Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Margaret Wycherly, whom Hawks found “a superb actress,” played the important part of York’s mother but ultimately found herself with hardly any lines to say. “As we were rehearsing,” Hawks remembered, “I told her to cut out a line. ‘Oh, that’s one of my best,’ she said. Well, we played the scene and I told her to cut out a couple more lines and pretty soon she said, ‘I’m not going to have any thing to say.’ I said, ‘That’s a good idea—let’s just play it without your saying anything.’ And it made a much better scene. As he went away, his sister says, ‘Why is he going, Mom?’ and the mother says, ‘I don’t rightly know.’ They didn’t know, and he didn’t know. They were going off to war, and I thought it was best not to take sides in the argument.” The fifteen-year-old actor Dick Moore, who played York’s younger brother George, remembered things rather differently. “Margaret Wycherly was a pain in the ass,” he said. “She had a superior New York theater attitude. She was kind of a joke on the set. She was very grand.”

  The only role that posed any casting problems was that of York’s sweetheart, Gracie Williams. When Hawks and Howard Hughes parted ways on The Outlaw, Hawks had relinquished any financial participation in the picture, with the proviso that he could borrow Jane Russell anytime he wanted. Having liked Russell a great deal but not gotten to work with her, Hawks tested her for Gracie the first week of January, and both he and Lasky were happy with the result. Wallis, who was leaving for Washington, D.C., to attend FDR’s third inauguration, wasn’t convinced. “I agree with you that Jane Russell is very attractive, but I hardly think she is the type for Sergeant York. She doesn’t look like the simple, backwoods country girl to me.” Familiar with Hawks’s taste for provocative, knowingly sexy young women, Wallis was troubled by the director’s inclinations in casting this part and warned him that “any attempt to try to make her a sultry, sexy, wild creature that might be played by Paulette Goddard will, I am sure, meet with violent objections from the Yorks.” Wallis added that Jack Warner had voiced similar concerns. Wallis then argued in favor of another young actress Hawks tested, Suzanne Carnahan, but finally Hawks tried out an attractive, coquettish sixteen-year-old, Joan Leslie, and cast her just before shooting began. June Lockhart, a year younger than Leslie (and twenty-five years younger than Cooper), won the role of York’s sister.

  With an initial budget of $1 million and a shooting schedule of forty-eight days, Sergeant York began production on February 3. That morning, Cooper received telegrams from York, General John J. Pershing, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who had been the congressman from York’s district in Tennessee and was being portrayed in the picture by Charles Trowbridge; Lasky informed Wallis that these wires “pepped Gary up enormously.” At the end of the day, unit manager Eric Stacey, the studio’s watch-dog on the production, related to management that the star had been a half hour late in showing up in the morning, “which is nothing unusual for Cooper, I can assure you.” He also reminded Wallis of Hawks’s leisurely work habits, which had always annoyed the production chief. “Mr. Hawks has been in the habit of providing tea and cake for his staff every day. This was done today, and much appreciated, and I can honestly say that no time was lost by so doing.”

  Hawks would later claim, “We had no trouble at all—we just sailed through the picture.” From his point of view this was undoubtedly true, but the studio, at the time, saw things differently. Hawks spent the first five days filming on the Blind Tiger Café set and at the end of the first six-day work week was already four days behind schedule. As usual, Hawks was taking his time, letting the actors get a feel for their roles and ease into the picture.

  Dick Moore, who played York’s younger brother, had appeared in more than one hundred pictures since he was eleven years old, but he still felt insecure as an actor. In the café scene, in which he comes to take a drunken Alvin home to their mother, Moore felt stiff and uptight standing there patiently with his rifle. “Hawks sense of how to get the best out of me, and to make me comfortable, was uncanny,” Moore said. “At one point in the scene, I smiled, accidentally. He said, ‘Very good, we’ll try another one.’ But he took me aside and said, ‘Everything you’re doing is good, but at no time in this entire picture does George have to smile. Don’t think you have to. Only when you feel like it.’ So I totally relaxed. How he sensed that I’ll never know.” With Sergeant York, Moore’s whole attitude about acting changed. “The thing I admired about Hawks was the sense of freedom he instilled in me.… He was a very subtle director, he would just give suggestions. He was courtly, gracious, and treated his actors with respect, even diffidence.” Gary Cooper took the teenager under his wing, teaching him how to throw a knife and talking Moore’s mother into buying him his first rifle. “I became an outdoors person because of my experiences on that picture,” Moore said.

