Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  In July 1938, Howard Hughes made the biggest headlines of his life when he completed his epochal round-the-world flight in the record time of just over ninety-one hours. Later that year, word began circulating that he was planning a return to the movies after his withdrawal in disgust, six years earlier, in the wake of Scarface. First, however, he sold the screen rights to The Front Page to producer Edward Small. With Only Angels Have Wings just barely into production, Hawks went to see Cohn to try to sell him on producing another version of The Front Page as Cary Grant’s next starring vehicle for Columbia. Initially, Cohn imagined Grant in the reporter role, with the editor Walter Burns being played by the celebrated newspaper columnist and staccato-speaking radio commentator Walter Winchell, who had already appeared in a couple of pictures for Zanuck at Fox. When Hawks informed the studio boss that he wanted Grant to play Burns and a woman to appear as the reporter, Cohn, Hawks related, was initially aghast but quickly came around to his idea during the course of a single meeting. In early January 1939, Cohn bought the remake rights to The Front Page from Eddie Small.

  With Hecht and MacArthur unavailable—Hecht was busy doing uncredited rewrites for Victor Fleming on Gone with the Wind and preparing his next film as a director, Angels over Broadway—the first screenwriter Hawks approached to ring the transformation was Gene Fowler. The man responsible for setting the playwrights back on track when they were having second-act problems during the writing of The Front Page, Fowler was a natural candidate for the job, but he resented, as Hecht did not, the changes Hawks wanted to make. Rebuffed, the director instead turned to another old Hecht crony, Charles Lederer, the prankish, wealthy nephew of Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, who had begun his career polishing dialogue on Scarface and helping Bartlett Cormack with the adaptation of Lewis Milestone’s 1931 film of The Front Page.

  While remaining in Hollywood to direct Only Angels Have Wings, Hawks stayed in close contact with his writers as Hecht briefly accompanied Lederer to Palm Springs to help him revise the Front Page plotline. It was Lederer who took Hawks’s basic notion the crucial extra step to make ace reporter Hildy Johnson the ex-wife of Walter Burns, who schemes to lure her back into his professional and personal life before she marries a straight-laced mama’s boy the next day. Hawks credited Lederer’s idea with making “all the scenes much better and the characters more definite. Now we knew what we were talking about—two people who had been married and in love and divorced. After that, it wasn’t really a great effort to do the story. We were a little snagged up before that because the relationship was nebulous.”

  After Hecht helped him a bit more on structural revisions, Lederer remained in the desert to complete the first draft, which he presented to Hawks on May 22, just twelve days after the Angels gala premiere. Lederer did two more drafts by the beginning of July. But Hawks, feeling that the dialogue needed more punch, then decided to call in Morrie Ryskind, who had pitched in so helpfully on Ceiling Zero. Ryskind was a particularly apt choice, not only for his comic mind but because of his intimate familiarity with the material; his celebrated and frequent collaborator George S. Kaufman had directed the original Broadway production of The Front Page. Ryskind worked through the summer right up to the start of shooting at the end of September, by which time more than half of what Hawks considered the “finest modern dialogue that had been written” had been rewritten.

  Changing Hildebrand into Hildegard enriched the dynamic of the story in obvious ways, enabling it to become “a very curious and complex romantic comedy in which love is expressed through work and work is expressed as love.” Hildy becomes a markedly stronger character as a woman, doubly important to Walter and not only because of the romantic connection: Hawks made sure to include a scene not present in the play—Hildy’s superb prison interview with murderer Earl Williams—that showed this celebrated pro in action, doing her job, proving how good she really is and thereby how worthy of Walter’s high esteem. Her sex also changes the dynamic in the otherwise all-male courthouse pressroom and alters the focus of the scene in which Earl Williams’s floozy Mollie Molloy tells off the “gentlemen of the press.” It also, of course, required a total rethinking of the character to whom Hildy is engaged. In the play, Hildy’s intended, Peggy Grant, was the one boringly “nice” individual in whom Hecht and MacArthur clearly had no interest. Bruce Baldwin, shrewdly written in the new His Girl Friday as being unqualified to enter Hildy’s world of the newsroom and presented by Hawks as the only person who speaks slowly, is used as the butt of jokes to ridicule the safe, dull, conventional life Hildy is on the verge of embracing. He is also, however, given a vestige of decency and legitimacy that enhances his position as a mere foil and punching bag for Walter in his attempts to win back Hildy. He may be a chump, but as newly conceived for the film, he becomes, unlike Peggy Grant, not only an obligatory character but a memorable one.

