Still in financial straits, Lasky had to borrow in order to pay York the first half of his advance, as well as to wrap up control of three essential York-related properties: Sergeant York And His People, by Sam K. Cowan, Sergeant York: Last of The Long Hunters, by Tom Skeykill, and Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary, edited by Skeykill.
RKO quickly cooled on what executives envisioned would be an expensive production, so Lasky started his hunt for studio backing at the top. MGM’s Louis B. Mayer was enthusiastic but, as he had done with David O. Selznick on Gone with the Wind, demanded a heavy price for his participation. Not wishing to lose control and a sizable share of any profits, Lasky weighed his other options, immediately ruling out Paramount, which had dumped him, as well as Universal, 20th Century–Fox, and Columbia, where various personality conflicts existed between him and top executives. With few possibilities left, he went to Warner Bros., where the ultrapatriotic Harry Warner prevailed upon his brother Jack to make the deal. The studio paid Lasky $40,000 for the written material, gave York his second $25,000, and agreed to an $88,500 producer’s salary as well as to paying Lasky 20 percent of the rentals after $1.6 million domestic and $150,000 foreign. After $2.5 million in rentals was reached, Lasky’s share would increase to 25 percent.
Delighted that his perseverance had paid off so handsomely, Lasky returned once more to Tennessee, this time in the company of the writers Harry Chandlee and Julien Josephson. A veteran screenwriter, Chandlee was chosen partly because he had spent part of his youth near the Tennessee-Virginia border and had written a 1915 picture, A Magdalene of the Hills, that evinced knowledge of mountain folk. For ten days, the Hollywood men interviewed locals, scoured back issues of newspapers, and talked with former Governor Roberts of Tennessee, who had performed the Yorks’ wedding ceremony. After exercising “considerable persuasion,” Lasky convinced York to give them a thorough look at the love letters York had written to his sweetheart, Gracie, while overseas. York himself entertained them by staging a down-home turkey shoot before their departure in late April.
Prodded by Warners’ and Lasky’s desire to begin production before year’s end, Chandlee and Abem Finkel, who replaced Josephson, handed in a 105-page, scene-by-scene treatment in mid-July. Studio enthusiasm for York was high; Robert Buckner, an intelligent writer and valued story editor, advised production chief Hal Wallis that the film could emerge as a Mr. Deeds Goes to War. Implicit in this view of the project was the expectation that Gary Cooper would play the lead. Cooper was the only actor Lasky could envision in the role, but landing him posed a major problem. Cooper was under contract to Sam Goldwyn, Lasky’s former brother-in-law, and the two men had been on bad terms for twenty-five years, since Lasky had pushed Goldwyn, then Samuel Goldfish, his treasurer and film salesman, out of his company. Furthermore, Goldwyn had just loaned Cooper to Warner Bros. for Meet John Doe, and Jack Warner was certain he wouldn’t be able to get him a second time, as he was then ranked as the number-five box-office name in America, after Gable, Garbo, Deanna Durbin, and Errol Flynn. Goldwyn, however, coveted Warners’ biggest star, Bette Davis, for his upcoming adaptation of The Little Foxes. Warner made it a policy never to loan Davis out, but he made his one and only exception in this case, and the two players were exchanged in a direct swap.
Unexpectedly, Cooper himself was against it. Approaching his fortieth birthday, he was wary of playing a famous and younger man (York was thirty-one at the time of his exploits) and was frankly scared of the demands the role would make on him. “In screen biographies,” the actor opined, “dealin’ with remote historical characters, some romantic leeway is okay. But York’s alive and I don’t think I can do justice to him. He’s too big for me … he covers too much territory.” Throwing a monkey wrench into their plans, he gave Warner Bros. and Lasky a flat “no” when first approached. Lasky kept working on him, however, and in August brought York to Hollywood for a brief visit to meet the actor, during which they spoke of virtually nothing but hunting. To generate publicity, Lasky variously announced that Cooper was the only movie star York liked or even knew about and that one of the conditions of his deal was that Cooper play him (the two looked not at all alike, and York sported a trim little moustache). Cooper began to weaken, later saying, “What got me to change my mind was York, who wanted me to do the picture. Even then I wasn’t convinced. When we met I realized we had a few things in common. We were both raised in the mountains—Tennessee for him, Montana for me—and we learned to ride and shoot as a natural part of growin’ up.”
