Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  At an SDG meeting on the evening of August 30, however, the SDG served notice that it had no intention of partitioning itself. The producers felt that they shouldn’t negotiate with the directors just as the National Labor Relations Board had refused to negotiate with design engineers at the Chrysler automobile company on the basis that they were well-compensated creative artists. To the contrary, Hawks and guild attorney Barry Brannen pointed out at the meeting, directors had no contractual power to hire and fire and were therefore employees themselves, not management at all. “In practice,” Brannen acknowledged, “a director may exert substantial influence in selection of cast or designation of members of the production unit, but this influence is exerted vicariously by means of recommendation and suggestion and not as a matter of right by any authority given him under his contract.”

  Balking at this ultimatum, the producers stiffened their position, insisting that it would deal with the SDG only if it represented actual motion picture directors. The committee expressed its astonishment that the producers would “attempt to change the internal organization of the other and opposite party” in labor negotiations, with Hawks protesting that this would amount to “nothing less than the dissolution of the guild!” On September 23 (the first day of shooting on Bringing Up Baby), spurred by the producers’ refusal to negotiate, Hawks, Ford, and Sutherland issued a statement to the trade press blaming the producers for the stalemate and announcing that the SDG would be filing for certification with the NLRB. But from here on, Hawks played a significantly diminished role. In October, Frank Capra, Herbert Biberman, and Lewis Milestone took charge of the Inter-Talent Council, which coordinated dealings with the other guilds, and Capra assumed the chairmanship of the negotiating committee the following April, a month before he was elected SDG president. Still, a basic agreement and full guild recognition from the producers wasn’t achieved until May 1939.

  For Hawks, his own family history, fundamental instincts, and personal politics ran against the sort of FDR-style progressivism that the labor movement represented. (A cynical critic once suggested that if Hawks had ever made a film about American labor, it would have centered on the code of professionalism among strikebreakers hired by management—an unfair hypothesis but one perhaps not inaccurate in its assessment of Hawks’s sympathies). Nor did Hawks ever lose much sleep worrying about the plight of the common man during the Depression. Hawks’s lack of compassion and elite image of himself made him fundamentally ill-suited to active political engagement on behalf of any cause, and it was easy for him to see that Capra, King Vidor, Rouben Mamoulian, and others would be more effective than he in keeping up the fight for the SDG. Hawks’s guild activity was always a matter of looking out for his own interests, which included increasing his salary, boosting his leverage with and independence from the studios, and gaining more artistic control.

  Although the way the cast and story were coming together was creating considerable optimism about Bringing Up Baby, RKO still had cause for concern as the start date approached. The large salaries of Hawks, Grant, and Hepburn put the original budget at $767,676, and Briskin was advised more than a month before shooting that it was “suicidal” to make a Hepburn picture at that expense. “Hawks is determined in his own quiet, reserved, soft-spoken manner to have his way about the making of this picture,” production executive Lou Lusty prophetically noted to the studio chief. “With the salary he’s been getting he’s almost indifferent to anything that might come to him on a percentage deal—that’s why he doesn’t give a damn about how much the picture will cost to make.… All the directors in Hollywood are developing producer-director complexes and Hawks is going to be particularly difficult.”

  Work on the film went slowly from the outset. The first problem was that Katharine Hepburn, who had never done “screwball” comedy, wasn’t getting the hang of her part; Hawks had imagined that she’d have no problem because the role was such a close fit to her own background as a clever, imaginative, outspoken New England heiress, but she was trying too hard, desperately attempting to “act” funny, and constantly cracking up at her own antics and those of her costar. Although he was normally able to set uncertain actors straight with some simple, direct guidelines, Hawks couldn’t figure out what to do with Hepburn. “I tried to explain to her that the great clowns, Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, simply weren’t out there making funny faces, they were serious, sad, solemn, and the humor sprang from what happened to them.… Cary understood this at once. Katie didn’t.”

