It took a couple of decades, but Bringing Up Baby began building a reputation when it started being shown on television in the 1950s, and by the late 1960s, when film buffs started drawing attention to the sometimes underestimated talents of Cary Grant and Hawks, and to the wonders of 1930s romantic comedy, the film finally achieved its deserved position as one of Hollywood’s most perfect and brilliant comedies. Perhaps nothing did so much to ratify the classic status of Bringing Up Baby as Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 hit comedy What’s Up, Doc?, starring Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand. After having paid homage to John Ford and Orson Welles with The Last Picture Show the year before, Bogdanovich, plausibly enough, told everyone how Bringing Up Baby had inspired him this time out, which was like an invitation to the press to compare the new film unfavorably to its model. Audiences didn’t know or care, but suddenly Bringing Up Baby was being referred to as one of the greatest comedies ever made. It only took thirty-five years. But it did give the film a new lease on life, one that has continued ever since.
As a comedy, as well as a love story, the film represents a huge advance on Hawks’s only previous farce, Twentieth Century. It is aggressive and dark but stops just short of spinning out of comic control toward the end and of pushing too far into the comedy of humiliation, that hallmark of his postwar comedies. His collaborators could not have been more felicitous, and it represented one instance in which all the fun the actors and filmmakers were having actually spilled into the picture for the audience’s benefit.
There was, however, a price for the indulgence that helped create the greatness of Bringing Up Baby. And that price was Gunga Din.
With Bringing Up Baby finished and in release, Hawks had every intention of moving right back onto Gunga Din. Once Berman assumed full control of RKO’s major projects, he, too, wanted to reactivate it, and in early 1938 he assigned the writer Anthony Veiller to cut down the Hecht-MacArthur-Hawks-Nichols script, which ran to 284 pages, enough for at least a four-hour movie. Berman and Hawks met numerous times during February and March to discuss the picture, the result of which was a growing distrust on Berman’s part that Hawks would ever toe the line when it came to budget or scheduling matters; Hawks had plenty of excuses for what had happened on Bringing Up Baby, but Gunga Din would be a far grander production, one that promised, at about $1.5 million going in, to have the biggest budget ever for an RKO film. Berman had no doubt that Hawks could make a fine, rousing picture of Gunga Din, but nothing the director said could make the producer forget that Hawks was, in his experience, “slow and difficult.” Berman eventually made his decision: “I was afraid he would go over budget so much that I would be in trouble. So I didn’t go with Howard. I went with George Stevens who, up to that time, had made pictures quite reasonably for us.” For his part, Hawks didn’t think much of Berman’s overall track record as a producer, and he made Berman’s decision easier by telling him, “I don’t think I want to trust myself to your judgment.”
The news wasn’t broken to Hawks directly but, rather, to his brother William, who was informed at a meeting with RKO brass on March 17, 1938, that not only was Howard off Gunga Din but the studio was terminating his contract. Two days later, a distressed Howard wrote back protesting the studio’s decision, stating that he would suffer “very substantial damages” if he didn’t make the film, and insisting that he was “ready, able, willing and anxious to complete the direction of said photoplay Gungha Din [sic], and to comply with all of … obligations under said contract.” On March 21, RKO sent Hawks a letter citing numerous contractual defaults and breaches on Hawks’s part and informing him that their decision to dump him was “neither arbitrary nor unreasonable,” as he had claimed, but “arrived at after mature deliberation. We believe, in good faith, that sound business judgment makes this step necessary.” Certainly the deciding factor in letting him go was that since the fall of 1936, RKO had paid Hawks $242,500 (including a $40,000 payoff to get rid of him) for the privilege of losing more than $350,000 on Bringing Up Baby. The bottom line on the studio’s relationship with Hawks was not pretty.
