After rejecting everything remotely appropriate for Cooper in Goldwyn’s development files, Wilder pulled out a fourteen-page story he had once put together with Thomas Monroe. “From A to Z” concerned a British linguistics professors named Professor Thrush who, at the age of ten, had written “a much spoken of thesis on ‘The Faults in Shakespeare’s English Grammar.’” Thrush found Babe singing in a 42nd Street burlesque house, and the ensuing conflict between the rarefied academic environment and Babe’s bruising underworld acquaintances ended in “the triumph of science and knowledge over brute force, of intellect over iniquity, of Einstein over Capone.”
Through the late winter and early spring of 1941, while Cooper was in the middle of Sergeant York, Brackett and Wilder tore into the script, tailoring it for the star by changing the leading character to a shy American and fleshing out the wonderful roles of the seven older professors with whom the younger man would work in preparing a new encyclopedia. They even identified specific actors, including Walter Brennan, in the script.
When it came to selecting a director, Goldwyn had to admit that none of his contract directors had managed to show Cooper off to maximum advantage. Since the whole project was being built around the actor, the producer reluctantly agreed that anyone Coop wanted was all right with him, even the dreaded Howard Hawks, who hadn’t set foot in his studio since the nasty split on Come and Get It five years before. In his favor, Hawks had subsequently proved himself as an ace comedy director with Bringing Up Baby and particularly His Girl Friday, so Goldwyn went along despite his private feeling that Hawks had “no character.” So if Hawks was responsible for nudging Cooper over the edge into committing to do Sergeant York, the actor might be said to have returned the favor on what became Ball of Fire. Not that Hawks needed much convincing. He found the screenplay outstanding, later commenting that “Brackett and Wilder were superb writers and they could make almost anything good.” Of course, Hawks had to find a way to somehow claim the material as his own, insisting that when the writers were stuck, he clarified everything for them by pointing out that their story was really Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with Babe, now Sugar-puss, as Snow White and her gangster boyfriend as the evil queen. Wilder, however, pooh-poohed Hawks’s credit grab.
Charles Feldman waited until the perfect moment—June 17, the day after the first preview of Sergeant York—to nail down Hawks’s $100,000 directing fee, “at which figure, Goldwyn promptly proceeded to faint”; this was the most Hawks had ever received for a single picture. Warner Bros. was simultaneously trying to arrange for Hawks to direct Orson Welles in its adaptation of the George S. Kaufman–Moss Hart Broadway comedy smash The Man Who Came to Dinner, but Hawks was spoken for.
Once he was on Ball of Fire, Hawks’s first challenge was to cast the female lead, a problem exacerbated, as it had been on His Girl Friday, by several surprising rejections, but once again the final choice proved felicitous. Having just won an Oscar for her dramatic performance in Kitty Foyle, Ginger Rogers, Goldwyn’s first choice, spurned the role of Sugarpuss O’Shea as too frivolous now that she had established herself as a serious actress. Carole Lombard disliked both the character and the story, and Harry Cohn refused Goldwyn’s request for Jean Arthur, whom Hawks did not want anyway, although the actress went public with her anger over being denied her chance at the part. In late June, Hawks filmed tests with twenty-three-year-old Betty Field, who had just scored in Lewis Milestone’s film Of Mice and Men, as well as with longtime second banana Lucille Ball. Cooper finally suggested his Meet John Doe costar, Barbara Stanwyck, whom everyone agreed would be ideal.
Production began on Monday, August 6, 1941, with a forty-eight-day shooting schedule. By Hawks’s standards—and to Goldwyn’s delight—filming zipped along relatively efficiently. Hawks began each day by watching the previous day’s dailies and was usually on the set by 9:20 A.M.; after a month, the company was only four and a half days behind schedule, with the slight delays due to rewriting and an eye inflammation that briefly put Cooper out of action. The septet of Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers, S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, Tully Marshall, Leonid Kinsky, Richard Haydn, and Aubrey Mather were cast as the graying professors, and Hawks personally decided which of them should play which roles. Kinsky, who had known Hawks since appearing in a small part in The Road to Glory, said that the character actors “had a certain amount of freedom, we were able to suggest some things.” At the same time, the director persisted in his shameless way of appropriating other people’s ideas as his own. “He never gave credit for anything,” Kinsky observed. “He rented people, the finest and the best, and then called what they did his own.… [Once] I told him, ‘We’re old-fashioned professors, and we’d sing the old university hymn “Gaudeamus igitur” after a few drinks. If we didn’t, there’d be something wrong with us.’ On the set, after a few rehearsals, Howard stopped and said, ‘I have an idea: these men studied in Vienna. I think they’d sing “Gaudeamus igitur.” No old-fashioned professors’ group would spend an evening without singing that.’”