  In a measure of desperation rare for the director, Hawks turned to Walter Catlett, a veteran comic long associated with the Ziegfeld Follies. After watching some rushes, Catlett agreed that Hepburn was overdoing it but initially refused to work with her, until Hawks got Hepburn to ask him herself. “Walter played a whole scene of hers out with Cary Grant, played it with every mannerism of hers, very serious, and she was entranced. She said, ‘You have to create a part for him in the picture.’ And I did.” (Catlett was prominently featured as Constable Slocum.) “After that, she played perfectly—not trying to be funny, but being very, very natural and herself.” Hepburn also credited her costar with keeping her on the right track: “Cary Grant taught me that the more depressed I looked when I went into a pratfall, the more the audience would laugh.”

  Hepburn and Grant, who with their respective mates at the time, Howard Hughes and Phyllis Brooks, socialized a great deal off the set, were utterly full of beans on the shoot, overflowing with energy and thrilled to be working together. “We wanted it to be as good as it could possibly be,” Hepburn said. “Nothing was ever too much trouble. And we were both very early on the set. Howard Hawks was always late, so Cary and I worked out an awful lot of stuff together. We’d make up things to do on the screen—how to work out those laughs in Bringing Up Baby.”

  Among the scenes Grant came up with was the priceless one in which, after Hepburn tears his formal suit in a swank supper club, he accidentally steps on her dress and rips off its rear, revealing her lingeried backside. To prevent everyone from glimpsing this, Grant first covers it with his top hat; then, once she has felt the breeze, they walk in step with him pressed as firmly up against her back as possible. Something similar had happened to the actor not long before at the Roxy Theatre in New York City, where he had been seated in the front row of the balcony with the head of the Metropolitan Museum and his wife. When Grant stood to allow the wife to cross in front of him to go to the bathroom, he found that he’d neglected to zip up his fly and began to do so, only to catch the woman’s frock in it. The two then had to lockstep to the manager’s office in order to find a pair of pliers to disconnect Grant’s fly from the lady’s garment. Hawks loved the story and fully caught its comically embarrassing spirit.

  In a later scene, Hepburn accidentally broke the heel off her shoe. Immediately, Grant whispered to her the line “I was born on the side of a hill,” whereupon she repeated the ad-lib as she continued to limp along. It was this sort of dazzling quickness Grant was to exhibit even more abundantly for Hawks two years later in His Girl Friday. Grant also provided his costar with some invaluable coaching for the final scene, in which she climbs toward him by ladder, then across his giant reconstruction on a brontosaurus, only to be saved by his outstretched hand when it collapses in a heap under her. “I told her when and how to let go,” Grant remembered. “I told her to aim for my wrists, an old circus trick. You can’t let go of that kind of grip, whereas if you go for the hands, you’ll slip. She went right for my wrists, and I pulled her up. Kate was marvelously trusting if she thought you knew what you were doing.” In general, Hepburn recalled, “Everyone contributed anything and everything they could think of to that script.”

  Working with the leopard, which was trained by a Madame Olga Celeste, provided an adventure all its own. Contrary to what RKO imagined, Hawks had the cat slinking through a great many scenes unleashed. Grant was terrified of it and played as few scenes with it as possible. (The avoidance of the ac
tor’s face in some close-ups, including those in which the beast rubs up against his legs, suggests the use of a double.) The star was not terribly amused when, as a practical joke, Hepburn dropped a fake leopard through the top of his dressing room. For her part, Hepburn suggested, “I didn’t have brains enough to be scared, so I did a lot of scenes with the leopard just roaming around.” Madame Celeste was always just outside camera range with a large whip, and Hepburn wore a heavy perfume that had the effect of turning the jungle dweller into a pussycat. But the actress had a very close call in one scene in which she wore a dress with a hem lined with little weights. When Hepburn swirled around and made the dress swing abruptly, it startled the leopard into making a lunge for her back, and only a swift crack over the head from Madame Celeste kept the cat from clawing Hepburn. From then on, the cat was not permitted to walk freely among the actors.