Bringing Up Baby also proved to be the last straw in RKO’s association with Katharine Hepburn. The studio had brought her to Hollywood in 1932, given her starring roles from the outset, and tailored fourteen productions to her specifications. Now, even with her greatest ally, Pan Berman, holding the reins of power, RKO could no longer justify pouring good money after bad on this high-priced star. She had originally been announced to play another dizzy heiress in The Mad Miss Manton, but Barbara Stanwyck won that choice role when Bringing Up Baby went over schedule. Once the Hawks film was completed, RKO contemptuously offered Hepburn a part in a modestly budgeted programmer, Mother Carey’s Chickens. When she refused it, the studio gave her the choice of taking the role or buying out her contract. Although most actors couldn’t have afforded to do so, Hepburn’s personal fortune afforded her the luxury of choosing the second option, which she did to the tune of $220,000. Her career upswing of Holiday and The Philadelphia Story lay just ahead.
George Stevens, ironically, ended up going forty days over schedule on Gunga Din (the same amount as Hawks had on Bringing Up Baby) and bloating the budget by some $400,000, to an enormous $1,909,669. Therefore, even though the film was a smash hit, it still didn’t cover its costs in initial release. The Stevens film has been widely enjoyed and even loved over the years, but one suspects that Hawks, with his great feel for both adventure and comedy, would have made something more lasting and memorable out of it (though it remains doubtful whether Hawks would have eliminated or even softened what today seems an almost unbearable jingoism and white supremacy; this was a hallmark of the Hecht and MacArthur script, which Hawks had such a significant hand in shaping). Gunga Din remains one of the most prominent “might-have-beens” of Hawks’s career, a picture that very well could have been one of his best, as well as one of his most successful. Hawks was acutely disappointed not to be able to make it. But there was consolation—both for him and for the public—in what he ended up doing instead.
19
Only Angels
In the wake of the RKO fiasco, Hawks had to dodge more trouble of his own making in the persons of underworld figure Ben Kaufman and bookie Donald Miller, whom he owed nine thousand dollars from a 1937 gambling debt. Hawks was now denying that he owed it, despite a promissory note payable the previous July 3, and went so far as to claim that since the debt stemmed from gambling, the transaction had been illegal and therefore could not be enforced: Charges were filed against Hawks in any event, but he managed to elude a summons served him on April 8 by having his household help lie that he was in New Orleans and wouldn’t be back for a month. The case dragged on for another year until it was thrown out.
When he was supposedly in New Orleans, Hawks was, in fact, still in Los Angeles and once again submerging himself in Screen Directors Guild activities. At an April 12 meeting with Association of Motion Picture Producers President Joseph Schenck, Hawks and Capra reiterated the guild’s basic platform and requested that the producers return to the bargaining table. On May 15, Hawks was elected second vice president of the guild, replacing Frank Tuttle, and was also returned to the twelve-man board of directors. At the same time, Capra was elected president of the 150-member organization, succeeding King Vidor, while Woody Van Dyke supplanted Lewis Milestone as first vice president.
When the SDG formally filed with the National Labor Relations Board on August 2, claiming that the major Hollywood studios were violating the Wagner Act and employing unfair labor practices in refusing to negotiate with the guild, the stage was set for the final phase of the directors’ battle for full recognition by the producers. In mid-August, with Schenck and Zanuck finally back from an extended European trip, Capra called on Hawks and Van Dyke to rejoin him on the committee to negotiate with Zanuck, who spoke on behalf of the producers. After an initial meeting between the two sides on August 21, Zanuck announced that, with Hollywood’s international reputa
tion at stake, “the civil war in the film industry must be ended.” Responding to Zanuck’s promising suggestions that an agreement was at hand, Capra, Hawks, and Van Dyke gave upbeat reports to membership at a meeting the following evening and proposed a postponement of the NLRB hearings.
The producers, however, quickly backtracked, reiterating their specious argument that directors were actually part of management and insisting on negotiating with full-fledged directors separately from assistant directors and unit managers. It took until February, and the threat of an implied directors’ strike and boycott of the imminent Academy Awards, but the producers finally agreed to recognize the guild and enter into collective bargaining with directors. Ratification of the basic agreement, which finally did exclude unit managers but embraced certain creative rights for directors, such as two weeks’ preparation time and “consultation” on casting, editing, and second-unit work, came on May 1, 1939.