Other than what he borrowed from his collaborators, Kinsky found that Hawks had very few suggestions to offer in rehearsals, although “you felt that he was the boss of the whole thing. He had the same talent, but in a different way, that Wyler had. He would just have you do it, then do it again, without explaining why. Gary Cooper was the easiest person in the world to work with. It was like working with a beautiful horse. So honest, so truthful.” On Sergeant York, Cooper had been concerned about capturing the simple, religious nature of a real-life figure, while on Ball of Fire, he complained to Hawks that some of his dialogue was too complicated and difficult to deliver. Nevertheless, their collaboration was once again the definition of congeniality.
Kinsky found Barbara Stanwyck “professional but cold” and recalled that she never became a part of the collegial camaraderie that developed among the men in the cast. But Stanwyck’s professionalism suited Hawks just fine, as he enjoyed working with her enormously and always ranked her among the best actresses with whom he ever worked. The feeling was not entirely reciprocated, however. Stanwyck confided that while she thought Hawks did a competent job, she felt the picture lacked a certain spark of inspiration, and she secretly regretted that Billy Wilder, present at all times on the set, hadn’t directed it instead.
Fresh off Citizen Kane, Gregg Toland had deeply explored the possibilities of deep-focus cinematography since working for Hawks on The Road to Glory and Come And Get It. Hawks, whose films were conventionally well-photographed without being innovative visually, found the technique suitable “when you didn’t give a damn what the people looked like, as with the old professors. The harsher the lighting, the better they looked.” The director thought deep focus “was only good with a group like that, because they worked as one person—I always thought of them as one actor. ‘The professor’ meant all of them—I seldom singled one out.… Anyway, it was kind of a stylized thing, and you had to adapt your style to it. I never tried for depth of focus on a picture where it would intrude.” Hawks was impressed with Toland’s solution to one photographic dilemma. Cooper was to enter a dark room where Stanwyck was in bed. Hawks wanted only her eyes to show but didn’t know how to avoid revealing her face as well. Toland’s answer: Have Stanwyck do the scene in blackface.
To shoot the location footage, Arthur Rosson took a second-unit crew to New York City and worked all over town, including at Yankee Stadium during the World Series. After the film had been shooting for two months, it was nine and a half days behind its original forty-eight-day schedule. Due to the rewrites, however, shortly before the end Goldwyn officially extended the schedule to fifty-eight days. But with shooting rolling into mid-October, the real pressure to finish was coming not from Goldwyn but from Cooper, Stanwyck, and Hawks. They were all invited by Ernest Hemingway to join him in Sun Valley for a hunting vacation, and this just couldn’t wait. Hawks responded, as he sometimes managed to do, by knocking off a hefty six and a half pages o
f script in one day, then pushing ahead without delay to the final major sequence, Sugarpuss’s performance of “Drum Boogie.” (Benny Goodman singer Martha Tilton dubbed Stanwyck’s vocals, and bandleader Gene Krupa improvised the variation, “Match Boogie,” played with a pair of matches on a matchbox, which Hawks liked and threw into the film.) The picture wrapped on October 16, officially one day ahead of schedule, with a final budget of $1,152,538, including 15 percent for overhead and contingencies. Cooper outearned even Hawks, taking home $150,000, while Stanwyck received $68,333, markedly less than the writers.
Once again, Hawks, with more interesting places to go and people to see, left final editing and postproduction work to studio hands. Rushing the picture to completion so as to ride on the coattails of Sergeant York’s immense success, Goldwyn scheduled the first sneak preview for the first week of November but suffered an unusual embarrassment in the process. By gentleman’s agreement, the Hollywood trade press did not review new films at sneak previews as long as the screenings were held sufficiently outside of Los Angeles. The suburb of Glendale, however, was considered fair game, so when Variety got wind that Ball of Fire would be snuck at that town’s Alexandria Theater, the critic Bill Brogdon was dispatched to the event. But once Goldwyn discovered that Brogdon was present, he refused to proceed with the showing. According to the New York Post, “a riot broke out,” with people demanding that Brogdon be thrown out on the street. Goldwyn ended up taking the print and his guests to a theater in Pasadena.