  Hawks rarely complained about practical problems that held pictures up, but he had good cause here. “Now, if you don’t think that was a hard one to make! Oh, that goddamned leopard—and then, the dog, running around with the bone.… Katie and Cary had a scene in which he said, ‘What happened to the bone?’ And she said, ‘It’s in the box,’ or something like that. Well, they started to laugh—it was ten o’clock in the morning—and at four o’clock in the afternoon we were still trying to make this scene and I didn’t think we were ever going to get it. I tried changing the line. It didn’t do any good.… They were just putting dirty connotations on it and then they’d go off into peals of laughter.”

  But problems with the animals, as well as with actors just having too good a time, were scarcely the only reasons the shooting proceeded so slowly. As the studio had feared, Hawks himself set a very relaxed pace. Fritz Feld, who played a psychiatrist who advises Hepburn in the supper club, recalled nostalgically, “Often in the morning Howard Hawks would come in and say, ‘It’s a nice day today. Let’s go to the races.’ And we’d pack up and go to the races. Kate continued her custom of serving tea on the set. We all laughed and laughed, and were very happy.” At the end of the scene Feld and Hepburn shared, Hawks sent in two cases of champagne. As Feld wistfully said, “Those were the good old days!”

  The one story Hawks typically never failed to tell about Bringing Up Baby was an example of one-upsmanship over Hepburn. This is the version of it he related to Peter Bogdanovich: “I remember another time we were making a scene and Katie was talking so much she didn’t hear me. We called, ‘Quiet!’ She didn’t hear that. Called ‘Quiet!’ again, and she didn’t hear it, so I just stopped everybody, and all of a sudden, in the middle of talking, she stopped and said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘I just wondered how long you were gonna keep up this imitation of a parrot.’ She said, ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ and she led me around to the back. She said, ‘You mustn’t say things like that to me. Somebody’ll drop a lamp on you. These are my friends around here.’ I looked up at the man on the lamps. When I was a prop man, this fellow had been an electrician—I’d known him for God knows how many years. I said, ‘Pete, if you had your choice of dropping a lamp on Miss Hepburn or me, who would you drop it on?’ He said, ‘Get out of the way, will you, Mr. Hawks?’ And Katie looked up at him and looked at me and said, ‘I guess I was wrong.’ And I said, ‘Katie, he doesn’t make it wrong, but you are. And I can tell you one thing, I’m gonna come up and kick you right in the behind if it happens again.’ She said, ‘You won’t have to kick me.’ And from that time on, she was just marvelous.”

  When RKO executives began seeing dailies of the film, their worries had to do with things like Grant’s owlish glasses and Hepburn’s out-of-control hair, which they believed reduced the stars’ appeal. They had also expected a sweeter, more glamorous approach, as opposed to what they perceived as a hard, unromantic tone in Hawks’s direction. But this hardly compared to their alarm when the schedule for RKO production number 999 began getting completely out of hand. There was nothing the studio’s designated associate producer, Cliff Reid, could say to the far more powerful Hawks to get him to speed up, and the stress of his own impossible position made him physically ill.

  By late October, the RKO executive suite was in a shambles. Sam Briskin, who had come to the studio nearly two years earlier from Columbia, was fed up with many things: the company’s disorganization, partly caused by its being in receivership; the fact that his decisions were constantly being undermined by the conservative receivers; the fact that Pan Berman had first call on the studio’s leading talent, and that he, Briskin, had only once had access to one of the company’s top artists—Hepburn for Baby. In the first week of November, Briskin quit as vice president of production. Two weeks later, Berman was officially put in charge of A pictures, while Leo Spitz took control of the B unit. Throughout all of this, Bringing Up Baby was conveniently ignored, and it didn’t bother Hawks a bit that the administrative disarray resulted in there being no one on the lot who could intervene in the forceful way of a Hal Wallis or Sam Goldwyn. Originally, the film was scheduled for a fifty-one-day shoot, ending November 20. By that time, Hawks had barely shot half the movie. With scarcely a break for Christmas and New Year’s, shooting finally finished on January 6, 1938, after ninety-one days, forty days over schedule; the duration was so unusual that Variety gave it special coverage. Fulfilling the studio’s worst fears, the cost soared correspondingly, to $1,096,796.23, or about 40 percent above the already lavish original budget. Nearly a third of the overages were caused by an option and hefty penalty payments to the two stars that kicked in when filming ran past the limits earmarked in their contracts; Grant and Hepburn each ended up earning just over $120,000 for the picture, nearly $50,000 more than their original salaries.

