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Air Force
Air Force is going to be the real stuff.
—Howard Hawks
Many weddings have been victimized by rain, storms, and all manner of bad weather. Some have been marred by unruly guests, embarrassing faux pas, and even no-show participants. But few had what Hawks’s and Slim’s had: Pearl Harbor.
It seemed to have taken forever but, finally, more than three years after Hawks and Slim met, the final details of his divorce settlement with Athole were resolved and they were at last free to marry. Now that their future together was in no doubt, Slim threw herself into planning the Hog Canyon home, and Hawks put the Benedict Canyon house up for sale and rented a temporary residence for himself, Slim, and the kids in Bel Air, adjacent to the Bel-Air Country Club golf course.
By the beginning of December, everything seemed in order: the wedding date was set for December 11, Hawks had made what he thought were marvelous plans for the honeymoon, his current film was the biggest hit in the country, Ball of Fire was opening in a month, and Slim, after much debate, had decided not to invite her father to walk her down the aisle. Then, on Sunday, December 7, they awoke to the news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese. The United States was going to war. Slim, however, was not to be denied, and four days later, the wedding went ahead exactly as planned.
Howard Hawks and Nancy Gross were married in a small, formal ceremony at Hawks’s parents’ Pasadena home. Dr. Roderick Dhu Morrison of Altadena officiated, Bill Hawks was the best man, Slim’s schoolgirl friend Dixie Cavalier-Carlisle was her bridesmaid, and Gary Cooper gave her away. The fashion-conscious Los Angeles Times reported, “The bride wore a wedding gown that had been in her family for four generations. It is an old-fashioned, ivory satin dress with a slight train and a deep, lace collar. She wore an old lace and tulle veil. She had carnations in her hair and her bouquet was all carnations.” Slim admitted that at the last minute, as she was standing at the top of the stairs, she developed cold feet and told Cooper she didn’t want to go through with it. Coop told her it was too late to back out, and down they went.
Hawks had arranged for them to travel by train to New Orleans, then on to Miami, where they were to share a house with the newlyweds Shipwreck Kelly and the 1930s’ most famous debutante, Brenda Frazier. However, because army troop trains were already receiving priority on the tracks, the honeymooners’ train was endlessly delayed. Once in Miami, Hawks spent most of his time golfing or fishing with Shipwreck, abandoning Slim with Frazier, a spoiled rich girl whom she found utterly vapid and uninteresting. Hawks’s plans to continue on to the Bahamas and Cuba had to be scuttled because of the war, but by this time Slim was too disillusioned about the honeymoon trip to care and just wanted to return to Los Angeles as quickly as possible.
By the time they got back, Hawks found that quite a few of his friends had already enlisted for military duty. Jimmy Stewart, Darryl Zanuck, and John Ford were already commissioned officers, while Frank Capra, William Wyler, and John Huston would be entering the U.S. Army Signal Corps as soon as they disposed of their obligations on current pictures. Forty-five years old and a veteran of World War I, Hawks did not have to consider actual duty in the armed services. But rather than sign on to make government documentaries, as had Capra, Wyler, Huston, and any number of other filmmakers, Hawks opted to stay stateside, where he spent the next year and a half working exclusively on major studio projects heralding the war effort.
Although there was no doubting his patriotism and dedication to the cause once the United States declared war, nor the slightest suggestion that he was an America First proponent or isolationist, there is reason to believe that Hawks was a latecomer in supporting U.S. involvement in the war. His close friend Christian Nyby, a film editor in the 1940s, said that, ironically, the director of Sergeant York felt throughout 1941 that the United States was being railroaded into the war and afterward was “teed off” because of his suspicions that FDR had known about the Japanese plans for Pearl Harbor two days before the attack occurred. According to Nyby, Hawks never softened in his view of Roosevelt as “a pompous ass.” With a beautiful young wife, a gorgeous new home, and an earning power matched by only a handful of other Americans at the time, Hawks made his choice: he stayed home and signed a contract that would guarantee him a minimum of $100,000 per year, with the opportunity to make much more.
