Located in a natural canyon above Hog Creek, with slopes rising to the east, west, and north and covered with shrubs and trees, the land was perfect for a gentleman such as Hawks who wanted to keep and breed horses, play host to guests in an impressive but relaxed manner, and create a superb outdoorsy environment for his young wife and growing kids. Once this was settled, Slim took it upon herself to supervise every element of the home’s construction and decoration down to the tiniest detail. The look of what became the S-Bar-S Ranch at 1150 Moraga Drive was very closely based on Van Nest Polglase and Perry Ferguson’s casual American ranch design for Katharine Hepburn’s Connecticut home in Bringing Up Baby, but the actual architect was the celebrated Myron Hunt, one of Frank Hawks’s closest friends in Pasadena and the designer of, among other things, the Rose Bowl. When it was finally finished, with a pool, vast lawns, stables, barns, horse paddocks, extensive wooden fencing around the corral, and a large garden planted entirely by Slim enhancing the comfortable but unostentatious wood-and-stone house, the estate was a masterpiece of understated taste and refinement, a rural paradise in an unspoiled urban setting, a man’s castle with a very smart feminine touch. As David Hawks said, “Anybody would have loved to live in the stable.”
On July 24, 1940, Athole—or, properly speaking, her sister, Norma on her behalf—filed for divorce. During this final period, Athole “was very in and out,” as David put it. Misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and therefore incorrectly treated, Athole was in such a deteriorated mental state that she was easily “convinced by the doctors, her mother and sister to file for divorce, since they argued that she and my father didn’t really belong together,” observed Barbara. At the court proceedings, which Athole did not attend, Norma acknowledged that Athole was “mentally afflicted,” but blamed this on Hawks’s “cruel and inhuman treatment.” The details and eventual settlement took nearly another year and a half to work out, but Hawks in the end agreed to pay a thousand dollars a month to support Athole (she also received additional money from Norma) while gaining full custody of the children, including Athole’s son Peter, who turned sixteen in 1940; Hawks was also required to set up trust funds for the children. There is no question that breaking from her husband represented a terrible ordeal for Athole, but David said, “She coped. A lot of people would have committed suicide. She was very warm, very loving. When she was well, she was such a lovely person, really fun.” Still, her troubles were real and unavoidable, and her son admitted, “I was shielded from it a lot. Maybe they just put her away at the first sign of any problems. We’d go visit her in these locations where she was put, but it was never explained to us. We just sort of gradually became aware of a mental illness problem.”
That summer, Hawks worked to bring Slim and his children even closer together, and the best way he knew was through sports and shared outings. Hawks arranged for Peter, David, and Slim to learn skeet shooting under the instruction of Tommy Thompson at a range just south of the Santa Monica Airport, and he subsequently took them dove hunting in the Imperial Valley. Later, Hawks put in a shooting range at Hog Canyon that everyone agreed was one of the best in Los Angeles. They also went on a fishing trip to June Lake with Faulkner, whom David found to be “just a friendly, Southern good ol’ boy who liked fishing.” While Hawks was just a recreational Western rider, Slim was highly trained at dressage and jumping. However, her riding days came to an end late that summer when she fell and broke her leg, landing her in traction at the hospital for an extended period. After that, she refused to as much as mount a horse, even, she joked, one of her husband’s Tennessee Walkers.
By August, Hawks had to turn serious attention to the Billy the Kid project, now known as The Outlaw. With Furthman’s script coming along, Hawks concentrated on the casting, which promised to be fun since the two leads, Billy and the girl, Rio, would be played by unknowns. Working out of Hughes’s offices at 7000 Romaine in Hollywood, Hawks looked at dozens of young hopefuls, including Gene Fowler’s son Will and Wallace Reid Jr. for the Kid and, among the women, Beverly Holden, who had been up for Rita Hayworth’s role in Only Angels Have Wings. Facing a final round of screen tests without being sold on anyone, Hughes found a prospect for the Kid in a dark-haired, physically compact twenty-three-year-old insurance clerk, Jack Beutel (soon changed to Buetel), while Hawks was taken with photographs of a nineteen-year-old aspiring model named Jane Russell that he’d received from an agent who had noticed them at a photographer’s studio. Working in an improvised studio in the vast basement of the Romaine building with Lucien Ballard behind the camera, Hawks paired off his five male and five female finalists at random to enact “the beginning of the big rape scene, where Billy and Rio come eye-to-eye, she has a pitchfork laying in wait and he throws her in the hay. It was all close-ups,” recalled Russell.