For Hawks, this formative period marked the peak of his active involvement in guild affairs. From here on, he attended few meetings and was often in arrears with dues payments. The tedium of organizational politics, as well as the liberal labor-movement orientation of Hollywood unions in general, was not for him. Selfishly, he had got what he wanted out of the guild’s formation—a bit more power over his own work, something he had been accruing on his own in any event.
On June 10, the Los Angeles area’s latest racetrack, Hollywood Park, or “Warner Park,” as it was dubbed within the industry, debuted in Ingle-wood. The grand opening, Variety observed, “was distinctly a Warner Bros. production, with the Warners doing everything but ride a horse.” Responding to Hollywood’s craze for the ponies, a passion they shared, the brothers Warner built the attractive and luxurious facility as a rival to Hal Roach’s Santa Anita track east of the city. Its first season ran through July 23, and Hollywood Park instantly became a magnet for showbiz socialites, high rollers, and self-styled horse owners and experts, including Hawks.
In late June, Bill Hawks married Virginia Walker, whom Howard had prominently featured as Cary Grant’s sniffy fiancée in Bringing Up Baby. For Howard Hawks, it was largely a recreational summer of going to the track, outings with Peter and David, making the rounds of nightspots with his eye constantly out for aspiring young starlets, and working out ideas for his upcoming film project. By summer’s end, things would come together for him in very big ways on two major fronts.
On August 30, Hawks spent the evening gambling at the Clover Club, an exclusive enclave for the film-business elite on the Sunset Strip. Heading out of the private gambling salon, he noticed his acquaintance Albert (Cubby) Broccoli dancing with a very attractive young woman he’d never seen before. Afterward he took Cubby aside and, in his drawling, completely casual manner, asked, “Who’s the girl you’re with? I’d like to meet her.” And so it was that Howard Hawks met Nancy Raye Gross, who, at a glance, was just Howard’s cup of tea: a strikingly beautiful twenty-one-year-old, she had flashing eyes, a ready smile, and, at five feet, eight-and-a-half inches, a model’s physique. She also possessed notable composure and a stylish, well-bred manner that was immediately apparent, as well as a sharp, no-nonsense wit that belied her age and proved instantly appealing to the sophisticated Hawks.
After a couple of dances, Hawks pulled out his usual line—“Do you want to be in movies?”—and was startled when his companion replied in the negative; it wasn’t often that such a dazzling young woman making the rounds in Hollywood had no interest in becoming an actress. Regrouping quickly, however, Hawks, instead of asking her for a real date, invited her for a swim at his house the next day.
Aware of Hawks’s industry reputation and struck by his imposing looks and sartorial elegance, young Miss Gross accepted. She was even more impressed when she arrived at 1230 Benedict Canyon; unlike most of the ostentatious and phony-looking Hollywood homes she had seen, this “was a beautiful, proper house … a lovely fieldstone building. The interior was English country house at its best, with tasteful chintz fabrics, real furniture, an excellent staff, and good food.” After their swim, Hawks intently questioned his guest about her background, her interests, and why she had come to Los Angeles.
What he found out was that “Slim,” as she was already known, had been born in Salinas, California—Steinbeck country—and had been raised, along with her beautiful blond sister, Theodora (Teddie), who was five years older, and her brother, Buddy, who was three years younger, in Pacific Grove, a small, sleepy beach resort town on the northern end of the Monterey Peninsula. Her father, Edward, was a prosperous businessman who owned much of what Steinbeck made famous in Cannery Row, and she grew up as a spirited, adventurous child. Although she was well brought up by her mother, née Raye Nell Boyer, and Raye’s own mother, “Auntie Rydie,” who also lived at the house, the family was not a happy one because of her father’s severe, intolerant, unloving character. Although he himself was born Catholic, he had dropped the religion, and he hated Catholics, including the many Italians who worked for him, as well as Jews. Racially prejudiced and politically right-wing, the willful and hardworking Edward Gross was almost a caricature of a smug, close-minded Germanic tyrant in the style of the Kaiser—big-bellied, double-chinned, and, from a kid’s point of view, no fun. He detested Christmas, never acknowledged birthdays, and would never allow his children to have friends over to play.
