Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  With Barrymore reporting two hours late on the first day, filming began on February 22, 1934, with the scene of the telephone conversation between Oscar Jaffe and the detective, played by Edgar Kennedy. Lombard began work the next day with scenes in Lily Garland’s dressing room, and sound man Edward Bernds confirmed that the actress was entirely on top of her role from the moment she started shooting. “She was great from the first day,” he recalled. Given a tight twenty-one-day schedule, the film was made virtually in sequence, except for the theater scenes, which were bunched together early in the shoot. Hawks had selected Joseph August, the cinema-tographer of his first two pictures, The Road to Glory and Fig Leaves, to man the camera, and production rolled along just slightly behind until the third week, when the interplay of the rapid-fire drawing-room scenes between the two leads required so much rehearsal and refinement that filming fell five and a half days behind. But Hawks was trying something new, and everything depended upon the precise timing of the dialogue delivery, which made it “a completely high-pressure picture,” in Hawks’s view. “It isn’t done with cutting or anything. It’s done by deliberately writing dialogue like real conversation: you’re liable to interrupt me and I’m liable to interrupt you—so you write in such a way that you can overlap the dialogue but not lose anything. It’s just a trick. It’s also a trick getting people to do it—it takes about two or three days to get them accustomed to it and then they’re off. But you must allow for it in your dialogue with just the addition of a few little words in front. ‘Well, I think—’ is all you need, and then say what you have to say. You have to hear just the essential things. But if you don’t hear those in a scene, you’re lost. You have to tell the sound man what lines he must hear and he must let you know if he does. This also allows you to do throwaways—it keeps an actor from hitting a line too hard and it sounds much funnier.” Hawks eventually found that his actors sometimes spat out their dialogue so fast that even he didn’t understand it.

  Although Hawks said he lost one day of shooting because Barrymore was drunk, the star was generally a model of dedication and cooperation, offering to work two days for free to make up for his delinquency, knowing his lines, and helping the director plan the onstage sequences. Barrymore devised his own Kentucky Colonel disguise for the scene in which he sneaks onto the Twentieth Century and improvised the very funny bit in which, once safely inside his compartment, he elongates his nose putty and concludes by picking his nose. After the rocky beginning, Barrymore became Lombard’s biggest fan and supporter, giving her tips and rehearsing with her at length until Hawks was satisfied. After this high point, however, Barrymore’s Hollywood career went into a steep decline. On his next picture, Hat, Coat and Glove, RKO was forced to suspend production when the actor couldn’t remember his lines, and the deliberate self-caricature of Twentieth Century sadly degenerated into a general run of helpless self-parodies through the last seven years of his career. Hawks’s own comportment was reserved, as usual. “The word that comes to mind is austere,” said sound man Edward Bernds, who later became a director himself. “He didn’t go in for camaraderie with the crew. He didn’t even seem to be directing, he never seemed to have conferences with the actors. Hawks seemed to take a well-played scene for granted. He took it in stride. He expected it. For Hawks, every scene had to be perfect, he wanted it to be perfect from beginning to end.”

  Filming wrapped up with scenes in Lily’s apartment on Saturday, March 24, after twenty-seven days of shooting, six days over schedule. Two added scenes were shot in mid-April, and on May 3, Twentieth Century opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York. The critics were generally appreciative of the film’s sophistication, expert playing, and direction. But Variety’s prediction that the film was “probably too smart for general consumption” was born out by business so lackluster that the film lasted only one week at Radio City. As Hawks noted, “The public wasn’t ready for seeing two stars act like comedians the way those two did.”

