Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Warner Bros. played off Sergeant York very slowly, milking its extraordinary timeliness for all it was worth. After playing in exclusive runs at inflated prices in major cities past Labor Day, the picture gradually spread into other markets until it entrenched itself as the number-one film in the country throughout the fall, breaking box-office records in many markets. The film was a phenomenon of staggering proportions, and its reputation was enhanced even further by the role it played in helping to quell the braying of some virulently right-wing politicians in Washington. Incensed by what they viewed as Hollywood’s role as self-appointed cheerleader for joining the war, isolationists and America Firsters in the Senate launched some loudly publicized hearings before an interstate commerce subcommittee on September 9. The subject was the allegedly insidious content of Hollywood movies, particularly the “warmongering” dramas that dared to suggest that the Nazis represented a threat, that Americans ought to extend a helping hand to Britain and perhaps prepare the join in the battle themselves. As always, attacking the film industry made for headlines, but when Sergeant York began building in popularity, editorial writers all over the nation began using the film as a club to demolish the Capitol Hill reactionaries, stating that the filmed biography of a religious pacifist’s conversion to a war’s righteousness represented “the full and complete answer” to the senators’ rants. By late October, the hearings fizzled out.

  Thrilled with the gold mine Jesse Lasky had brought them, Warner Bros. executives were nonetheless upset at the hefty percentages they were contractually forced to pay the producer; once the picture passed $1.6 million in rentals (the amount returned to the distributor from the total box-office gross), Lasky got twenty cents of every dollar. The studio tried different strategies to hold on to more money, such as offering to buy back points, delaying payments inordinately, and pleading that since the foreign market had become so limited due to the war, Lasky ought to understand and give up his share of overseas revenue. Lasky’s contract had no loopholes, however, and the sixty-one-year-old producer crowned his career by making $2 million on the film, which ultimately returned $6 million in rentals from the domestic release alone, making it the third biggest box-office attraction in film history, after Gone with the Wind, which then stood at $18 million, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which had earned $7.15 million to that point (in 1941, a film was generally considered a hit if it returned $1 million to the studio). Cooper, who also had Meet John Doe and The Westerner out that year, was declared the number-one box-office draw in America, while Variety ranked Hawks as the industry’s number-three “money director” on the basis of this one film, following Arthur Lubin, who directed three popular Abbott and Costello comedies that year, and the late Victor Schertzinger, who was also responsible for three successful releases before his sudden death. After the United States entered the war, the picture experienced another surge of publicity as countless news stories told of men, including two ministers, withdrawing previously stated objections to combat duty and enlisting after being inspired by the picture.

  Not surprisingly, Sergeant York was nominated for a dozen Academy Awards. Although Citizen Kane was a prime contender in most categories, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley won the top Oscars, for best picture and director. The only York wins went to the editor, William Holmes, and to Cooper, who had won the New York Film Critics award for best actor and accepted his first Oscar from James Stewart, who was already in the Army Air Corps, having been the first major film star to enter the military. Cooper closed out his brief Oscar speech by saying, “It was Sergeant Alvin York who won this award. Because to the best of my ability, I tried to be Sergeant York.” Hawks received his only Oscar nomination for the film. Years later, when they were old in Palm Springs, John Ford, who won four Academy Awards for direction over the years, would rib Hawks about how he, Ford, had beaten him out of the Oscar undeservingly.

  Hawks finally received a honorary career Oscar in 1975, but before that he always claimed it didn’t bother him that he hadn’t won. “I don’t think much of some of the pictures that have won, so I don’t think it would mean much to me.… It hasn’t anything to do with the fact that I didn’t ever get one myself.… And I listened to too many speeches of acceptance that would have made a good comedy.” Lasky was undoubtedly more disappointed than Hawks at not going home with a statuette, but he was full of plans and projects and surrounded by people who suddenly wanted to work with him again. The producer announced that his next project would be a history of the Boy Scouts, and adding that he and Hawks would work together again on another biographical venture, The Adventures of Mark Twain. Neither film happened as planned, and although he produced several more pictures through the 1940s, he was in debt again in the years before his death in 1958.