In the wake of Sergeant York’s breakaway success, Hawks was inundated with offers. Jean Gabin, the recently arrived French star, asked for Hawks to guide him through his first Hollywood picture, John O’Hara’s adaptation of Willard Robertson’s 1940 melodramatic best-seller Moontide, and Zanuck and producer Mark Hellinger, hoping that Hawks could help mold Gabin into another Gable or Tracy, pursued the director at length before giving up and settling for Archie Mayo. Zanuck also tried to persuade Hawks to direct Ten Gentlemen from West Point, about the early history of the academy, which Henry Hathaway eventually took on. There was talk of a Gary Cooper–Barbara Stanwyck Western called Cheyenne that William Hawks would produce at RKO, and that studio also approached Hawks about reuniting with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell on a war-oriented project called Bundles for Freedom.
After preparing The Outlaw and then doing Sergeant York and Ball of Fire back-to-back, Hawks was physically spent, almost ill, and told Feldman that he needed to rest and recuperate before launching into another picture. He refused another future box-office giant starring Gary Cooper, Sam Goldwyn’s inspirational biography of Lou Gehrig, The Pride of the Yankees, which Sam Wood also ended up directing. Hawks was tempted, but Feldman reported to his staff that the way he was feeling, Hawks “didn’t care whether he did the picture or not, if he was going to be rushed into it.” Warner Bros. paged Hawks to take the reins on the Edna Ferber Western Saratoga Trunk, but Hawks didn’t want to work with Errol Flynn and told Hal Wallis he’d consider it if Cooper would star (which he did, opposite Ingrid Bergman, under the ubiquitous Sam Wood). Warners also proposed to Hawks The Hard Way, which Vincent Sherman ended up directing memorably, as well as Jesse Lasky’s Mark Twain biography, which Irving Rapper eventually took on.
One Warner Bros. picture Hawks definitely was not involved with was Casablanca, his own claims to the contrary. One of Hawks’s tallest tales was about how, one day, he and Michael Curtiz were supposedly commiserating about the lousy projects Warner Bros. wanted them to do, Curtiz complaining about how he didn’t know anything about Tennessee hill people and Hawks moaning about a silly story about a bunch of people who meet at Rick’s nightclub. Between them, he said, they agreed to swap pictures, and the rest was history. However, Sergeant York began shooting in December 1940, eighteen months before Casablanca, so the timing is considerably off. Warner Bros. did send an early draft, called Everybody Goes to Rick’s, to Hawks while he was working on Sergeant York, as it did to Curtiz. But Slim, whom Hawks had trained to read and analyze scripts for him, told Hawks it was terrible—granted, this was a long way from what the final screenplay would be like by the time shooting was completed. Curtiz agreed to direct the film in March 1941. When he saw the finished film, Hawks said he liked it, but claimed it had “an awful musical comedy quality” and admitted, “I never had any faith in my doing anything like that.”
When Hawks and Slim were married, Slim was referred to in the press as a “film writer,” a typically Hawksian exaggeration that nonetheless had an explanation, even if no one was asking. In the first of what were to be many schemes by Hawks and Feldman to buy literary properties and then sell them to the studios, Hawks brought to his agent’s attention “Phantom Filly,” a story by George Agnew Chamberlain published in the Saturday Evening Post, which was bought in the names of Nancy Gross and the CKF [Feldman] Corporation for $7,500, written into a script by Feldman client Winston Miller and unloaded to Fox for $60,000, resulting in a huge profit for Slim and Feldman. Henry Hathaway directed the picture in 1944.
In late November, two weeks before Hawks’s wedding, F
eldman was trying to put over another idea, that of selling Hawks and Gary Cooper as a package. Even though Feldman didn’t represent the actor, who was still under contract to Goldwyn, the prodigiously creative agent argued, “I am thoroughly convinced, because of Hawks’ relationship with Cooper, that Gary will definitely do almost anything that Howard wants to do.” Of course, any studio in town would have been interested in these two men under any terms that were remotely realistic, but Feldman was zeroing in on the unlikely target of Universal, which did best with such lowbrow fare as Abbott and Costello comedies and Deanna Durbin musicals, since he believed he was most likely to win the greatest profit participation and artistic control from the studio most eager to land such prestigious talent.