Goldwyn was then distributing his pictures through RKO, and the company made it their first release of 1942. The film enjoyed an excellent three-week run at Radio City Music Hall beginning January 15 and did exceedingly good business everywhere, generating $2,200,000 in rentals to rank as the year’s twenty-fifth biggest box-office attraction.
Ball of Fire doesn’t rate with Hawks’s best comedies of the period, Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, although it remains utterly charming for the brash cleverness of the dialogue, the heartwarming geniality of the professors, and the expert comic playing of Cooper and Stanwyck. At 111 minutes, it runs too long, and Hawks was not able to pace it at the same speed as his previous comedies, albeit for good reason. The film “was about pedantic people,” Hawks pointed out. “When you’ve got professors saying lines, they can’t speak ‘em like crime reporters.” He added, “It didn’t have the same reality as the other comedies, and we couldn’t make it go with the same speed.”
As Robin Wood observed, the film charts a favorite Hawks theme of conflicting characters’ “mutual improvement through interaction,” but the dynamic of the plot is directly opposed to those of his comedies of “irresponsibility.” Unlike Bringing Up Baby, where Cary Grant’s academic life is thoroughly disrupted by Katharine Hepburn, or His Girl Friday, where Grant’s unethical high-handedness rides roughshod over any notion of propriety, the world of civilized values is respected and reaffirmed here. The tough-guy gangster stuff feels off-putting as well as annoyingly artificial in this context, underlining the fairy-tale conceit of the entire story, and Hawks sides with respectability and rectitude in Ball of Fire for the only time in any of his comedies. This said, he also recognizes the need of his leading man to be loosened up by a spirited woman of the world, a theme that never varied in his work or personal life.
As soon as filming concluded, the Hollywood contingent left for Idaho, where Hemingway and his three sons had arrived in September for antelope hunting. As he had in the two previous autumns, Hemingway, who had married the writer Martha Gellhorn the previous fall, was staying gratis at the plush, twelve-unit Sun Valley Lodge, a year-round resort that desperately needed the kind of publicity Hemingway’s presence could bring it. Gary and Rocky Cooper had visited the season before, and this year Hemingway, now at the peak of his success and fame, broadened the invitation to include Hawks and Slim, whom he hadn’t seen since their Key West visit nearly two years before, as well as Barbara Stanwyck and her husband, Robert Taylor. Because Hemingway’s two younger sons, Patrick, thirteen, and Gregory, almost ten, were so close in age to David, Hawks’s twelve-year-old son also got to go, skipping school for a couple of the best-spent weeks of his childhood. Also on hand was Hemingway’s buddy Robert Capa, the great Hungarian war photographer, who became friendly with Hawks and Slim and took pictures of the group hunting and partying that beautifully document the time. Coincidentally staying at Sun Valley, although not explicitly as part of Hemingway’s group, were Leland Hayward—perhaps the only Hollywood agent with more class and sophistication than Charles Feldman—with his actress wife, Margaret Sullavan, and the producer William Goetz and his wife, Edie, Louis B. Mayer’s daughter.
Following Hemingway’s lead in mostly glorious Indian summer weather, the group hunted partridge and pheasant, swam, played roulette, and drank at night. Hemingway wasn’t particularly taken with Robert Taylor, but he enjoyed the spunky Stanwyck and liked Cooper as much as ever; the year before, Coop had shown Hemingway up with his expert riflry, so the writer was pleased when Sergeant York asked for pointers to improve his skill with a shotgun.
As for Hawks, when the director talked in general terms about his notions for making a film about trotting horses, Hemingway urged him to hire his old friend Evan Shipman, a poet and horse expert, as technical adviser. He also challenged Hawks to slug him in the belly as hard as he could causing Hawks to break his hand. Hemingway later wrote that he found Hawks “a very intelligent and sensitive man with a lovely girl,” and there was no doubt that it was this “girl” who most occupied his thoughts. The strong, disturbing, unmistakable connection between Hemingway and Slim instantly reasserted itself here, although, at least on Slim’s part, there was no way they were going to start something physical. But Hemingway persisted in sticking close to Slim while hunting and hovering solicitously after hours.