  That Sergeant York is not now ranked among Hawks’s most enduring or admired films is a result of several factors, including its very success at the time of its release, its historical timeliness and consequent datedness, and its folksiness, visual phoniness, and propagandistic nature. None of the copious post-1950s critical analyses of Hawks’s career devotes much attention to the film; with its rigidly set story, preordained ideological and political intent, origins as a producer’s project, heavy studio feel, and focus on the inner journey of an individual rather than the actions of a group, Sergeant York has generally been dismissed by students of Hawks as atypical of his work in general, a more conventional Hollywood product than was his norm. Citing how unusual it was for a Hawks film to deal explicitly with major moral, religious, and patriotic issues, Robin Wood argued that “it is precisely these factors that work consistently against the film’s artistic success. One feels Hawks continually hampered by having to ‘stick to the facts’; an intuitive artist, he is ill-equipped to handle big issues on any but a superficial level.”

  Looked at today, the skill that went into the film still appears impressive and Cooper remains remarkable, but the film does suffer in comparison to Hawks’s best work in that it seems not only conventional but unsurprising. Much of the humor is genuinely earned, and Hawks’s one audacious invention, the turkey gobbling, clinches the picture with comedy at its dramatic high point; on one hand, the device is inspired, while on the other, it under-cuts any serious consideration of York’s pacificistic inclinations or qualms about killing. More than on any of his other films, Hawks had considerable real-life material and predetermined attitudes he was forced to accomodate on Sergeant York, and so had less room in which to maneuver to his own liking. But while the film was not viewed as a personal triumph for Hawks, it greatly enhanced his standing in the industry and took him less than half a year to complete, start to finish.

  23

  Catching Fire

  At just about the same time Hawks met Slim, he began a relationship with another individual, with whom he would form the most important professional association of his life. Influential but not yet a dominant force in motion pictures by 1940, Charles K. Feldman always bore the trappings of success. One of the most intelligent and cultivated agents in Hollywood, he was handsome, persuasive, married to a celebrated beauty, host of some of the town’s most elegant parties, and holder of a client list that included some of the most sophisticated and distinguished artists in films.

  Female stars loved Feldman. His dalliances with some of them continually threatened to dash his marriage, and even those with whom he never got involved adored him for his constant attention, lavish gifts, and solicitous, soothing style. At the same time, he was equally at home with his many tough-guy clients and the studio moguls; among the latter, he was particularly close to Darryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, and David O. Selznick.

  The one tycoon with whom he was decidedly not on friendly terms was Louis B. Mayer, for Feldman had stolen away the girl Mayer coveted for himself. This may have made Feldman persona non grata at MGM, but it actually enhanced Feldman’s reputation among many in the Hollywood crowd, who enjoyed imagining Mayer’s insulted rage at being humiliate
d by a mere flesh peddler.

  In 1928, Feldman had opened a law office, concentrating on show-business clients, especially agents. However, when he realized how much more money agents were making than he was, he decided to shift into that field himself, and in 1932 he opened a talent agency with Ad Schulberg, the vivacious, popular, left-wing-activist wife of about-to-be-deposed Paramount production head B. P. Schulberg, who had left her for actress Sylvia Sidney. Ironically, Schulberg was just beginning an affair with, of all people, Louis B. Mayer, the first serious extramarital involvement of the studio chief’s life. The Schulberg-Feldman Agency, which initially specialized in writers but shortly added several big-name stars to its roster, was inaugurated with a lavish party on July 18, 1932, at their Taft Building offices; the pair were later joined in their partnership, first by Noll Gurney, then by the agent Sam Jaffe.