A few days later, Hawks called Buetel and Russell in to see him and separately showed them all the screen tests. For her part, Russell said, “I was astounded at how I looked. I had a very mediocre image of myself, so I was amazed and very pleased!” Without a word, Hawks escorted first Buetel, then Russell to his small office, sat down at his desk, and calmly said, “Well, you two kids have the parts.” Russell never forgot how, when he announced this, Hawks “was so calm and quiet, but his eyes were twinkling, bright blue.” But after she rolled back on her little cot and threw her hands over her head and Buetel similarly erupted, Hawks said, “Now that’s what I want you to do, be totally spontaneous and natural.” In fact, Russell had noticed Buetel from the first time she saw him at the tests and “had picked Jack out as the cutest boy there.” On their way out of Hawks’s office, they noticed a tall, thin man leaning against the hallway wall looking at them. It didn’t take them long to figure out that this was Howard Hughes. It was clear, however, that “he didn’t want to meet us, just to see us in the flesh,” said Russell. “Howard Hawks and Howard Hughes had agreed on the tests, they had to agree on the discovery of Jack and myself.” After a quick look, Hughes disappeared into Hawks’s office. Russell wasn’t actually to meet her longtime boss and benefactor until months later, after returning from location work in Arizona.
Hawks threw a party for his lucky couple at the Mocambo nightclub on the Strip, where they were thrilled to meet Gary Cooper, and the director gave the untrained new actress voice and posture lessons. “He wanted me to keep my voice low, and he said that girls should walk from the hips, not from the knees. He said I should take long strides” Russell remembered. Hawks took Russell to Nudie’s, a famous cowboy outfitter, where he bought her some well-tailored Western clothes, and sent her to see Slim in the hospital, where she was still laid up in traction with her broken leg. Slim arranged an appointment with her favorite women’s-wear buyer so Russell could be properly attired on location.
Even though MGM was proceeding with its own Billy the Kid picture, starring Robert Taylor, which looked as though it would beat theirs into theaters, Hughes and Hawks went ahead. Hawks cast two solid actors he’d worked with before and knew he could count on, Walter Huston and Thomas Mitchell, to play Doc Holliday and Pat Garrett, respectively. Much as had been done for The Dawn Patrol, an entire tent city was put up outside of Tuba City, Arizona, a small Indian town on the Navajo reservation about seventy-five miles north of Flagstaff. As locations went at that time, it was extremely remote, not easy to reach, and far from any luxurious amenities. With the still-mending Slim remaining behind, Hawks flew in with Lucien Ballard and was joined by Furthman, who continued to amend the screenplay as shooting began in the last week of November, as well as by Cubby Broccoli, whom Hawks made an assistant director. Not needed for the initial scenes, the voluptuous Jane Russell was immediately taken to be photographed in a series of revealing outfits that prominently featured what the publicity campaign later trumpeted were “two good reasons for seeing The Outlaw.” After a few days of being pushed to pose in increasingly preposterous positions, Russell had had enough: “In tears, I went down to see Howard. He said, ‘Look, Jane. You’
re a big girl. If you don’t want to do something, the answer is “no.” Cooperation is not always the best thing to do.’ It’s the best advice I ever got,” Russell averred.
While this mythmaking was going on, Hawks directed the opening sequences: the introductions of Billy and Doc Holliday and the scene—the best in the entire picture—in which Thomas Mitchell’s Pat Garrett tries to hit Billy in a saloon but gets knocked down by him instead. Just as he had on Scarface, Hawks insisted that Hughes come nowhere near the set while he was working, and he was reassured that his “partner” was hundreds of miles away in Los Angeles. This represented less protection than it seemed, however. As he began to see the rushes that were shipped back to him each day, Hughes started complaining by telegram and phone that Hawks wasn’t taking advantage of the locale’s scenic possibilities. He then took exception to Hawks’s direction of Buetel. Russell felt that “Hughes identified with Billy the Kid and wanted him to be the antihero. Hawks wanted him to be smart-alecky. Hughes wouldn’t hear of this. Hughes didn’t want him cocky, but Hawks definitely did.”
