consideration the fact that we are paying him a seemingly large amount of money for two weeks’ work … as this would be merely penalizing him for doing what would take a lesser man at least six or eight weeks, with infinitely poorer results.”

  Pancho Villa was, and remains, an equivocal historical figure, a man of the people who fought a corrupt dictatorship on behalf of the dispossessed but was also a dissolute, unreliable drunkard who constantly cheated on his wife, could not solidify his gains and led an ill-advised attack on the Uni
ted States in 1915 (something not mentioned in the film). What Villa stories Hecht knew mostly came from Charles MacArthur, who had been part of the American Expeditionary Forces that pursued Villa down through Mexico after his assault on New Mexico. Hecht also brought aboard Wallace Smith, who had ridden with Villa and covered him for the Hearst papers, as a consultant.

  Selznick was intent upon obtaining official approval of the script from Mexican authorities before shooting, both to pave the way for location work and to generate favorable publicity. The problem was that there were at least three powerful politicians whose consent was critical: Plutarco Elías Calles, who had fought against Villa and was interested in a movie that showed the rebel as a spineless fool; President Abelardo Rodríguez, of course; and Army General and Michoacán state governor Lázaro Cárdenas, who looked as though he would unseat Rodríguez in the forthcoming election, which would take place while the film was in production. Selznick instructed Hecht to revise the script with an eye toward pleasing (or at least not offending) friend and foe alike, and Joe Schenck acted as an official intermediary. In addition, film star Ramon Novarro’s brother, Carlos Samaniegos, who had connections to the Mexican political elite, personally took the revised script to Mexico City, where it was approved by all three key figures. Villa’s widow, brought to Hollywood by Selznick, even came onboard, although the script made no bones about Villa’s constantly roving eye and the fact that “he gets married all the time.” What MGM might have had to pay out to obtain all this cooperation is not recorded.

  The challenge of avoiding any ruffled feathers on both sides of the border led Hecht to a sort of ahistorical approach to Villa’s career as seen through the eyes of a drunken American newspaperman whose dispatches about ongoing events in Mexico may or not be reliable. It was a view of history as seen and shaped by the media, as well as a glamorization and magnification of the journalist’s role in world affairs (and of American influence on internal Mexican politics). Villa is made to fight one battle simply because the journalist has, on a drunk, already reported that it had taken place. That Villa’s buffoonish aspect would be emphasized was guaranteed by the casting of Wallace Beery, while Lee Tracy was an ideal choice as the tough-talking scribe Johnny Sykes, who could match Villa drink for drink.

  Utterly unconcerned with factual integrity or the actual politics of the period, Hawks saw Viva Villa! as an opportunity to make a rugged, boisterous adventure with the sort of irreverent, bizarre scenes rarely seen in a historical piece. Hawks left Los Angeles on September 25, 1933, and in Mexico City worked further with Hecht on refining the script. What tickled Hawks’s fancy were blackly comic scenes that underlined the absurd and emphasized the startlingly incongruous. He and Hecht wanted to introduce Villa cutting down dead bodies from a scaffold. As Hawks described it, “And we dissolve, and he’s talking with the mayor of a town and he says, ‘Speak louder, they don’t hear so good.’ And all the dead forms were up in a jury box and he was trying the man who sentenced them to death.” A variation on this scene remains in the picture, although a similar scene he cherished went unfilmed, depicting female army camp followers scouring a battlefield to find their slaughtered men, then propping them up against trees, drinks and cigarettes in hand, in order to spend one last evening with them. Villa’s memorable death scene began as another such sequence, but was highly modified and sentimentalized in the final version. After being shot and mortally wounded, Villa is joined by Johnny, the reporter, and he slowly dies with his head resting on a side of meat outside a butcher shop. “Villa said to him, ‘Johnny, I’ve been reading about what great men said when they died. What am I going to say, Johnny?’ And Johnny says, ‘I’ll think of something.’ Villa says, ‘No, I want to hear it now, Johnny.’ So Johnny went into a spiel about a great man shot and dying, faithful followers coming from far and near. The last thing he says is, ‘Forgive me, my Mexico! If I have harmed you it was because I loved you.’” At that, Villa says, “‘That’s pretty good, Johnny. That’s pretty good. Look, don’t tell my wife that I was buying pork chops for Rosita, will you?’ And he died with that.” In the reshot version (not directed by Hawks) Johnny tells him how all the peons will gather to sing “La Cucaracha”; then Villa delivers the final line, “Johnny, what I done wrong?,” and the film ends with a close-up of the medal he received for his achievements.