  Structurally, Hawks and his writers followed the pattern the director had first employed on his adaptation of Twentieth Century: adding an extensive “prologue” establishing the prior personal and working relationship of the central couple, then boiling down the play’s three acts—in the case of His Girl Friday, into a tight seventy minutes—while largely retaining the constricted settings of the theater piece. The first twenty minutes of His Girl Friday, from Hildy’s entrance through her long conference with Walter Burns and the luncheon they share with her fiancé, Bruce Baldwin, were entirely invented for the film. In creating this foregrounding material, Hawks moved the beginning of the action up to the daytime, which then eases into night as the story unfolds, the same progression used in Bringing Up Baby.

  The original play boasts one of the most famous final lines in American theater history: after scheming to keep Hildy onboard long enough to help him with the Earl Williams case, Walter encourages him to leave to join his fiancée, giving him a watch as a parting gift; after Hildy has left, Walter reveals his essence by phoning the police and telling them to apprehend Hildy, since “the son-of-a-bitch stole my watch!” In the more relaxed pre-Code days of 1931, the original film of the play was able to get away with this line, which, eight years later, Hawks could not have done even if he’d wanted to. But by this time, Hawks felt the line had become so familiar that it was shopworn, and he wanted to find something better. This assignment fell to Morrie Ryskind, who came up with what he thought was a brilliant new ending, in which Walter and Hildy have a wedding in the newsroom and break into a huge fight as soon as they say “I do.” Abner Biberman’s Diamond Louie was to have had the last word: “I think it’s gonna turn out all right this time.” This was never shot, however, since Ryskind, a little proud of himself, laid it all out for a bunch of other Columbia scribes at a writers’ hangout after work one evening. Just a few days later, one of the screenwriters who had been there told him that he had just seen Ryskind’s ending being filmed on a nearby soundstage—for a different picture.

  Ryskind was incensed but had no choice except to come up with yet another wrap-up. This time, he recalled, “I devised the one of a guarded marital reconciliation between Walter and Hildy. This was kept under wraps until Howard filmed it. Both Howard and I agreed that the romantic flavor of the new ending worked out better than our previous one, so in a way, I’m grateful to that writer at Columbia—who shall remain anonymous—for giving us the impetus to make a great film even better.” The final ending cleverly sends Walter and Hildy out to take the train to Albany, Hildy and Bruce’s original destination, in order to cover a labor strike, with Walter snidely remarking, ‘I wonder if Bruce can put us up.”

  The Hays Office had no overriding problems with the screenplay it received before production but vehemently objected to repeated references to newspapermen as “the scum of creation” and “the scum of Western civilization,” as well as to such untoward behavior as Hildy’s bribe of the jailer, Louie’s kidnapping of Mrs. Baldwin, and the idea of smuggling Earl Williams out of the court building. But censorship requirements impinged not
at all upon anything significant in His Girl Friday.

  While the procession of rewrites was under way, Hawks spent the summer realigning his family life. With Athole now under care in La Jolla, Hawks brought Slim more fully into his household, encouraging her to spend as much time as possible with his kids. They responded enthusiastically to this vital young woman, especially David, who found Slim an incredibly exciting partner in fun. Peter and David continued to live at the Benedict Canyon house, but Barbara, who was only three during the summer of 1939 and without a mother to care for her, was more often than not sent to stay with Hawks’s parents in Pasadena. For a private getaway just for Slim and himself, Hawks proposed a car trip to Mexico, but the fun was diminished by Hawks’s getting so lost that Slim feared that they’d never find their way back. There were the usual expeditions to June Lake near Yosemite, and Hawks was gratified by the way he could see a new family unit forming around him, with Slim as its spark plug.