  But resistance to the film then and now, regardless of its many sterling qualities, could also be due to several other factors that point to ways that Hawks’s overt comedies differ from his other films, in which humor and drama are deftly combined in a manner that is so much like life. One can easily imagine audiences at Radio City in 1934 being put off by the patented Hecht-MacArthur sexual cynicism, in which all exchanges of desire and love between men and women are charades and power plays. Of course, set within the broader context of the theater, the leading characters are constantly “performing” in order to get what they want, and much of the comedy derives from this very role-playing. But the insincerity of the characters can simultaneously prove offputting, since the story’s sympathy is clearly weighted entirely in favor of the brilliant thespians at the expense of the straight outsiders, who exist only to be buffaloed, bamboozled, and ridiculed, as is Lily’s boringly normal boyfriend (a dull Ralph Forbes).

  Hawks’s direction in Twentieth Century was often praised in the same breath in which it was called “frantic,” and the same could be said of his subsequent three outright comedies—Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and Ball of Fire. In the first three, particularly, Hawks pushed the pace to the breaking point, sometimes so far that it becomes more exhausting than funny. Twentieth Century and His Girl Friday, the two Hecht-MacArthur comedies, are also the only Hawks comedies not to feature shy, put-upon, often humiliated men; both of these have a powerful male figure who is officially the woman’s boss, but to whom the woman manages to successfully stand up. Without Hecht and MacArthur, the women have their way entirely with the hapless men in Hawks’s comedies.

  Hawks preferred making comedies to dramas, but he also felt that it was “suicide’ to announce to the audience that you are trying to be funny. Nor was Hawks interested in joke-derived humor, saying, “I can’t remember ever using a funny line in a picture.” For him, humor had to flow out of the characters and their attitude to what was going on around them.

  But probably the point where Hawks’s overt comedies and the rest of his work part ways most noticeably is in the style. Hawks’s films, dramatic or comedic, are always very stylized, hermetic, and self-contained. In his best films, all seriocomic, the fantasy world that existed in the director’s head was played out with a recognizable human and emotional balance that seems both natural and intensely poetic. But you don’t feel the filmmaker’s hand. The breathless comedies, even at their greatest, still fundamentally seem artificially engineered, utterly unnatural. Hawks was as clever, smart, and inventive as anyone else working in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, but of all the most expert comedy directors of that period—Lubitsch, Wilder, Sturges, McCarey, La Cava—Hawks was the only one whose fundamental instincts and personality were not comic. At the same time, Hawks made some comedies that can be ranked with the best made by anyone, whereas it’s impossible to imagine Lubitsch making The Big Sleep, Wilder directing Red River, Sturges tackling Sergeant York, McCarey or La Cava mastering the challenge of Scarface or Air Force. Without sending them up, of course.

  14

  Barbary Coast

  After completing the added scenes for Twentieth Century in April 1934, Hawks went fourteen months without shooting any film, the longest such period since his unwanted unemployment in 1929 after being fired from Fox. This time it was different, however. His marriage was stagnant, but because of Athole’s precarious mental condition, his concern for her, and his loyalty to the Shearer-Thalberg family, he felt constrained from doing anything about it. He was always open to little flings, but he knew that discovery of them could set Athole off into one of her deep depressions. Leading a bachelor’s life was easier for him in New York, where his activities couldn’t be monitored and keeping company with fellow carousers Hecht and MacArthur always guaranteed the presence of showgirls, aspiring actresses, and models. He spent whatever time he could there, and the five months—on and off—he was in New York, through the fall of 1934 and the following spring, represented the
longest stretch of time he was to spend outside Los Angeles until after World War II.