  In 1933, at a party in Beverly Hills, Feldman, then just twenty-nine, met Jean Howard. In retrospect, Howard claimed that it was love at first sight for both of them. Feldman had no trouble sweeping Jean Howard off her feet; however, the entanglements of their lives made their involvement considerably more complicated than that. Feldman was still in a passionate relationship with the stunning Mexican actress Raquel Torres, and his attentions to Jean Howard were something less than consistent and faithful. Howard was under contract as an actress at MGM, where she had worked, ever so briefly, under Hawks’s direction in The Prizefighter and the Lady the year before. Louis B. Mayer had taken an intense personal interest in her welfare; although she always claimed that there was never anything physical between them, there is no doubt that Hollywood’s most powerful boss was infatuated with her, arranging for her to spend evenings on the town with him, hiring a private detective to follow both Feldman and Howard, and, according to Howard, offering her $5 million to marry him. Howard eventually decided enough was enough and told a devastated Mayer that she was returning to Feldman. Soon after, Feldman and Howard were married.

  Even if Feldman himself was not welcome in Mayer’s office in the aftermath of this wild interlude, Ad Schulberg certainly was, and it was she who handled the agency’s MGM contract players, including Norma Shearer. After another year, however, Schulberg left to form her own agency, upon which Feldman formed an alliance with a former law associate of his, Ralph Blum. Mayer was finally forced to do business with Feldman personally in 1936, when his biggest star, Greta Garbo, insisted that Mayer hire Feldman’s client Charles Boyer to appear opposite her in Conquest.

  Charlie Feldman and Jean Howard were an enormously popular Hollywood couple, but they were not without their problems. Charlie’s philandering led to several temporary separations, and while he was not a compulsive womanizer, he was in the business of cultivating beautiful young actresses who not only saw him as a way up the Hollywood ladder but were genuinely attracted to him. For a man like him, sporadic dalliances were all but inevitable, which forced Jean Howard to decide whether or not she was capable of looking the other way.

  In 1935, when Feldman-Blum moved offices, Feldman got to know William Hawks, whose Hawks-Volck agency maintained offices in the same building in Beverly Hills. Feldman’s initial encounters with Bill’s brother Howard were casual, but by 1939 a real friendship was developing, with the men often meeting for lunch at the Brown Derby down the block or at Victor Hugo to discuss deals, stars and starlets, and horses, as Feldman and Hawks had a major gambling fixation in common. In addition, neither was a fan of the long-term studio contract, Hawks because he hated being tied down to one studio, Feldman because he believed there was more money to be made in making deals on a picture-by-picture basis. Both men felt a strong impulse to produce films independently, and although it would take awhile, their strongest bond was based on blazing this trail together, to their mutual profit.

  Feldman quickly caught on to Hawks’s propensity for self-aggrandizement, but he enjoyed it and over the years got a big kick out of listening to Hawks tell others tall tales he knew to be whoppers, just to watch their reactions and to see how far Hawks would go with them. Jean Howard said that Feldman would often come home smiling and shaking his head saying, “He really is the biggest liar that ever happened.” Jean asked if Hawks believed what he was saying, and her husband would insist, “He believes every word he’s saying.” For her part, Jean found Hawks “a very attractive man … very polite but a cold kind of fellow. He wouldn’t be somebody that I would wave to across the street and say, ‘Hi, Howard.’”

  But while Hawks and Feldman were becoming increasingly close, their wives had little time for each other. Jean Howard felt that Slim was a social climber and sensed almost at once that Slim wasn’t very happy with her man, even more so when Slim realized that Hawks was much less interested in hosting or even attending glittering Hollywood parties than she was. Jean resented the way Slim seemed to copy both her style of entertaining and her taste in home decoration, and before long she found excuses to avoid any invitation to accompany her husband to the Hawks home. One time she resorted to getting high on some marijuana Errol Flynn had given her to get through an evening with the Hawkses. One way of reading this is that Jean saw an uncomfortable amount of herself in Slim. Jean had few equals within the inner circle of Beverly Hills society, and the frostiness between her and Slim happened to be the result of two very like-minded women trying to occupy the same turf.

