Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Tracy, of course, tried to put a good face on things, telling reporters back in Los Angeles, “After some strenuous weeks making Viva Villa!, I was just relaxing—feeling high. I had my pajamas and a bathrobe on. I was in my own hotel room—not on a balcony. Somebody yelled—I yelled back, in the customary Tracy manner. There didn’t seem to be anything vulgar nor offensive.”

  He added that there were three other members of the Viva Villa! company with him at the window, and they all started cheering when the parade went by. “Somebody shouted back at us. Well, you know how those things are. We shouted back at ’em—’Go to______, ha hah!’ or something like that. Anyway, it was all a big joke with us.”

  When Hawks got back to Los Angeles on November 22, he was immediately called on the carpet by Mayer, who insisted that the director state publicly that Tracy had been impossible to control. What happened next depends on whom you want to believe. The most extreme, and unbelievable, version—Hawks’s, of course—is that the director grabbed Mayer, pushed him up against a wall, told him “to go to hell” and quit. The always well-informed John Lee Mahin contrarily claimed that Mayer, upset that the film was going slowly and that retakes would push the budget well over one million dollars, fired Hawks to cut his losses. Whether he quit or was fired, the fact is that Hawks remained on the lot for some time after departing Viva Villa!, which would not have happened if he had manhandled Mayer. Having deduced some time ago that his future didn’t lie at MGM but tied down by a long contract, Hawks decided to transform this apparent setback into an opportunity to escape. Hawks informed studio vice president Eddie Mannix that Mayer “rubs me the wrong way” and that he wouldn’t work for him anymore. Then, Hawks said, he stayed in his office for ten weeks, writing useless material he knew the studio would reject, until they finally agreed to let him go.

  As for Viva Villa!, Hawks naturally said that when he departed, “they had everybody call me to go back and I wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘I don’t want any more of ’em.’” When his old friend Jack Conway was assigned to replace him, Hawks claimed, Conway “would call me up and say, ‘What do I do about this?’ and I’d tell him the best I could on the telephone.” Conway received solo directorial credit. For his part, Beery piloted his own plane home, refused to answer questions about what had happened, and demanded a hefty bonus for having to replay his scenes with the new actor cast in Tracy’s role, Stuart Erwin. Mona Maris, who had been playing an aristocrat who takes a fancy to Villa, only to be brutalized by him, was summarily dismissed and replaced by Fay Wray, and Selznick badgered Ben Hecht, now back in Nyack, into extensive rewriting of the film’s second half to cut the reporter’s importance way back. The remaining scenes were shot in the mountains outside of Los Angeles and on the Culver City lot. In the finished film, what Hawks and Howe shot in Mexico is pretty easy to spot: the clearly location-made opening scene of the child Pancho watching his father being whipped to death for speaking out against injustice, the enormous crowd scenes, the impassive but noble peasant faces, the many shots of riders moving against stunning backdrops all have a starkness and brute strength missing in the softer, sculpted images Charles G. Clarke created for Conway. Some scenes, notably Villa’s farewell speech to his people midway through, intercut between Conway and Hawks, with the former’s interior close-ups of Beery appearing utterly isolated from the seeming thousands of cheering, rifle-toting men earlier captured by the latter. But there is less of Hawks and Howe than there might have been due to a highly suspicious accident at El Paso in which a plane carrying twenty thousand feet of negatives crashed and burned after the pilot bailed out.

  Although it was nominated for best picture and best screenplay Oscars in 1934, Viva Villa! ultimately emerged as something closer to a cartoon biography than a subversively funny look at early-twentieth-century mythmaking, as Hawks and Hecht had intended. “It really could have been one hell of a picture,” Hawks believed. “I tried to make a strange man, humorous but vicious, out of Villa, as he was in real life, but Conway’s version had Wallace Beery playing Santa Claus.” Although the film proved to be a reasonably popular attraction, it just barely broke even because of its bloated budget.

  “I knew it never was going to work out,” Hawks said of his stint at MGM. As should have been obvious from the start, the MGM way of making movies—of preparing stories and scenarios and casts before assigning directors, then shuffling them around and reshooting extensively, often using other directors, and all of this orchestrated from above by Mayer, Thalberg, and now Selznick—was utterly antithetical to Hawks’s methods; Hawks later said, “I was glad to get out of that goddam place.”