Suddenly, without warning, the boom was lowered: after just two weeks, Hawks was off the picture, Hughes would replace him as director, and the company would return at once to Los Angeles. This is one of several instances in Hawks’s career where it remains debatable whether the director quit or was fired; either way, the decision was mutually agreeable. Hawks could already see that Hughes’s personal interest in the story and his young stars was such that he’d be constantly interfering in a way that he never had on Scarface. Hawks’s usual response to interviewers about his departure from the picture was, “We had different ideas about revealing women’s bosoms, and things like that,” so that when the chance to direct Sergeant York presented itself, he told Hughes, “You always wanted to direct, why the devil don’t you direct this?”
Both Ballard and Russell remembered it rather differently, however. The cinematographer stated that Hughes strategically waited until a day when the crew was idle and Hawks and Ballard were off scouting a new location. At that moment, Hughes ordered the entire company home, save for the director and cameraman, who were left in the lurch. Ballard made no bones about it: “Howard and I were taken off the picture,” he said. “We were told that we were to pack up and leave—very suddenly.” Abruptly informed of the news by unit manager Cliff Broughton, Russell and Buetel were devastated that they were no longer to be guided through their film debuts by one of the top directors in Hollywood. When Hawks finally turned up, he told the kids that since “no one tells me how to shoot a picture,” he had advised Hughes to take over in his place. He even invited them to fly back to Los Angeles with him, but Broughton warned them that Hughes would be furious if they accepted Hawks’s hospitality, so they returned, as they had arrived, by bus. Later, when Russell finally met Hughes for the first time, she said that he told her, “Howard Hawks was spending too much money, so I’m going to shoot this in the studio.” Ironically, a completely opposite story was reported in the press, with Variety stating that “Hawks pulled out when Hughes insisted on a budget of $1,500,000, which, Hawks contended, would have reduced the chances of realizing on a percentage basis.”
To Russell’s great disappointment, Hawks never directed her in any scenes. “I watched a little. I loved the way he directed Jack. I adored him, and got things from him I was able to use even though he was no longer there. He didn’t take any shit off people. He knew what he wanted, and if he didn’t get it, he removed himself.” As he was saying good-bye, Hawks told both Russell and Buetel that he wanted to work with both of them again someday, and he meant it.
As for The Outlaw, the rest of the shoot was “painful,” in Russell’s view, in more ways than one. “Hughes wasn’t really sure what he wanted and did it over and over and over. It was the most insane thing I’ve ever seen. Walter Huston had the right idea, because he just took it like a big joke,” said Russell. By contrast, Thomas Mitchell was none too pleased with Hughes’s amateurism and made sarcastic and derogatory remarks about his new director’s abilities throughout the shoot.
Encouraging the ever-present Furthman to outrageous extremes and oblivious to prevailing censorship norms, Hughes laboriously guided his ripe young stars through ridiculously stilted and contorted sexual situations, with Buetel striding around in tight leather outfits, Russell constantly posing for maximum mammary impact, and both of them enacting some kind of weird S&M ritual that would have been campy if it wasn’t so dull. The extent to which Hughes tried to emphasize Russell’s chest bordered on the demented, as he instructed his new cameraman, Gregg Toland, to devise shots that would allow viewers to peer all the way down her blouse. In one scene, he directed Russell to carry a tray so as to make it appear that her big breasts were, in fact, on it. When he looked at the scene later, he kicked himself for covering this action in a medium shot and spent ten thousand dollars to pay a specialist in optical printing to create a zoom in on the tray and its contents. It was a difficult effect to achieve but, as one Hughes aide vividly recalled, “When Hughes saw it, I never saw a kid so tickled in my life.” The shot went into the picture. Hughes was so fixated that he privately ran shots of Russell’s most overtly sexual posturings night after night in his screening room, and rumors have persisted over the years of special nude footage made for Hughes’s delectation alone.
