Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Hawks’s enlistment for The Road to Glory kept the director working at an incredible pace, which, in addition to helping him cover his expenses and debts, kept him out of the house and at a distance from his problems with Athole. By late 1935, Athole was pregnant again, with the child expected the following May. Without a pause, Hawks went straight from Warner Bros. in late November to the Westwood lot, where he began sketching out a story for the war film with Joel Sayre, a young writer known for the college novel Ricketay-Rax. Just as they were starting, Hawks heard the horrible news from Mississippi: Faulkner’s brother Dean had been killed while giving a flying lesson in the Waco aircraft Bill had sold him. Better than anyone, Hawks knew how this tragedy would affect his friend, having lived through the same thing five years before. Like Hawks, Faulkner had to identify the body, but he then went much further than that, working with the mortician all night in an attempt to make Dean’s horribly disfigured face presentable for the sake of the widow.

  On top of that, in early December Faulkner’s financially strapped publishers were obliged to call in a loan they had made to him. The novelist was deeply into work on Absalom, Absalom! at that point, but his bank account was now depleted, forcing him to look again to Hollywood for some quick earnings. Although Zanuck was less than enthusiastic about hiring Faulkner, about whom the legends of epic drinking and preference for working “at home” were already growing, Hawks enjoyed sufficient sway to get his friend hired at a thousand dollars a week, on condition that he work with Sayre. This was fine with both Hawks and Faulkner, and the writer reported to the studio on December 16.

  Although Faulkner would work closely with Hawks on this picture just as he had at MGM, this was not a “Howard Hawks production,” as most of his previous pictures had been. Zanuck’s designated associate producer on The Road to Glory was the elegant, well-educated Georgian Nunnally Johnson, a former journalist primarily known as a screenwriter. He and Faulkner hit it off immediately; they shared a pint at their first meeting, at which Faulkner poured out the story of his brother’s death, then proceeded to get plastered together that night. Faulkner also got on well with the gregarious Sayre.

  For the sake of his friend’s continued employability more than that of the picture, Hawks admonished Faulkner not to go on one of his drunks until the script was finished. But still having nightmares about his brother’s plane crash, bedeviled by the as-yet-unfinished Absalom, Absalom!, and frustrated by his domestic situation back in Oxford, Faulkner couldn’t help himself. He was also stunned and unnerved by the woman he met in Hawks’s outer office when he reported for work. Although Meta Carpenter had begun working as Hawks’s secretary on Sutter’s Gold, she had started after Faulkner had finished his own work on the project and so met him for the first time now. A lovely, intelligent honey blonde with a sweet Mississippi accent that made Faulkner feel right at home, she was impressed by the writer, who was cordial with her. Two days later, however, he turned up in the office drunk and badgering her to have dinner with him. Panicked, she retreated into Hawks’s inner sanctum and begged her boss to inform his friend that she, as a well-raised southern girl, had no intention of going out with a married man.

  Although Faulkner was back on good behavior while he and Carpenter worked together—she trying to decipher his tiny handwriting in order to type his script pages—he continued to invite her to dinner. Even after she finally accepted and began seeing him every night, his courtship remained slow and cautious. Well before they actually started a physical affair, Faulkner intuitively sensed that Carpenter, who had been raised just fifty-five miles from Oxford, offered the promise of an emotional outlet for him, a salvation from the oppressiveness of his life while in Hollywood, and later a way for him to express his pent-up passion after two years of not sleeping with his wife.

  Hawks, who was always very correct with his attractive secretary, watched all this from a bemused distance, even though the affair involved two of the people most closely involved in his daily life. It certainly didn’t hurt Faulkner’s productivity, as he turned out as many as thirty-five script pages a day when five was considered the industry norm. Working right through to New Year’s Eve, Faulkner and Sayre delivered a 170-page first-draft screenplay. Drawing on the Verdun veteran Hawks had met years before, the script opened with Captain Paul Laroche keeping company with the lovely nurse Monique and subsisting on a diet of aspirin and brandy due to the horrible pressure of his job: half of his company of the Thirty-ninth Infantry gets killed every time it goes to the front. Repeating the gambit from The Dawn Patrol, his new young lieutenant, Michel Denet, ridicules this record. Denet also begins an affair with Monique, which further places the men at odds. After numerous reckonings and battles, Laroche is blinded. Just as in Today We Live Robert Young’s Claude considers himself useless to Joan Crawford’s Diana once he’s lost his sight and clears the path for Gary Cooper’s Bogard, so does Laroche yield to Denet once he’s blinded, by undertaking a suicidal mission with his father, in this case, rather than with his best friend.