  13

  Screwball: Twentieth Century

  After his exasperating year and a half at MGM, Hawks knew he needed a fresh start, and Twentieth Century marked the beginning of several things for Hawks, all of them very significant for his career. Since sound came in, he had directed six dramas—some heavier than others, all more brutal and harsh than the norm, with gangsters, prisoners, heavy drinkers, doomed soldiers, reckless racers, and desperate fishermen as their subjects. With the exception of a grafted-on Joan Crawford, women had not been central to these films, and while Ann Dvorak and Zita Johann had offered characterizations that were not without interest, it couldn’t be said that Hawks showed any particular touch with actresses or female characters up to this time.

  Nor had he done an outright dialogue comedy. All of Hawks’s experience had taught him the value of injecting humor where it might least be expected, but only in Fig Leaves in 1926 had he played a picture strictly for laughs. But with Twentieth Century, Hawks would help introduce what became known as a new genre to the screen—the screwball comedy, in which attractive players, one of them a major star, horsed around and bounced off one another in a manner normally expected only of comedians or supporting types. Before this, as Hawks explained it, “they didn’t have leading men and leading women make damn fools of themselves like they did in that picture.” What’s more, the film set a new standard in pacing comedy with its freewheeling approach and overlapping dialogue. The film version of The Front Page may have featured equally quick pronunciation of words, but Hawks always claimed that Milestone’s direction created a “false” sense of speed through its cutting rather than the exchange of dialogue. Many of the early 1930s Warner Bros. pictures also featured some pretty fast talking, but much of that derived from the individual, wise-guy styles of specific actors, notably James Cagney and Lee Tracy.

  By leaving MGM for lowly Columbia, Hawks also reasserted the importance of his independence. Although it is not true, as he later claimed, that he never signed long-term contracts with any studios, it is significant that at a time when most of his friends were forging important studio affiliations that guaranteed work and steady money, Hawks deliberately chose the nonaligned route so that he could keep his options open regarding material, actors, and control of his movements. After what had happened at MGM and, to a lesser extent, Warner Bros. and Fox, Hawks was determined to take charge of his career himself, to be beholden to the studio bosses as little as possible. After 1933, Hawks did not again make two films in a row for the same company until 1939–40, when he was able to call his own shots at Columbia on Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday. Despite the fact that the mid-1930s did not result in Hawks’s very best work, they were of vast importance in carving out his reputation, and bolstering his self-image, as an independent operator who would work on his own terms or not at all.

  Hawks made running off to film Twentieth Century sound like the easiest thing in the world, and it was true that “everything that had to go right went right.” The trick Hawks had up his sleeve after he lost Viva Villa! was the idea of making Twentieth Century practically overnight. Making himself look smarter than anyone else, as usual, Hawks loved telling the story of how he finagled five thousand dollars and ten weeks of vacation pay out of his pal Eddie Mannix when he left MGM, and at the end of that time invited Mannix to a preview
. “He said, ‘Of what?’ and I said, ‘A picture I’ve made since I left you.’ And when he saw the picture, he said, ‘Do you mean to say that you made that in the ten weeks while we were paying you $5,000 for a vacation?!’ and I said, ‘Yes.’” If true, this would have helped Hawks justify taking such a low salary for Twentieth Century, as he agreed to make it for just $25,000, or half of what he was making a few pictures back. It was one of the rare pictures on which the screenwriters made significantly more than the director; Hecht and MacArthur sold the play to Columbia for $25,000 and received another $14,525 for their adaptation.

  As a friend of Hecht and MacArthur’s, Hawks had attended a performance of Twentieth Century during its monthlong run at the El Capitan in Los Angeles in June and July 1933. By the time Viva Villa! was pulled out from under him, Harry Cohn had already unsuccessfully tried to recruit Rouben Mamoulian and, subsequently, William Wyler to direct a film version of the play. He then turned to the suddenly available Hawks, telling the director he had the job provided he could both make it cheaply and secure John Barrymore for the leading role of the overbearing theatrical producer. The Christmas holidays were approaching, but Hawks, intent upon showing up MGM and getting the film done in no time, made plans to leave for New York almost at once to work with Hecht and MacArthur.