Warner Bros. announced Cooper for the lead in September. But still without a director or final script, the studio privately hedged its bets, considering both James Stewart and Henry Fonda, although neither was under contract to the studio; as late as November 15, Ronald Reagan did a screen test for the role.
A great deal of similar skirmishing went on concerning the appropriate director. In August, Lasky approached Goldwyn’s top director, William Wyler, but he was in New York preparing for The Little Foxes and, while claiming interest, begged off until he could see a finished screenplay. Wallis’s first choice was Victor Fleming, but he was already preparing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at MGM. Henry Hathaway was tied up at Paramount, Henry Koster had obligations at Universal, and after giving consideration to Norman Taurog and Henry King, Jack Warner personally wooed King Vidor in November, to no avail.
The hoped-for December 2 start date had come and gone when Lasky learned that Hawks was out of a job and available. Wallis, who had happily avoided working with Hawks in the five years since Ceiling Zero, reluctantly agreed to allow Lasky to offer the script to the director, principally because he knew that Hawks’s participation would virtually guarantee the willing cooperation of Gary Cooper, who was still hemming and hawing despite his commitment to the project. The initial problem, however, was that Hawks found the Chandlee-Finkel script “bad.” In his self-serving account of his initial meeting with Lasky, Hawks claimed to have told the producer, “Look, close your door, and tell the secretary no calls, and tell me why the hell you bought this story.” Lasky proceeded to relate the drama he wished to film, something Hawks found at total variance with the screenplay he had read. “Jesse,” Hawks said, “I’ll make the picture if it’s O.K. with you that I just do the story you told me.” Startled, Lasky immediately agreed.
The way Hawks always told it, he also promised to deliver Gary Cooper, even though, by this point, the star would have had serious problems backing out of his agreement. The story is worth relating, however, in that it illustrates both Hawks’s egocentrism and his obsession with getting the upper hand over studio executives in general, and Hal Wallis in particular. Hawks said, “I called Cooper, and I said, ‘I just talked to Lasky. Didn’t he give you your first job?’ Coop said yes. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he’s broke, he’s got the shakes, he needs a shave, and he’s got a story that I don’t think would hurt you to do, or me.’ He said, ‘I’ll come over and talk to you.’ And he came over, and he said, ‘Where’s that new gun of yours?’ He didn’t want to talk about anything. Finally I said, ‘Look, Coop, we have to talk about this.’ He said, ‘What the hell is there to talk about? You know we’re gonna do it.’ So I said, ‘Well, come with me, and if I say “Isn’t that right, Mr. Cooper,” you say, “Yup.” So we went over and saw Hal Wallis, and I said, ‘We’ll do the picture for you if you stay out of our way and don’t interfere at all. Isn’t that right, Mr. Cooper?’ ‘Yup.’ ‘We’re gonna change the plot, the story around. Isn’t that right, Mr. Cooper?’ ‘Yup.’ ‘I’m gonna use Johnny Huston as a writer.’ Well, they had to say yes, and we started to work on it.”
Hawks’s deal, dated December 16, paid him $85,000 for twelve weeks’ work; with overages, he ended up receiving nearly $110,000 for directing Sergeant York. The picture was also to be billed as “A Howard Hawks Production,” even though Lasky and Wallis would be the producers of record, and Hawks demanded extra time to prepare a new script. To this end, he recruited
thirty-four-year-old John Huston, who was then a fast-rising fair-haired boy among Warner Bros. screenwriters. Hawks had had a passing acquaintance with him since directing his father, Walter, on The Criminal Code and was pleased when Wallis teamed him with Howard Koch, the writer of the legendary Orson Welles radio broadcast The War Of The Worlds who had made a strong impression with his scripts for The Sea Hawk and The Letter in his first year in Hollywood. Working practically round-the-clock, including weekends, through Christmas and the New Year, the two writers delivered eighty-three pages of the rewrite by the end of the first week of January 1941, less than a month before the new start date of February 3.