  This sabbatical was only possible, however, because of the collapse of a huge film project. After his quick, low-budget job for Columbia, Hawks started plotting his first true epic. Based on a 1926 historical novel by Blaise Cendrars, Sutter’s Gold had been one of the projects undertaken by Sergei Eisenstein at Paramount during his ill-fated Hollywood sojourn of 1930. Although Westerns and pioneer stories had cooled off as a genre since Cimarron won the Oscar in 1931, Hawks became very keen on making this expansive tale about the Gold Rush. Looking for a way to do so, he found a receptive ear at Universal, one of only two studios where he had never worked in any capacity (the other was RKO), and he made a lucrative deal for what was certain to be a costly picture. Setting up offices in his own bungalow on the San Fernando Valley lot, he hired a new secretary, a beautiful, slim, divorced twenty-eight-year-old Mississippian named Meta Doherty Carpenter, who would work with him as secretary, and then script girl, with interruptions, for the next twenty-five years. She was put in charge of arranging his files and moving them from studio to studio, helping Athole at home, paying bills, and driving Peter and David back and forth to their grandparents’ in Pasadena on weekends. To her distaste, she also became more involved with her boss’s extracurricular activities than she cared to, handling Hawks’s relations with any number of unsavory bookies, warding off the gambling-world types to whom Hawks owed money, and organizing the care and movements of Hawks’s racehorses.

  To work up a script on Sutter’s Gold, Hawks called again upon Faulkner. Having earned himself some novel-writing time after his months of hard labor at MGM, Faulkner had begun writing one of his most ambitious and demanding works, Absalom, Absalom! but had become stuck and was willing to return to Hollywood for what Hawks swore would be a brief stay. Faulkner spent a month in Hollywood beginning in late June, turning out a full 108-page scene treatment of Sutter’s Gold before returning to Oxford. This lengthy treatment was enormously detailed and so dramatically unwieldy as to be impossible to film. Faulkner continued to do some work on it after returning to Mississippi, but Hawks brought in John Barrymore’s close friend, the former newspaperman Gene Fowler, to help chisel it into a script. However, when Universal, one of the cheapest studios in town, announced that they weren’t prepared to spend more than $750,000 on the film, Hawks threw up his hands and walked away from it, knowing that such a logistically complex production would require a good deal more than that.

  With nothing immediately in the offing, Hawks readily accepted an urgent plea from Hecht and MacArthur that he come East to help guide them in their latest project: producing and directing their own films at Astoria Studios in Queens. Determined to show up the philistines in Hollywood by making high-quality and commercial pictures on which the writers, of all people, were in control, Hecht and MacArthur cut a deal to produce four pictures for Paramount. At the time, Walter Wanger was in charge of the studio’s Queens facilities, where many memorable early sound pictures—including the first Marx Brothers films and some Lubitsch classics—had been made but which were now less frequently used. Two men Hawks knew well, Scarface cameraman Lee Garmes and Arthur Rosson, had already signed up to help the writers with their dream undertaking, which was designed to demonstrate that good, professional-looking pictures could be made at much lower costs than the norm. To this end, Hecht and MacArthur took no fee for writing, producing, and directing in the expectation of receiving a healthy slice of profits, and stage actors were engaged for far less than Hollywood stars received. Their first production, Crime Without Passion, starring Claude Rains, was budgeted at only $150,000. Hawks had no artistic input on the film at all but was happy to help out his good friends and valued collaborators. “I came to New York and helped them get started. When they began to feel comfortable I got out of there and they finished it. I didn’t direct the picture, I just told them what I would do.” Their next collaboration would come sooner than they expected.

  Hawks had known Samuel Goldwyn for many years but never worked for him, rightly suspecting that Goldwyn was one of those producers, like Selznick and Thalberg, who so thoroughly dominated their productions that the director was more like a go-between. However, when Goldwyn offered him sixty thousand dollars, more than he had ever received to direct a film and more than double his last salary, on Twentieth Century, Hawks could scarcely refuse.