Unsurprisingly, the film was rejected outright by censor Joseph Breen, who was shaken to the core by its relentless obsession with Jane Russell’s physique. He was extremely concerned that the film, if shown publicly, might spark a trend to “undrape women’s breasts.” The appeals, legal haggling, and recutting went on for nearly two years until, in a barrage of publicity orchestrated by the endlessly resourceful Russell Birdwell, The Outlaw finally premiered at the Geary Theater in San Francisco on February 5, 1943, accompanied by a special “stage epilogue” in which Russell and Buetel performed an embarrassing scene supposedly written for the film but never shot. By this time, Jane Russell had become an international sensation on the basis of her eye-popping cheesecake photographs. The film was briefly seized by the San Francisco police, then cleared, but after the landslide of attention and promise of great business, Hughes, preoccupied with his Spruce Goose airplane project, suddenly withdrew the film. More legal battles ensued until the picture was once again offered to the public, in altered form, in 1946, then again in 1950. The film generated millions of dollars in grosses over the years but, as Hughes confidant Noah Dietrich pointed out, the problem with The Outlaw was that it was a $450,000 picture that Hughes spent $3 million to produce. Despite all the publicity, free and otherwise, “he lost money on it,” said Dietrich.
The film’s overriding fetishism makes it clear that Hughes truly did have a very different picture in mind than anything Hawks would have made, and the result confirmed Hawks’s belief that his intermittent friend had no talent as a director: “My idea of a good director is a man who chooses his own story and works on it, and casts his own picture and does everything about it, and he didn’t do that, you know.”
22
Sergeant York
It took Hawks no more than a week to land a new film, whereas it had taken its producer nearly twenty-two years to set it up. Sergeant York had been a passion of Jesse Lasky’s ever since he watched from his Fifth Avenue office window on May 22, 1919, as the war hero Alvin York was showered with confetti by the population of New York City; Howard Hawks simply stepped into the breach when his departure from The Outlaw freed him to fill it. Not only was Hawks ready for this inspirational story of a Tennessee mountain man who overcame his religious objections to serve in the army and become famous by capturing 132 German soldiers; with war spreading in Europe, the public was also ready for it. As Helen Buchalter of the Washington Daily News noted the day after the film’s dignitary-studded premiere in the nation’s capital on August 1, 1941, Sergeant York hit the screen “at the precise moment when the American frame of mind is ripe to receive it.” By becoming
available at the critical moment, Hawks walked into the biggest hit of his career.
Lasky, of course, had given Hawks his first job in the industry, in the Famous Players–Lasky property department, during the twenty-year-old’s summer vacation from Cornell, and had employed him again at Paramount as a story executive before Hawks became a director. Upon witnessing the extraordinary outpouring of emotion for York in 1919, Lasky had spent the next two days trying to convince York to star in a motion picture version of his life story.
Lasky was not the only showman who tried to make hay from York’s sudden fame. Florenz Ziegfeld had wanted him to team up with Will Rogers in a folksy, inspirational sketch for his stage extravaganza, and Lee Shubert had offered to feature him in a revue. Despite his genuine need for money, York had categorically refused these and all other commercial proposals, stating, “Me, I don’t allow Uncle Sam’s uniform for sale.”
Ten years later, after the arrival of sound films, Lasky once again approached York and was again turned down. Squeezed out of his job at Paramount in 1932, the once great executive soon became a pathetically marginal figure in the industry, losing his house and falling heavily into debt. In the winter of 1939–40, with the outbreak of war in Europe, it occured to Lasky that he might be able to prey upon York’s patriotic sentiments as a way of finally bringing him around. The producer received no replies to his numerous letters and wires, so in February 1940, Lasky flew to Nashville and made the three-hour drive to Pall Mall, Tennessee, to court the man in person. The recalcitrant York, who had recently opened a modest Bible school, reacted coolly, but at least he didn’t turn his guest down cold—partly because, for the first time, Lasky was not proposing that York play himself on-screen.
When Lasky returned two weeks later with a prepared contract, York wouldn’t sign. Undaunted, Lasky continued to cajole the principled man, and when he came back a third time with a simpler contract, York, citing the need to combat Hitler as the reason, finally signed it, on March 21, 1940, in the old state house in Nashville in the presence of Governor Prentiss Cooper. York would receive fifty thousand dollars and a sliding percentage of the gross starting at 4 percent after the picture grossed three million dollars and growing to 8 percent after nine million dollars, with proceeds going to the York Bible School. Lasky announced that the picture, which would probably be filmed in Technicolor for RKO release, would downplay the war theme and instead be a “document for fundamental Americanism.”
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 40