  The film’s editor, George Hively, had been cutting the picture right along through production, so that RKO, desperate to see returns on their huge investment as quickly as possible, was able to make finished prints within a matter of days and hold two previews almost at once, on January 17 in Huntington Park and two nights later in Inglewood. Audience reactions could not have been better: An “excellent-plus” and an “A-plus” in two separate studio assessments. Despite the smash responses, Pan Berman felt the picture needed to be cut further and did so over Hawks’s strenuous objections. A subsequent preview with the shorter, and final, version at the Chicago Theatre was equally successful, with the report of a “terrific” response from the sold-out house fueling great optimism in the front office that their Baby might just make some money after all.

  As for the Hays Office, it found the dress-tearing incident “border-line business” that “may be deleted by a number of the political censors boards, both in this country and England”; indeed, the strict Ontario censors objected to Grant’s slapping his hat against Hepburn’s bottom and her retort, “Will you please stop doing that with your hat?” Hawks, Nichols, and Wilde had been clever enough to sneak their more subtle but quite outrageous sexual humor through under the censors’ noses. Not only did the bone-in-a-box references get through undetected, but so did all the other “bone” jokes, including the one in the opening scene in which Grant’s David Huxley, pondering the quite erect-looking dinosaur bone he holds in his hand, innocently remarks, “This must belong in the tail.”

  The early trade press served up excellent “money” reviews, and the reactions by mainstream critics were equally favorable. Everyone liked the picture enormously. “Audiences used to roar at this one,” an RKO executive admitted, and Hawks often recalled that the laughter was so great that it prevented people from hearing many of the other funny lines. But despite it all, the picture didn’t do nearly well enough at the box office to approach recouping RKO’s investment.

  The highly erratic commercial performance of Bringing Up Baby was deeply perplexing to the industry in 1938 and, in a sense, remains so today. With theater manager Cliff Work “guaranteeing a refund to any patron who does not enjoy this picture,” Baby began its world-premiere engagement at the Golden Gate in San Fran
cisco on Valentine’s Day and, backed by great reviews, did bang-up business. As the film fanned out across the country, it did solidly in such markets as Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, Cincinnati, and Washington, D.C., but came up short of expectations in numerous other cities, especially in the Midwest. But the real shock of its disappointment hit with its opening on March 3 at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Grossing only $70,000 at the 5,980–seat house, where strong attractions generally pulled in $100,000 or more, Bringing Up Baby was precipitously yanked after only one week, suggesting, as Variety dryly noted, that “the Katharine Hepburn draw, as expressed in some quarters, isn’t what it used to be.” Subsequent runs in New York were equally weak. The film’s box-office track record was utterly without comprehensible pattern and wasn’t entirely bad by any means; its conspicuous flop in New York forged the impression of a failure where it mattered most, and the film needed to be a huge hit to compensate for the egregious budget overages.

  In its initial run, Bringing Up Baby grossed just $715,000 in the United States. Overseas, it pulled in $394,000, bringing the total to $1,109,000. A 1940–41 reissue generated an additional $150,000. To trigger Hawks’s percentage participation, the picture would had to have grossed $1,875,000, and it never came close. When all was said and done, RKO lost $365,000 on the film, fulfilling everyone’s worst initial fears.

  The common reasons advanced for the picture’s relative initial unpopularity are that it was too sophisticated, that the characters were too intellectual, that there was no real romance in it, that the lighting was too dark for a comedy. Most famously, Katharine Hepburn was accused, in a list prepared by Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theatre Owners of America, of being “box office poison,” a distinction she shared with Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, and others. But Hawks, who always insisted that there was something wrong with a film if it failed to win a large audience even if critics considered it great, had a more subtle reading of why the film fell short. He eventually concluded that Bringing Up Baby “had a great fault and I learned an awful lot from that. There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball and since that time I have learned my lesson and I don’t intend ever again to make everybody crazy.”