Family life was largely joyless and grim whenever Father was around, but the atmosphere turned truly tragic in the winter of 1928. In a dreadful accident, eight-year-old Buddy’s long nightshirt was ignited by embers from the fireplace; the screaming child was chased around the living room by his mother and siblings, and much of his body was burned by the time Raye managed to wrap him in a carpet. Called home, Edward gave blood for a transfusion in an attempt to save his son’s life, but to no avail.
Buddy’s horrible death irrevocably tore the family apart. From that day on, Edward took Buddy’s death out on his wife, blaming her for not saving him and even designing a family mausoleum with only four spaces, for him and his three children—Raye was to be excluded. Within a year, Teddie and Nancy were sent to convent school, where they became estranged from each other. Edward moved out of the house, leaving Raye alone there with her mother. Shortly after Teddie’s graduation she, too, abruptly left the house and never spoke to her mother or sister again, turning instead to her father, who made her his business partner and heir apparent. Naturally, this brought Nancy closer to her mother, who in her divorce from Edward won a sufficient settlement to live comfortably in a Carmel hotel and allow Nancy to grow up with a measure of stylish luxuries, which included personal lessons in horseback riding, tennis, and swimming, as well as entrée into the area’s monied social set.
At seventeen, Nancy met a wealthy, twenty-one-year-old socialite and brooding intellectual with whom she fell in love, and midway through her final year at her Dominican convent school she dropped out. The skinny teenager’s excuse was ill health, and in search of a warm climate, her mother financed a winter-long stay in the restorative warmth of Death Valley. Staying at the comfortable but staid Furnace Creek Inn, which attracted some show-business clientele, the vivacious youngster attracted a good deal of attention. In time, she was taken under the wing of film stars Warner Baxter and William Powell. (Coincidentally, Baxter was about to start work for Hawks in The Road to Glory, while Powell, who had worked for the director in Paid to Love, would shortly become engaged to Hawks’s momentary flame Jean Harlow.) Powell, in particular, took a proprietary, fatherly interest in the budding beauty, and it was he who dubbed her “Slim Princess,” of which the “Slim” part stuck. An initial visit to Los Angeles, during which Bill Powell invited Slim and her mother to lunch, whetted the young woman’s appetite for a more glamorous, exciting life. Her circumstances allowed her to travel to Los Angeles for a few days each month and to stay at the elegant Beverly Wilshire Hotel; before long she became a regular guest of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies at San Simeon,
even traveling with them privately to Mexico as well as their northern California ranch, Wyntoon. In the process, she also became friends with numerous film personalities, notably Cary Grant and David Niven.
By early 1938, her grandmother had died. Feeling the irrevocable pull of Hollywood, its social scene and its eligible bachelors, Slim persuaded her mother to move with her to Los Angeles. They moved into a house on Sunset Boulevard near UCLA, and Slim was just getting the lay of the land socially when, after attending a prizefight with Broccoli and King Kong star Bruce Cabot, she met Howard Hawks. Even the most amateur psychologist wouldn’t have a hard time figuring out what would have attracted Slim to Hawks: she had always been in need of a strong, positive father figure, and Hawks—gray-haired, commanding, gentlemanly in an Old World sort of way, conservative, Germanic in his unbending reserve, and, at forty-two, literally old enough to be her father—filled the bill in virtually every possible way. She was especially struck by Hawks’s “candid” blue eyes (others more often compared them to ice), which reminded her of her father’s, which were “the most piercing light blue eyes I’ve ever seen. It was as if a pale fire burned in them.”
At the same time, Nancy Gross clearly had her eye out for the big catch. Trained in the social graces and like catnip to men, she never in her life seriously entertained the notion of work, and each of her three marriages represented a step up on the social and financial ladder. Superficially educated in literature, quite knowledgeable about classical music, already fashion conscious, and extremely at home at outdoorsy activities from riding to fishing, she easily outclassed most of the women her age in Hollywood; and, since she had no professional aspirations, she lacked the often off-putting edge of aggressiveness and desperation of young hopefuls on the make.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 35