  The script went through four more drafts—all credited to Sayre and Nunnally Johnson, although the film itself would credit Sayre and Faulkner. Faulkner had left the picture “temporarily due to illness” on January 7 after having finished Absalom, Absalom! and going on the bender Hawks had warned against. Some of the significant plot points can rather easily be traced to Faulkner through his work on Today We Live and the unfilmed War Birds, as well as through aspects of his fiction. It is also conceivable that Carpenter’s relationship with Faulkner may have influenced Denet’s initial attempted seduction of Monique, which he undertakes while playing “Liebestraum” on the piano. Faulkner was entirely immune to the emotional power of music—“It’s unnatural,” he told screenwriter Harold Jack Bloom years later. “The only real music is birds singing.”—but Carpenter was a trained classical musician whose passionate love for it was plain to her man. Captain Laroche’s unusual attachment to his (unseen) sister harks back to Scarface, while it was Zanuck who suggested the rosary as a prop that passes among Laroche, Monique, and Denet. Nunnally Johnson claimed that the nearly entirely rewritten dialogue that appears in the script’s fifth draft, delivered on January 27, just as the film was entering production, was all his, and it might well have been. All the same, Faulkner returned to the studio in late February and helped Hawks collate all the material from the various drafts into what he wanted for the film.

  Not only was the material less than fresh, but the casting kept The Road to Glory from catching fire as well. Fredric March and Warner Baxter both belonged to Fox’s stable of stars and were assigned to the picture by Zanuck. While competent and convincing as Denet and Laroche, respectively, they were also cold and uninvolving personalities unable, on their own, to bring the script to life. Then there was June Lang. Hawks’s burgeoning reputation as a star maker took a hit this time. As Hawks said, “I was making tests one Sunday of about ten girls, and this girl appeared.… And she was so bad I said to the cameraman, ‘My God, we’ve got to stay here a little while longer—this girl is so bad—it’ll ruin her completely if we print this.’ So I worked and worked and worked with her and turned out a scene, and Zanuck, Schenck and everybody went absolutely crazy about this girl. They took her on, and I was stuck with her.”

  Unfortunately, Lang’s awkwardness is immediately apparent in the first scene with Baxter, where her high-school-drama-class stiffness helps get the picture off to a poor start. Her pencil-thin eyebrows and perfectly coiffed bangs do little to improve her credibility as a wartime nurse, but there is no denying her modelish beauty. In the end, Hawks felt that “she didn’t annoy you” but “she was just a child and she thought like a child. It was terribly hard to do an adult picture with her.” In story terms, he didn’t believe that Monique was supposed to be in love with Captain Laroche, but “you really couldn’t tell much from the picture because June Lang couldn’t act, and it was pretty hard to get across an emotion of any kind.” Hawks made t
he best of it, but admitted, “We’d have got more if we’d had a more experienced actress.” One of the actresses he liked when he tested her that Sunday was twenty-year-old Clara Lou Sheridan, who had already done bits of no consequence in more than a dozen pictures. Her heavy Texas accent ruled her out as a French girl, but Hawks recommended her to Jack Warner, who signed her and changed her name to Ann Sheridan. She and Hawks had a fling some time thereafter, and more than a decade later he cast her in I Was a Male War Bride.

  The filming was arduous. Even though the company was shooting only on the back lot, and not on some distant location, the long February and March nights were bitterly cold and difficult. Tempers grew short as the technical and logistical demands of the period war film made progress slow, and relations among the cast and crew became strained. Working with Hawks for the first time, the cinematographer Gregg Toland didn’t achieve the sort of startling nighttime effects he created a few years later on The Long Voyage Home, but he expertly matched his style to the existing French battle footage and launched a strong friendship with Hawks in the process. Other compensations for the director included working with Lionel Barrymore, who gave a very good performance as Laroche’s father, who slips into the company as the oldest private in the army and accompanies his son on the fateful final mission, and finally working with his friend the irrepressible Gregory Ratoff, to supply the nominal comic relief.