  Adapting the play wasn’t just a simple matter of opening it up and inventing some new locations for the action (almost the entire play takes place during a sixteen-hour train trip). The work had its origins in a play called The Napoleon of Broadway written by a press agent named Charles Bruce Milholland and inspired by his former boss, the lordly theatrical producer Morris Gest. Milholland gave his manuscript to another Broadway titan, Jed Harris, who identified with the leading character but felt it wasn’t a professional play. For a price, he convinced Milholland to let him give it to Hecht and MacArthur, from whom Harris wanted another play. Within three weeks, the speedy team delivered the first two acts to Harris, who could now see that the character of Oscar Jaffe was based on Gest, David Belasco, and, naturally enough, him.

  Hecht and MacArthur had trouble getting around to the third act, however. After a long gestation period, interrupted by numerous screenwriting assignments, including Scarface, Twentieth Century opened on Broadway on December 29, 1932, to strong notices and a respectable run.

  When Hawks decided to undertake the film, he went to Gregory Ratoff, who had played Oscar Jaffe in the Los Angeles run, for advice concerning potential changes and improvements. He came away convinced that the woman’s part should be changed from an imperious grande dame to “Sadie Glutz” from Third Avenue. Hawks admitted that having no theatrical background—indeed, never even having been backstage—he was not particularly the most knowledgeable director for such a piece. He conceded, “If it hadn’t been for Gregory Ratoff’s help, I wouldn’t have realized what things could be played around with or worked on.”

  Having received the playwrights’ approval for the character change over the phone, Hawks boarded a train for New York, carrying with him a special parcel. In Mexico City that fall, Hecht had ordered six custom-made miniature wax tableaux by special artisans, but they were just now ready. Hawks had brought them over the border, and a couple of months later he finally presented the suitcase to Hecht in Nyack. “He opened it and there were six boxes of little wax statues that were the dirtiest things I’d ever seen in my life—a mother going down on her son, things like that,” said Hawks. “They were really horrible but they were fabulously done by this erotic, crazy family down there who were great artists. Well, I was going to kill him. I got cold perspiration thinking about what could have happened if I’d got caught with those things.… Ben was always up to some crazy thing like that.” Hecht had special shelves built in his library to show off his acquisitions, to the assorted delight and dismay of his visitors.

  Hawks spent full days working with the writers, staying on top of them to ensure that the work got done and loving every minute of it. Often in the presence of the young theatrical producer Billy Rose, who was trying to initiate his own collaboration with Hecht and MacArthur, the three men batted around dialogue ideas and completely rewrote the woman’s character, who became Lily Garland, née Mildred Plotka. At Hawks’s insistence, they also significantly altered the structure. In the play, from the outset Oscar and Lily are seen going head-to-head in the train. For the film, Hawks requested a prologue that would reveal the essentials of the pair’s relationship, showing their initial Svengali-Trilby phase as Oscar transforms her into a star, the nature of their love affair, and her eventual flight to Hollywood to escape Jaffe’s ragings and possessive control. This prologue ended up lasting a half hour, boiling the substance of the original play to a mere hour on film, resulting in a thoroughly overhauled work that Hawks felt “had a whole lot more to it than the play.”

  The director kept pushing the writers beyond the point where they might have gone on their own. “I remember when we’d finished the script, they figured we were all done,” said Hawks. “I said, ‘Now we start on new, different ways of saying the same thing.’ We had more fun for three days just twisting things around. I asked them, ‘How do you say this—“Oh, you’re just in love”?’ Ben came up with ‘You’ve broken out in monkey bites,’” (not realizing he had already used the line in A Girl in Every Port). The general pattern was for the men to sit around swapping lines, with Billy Rose, a former world champion in a shorthand competition, scribbling them down and a secretary typing them up at night. When they got a good idea locked in, Hecht would disappear to write it while Hawks and MacArthur played backgammon. “They taught me how to play. We would work for two hours and play backgammon for an hour. I started winning from them so they got together and decided that when I was their partner they’d lose so that I would always be on the losing end of it. They were so gleeful about this, but I saw what they were doing. If I threw a six and a three and I wanted a six and a four, I’d move it six and four. They never noticed. I won about $40,000 in IOUs from them and they never knew why the hell they were losing.”