  Through August and September, as the storm clouds of war broke over Europe, Howard Hawks’s main professional concern was finding the right actress to fulfil his idea of a man-woman Front Page. Although Cohn had announced Jean Arthur for the picture back in March, she and Hawks remained cool toward each other. So the offers went out to actresses at other studios: to Ginger Rogers, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, and, most seriously, to Irene Dunne. Amazingly, all refused. Finally, with the start date looming less than two weeks away, Cohn arranged to borrow Rosalind Russell from MGM, where she had just finished work for George Cukor on the picture that would shortly establish her once and for all as an important star, The Women.

  The announcement of Russell’s casting proved particularly humiliating to the smart, good-humored actress, who had never met Hawks. Russell had read a New York Times story revealing how the director had approached every important actress in Hollywood “before Harry Cohn had stuck him with me.” None too excited about the prospect of her first meeting with Hawks, Russell took a swim first and didn’t bother to dry her hair, so that when she turned up at his office on the lot, he “did a triple take” before asking her in.

  Taking the offensive with a director she was predisposed not to like, the plain-speaking actress bluntly confronted him with her knowledge that he hadn’t really wanted her for the part. Hawks blandly told her that everything would be all right and quickly ended the meeting by instructing her to go to wardrobe and order a sharp-looking striped suit.

  After four days of photographic, wardrobe, and makeup tests, production began on September 27 with the scene that would mark the beginning of the picture: Hildy Johnson arriving in the newsroom on her way to tell her ex that she’s to be married the next day. The sequence includes one of the rare extended moving-camera shots in Hawks’s work, albeit a highly effective one, in that it definitively establishes Hildy’s relationship with, and dominance in, her workplace as she strides through a sea of well-wishing coworkers. The next day, Cary Grant reported to work for his initial scene with Roz Russell, one that involved, as did all their interchanges, a great deal of complex timed dialogue and business. Having enjoyed two very spirited collaborations with Hawks already, Grant was accustomed to, and in fact had earned, the loose reins the director gave him, but Russell was highly disconcerted because Hawks said nothing and just sat there watching her with eyes that she felt looked “like two blue cubes of ice.” Unable to take it anymore, she went to her costar to express her dismay and ask if he thought Hawks approved of what she was doing. “Oh, sure, Roz,” she said Grant told her. “If he didn’t like it, he’d tell you.”

  This gave her enough confidence to confront Hawks directly and demand his thoughts. “Unwinding himself like a snake, he rose from his chair. ‘You just keep pushin’ him around the way you’re doing,’ he said. I could hardly hear him but I could see those cubes of eyes beginning to twinkle.

  “He’d been watching Cary and me for two days, and I’d thrown a handbag at Cary, which was my idea, and missed hitting him, and Cary had said, ‘You used to be better than that,’ and Hawks left it all in. It’s a good director who sees what an actor can do, studies his cast, learns about them personally, knows how to get the best out of them,” she observed.

  From then on, things went swimmingly between cast and director, with Hawks not only giving the actors freedom but encouraging them to come up with their own bits, lines, and flights of fancy. As precise and adamant about adhering to the script as Hawks could be on a “serious” film such as Only Angels Have Wings, he was loose and casual about such matters on his comedies, rightly feeling that the actors could bring inspiration and life to the material on the set that writers couldn’t possibly think of in an office.

  At the same time, Hawks the engineer was still very much present. Everyone always said that the original film of The Front Page featured some of the fastest dialogue ever delivered on-screen. Hawks devised a way to set a new speed record on His Girl Friday by having the actors overlap each other’s dialogue. This technique had been tried before, of course, by him and others, but Hawks and his writers worked out a careful plan by which “we wrote the dialogue in a way that made the beginnings and ends of the sentences unnecessary; they were there for overlapping.” He also cranked up the pace to where, by one count, the actors were speaking at up to 240 words per minute, compared to the average speaking rate of 100–150 (the drawling Hawks would have come in at something significantly slower than that). When some newsmen came to the set and remarked about the speed of the original, Hawks arranged to screen comparable sequences from both films at the same time to put the question to the test. The visitors were amazed at how slow the original seemed by comparison, leaving Hawks to surmise, “I guess we’d accomplished what we’d wanted, which was to make it fast.”