  The scene Hecht originally wrote could even have been inspired by some extramarital shenanigans he was pulling at the very moment of the writing. In Mexico City, Hecht had shacked up again with his companion from the South American trip. Suddenly, however, Hecht’s wife, Rose, showed up unannounced and the panicked writer turned to Hawks for advice. “I said, ‘You’d better be perfectly honest. Be a reporter and tell her the story of her husband who’s down here with another woman and what’s she going to do about it?’ And he did and by God he got away with it. Rose said plenty to him, I don’t think she liked it a bit, but God knows she must have known what he was. I think Ben amused me most when he got into a real bind. He enjoyed being the brunt of trouble, it kept him very busy thinking how to get out of it.”

  Harold Rosson was originally set to photograph Viva Villa!, but with his marriage to Jean Harlow in the works (they would elope on October 20), he pulled out and was replaced by James Wong Howe. Mostly in Howe’s company, Hawks took little plane trips far into rural and mountainous areas looking for locations. Although he never specified it, it seems certain that it was during these jaunts that Hawks met some of the expatriates and maverick fliers who helped inspire his story for Only Angels Have Wings.

  The actual shooting of Viva Villa! was wild and woolly from start to finish. Very few Hollywood films had undertaken prolonged, full-scale, first-unit location expeditions to foreign lands prior to this. Even if California was only a few hours away, the company was still worlds apart in the hinterlands of Mexico. Posted two hundred miles outside of Mexico City with nothing to eat, the crew subsisted on oranges and brandy. Fed up with the lack of amenities and diversions, Wallace Beery rented a plane and regularly flew up to El Paso for good times, while Lee Tracy boozed even more heavily than usual. Hawks had run-ins with “gangsters,” tough guys who knew he’d made Scarface and were intent upon showing him how they killed people in Mexico. The crew was large and some scenes required hundreds of extras, which included both army regulars and peons. “There were people shot every day when we were making the movie,” Hawks testified. “It was crazy in those days.”

  Hawks may even have inadvertently killed a man himself. At one location, “a fellow came out and shoved a gun at me and started to yell something. I just turned and hit him, and he went over and hit on his head on the railroad track. I never heard whether he died, or what happened. I said, ‘What the hell was he yelling?’ They told me that he said, ‘This is for the revolution!’” Another man supposedly “blew his brains out” in front of everyone. Hawks’s bemused comment on all this turmoil was simply, “It was nutty.”

  All this was nothing, however, compared to the international incident perpetrated by Lee Tracy on Sunday, November 19, the anniversary of the revolution. The Mexican part of the shoot had just been completed; Hawks claimed, in an outright lie, that he had left by then for Los Angeles and that when his train arrived at the border he was besieged by reporters quizzing him about an event he knew nothing about.

  Tracy’s outrageous behavior has been reported in many ways, and never so bluntly as by Hawks. He said that even though he had placed Tracy in the hands of a Mexican major to make sure he didn’t get in any trouble, the high-strung actor got drunk anyway and, from his hotel balcony, “peed on the Chapultepec Cadets during the Independence Day parade in Mexico City and got put in the can.”

  U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Josephus Daniels reported more fully to the State Department:

  Tracy appeared on a balcony of the Hotel Regis, unclad and using very profane and insulting language at the moment when the military cadets marching in the parade of November 19th were pass
ing in front of the hotel. He was immediately arrested and … was released at 1:00 o’clock on the morning of the November 20th and left the capital by plane at 6:00 A.M. that day. His arrival at El Paso, Texas, was reported in press dispatches from there the following day, November 21st.

  From November 22nd to November 24th the Mexico City press gave considerable publicity to the Tracy incident, as well as to the filming of the picture, Viva Villa! On November 23rd prominence was given to a telegram which Mr. Louis B. Mayer sent to President Rodríguez apologizing for the conduct of Lee Tracy and announcing his dismissal and the cancellation of his contract with the company.

  Prior to the arrest of Lee Tracy, considerable newspaper publicity had been given to alleged complaints against the filming of the picture Viva Villa!, which was said to picture the former revolutionary leader of Mexico, General Francisco Villa, in a manner defamatory to Mexico.

  There was no mention of urination in the ambassador’s summary, nor was there in a more detailed account prepared by the embassy’s third secretary, John Aguirre. Frantic skirmishing was necessary on the part of embassy officials and MGM representatives to prevent Tracy from being fined and deported, which is what the Mexican government wanted to do; in fact, officials held the train to Juárez for twenty minutes on the night of the 19th, with the intention of putting him on it. On the 20th, Hawks, who in his own memory of events had left before any of this started, arrived at the U.S. Embassy for a meeting, at which he requested that the consulate general handle the case from here on, which was done. After much bowing and scraping by MGM; Wallace Beery, who offered to make a public apology; and Ramon Novarro’s well-placed brother, Tracy was allowed to leave, only to be fired from the picture and banished from MGM forever by a furious Louis B. Mayer. Tracy, whose star had risen so quickly in Hollywood over the past four years, continued acting in films for several more years but increasingly turned back to the Broadway stage. He never worked for MGM again.