  Goldwyn had been trying to get a film called Barbary Coast off the ground for more than a year before Hawks became involved. In 1933, the producer had bought a book called The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld, published that year by Knopf and written by Herbert Asbury, the author of The Gangs of New York. Between June 1933 and October 1934, when Hawks signed on, Goldwyn spent nearly eighty thousand dollars having no fewer than eleven different synopses, outlines, treatments, original stories, and full scripts prepared by such estimable writers as Frances Marion, Marcus Goodrich, Joel Sayre, Kenyon Nicholson, Dwight Taylor, Nathanael West and Oliver H. P. Garrett. The assignment facing all of them, finding a strong approach to telling the story of San Francisco’s wild birth pangs during the Gold Rush of 1849, became a much greater challenge when, after Goldwyn bought the book, Will Hays introduced much stricter censorship and morality guidelines, severely limiting the licentiousness that could be presented in what needed to be a bawdy tale. The producer sent an early draft to Gloria Swanson to gauge her interest and at one point announced that the project would star Gary Cooper and Anna Sten. Goldwyn could think of no director who would have been more at home during those days than “Wild Bill” Wellman, so he was enlisted. He couldn’t figure out what to do with the project either, but he ended up earning $39,000 before he was replaced.

  By the time Hawks came aboard in October 1934, Goldwyn had signed Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea to long-term contracts and had decided to star them together in the picture. Hawks’s original notion was to pattern Barbary Coast after Sternberg’s Morocco, one of his favorite films and one of Jules Furthman’s best stories. That idea survives in the finished film mainly in the opening sequence, in which a mysterious blonde (Hopkins) arrives at night by boat in an exotic port and is treated solicitously by an older gentleman. Similarly, but only in general ways that resemble countless other stories as well, she takes up employment in a nightclub and must ultimately sacrifice the material wealth she enjoys as the mistress of an older man for the love of a handsome younger one. But with Furthman tied up at MGM on Mutiny on the Bounty, Hawks proceeded through the winter with writers Nat J. Ferber and Oliver H. P. Garrett, getting nowhere.

  By March, Hawks suspected that Hecht and MacArthur could be approached about writing the script. Except for a successful New York run, Crime Without Passion had flopped, as had their second Astoria effort, Once in a Blue Moon. With their third, The Scoundrel, starring Noël Coward, finished but not yet open, the pair were ready to help themselves to forty thousand dollars of Sam Goldwyn’s money, despite their lingering feeling of having been hoodwinked financially by the producer on The Unholy Garden. Even though Hawks’s presence was the deciding factor in their agreeing to do it, they weren’t above pulling a fast one on him, as Hawks realized when he had lunch with the writers’ agent, Leland Hayward, at the “21” Club shortly thereafter. Hayward went on and on about how he had just sold the same story by the writers for the third time until Hawks asked if the story was about a man named Chamalis. It was indeed, and Hawks knew he’d been had, turning him sour on a story he hadn’t been terribly fond of in the first place. “Every once in awhile they’d get into a story like this—a prostitute and a poet—and then they’d go kind of bad,” he theorized. “The poet quoted poetry, and Miriam Hopkins was the evil woman from the Barbary Coast, and it all got out of hand. But Goldwyn liked it. I didn’t, and I was stuck.”

  Nonetheless, comfortably away from the problems of home and with more young women available than he could possibly handle, Hawks stayed in New Y
ork for months, living in a suite at the Waldorf Towers while Meta Carpenter, whom he had brought along, stayed at the St. Moritz. Her living room became the place where weekdays, Hawks, Hecht, and MacArthur would work on the script, with MacArthur on the floor or the couch, Hecht up and down dictating, and Hawks, either reclining in a chair or walking around with his hands in his back pockets, interjecting and spinning off on the team’s ideas. “Howard would nod, say a few things, but was best at pointing them in the right direction,” Carpenter remembered. “He always had a good idea of where the story was headed.” Weekends were often spent in Nyack, where further script dictation would be intermingled with showfolk play, and Carpenter remembered one startling incident. The doorbell rang, and Hawks went to open the door. It turned out to be Tallulah Bankhead, and the moment she saw Hawks, she growled, “Damn you,” and hit Hawks hard on the head. There were six raised eyebrows in the room, but nobody asked any questions about what might have happened between Hawks and the notoriously promiscuous actress.