In her memoirs, Slim recounted two notably revealing stories about Hemingway’s feelings for her. The writer told her that his two young sons “asked him what falling in love is. ‘Well,’ Ernest said, ‘do you remember when you first met Slim?’ Gregory piped up, ‘Boy, I sure do.’ And then Ernest said, ‘Well, what did it feel like?’ ‘Like being kicked in the stomach by a horse,’ Gregory said. Papa laughed. ‘That’s just what falling in love is like.’”
On another occasion that fall, Slim remembered, she had just taken a shower and went to dry her hair in front of the fireplace, where she found Hemingway and Capa. Hemingway asked if he could brush her hair and, receiving permission, brushed it for a very long time. “When he was finished, he dropped the brush on the floor in front of me and said, ‘You don’t know what that was like. It was very, very difficult. Both for Capa and me. You’re a very provocative woman. I can’t be around you too much.’” Slim made light of this, diffusing the tension and allowing the good times to continue.
The underlying reason for the trip was to work out a strategy for Hawks to get the directing job on For Whom the Bell Tolls. In the year since its publication, the novel had become the biggest best-seller since Gone with the Wind, putting Hemingway back on top of the heap among American writers. Paramount’s record purchase price of $115,000 for the motion picture rights was rising to $150,000 because of the book’s enormous sales, but nothing concerning the film’s production had been locked down. The studio hadn’t begun to figure out how to handle the book’s touchy political and sexual elements, nor had a director been definitely selected. As a favor to Cooper, who would play the lead, Cecil B. De Mille had read the novel in galleys to help press Paramount into buying it but passed on tackling the film himself. Sam Wood, a former assistant of De Mille’s, was announced by Paramount for the job in June 1941. But since Cooper had contractual director approval and hadn’t officially been signed himself, the door seemed just sufficiently ajar for Hawks to slip in if everyone played their cards right.
Hawks went along with all this out of a desire to work with Hemingway and Cooper, as well as to take the helm of what could easily have
been the most prestigious and commercially successful film of his career to date. By the second week of November, Paramount had secretly agreed to give the picture to Hawks. At the crucial moment, however, Hawks’s uncertainty about the project asserted itself and he responded that he “might be interested if Cooper is definitely the lead and Hemingway writes the script.” Since he knew perfectly well that Hemingway would never actually sit down to write the screenplay, Hawks had to realize that this requirement would dash his chances to direct the picture.
The irony in all this, and the reason for his ambivalence, was that Hawks privately loathed For Whom the Bell Tolls. Up to then, he had loved nearly everything Hemingway had written, and they shared a great deal in the way of aesthetic tastes and codes of behavior. But Hawks found the new novel pretentious, overblown, and too overtly—even distastefully—political. Hawks knew that because of the novel’s fame and prestige and the author’s undoubted surveillance of the project, he wouldn’t be able to change it very much, unlike the drastic overhaul he would give To Have and Have Not. More than most filmmakers of the time, Hawks steered clear of august literary properties that could not be tampered with; when he had dared fiddle with Come and Get It, he was booted off the picture, and he was able to turn The Front Page inside out only with the express blessing of the coauthor, a good friend. Whatever lie Hawks told Hemingway concerning his feelings for For Whom the Bell Tolls is lost to time, but it was not a film Hawks was particularly eager to make or was crestfallen over not having done, at least until he saw how much money it earned.
The film Sam Wood directed, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, was a success beyond anything anyone dared imagine upon its release in 1943 but so turgidly directed that one can’t help but fantasize about what a Hawks version could have been like. It remains, in theory anyway, one of the great might have beens of his career, concerned as it was with a small group dedicated to a dangerous mission, the stoic denial and dedication of a capable American hero, and the enticing beginnings of a great romance with great star power. On the other hand, the novel was very much about political commitment and self-sacrifice, the profound impulse toward democracy and humanism versus fascism and destructiveness. Wood was oblivious, even hostile to these elements, but there is little reason to believe that Hawks would have been more responsive to them. Hawks probably could have figured out a way to make a version of For Whom the Bell Tolls that would have been terrific on his own terms. But given the novel’s stature, this would never have been countenanced at the time, so it’s a moot point, and Hawks was wise to recognize it. He was better off—artistically, if not financially—with To Have and Have Not.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 44