  Hawks’s characteristic understatement pays off in certain scenes, notably the creepy one, adapted virtually unchanged from the French film, in which the French soldiers hear Germans digging underneath their quarters with the intention of placing mines there and blowing them up. The quality of war as a never-ending night with no ultimate meaning is also strongly conveyed, although viewers who might see this as an antiwar tract along the lines of All Quiet on the Western Front are barking up the wrong tree, since none of the key creative personnel, including Zanuck, would have considered themselves pacifists. Hawks stated, “I’ve never made a picture to be anti anything or pro anything. I flew. I knew what the Air Force was up against. I used that theme from Dawn Patrol in another picture about war [The Road to Glory], and the theme is very simple. It’s a man who’s in command and sends people out to die and then he’s killed himself and some other poor bastard has to send them out to die.” Hawks also dispensed with the ghostly processional of war dead at the end, further emphasizing his cyclical, and defiantly nonpolitical, view of war. “I’ll come back. I always come back. I’m eternal,” Laroche tells his mistress at the outset, and he does, figuratively, as a different man, one who will be compelled to give the same speech and the same miserable orders, and probably to suffer the same fate.

  Given the unrelievedly bleak mood of the film, The Road to Glory did fairly well at the box office, breaking a five-year-old house record in its opening at the Rivoli in New York and enjoying solid, if not spectacular, runs in major cities throughout the country. “Strictly a man’s picture,” Variety dubbed it, “but has done business on that score.” But when Hawks returned to World War I one last time, five years later, he would take a very different, and more popular, tack.

  17

  Include Me Out: Come and Get It

  With three pictures in release, a new baby on the way, and an income commensurate with that of any filmmaker in Hollywood, Howard Hawks should have had a great year in 1936. Instead, he spent it in the crucible both professionally and personally, enduring turmoil, frustration, and hurt brought on mostly by his own obstinacy, selfishness, and coldness. The year provided vivid examples of Hawks’s will and stubbornness, his habit of just turning and walking away when things didn’t go his way, no matter the consequences for others. A positive reading of his behavior would praise his resolve and sense of principle; a negative one would see simple childish petulance.

  The difficulty of Hawks’s home life led him to remove himself from it as much as possible through nonstop work and obsessive gambling. A new baby wasn’t exactly what Hawks had had in mind when Athole got pregnant again; David was six now, Peter ten, and for some time Hawks had been unable to see how things between him and his wife would work out. Her breakdowns were just periodic but still always looming ahead. For her, even if her husband was scarcely around, having another baby made her happier than she had been in a long time and gave her the hope that this would help keep her faltering marriage together. If she was lucky, she didn’t know about Hawks’s ongoing affair with the statuesque showgirl and dancer Mary Lou Holtz.

  Professionally, Hawks should have known what getting involved with Sam Goldwyn again would mean, but his need for money—and Goldwyn would provide a $3,500 weekly paycheck—outweighed his hesitations. Even if Goldwyn sometimes seemed, or played, the fool, no director ever put anything past him. Hawks thought he could this time, and he tried, but to no avail in the end.

  Goldwyn’s taste for big literary names and properties led him to inquire about Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It even before it was published in late 1934 and to eventually pay forty thousand dollars for the screen rights. Set in the author’s native Wisconsin in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the sprawling novel centers on an unscrupulous lumber baron who rides roughshod over the land and his loved ones in pursuit of wealth and status. As far as Ferber was concerned, it was “a story of the rape of America,” and the book’s passionate ecological theme was the overriding impetus behind its writing.

  Goldwyn put his forces to work on the project at once. Edward Chodorov was the first screenwriter assigned to the adaptation, but when Ferber was critical of the changes he made, particularly with the lead female character of Lotta, he was taken off the job. Ferber persistently badgered Goldwyn to hire Howard Estabrook to write the script, but as he was presently under contract to Fox and on loan to MGM, Goldwyn turned to Jane Murfin, who in November 1935 handed in a draft Ferber considered “excellent” through the first half but problematic thereafter.