Embittered over having been taken off the picture, writer Abem Finkel got hold of the new draft and fired off a nine-page memo to Wallis in which he attacked what was being done to his and Chandlee’s work: “I have, of course, long since despaired of protecting the script from the blundering stupidities of Messrs. Cooper, Hawks, Huston and Koch.” Finkel complained that the simple Tennessee mountain folk were being changed into “background color … for laughs,” that York was being shown drinking when he had actually quit in 1914, that it was now made to appear as if Gracie “came on” to York, and that Pastor Pile was being turned into a “hell and brimstone shoutin’ preacher” when, in fact, he had written to President Wilson defending York’s conscientious-objector status. “It is my considered opinion,” he wrote, “that you must be on your guard against any ‘bright idea’ on the part of Messrs. Hawks, Huston or Koch if you would avoid a helluva mess.”
Hawks never actually met York, but he sent him dozens of questions and received the answers on Dictaphone recordings. Overall he remained concerned about making such an extraordinary story—the only ostensibly biographical one he would ever attempt—believable to audiences. Alvin Cullom York was one of eleven children in a family of farmers in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. A blacksmith, hell-raiser, and acknowledged great shot, York was hired as a young man by Rosier Pile, the pastor of the Church of Christ and Christian Union and, after he “got religion,” became an active church leader. At age twenty-eight, he fell in love with a fifteen-year-old neighbor, Gracie Williams, but her parents vigorously disapproved of the match. Two years later, York, along with every other available young man, was drafted into the army. Though he objected on the basis of his religious convictions, he finally had little choice but to report to Camp Gordon in Georgia. During basic training, Captain C. E. B. Danforth, impressed with York’s sincerity, allowed him to go home for two weeks to decide whether or not he could fight, and York actually did spend a day and a night on a mountain wrestling with his dilemma. Returning to Georgia, York was assigned to Company G of the Second Battalion, 328th Infantry, a part of the 82nd Division, which was dubbed the “All-American Division” due to its thorough mixture of men from all parts of the country. The company became part of the first American army offensive, the St. Michel drive. With York now a corporal, it moved to the Argonne Forest, where it was under fire for a record twenty-six days.
The incident that made York famous took place near Chatel-Chehery on October 8, 1918. York’s battalion, on its way toward a railroad behind German lines, suddenly found itself in the midst of machine-gun cross fire in a shallow valley. Sergeant Bernard Early and sixteen men managed to capture one group of German gunners, but an intense barrage from guns on an adjacent ridge killed six soldiers and seriously wounded three more, including Early. The others scrambled for cover, but York, finding himself exposed, used his sharpshooting talents to kill some twenty-five German gunners. A German major, evidently fearing that his entire force would be destroyed, whistled his surrender, whereupon York and seven other soldiers guided their prisoners through two German lines, collecting additional prisoners as they went. When it was all over, 132 German prisoners, including several officers, had been captured, and the action succeeded in the objective of taking the railroad.
After being decorated by France and Italy, York received the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor and was received as a conquering hero. When he returned to Tennessee, however, he found that his fame made no difference to Gracie’s parents, but he married the girl anyway. The only fees he accepted came from appearances on the lecture circuit, and he poured all the money into aiding an impoverished local school.
A nation’s need for heroes and the government’s propaganda machine may have been responsible for exaggerating York’s role somewhat and creating the impression that he had done it all singlehandedly; the man’s awareness of this, as well as his innate modesty, was undoubtedly responsible for his shunning the spotlight at the time. Nevertheless, there were those who persisted in questioning, and even denying, York’s heroism. In his memo to Wallis, Abem Finkel cautioned Warner Bros. against using Corporal William S. Cutting as a possible technical director on the film. “Cutting is the guy who claims York hogged all the credit unjustifiably.… He also insists that it was he, not York, that brought the prisoners back and that York pulled a fast one on him by bringing in these prisoners while Cutting was asleep in a shell hole.” York, Finkel pointed out, always admitted that he hadn’t done it alone.