Feldman’s brief to Universal on behalf of his client emphasized his recent successes and his friendship with Hemingway, “who is now working on a new book and to whom Hawks has given ideas.” Feldman further argued that Hawks deserved to get considerably more than Universal’s highest-paid director, Gregory La Cava, whose deal called for $125,000 and a percentage, saying that La Cava, “in my opinion, isn’t one tenth of the director that Hawks is.” As it eventually transpired, Universal would end up with Hawks but not Cooper, the one they actually coveted.
At the same time, Feldman had Hawks close to a lucrative one-picture-per-year deal at Fox, but the studio backed down, just as it did with a similarly expensive deal for Capra. The week before his wedding, Hawks had a dinner with Cary Grant at which they agreed to make two pictures together over the next three years.
After all these overtures, proposals, and negotiations, Hawks ended up signing two different contracts in early 1942, each of a long-term nature the likes of which he had avoided in recent years. The first, which he signed in February, was with Warner Bros., where he agreed to make one picture per year over the next five years for $100,000 per picture. For each production, Hawks was obliged to sixteen weeks of work, beyond which he would earn $6,250 per week. Warners was not yet amenable to paying their talent percentages, but Hawks did receive wide latitude in his choice of stories, and knew that he and Feldman would be able to sell just about any property they wanted to Jack Warner for a big profit.
Two months later, Hawks signed a long-brewing deal at Universal to produce and direct three pictures over three years. Again, he would receive $100,000 for sixteen weeks of work, but he was also cut in for 50 percent of the net profits. Here, the budgets would be lower—no more than $650,000, not including the salaries of the producer-director and the stars—but Hawks could get his “A Howard Hawks Production” credit in letters 75 percent the size of the title, whereas Warners would only allow it to be 40 percent. Hawks optimistically believed that with everything neatly set up and the top stars in Hollywood dying to work with him, he could make two pictures per year and earn more than $200,000 per year and still have twenty weeks left over. All those zeroes looked nice on paper, even if it was sheerest fantasy that he could ever be that prolific.
Before Pearl Harbor, Hollywood had produced a number of contemporary combat films. A Yank in the R.A.F., starring Tyrone Power, was the fourth most popular film of 1941; Dive Bomber, I Wanted Wings, and Flight Command had stressed the importance of military preparedness. But once the war started, the film industry immediately joined hands with the government to produce ultrapatriotic, even blatantly propagandistic entertainments designed to bolster the war effort. Warner Bros.’ first wartime drama to hit the screen was Raoul Walsh’s Desperate Journey, starring Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan as pilots trying to make their way out of Germany. But the studio’s first major push was on behalf of what became Air Force.
Hawks always said that Major General Henry (Hap) Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps, asked him to make this film, which was intended to promote the Air Force’s role in turning the war around from its disastrous start. Hawks had known Arnold through flying circles for some years, but the contact that launched Air Force began at a higher level, between Arnold and Jack Warner. Warner, who from this time on liked to be referred to as Colonel Warner, was, with Zanuck, the most gung ho of all the studio heads, which is reflected in the extraordinary wartime output of his studio. Once Arnold arranged for the cooperation of the War Department, Warner brought Hawks and the screenwriter Dudley Nichols onboard to prepare the script.
Hawks said it was Arnold who proposed the basic story “about the flight of B-17s that had left Hamilton Field up in Northern California and gotten past the point of no return when they heard over the radio that the Japanese had hit Pearl Harbor. They got in there that night, in all the smoke and everything, and were afraid of being hit again, so they were sent down to Manila.” The idea was to concentrate on the crew of one plane, and the Air Force appointed Captain Samuel Triffy as technical adviser to Hawks and Nichols. Resurrecting a method used on Scarface, Hawks and Nichols tacked red, yellow, and blue cards to a large cork board to lay out story strands and characters. They initially miscalculated, however, since the first draft of Nichols’s script begins with fifty-five pages of character development before the plane even takes off. This was quickly remedied, and the film benefited enormously from having the group of men thrust almost immediately into action.