  Before he left Nyack, Hawks helped his friends get their project with Billy Rose off the ground. Rose was determined to stand Broadway on its ear by producing a giant spectacle the likes of which had never been seen. Supposedly, it was Hawks who suggested that the most impressive backdrop for such a show would be a circus, while MacArthur offered that the world’s most dramatic plot was Romeo and Juliet. Voilà, Rose’s extravaganza would pit two rival circus families against one another, and Jumbo, which would finally open at the old Hippodrome in 1935, was born.

  With a solid first draft in hand, Hawks returned home, where his critical challenge was convincing John Barrymore to play the part. The matinee idol of the 1920s and the most famous Hamlet of his generation, Barrymore had already begun his descent into broad self-caricature and erratic, alcoholic behavior. He wasn’t a major box-office name but he was still a star, the key to Harry Cohn’s desire to make the picture. Barrymore had had a tempestuous affair with Mary Astor shortly before she married Howard’s brother Kenneth, but Hawks had never met the actor before heading up to his imposing mansion to tell him about the story and the role. As Hawks related it, when the actor asked why Hawks wanted him for the part, Hawks said, “It’s the story of the biggest ham on earth and you’re the biggest ham I know.” Barrymore accepted at once and considered it “a role that comes once in a lifetime,” deeming the film his favorite of the sixty-odd pictures in which he appeared.

  Carole Lombard, who was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, not far from Goshen, was Howard Hawks’s second cousin. But even though she had moved to California at age six and worked for Allan Dwan in 1921, when he and Hawks were close, Hawks had never seen much of her, and he suspected, on the basis of her lackluster screen credits to date, that she was probably a bad actress. However, much as had happened with Ann Dvorak, Hawks saw Lombard “at a party with a couple of drinks in her and she was hilarious and uninhibited and just what the part ne
eded.” It is with Lombard that Hawks truly began “discovering” young actresses, shaping their screen personalities and fashioning what became known as “the Hawksian woman,” an independent type with a mind of her own who would stand up to men and was not content “to sit around and wash dishes.” Appropriately enough, Hawks’s career as a Svengali commenced on a picture depicting the very same sort of relationship between a dominant man and a woman he remakes into a star. Just as significantly, it was the first time Hawks dared to pit a virtual beginner against an accomplished veteran in two equal leading roles; just as it would in later years, with Bogart and Bacall, and Wayne and Clift, Hawks’s gamble paid off. It is a tribute to his directorial control and brilliance with actors that he could simultaneously handle the chore of keeping John Barrymore in line, which many directors were unable to do, and help Carole Lombard find the key to liberate her own personality on the screen, clinching her career from then on.

  Still, there was a problem: the twenty-five-year-old former Mack Sennett bathing beauty was petrified at the prospect of acting opposite the screen’s aging Lothario, not to mention carrying a picture with him. Fortunately, the problem was confronted head on and solved on the first day of rehearsals. Hawks often asserted that his famous private bit of direction to Lombard regarding how she should handle Barrymore took place on the first day of shooting, but the celebrating “kicking” scene in the train was not actually filmed until the third week of production, by which time Lombard was very much in the groove of her performance. In rehearsal, however, in a precise reflection of the predicament of her character, Lombard was initially very stiff, “emoting all over the place. She was trying very hard and it was just dreadful,” explained Hawks. Barrymore was patient with her but at one point “began to hold his nose.” Becoming concerned, Hawks asked the actress to take a walk with him. “I asked her how much money she was getting for the picture. She told me and I said, ‘What would you say if I told you you’d earned your whole salary this morning and didn’t have to act anymore?’ And she was stunned. So I said, ‘Now forget about the scene. What would you do if someone said such and such to you?’ And she said, ‘I’d kick him in the balls.’ And I said, ‘Well, he said something like that to you—why don’t you kick him?’ She said, ‘Are you kidding?’ And I said, ‘No.’” Hawks’s parting remark was, “Now we’re going back in and make this scene and you kick, and you do any damn thing that comes into your mind that’s natural, and quit acting. If you don’t quit, I’m going to fire you this afternoon.” The direction worked, and Lombard’s natural spirited quality came through unchecked in her performance. Hawks claimed, “She never began a picture after that without sending me a telegram that said, ‘I’m gonna start kicking him.’”