  The following Monday, Lasky went to see Warner and Wallis to request a ten-week shooting schedule. While filming was getting under way, the art director, John Hughes, was supervising construction of the 123 sets required for the picture, including an enormous farmland and mountain set on a revolving merry-go-round base (to allow for different perspectives), with a two-hundred-foot stream and 121 trees. Because of the high ratio of settings to the number of sound stages available, throughout the shoot the art department was forced to wait for the company to finish with one set before demolishing it and quickly building the next; both the rewriting and the scene construction on Sergeant York barely kept up with the pace of shooting during the initial weeks. This merely contributed to an enormous squeeze at the studio as a whole; by March, production at Warner Bros. reached an all-time high, with 5,030 people on the payroll working on eight pictures on twenty-two stages.

  During the second week of shooting, Hawks received a memo from Wallis gently insisting that he speed up his work pace, the sort of missive that had become irritatingly familiar to him during Ceiling Zero. With the picture a week behind schedule after only two weeks of filming, a meeting was held to weigh solutions. The main problem was that the script was composed of many short scenes requiring a great deal of set-up time, but for economy’s sake it was decided to eliminate two major sequences from the end of the picture—a big wedding scene and the spectacle of York’s reception in New York City.

  Hawks’s rapport with his cast and crew was excellent, and the director was very happy with the way things were proceeding, except for the front-office pressure. He objected to the fact that the picture was still officially listed as being six days behind schedule when, in fact, the studio had agreed to Lasky’s request for an extended schedule. Furthermore, certain factors were out of his control. Joan Leslie, for instance, was forbidden to work past 6 P.M. because of her age. On more than one occasion, work at the Warners’ ranch had been scheduled, but heavy rains had forced last-minute rescheduling onto interior sets that were not entirely ready. Uncooperative dogs and mules held up filming of certain scenes: while Hawks was getting what he needed for most shoots with an average of between one and three takes, what should have been a simple dialogue exchange between Cooper and Erville Alderson became a twelve-take farce when a mule, which was supposed to stand still, kept moving around. Finally, the scene had to be re-staged so that the animal’s newly bound front feet couldn’t be seen by the camera.

  At the same time, it didn’t escape the attention of Stacey, the unit manager and Wallis that Hawks was up to his old trick of writing new dialogue on the spur of the moment. As Stacey told his boss in explanation of a very late start one day, “I noticed both the actors had yellow pages and the dialogue had been rewritten.”

  As usual, Warner and Wallis were not welcome on the set, but Hawks was not about to banish his old mentor Jesse Lasky from the stage. All the same, the director wasn’t afraid to let his producer know when his presence was unhelpful. When Hawks was trying to figure out how to stage a scene of York plowing the field, Lasky was standing right behind him with a guest. Dick Moore recalled that Lasky whispered something to his companion, w
hereupon Hawks announced to the room, “They called for quiet on the stage.” Lasky promptly turned and left the set with his guest.

  The fourth week of shooting started out to be notably difficult. Hawks came down with a very bad cold and requested that the scheduled exterior location work be postponed so he could stay indoors. This put his less-than-ideal relationship with the art director, Hughes, on the spot; feeling that the indoor-for-outdoor sets on which Cooper was to be seen plowing looked phony, Hawks demanded that they be changed and announced that he wanted to play the scene at night, with the “character silhouetted in a night sky and with no trees.” He also had words with Wallis’s spy Stacey, who instantly reported to his boss that “Mr. Hawks made a very sarcastic crack—something about shooting a schedule and not making any picture.”