  The zany, unpredictable behavior on the set was great for the actors, but it “was hell for the cameraman,” Joseph Walker recalled. “His Girl Friday was tough because you never knew where the actors were going to go.” Comedies normally call for brighter, plainer lighting than dramas, and the look and mood was certainly a world apart from that on their last film together. Nonetheless, Walker had to pay special attention to his female star. “Rosalind Russell was very hard to photograph,” he recalled, “because she had sagging jowls along her chin.” His solution was to have the makeup man, Fred Phillips, “paint a sharp, very dark line along the edge of her jaw, blending it toward her neck. Then, hitting her with a high key light, that dark line became a strong shadow below her cheek, giving it a firm, youthful appearance.”

  At one point, Roz Russell became concerned that the unvarying torrent of dialogue would prove too much for audiences to take, but Hawks, with great insight, reassured her: “You’re forgetting the scene you’re gonna play with the criminal. It’s gonna be so quiet, so silent. You’ll just whisper to him, you’ll whisper, ‘Did you kill that guy?’ and your whispering will change the rhythm. But when you’re with Grant, we don’t change it. You just rivet in on him all the time.”

  Given the green light, Russell quickly came up to Grant’s speed and matched him, quip for ad-lib. She had a ball: “We went wild, overlapped our dialogue, waited for no man. And Hawks got a big kick out of it,” she said. By now completely converted to Hawks’s methods, she decided that “Hawks was a terrific director; he encouraged us and let us go. Once he told Cary, ‘Next time give her a bigger shove onto the couch,’ and Cary said, ‘Well, I don’t want to kill the woman,’ and Hawks thought about that for a second. Then he said, ‘Try killin’ ’er.’”

  On another occasion, Russell did something so unexpected that Grant broke character and, with a grimace directed at Hawks and the camera, said, “Is she going to do that?” Hawks left it in the picture, just as he did other jokes in which Grant refers to Archie Leach (his real name) and describes Ralph Bellamy’s Bruce Baldwin character as looking like “that fellow in the pictures—you know, what’s his name—Ralph Bellamy.” Bellamy happened to be in watching dailies when Harry Cohn heard thi
s for the first time. The studio chief erupted in a fury at the impertinence, but he eventually let Hawks leave it in, retaining what has always been one of the picture’s biggest laughs.

  Despite her pleasure in the part, Russell began to feel that the combined efforts of Hecht, Lederer, Ryskind, and Hawks had pushed the piece somewhat in favor of the Walter Burns character, leaving him with most of the best lines. Taking matters into her own hands, she mentioned this to her brother-in-law Chet La Roche, the head of the advertising firm Young and Rubicam, who recommended one of his top copywriters to her. Out of her own pocket and unbeknownst to Hawks or the studio, the actress paid the writer, whom she would never identify, two hundred dollars a week to sharpen her lines, as well as, eventually, a few of Grant’s. Because of the anything-goes, ad-libbing atmosphere on the set, Russell didn’t have to clear her changes with Hawks, since she could just drop them spontaneously into her dialogue. All the same, Cary Grant began to suspect something was up; it got to the point where each morning he would greet his costar by inquiring, “What have you got today?”

  The ghostwriter came up with the rude bit of nose-thumbing business for Russell in the restaurant scene in which Burns makes fun of his ex-wife’s forthcoming train trip to Albany with her husband-to-be and prospective mother-in-law. That scene, which has no equivalent in The Front Page, proved to be one of the most complicated in the entire picture to shoot, as it involved three actors delivering very quick overlapping dialogue, perfect timing from the waiter and other bit players, and a great deal of precise innuendo and nuance in the line readings. (One will notice that food is served but virtually none is eaten during the scene; with the actors spitting the lines out so rapidly, there was no time for chewing.) With Hawks shooting in sequence and, as was always his custom, with just one camera, the scene came up a week and a half into production and took four days to finish rather than the allotted two.