As it happened, Cutting had already written to Lasky claiming that he and five other men had played a major part in the exploit and that York’s role had always been vastly overemphasized. Warners paid Cutting off with $250, but this started a ball rolling that threatened not to stop. The studio discovered that to tell the tale properly, some thirty-five to forty individuals would have to be paid to sign releases agreeing to their depiction in the film. The size of these payments proved to be highly inconsistent. Some men were satisfied with as little as five dollars, but Captain C. E. B. Danforth, for one, demanded and received fifteen hundred dollars. The inequity of the sums eventually made its way into the press, as did further attacks on York’s character. For example, an unsigned letter printed in the Boston Globe at the time of the picture’s release, written by a man who claimed to have been in York’s unit, maintained that York was “yellow.… We recall one morning as we were to go ‘over the top,’ York went stark mad with fear. He jumped up on top of the parapet and started to holler, ‘I want to go home. For God’s sake why isn’t this war over.’ Sgt. Early said, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll blow your brains out.’”
Whatever the truth, Hawks was mainly interested in making it all palatable dramatically. He began by coming up with the idea of the Tennessee turkey shoot and reapplying the motif in the battlefield when York picks off the German gunners. Searching for turkeys, York would gobble, a bird would stick its head up, and York would shoot it. “So in the war,” Hawks said, “he was looking down a line of German trenches—the Germans were all hidden—and we had him gobble, and they’d stick their heads out, and he’d shoot one of them. Well, the audience was amused by that and didn’t take it too seriously. So he got eighty prisoners that way and marched along and when he came to a bunch of Americans he wanted to get rid of them, but they didn’t want to take them, so he had to keep on going. That way we really had fun with it and the illogical quality was overlooked.” Hawks also claimed that he and Cooper came up with the idea of York’s licking his finger and wetting the rifle sight before taking aim, which became another well-remembered bit of business from the film.
Huston operated under the conviction that the film’s version of York’s heroics was very close to the truth. He was also taken with the notion of York as a reformed drunk who rationalized killing by convincing himself that his actions saved lives on balance. “I spoke with York on numerous occasions and he told me—and this is the fascinating part—that he was convinced that if he did it, he would save hundreds of human lives. He said, ‘If I destroy this machine gun, I’ll save thousands of people.’ He thoroughly believed it when we spoke about it.
“York was a very amusing fellow, and I tried to put this across in the film,” Huston testified. “I tried to show his comic side. And dramatically, he was a terrific character. I don’t believe that th
e film delivers a terribly profound and relevant message.… We weren’t trying to make All Quiet on the Western Front. That was a film which set out to show the First World War in all its horror, all the better to shock the viewer so that he won’t repeat it.… We chose to tell the story of a man, a particular case. It’s completely infantile and absurd to want to try to find an overall moral in it. I believe that Hawks, who is a great director, is a reactionary man, at least in his life. But you don’t feel this in the films he makes, nor when you work with him.”
Certainly, levity ended up being more important to the finished film than any commentary about the futility of war, a distinct contrast to Hawks’s previous World War I films, The Dawn Patrol, Today We Live, and The Road to Glory. With the need to take up arms again becoming increasingly apparent, the mood had changed since Hawks made those pictures, and the patriotic impulse that had originally engaged Lasky and the brothers Warner easily prevailed over Hawks’s own pessimism and the liberal-left politics of both Huston and Koch.
With one exception, the casting fell nicely into place. Walter Brennan, also on loan from Goldwyn, was a natural choice for Pastor Pile, although shortly after shooting began, Wallis demanded that the actor’s makeup be changed because his huge, bushy black eyebrows made him look “very much like Groucho Marx.” Brennan had been with the 101st Field Artillery in World War I and had seen action near the site of York’s exploit.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 41