  Hawks suffered through the week. He had Lasky, Huston, and Koch come on the set one day to rewrite the scene in which the mountain men register for the draft. The following day, he patiently waited as bit player Frank Orth kept blowing his few lines, requiring sixteen takes of one shot and thirteen of another. The last day of the week, however, proved the most productive of the entire shoot to date; having averaged fewer than two pages of script per day up to that point, Hawks sped right through four and a half pages of dialogue in Pastor Pile’s store, ending the week with a burst of enthusiasm.

  The following week, Hawks was feeling better, but the cinematographer, Sol Polito, fell ill and was replaced, mainly for the big meeting-hall sequence in which York “gets religion,” by Arthur Edeson, who had shot Ceiling Zero for Hawks and would soon handle the camera on the outdoor war scenes. That week, after constant pressure from Lasky, Warners finally upped the production from a forty-eight to a seventy-two-day shoot, or more than double the average for an A picture at the studio. “Physical construction” problems were officially blamed for the previous delays, but this didn’t stop Wallis from continuing to complain to Hawks, not only about what he considered the director’s slack working methods but also about the pacing of the scenes, which he felt was on the dull, slow side.

  At the same time, Wallis and Warner secretly began planning to assign a second-unit director to simultaneously shoot all the war footage, feeling that it would take Hawks forever to get around to it and another eternity to finish it. Hawks knew, of course, that some second-unit material would be used, but he was upset when the studio suddenly announced that stunt, action, and B-movie director B. Reeves Eason, nicknamed “Breezy” for his quick—some would say slipshod—shooting style, had been personally chosen by Lasky to direct the second unit. Hawks told his old boss, “I think we are making a great mistake to put a man on the second-unit work who is not a dramatic director,” but he had little choice but to acquiesce.

  At about the same time, in early March, an importrant budget meeting among the principals was called by the studio. Tired of being blamed for all the overages, Hawks told Warner and Wallis that he had sometimes been made to wait on the set for Lasky to deliver new pages of the script to him; he also insisted that the screenplay contained more material than could ever be used in the finished film. Lasky maintained that everything included was necessary. On March 10–11, Hawks astonished the studio by knocking out an uncustomary forty-four setups in making the turkey-shoot sequence; at the end of the second day, he had a tête-à-tête with Wallis in the director’s station wagon and received permission to keep Huston and Koch on to rewrite the final portion of the script, which still bothered him.

  Work proceeded efficiently through the rest of March, and when the scenarists finally finished their rewrites, Lasky felt compelled to send a note to Wallis: “I do not want to let the occasion pass without expressing to you my feelings about these two splendid boys. In spite of pressure, they maintained an enthusiasm for the work that I am sure will be reflected on the screen.” Wallis kept any comments about Hawks to himself from this point on, and as of April, only the weather could be blamed for the mounting delays. Breezy Eason no sooner arrived on location in the Santa Susanna Mountains, where two miles of trenches had been dug, than he was greeted with more than a week of torrential rain. Several of Hawks’s scenes, including the fox hunt, had already been switched from exteriors to interiors because of both his illness and inclement weather, resulting in a more studio-enclosed picture than he originally intended, but Eason had no alternative but to wait it out. Showing Breezy up, Hawks even completed the long sequence in the G Company barracks in two, rather than the allotted three, days, although he was then tripped up when Cooper couldn’t shoot for several days because of health problems.

  With a June release planned, Wallis personally took charge of the fine cutting of the first seven to eight thousand feet of the picture, up through the training-camp sequences. Hawks finally moved out of the studio onto San Fernando Valley locations at the Warner Ranch and Sherwood Forest, where the first thing he did was to have a shooting range set up so he and Cooper could indulge in target practice every day at lunch. Hawks put himself back on schedule with the grand accomplishment of finishing the firing-range scene, a seven-page sequence featuring Cooper and seventy-eight extras, in one day, which prompted the skeptical Stacey to tell Wallis, “Hawks is very consistent in making good speed on long sequences … after he has gotten the whole thing worked out.” In fact, Wallis’s concern was shifting to Eason; he complained, “I can’t seem to make much out of Eason’s dailies,” and, deciding that Eason’s scenes lacked scope, he attempted to solve the problem by sending him 250 more extras.