  The lead character was hard to cast. Barney Glasgow was written as a big, burly roughhouser who could take on any lumberjack on his crew, and the span of the story sees him age from thirtyish to his fifties. It remains difficult to think of any actor at any studio at the time who would have been ideal for it. Goldwyn tried to persuade his greatest rival, Louis B. Mayer, to loan him Spencer Tracy. But Mayer, who was then grooming Tracy for major stardom by giving him more sympathetic roles, rejected Goldwyn’s overtures out of hand. Almost by default, the 1930s prototypical tycoon, Edward Arnold, got the part.

  Choosing an actress to play the double role of Lotta was equally daunting. As written, Lotta was a pathetic, lame little barkeep who is loved, then dumped by the callous Barney Glasgow, who decides to marry up socially in order to guarantee his career and fortune. In distress, she marries Barney’s best friend, the hulking Swede Swan Bostrom. They have a beautiful daughter, also named Lotta, upon whom the besotted Barney lavishes money and gifts in a foolish, pathetic attempt to make her love him and thus make up for his having deserted her mother. Instead, the young Lotta is attracted to Barney’s son.

  Just as she was beginning her role for Hawks as the mercenary saloon girl in Barbary Coast, Goldwyn announced that Miriam Hopkins would play Lotta in Come and Get It. Hawks, who made two other pictures in the meantime, eventually persuaded the producer that Hopkins wasn’t the ideal choice. Abruptly, Goldwyn announced with considerable fanfare that Virginia Bruce had won the double role. Newcomer John Payne was also mentioned for the role of Barney Glasgow’s good-looking son. Involved with The Road to Glory, Hawks bided his time.

  While the director was still shooting in the trenches on the Fox back lot, he dispatched his ever reliable right-hand man Richard Rosson to begin filming second-unit footage in Idaho in mid-March. The crew’s assignment was to capture dramatic footage of falling timber, camp work, logjams, huge trunks sliding down flumes, hundreds of cut trees freed from ice and snow by explosion and sent downriver, and other lumbermill activities that would make up a
n exciting montage at the beginning of the picture. The crew was rugged and expert, but there were significant problems nonetheless. A lot of the action proved very difficult to photograph, particularly the flumes, and when the company arrived in Lewiston, they found themselves in the midst of a particularly bitter labor dispute. Eventually, it took four months of intermittent shooting, in Wisconsin and Canada as well as in Idaho, to get everything they needed, but it was worth it, as Rosson topped even his work in Tiger Shark, delivering footage that most critics felt was the most exciting in the finished picture.

  Hawks took on Come and Get It with considerable trepidation. Not only was he familiar firsthand with the sort of strangling effect Goldwyn had on directors, but he had serious reservations about the story and its commercial potential. He liked the first half, with its emphasis on the logging life, Barney Glasgow’s ambition, and the great love he discards, but he thought the second half “pretty lousy.” He considered the problems formidable enough to turn the assignment down, but he gave in when Goldwyn’s wife, Frances, begged him to do it. There were plenty of reasons why Hawks was regarded as the ideal director for the film. Not only was it a rambunctious piece peopled by strong, lusty characters, but the story literally took place in the Hawks and Howard families’ backyard. Edna Ferber had grown up about twenty-five miles north of Neenah, in Appleton, Wisconsin, where her father was rabbi to a small Jewish community. She had left that life behind to become a reporter and, by the 1920s, one of the most successful and prolific American novelists. Hawks sometimes claimed that Barney Glasgow was based on his own grandfather, a boast with a pinch of truth to it. The character was, in fact, a composite but was inspired mostly by the dominant Wisconsin lumberman and politician of the time, F. J. Sensenbrenner. A trait or two might have been taken from C. W. Howard, but the important thing was that Hawks knew this sort of man well; he had spent the first ten years of his life around such men, men like his neighbors Kimberly and Clark. When Ferber learned that Hawks was Charlie Howard’s grandson, she concurred with the Goldwyns’ decision to entrust her book to him.