Leaving Nichols to continue writing, the producer, Hal Wallis, to concentrate on the logistics of organizing the shoot, and Slim to check into Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles for the first of many “rests,” Hawks took a trip to Washington, D.C., in mid-May to consult with Hap Arnold and the War Department Motion Picture Board of Review. On the train he got to know another general and an older sergeant, the latter of whom supplied the basis for the service veteran played in the film by Harry Carey. The excited, proud little boy in Hawks came bursting out when he was embraced by all the military top brass. He boasted that he found that the Air Force’s gunnery manual was a useless document that couldn’t teach a soldier how to hit anything. Arnold supposedly challenged Hawks to rewrite it, which Hawks claimed he did. Arnold’s parting directive to the director was, “Tell the story of how the Japs laced hell out of us. Then tell how we struck back at them with our own medicine. Tell the whole story—its bitterness and sadness and bravery. Tell the story of the greatest fighters the world has ever known.” Hawks then joined Captain Triffy in Tampa, Florida, where the exteriors would be shot; not only would Drew Field serve as a plausible stand-in for Hickham Field in Hawaii, but the ongoing fear of a Japanese invasion on the West Coast completely ruled out filming with any Japanese-marked planes in California.
To get a head start on a picture Jack Warner was adamant to have in theaters by December 7, the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the miniature unit began shooting under the director Roy Davidson on May 18 in the ocean off Santa Barbara. They spent fifty-nine days creating scenes duplicating combat in Makasar Strait, the Coral Sea, Haruna, and the Celebes Sea.
On June 15, Hal Wallis was shocked when Dudley Nichols submitted a 207–page screenplay, nearly double the normal length for a feature film. Not only that, but the script was still incomplete. Hawks and Nichols had long since decided to make the plane, the Mary Ann, rather than any actor, the star of the picture. Helping set a predictable pattern for future combat films, the bomber crew was composed of a societal cross-section, mostly played by relative unknowns—John Ridgely’s stoical captain, Gig Young’s upper-class WASP, George Tobias’s comic Jew (similar to his character in Sergeant York). The only major name in the cast was John Garfield, whom, Hawks said, had always loved Scarface and was simply interested in working with him.
Many logistical problems had yet to be solved, and both Boeing and the Air Force were having trouble securing a Flying Fortress that could be spared for a significant period. Warners finally rented a mock-up interior from Paramount, and Hawks began filming in it on June 18 with his ten actors. With the script in such a tentative state, it was impossible to set a precise budget and shooting schedule, but a hefty $2 million and seventy-two days were allocated going in. Because of the long sche
dule, Hawks’s salary was bumped up to $150,000. Hawks’s favorite assistant director, Jack Sullivan, was at his side again, as was the cinematographer James Wong Howe, with whom he hadn’t worked since Viva Villa! in Mexico. Originally, the film was to have been shot by Sol Polito, who had done Sergeant York, but Howe ended up with the job, assisted in the special effects and rear-projection work by the veteran Hans Koenekamp. The entire first month was devoted to interior bomber scenes with the core crew, and Hawks moved along at the reasonable pace of one and a half to two pages of script a day (although at this rate, Nichols’s full screenplay would have taken more than two hundred days to film). Hawks covered many of his set-ups in a single take, but a handful of difficult group shots required as many as twenty-two takes.
After completing three days of hospital interiors, the company departed Los Angeles by train on July 21 for the 58½-hour journey to Tampa. Hawks found things far from well when he arrived. Setting up headquarters at the Tampa Terrace Hotel, Hawks learned that while the War Department was trying to cooperate the best it could, because of the demands of the war it had come up woefully short on equipment, including lights; that requisitioned electrical supplies and gasoline were going to be difficult to come by; and that many adjustments were going to have to be made in the script as a result. Furthermore, it was the hottest summer in Tampa in thirty-four years; the entire company was ordered to take daily salt pills and drink lime and quinine water. Although Hawks later claimed that he shot all the action himself without the aid of a second unit, the facts were otherwise. None other than Breezy Eason headed up the second unit, which worked out of nearby Mather Field while Hawks remained at Drew. Eason concentrated mainly on aerial shots coordinated by the great flier Paul Mantz, who had flown stunts on Ceiling Zero, and photographed principally by Elmer Dyer, who had worked on all of Hawks’s other aviation films, with assistance from Charles Marshall and Rex Wimpy. In Florida, Eason shot for nineteen days, covering just about all the aerial footage for the picture, including the Zero attacks, while back in Los Angeles he directed an additional twelve days of Japanese ship movements, battle material, and explosions.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 45