  Although stars of his magnitude normally were not required to take orders from second-unit directors, Cooper worked for about three days with Eason, mainly in long shots during battle while surrounded by dozens of extras at a time when Hawks was doing scenes set in the German headquarters. On April 26 and 28 the two units merged, with Hawks taking over and restaging aspects of the battle. With this done but the picture not yet entirely finished, Hawks announced that he was leaving on May 1 to attend the Kentucky Derby. Given no notice at all, Warner called in the contract director Vincent Sherman to cover the final sequences. On April 30, Hawks rehearsed them in Sherman’s presence, with particular attention to the scene in which York is decorated, and Sherman executed them according to Hawks’s plan the following day. Sherman recalled that Hawks instructed him, “‘Feature the people who are doing the decorating. We’ve seen enough of Coop.’ Seeing the picture later, he was right. He had an uncanny sense of story, of what was important in a scene.” Eason shot two more days of the trenches and the German machine-gun nests, and filming of Sergeant York finally wrapped on Saturday, May 3, after seventy days of actual shooting, two days under the final allotted schedule. Weather had limited Eason to twenty days of filming on a thirty-three-day schedule. The studio also announced that Cooper had appeared before the cameras for fifty-four straight days, excepting Sundays and sick days, a record for any star. The final budget, including a 39 percent studio overhead, came to $1.6 million.

  With Hawks out of town and the premiere less than two months away, Wallis continued to supervise the cutting and scoring of the picture with the film’s editor, William Holmes, and composer, Max Steiner, just as the publicity department geared up for a media onslaught of mammoth proportions. The first public preview, in a 150-minute cut without any war montages, was held on June 16, and York was duly wired that it had been a great success. After one more preview, the final print, running 134 minutes, was sped to New York in time for the July 1 world premiere. The day before, York was met at Penn Station by Cooper and numerous dignitaries, and a marching band accompanied them in a parade up Fifth Avenue to 82nd Division headquarters, where a motorcade awaited to transport them to a reception at City Hall with Mayor La Guardia. Making no secret of its enthusiasm for the picture’s combat-ready attitude, the government sent a special train from the nation’s capital carrying Mrs. Roosevelt, General Pershing, Wendell Wilkie, and several senators and congressmen. York and Cooper attended the invitational debut along with m
embers of the 82nd “All-American” Division and Generals Pershing, Hugh Drum, and Lewis B. Hershey. York made a dozen patriotic speeches, which were picked up by the national wire services, and Broadway was blacked out for thirty seconds at midnight on June 30–July 1 to dramatize the illumination of the Sergeant York sign at the Astor Theater, where the film opened with a top ticket price of $2.20 on a two show per-day road-show basis, with more shows added due to the demand. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale enthusiastically endorsed the picture, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek requested and received a print to show to his troops in China. To top off the dream come true of any publicity department, FDR himself saw the film, said he was “thrilled” by it, and invited York to the White House.

  The critical reaction to Sergeant York was so unanimous that it is difficult to find a single negative or even lukewarm review from the time of its release. Sensitive to the film’s manipulative, propagandistic nature or not, all the critics commented upon its remarkable timeliness and generally greeted it as a new American classic, the most important film to have come out since Gone with the Wind nearly two years before. Everyone rhapsodized about Cooper, and Lasky’s name was often mentioned in the context of a magnificent comeback and career capper.

  Despite his prominent billing, however, only seldom was Hawks given much credit for the picture’s success, other than to say that he did a fine or highly professional job. By contrast, when Frank Capra had taken Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to the capital for its premiere in 1939, the director was the center of attention. Sergeant York’s director, however, was nowhere to be found at its opening. On the eve of the greatest critical and popular success of his career, Hawks was back home in Beverly Hills, sporting with Slim, housebreaking the two eighty-five-pound English mastiff pups he had just bought, and preparing to start Ball of Fire in a month’s time.