  In 1940, Bill Hawks decided to quit the agency business to become a producer. That May, he announced the formation of United Producers Corporation, a group composed of Hawks, his longtime client Ronald Colman, and four others, all represented by Feldman: Charles Boyer, Irene Dunne, Lewis Milestone, and Anatole Litvak. The company intended to produce ten pictures for RKO over a period of three years, five of which would star Ronald Colman. The first of these, the inconsequential comedy My Life with Caroline, starring Colman under Milestone’s direction, was released a year later. With his brother no longer representing him, Howard Hawks was free to join Feldman, and the first deal the agent made for the director was the lucrative one for Sergeant York. Better yet was the fee Feldman would extract from Sam Goldwyn for Hawks’s next film.

  It was immediately prior to this that Hawks made his first and only trip to the Kentucky Derby, near the end of the Sergeant York shoot. Slim said that chez Hawks, listening to the running of the Derby on the radio “was treated like an on-the-spot broadcast of the Resurrection.” Hawks’s eyes would actually well up, she reported, at the playing of “My Old Kentucky Home,” such were his sentimental fantasies of being a great horse breeder from bluegrass country.

  Hawks’s excuse for leaving the shoot of Sergeant York a day before finishing it was that he had a horse running in the Derby. Of course, he had no such thing. Scheduled to depart by train, he and Slim instead flew as far as Kansas City, where Hawks insisted that they deplane and drive the rest of the way so that Slim could get a feel for the South, even though Slim could see that the real reason was that Hawks was airsick. They rented a car and, as so often happened, Hawks got lost, taking them on an inadvertent detour all the way to Cleveland before arriving in Louisville. Once they arrived, they found, also with great difficulty, the less-than-imposing home of Hawks’s acquaintance “General” Miles, a hee-hawing, rotund, older southern gent who was hosting a number of guests for the weekend. Hawks’s behavior there, as witnessed by Slim, seems unique in his entire life: “Howard was a fellow whose most relaxed and carefree moments were fraught with a kind of Brooks Brothers button-down dignity. On meeting him, you had the curious feeling that both of you were under water. But with the General, he emerged. Now he too was full of hearty laughter and rib-punching joviality. Howard was suddenly a stranger to me. It was the most complete metamorphosis I have ever seen in a human being.”

  The day of revelry continued through a drunken picnic and finally to the main event at Churchill Downs, by which time Slim was so fed up that she remained furious for the rest of the trip. The whole experience was, in fact, so disagreeable that she
made a point of never returning to Kentucky again. Hawks, however, became “horsier than ever,” to the point that he soon bought several racehorses, which, Slim said, “struck me as an excuse to justify his excessive gambling habit … which was so out of control he would bet on his own horse.”

  While Hawks was away, Feldman was busy lining up his new client’s next job and was in touch with Hawks about it nearly every day as Hawks and Slim pushed south to Nashville, Florida, and the Keys and then on to New Orleans, where they selected a vast number of Louisiana antiques for their future home. On June 4, the day after he and Slim arrived home, Hawks had a meeting with Sam Goldwyn about his next picture. The result was a clever, congenial entertainment as sweet and relaxed as most of his comedies were brash and frantic, one that also contained the oddest professional group ever portrayed in a Hawks film.

  Even before Meet John Doe and Sergeant York came out in 1941, Sam Goldwyn was chagrined at how all of Gary Cooper’s biggest hits were the ones he made on loan to other studios rather than the five he had thus far made in-house. Determined to develop better material for his most valuable star, Goldwyn arranged to borrow one of the hottest writing teams in town, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, from Paramount. Unhappy over the way his work was being treated at Paramount, Wilder was chomping at the bit to launch his directing career but agreed one last time to work strictly as a writer, persuaded by the staggering amount Goldwyn was willing to pay: $7,500 for the story, another $79,800 for the script. In addition, Wilder insisted on being allowed to observe every day of the shooting from beginning to end in preparation for graduating to the director’s chair himself, which he did the following year.