Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Barbara, at just six years old, was another, more delicate matter. After the divorce, Athole had taken Barbara with her to Santa Barbara, where they stayed in great luxury for a few months at the exclusive San Ysidro Ranch, which was owned by Ronald Colman, followed by a spell at the lodge in Sun Valley. When the burden of taking care of an active child proved too taxing for the unstable Athole, Barbara moved in with her father, first on Bellagio Road and then, briefly, at Hog Canyon. The highlight of this short spell was her friendship with their neighbor Victor Fleming’s two daughters, Victoria and Sally. “I’d always spend Saturday night with the Fleming girls,” Barbara remembered, “and Sunday breakfast was always a huge buffet.”

  Hawks, however, was hardly a candidate to be a fully responsible, attentive father who could be expected to look after the daily needs of a little girl, and Slim didn’t see why she should be called upon to single-handedly raise a daughter not her own. So Barbara was sent to live with Grandpa and Grandma Hawks in Pasadena. Seventy that year and having had five children of her own, Helen Hawks was far from thrilled about the prospect of raising another one, but was able to face the challenge with the help of her closest friend, Katherine Ogden, who had lived with Helen and Frank since shortly after seeing her young soldier husband drown on their honeymoon around the time of World War I. Katherine, who had never remarried or had children, was delighted to have Barbara in the house, and even if the little girl was terrified of her “aunt” much of the time, she still received much doting attention from her. She was enrolled in a girls’ school, Westridge, three blocks away, pursued her passion for horses, and saw her father infrequently, mostly on holidays. “My grandparents’ house had a telephone room,” Barbara recalled, “and my grandmother always thought she was being so smart, going in there, and five minutes later a phone call would come from Dad after he hadn’t called for a month.”

  As soon as Hawks checked off of the Warner Bros. lot at the end of October after thirty-four weeks of work on Air Force (more than twice the amount he was expected to work on any picture under his deal), he told Charles Feldman he had no intention of going back to fulfill the rest of his contract. He was livid at the way Hal Wallis had treated him throughout the shooting, capped by Wallis’s treachery involving Vincent Sherman. He categorically refused to work with Wallis again, which would make his life at the studio quite difficult. After a month’s cooling-off period, Feldman agent Ned Marin arranged an evening’s get-together with Hawks and Jack Warner, but Hawks was still too hot about it all to agree to come back just yet; even if he did, he told Warner, he would only deal with the front office, never with Wallis.

  While Hawks busied himself up to a point with his first production for Universal, most of his time was occupied plotting new projects and business schemes. He talked to Feldman every day and saw him almost as often. The idea of a Hawks–Gary Cooper team package was revived. Feldman didn’t represent the actor, and even persistent encouragement from Hawks couldn’t persuade Cooper to change agencies. But the real stumbling block to the team deal, as before, was the resistance of most of the studios to giving away a large percentage of their profits.

  The closest they came to a deal was at RKO, which was willing to completely finance any Hawks-Cooper ventures to the tune of $1.5 million pay them $350,000 per picture, and cut them in for 50 percent of the profits, an amount Feldman hoped to increase. To Hawks’s disappointment, Cooper went ahead with his own individual deals elsewhere, even though a project turned up that seemed ideal. In the wake of Sergeant York, everyone in Hollywood was looking for a similar true-life inspirational story, and they thought they saw one in Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace. Tough and very savvy, unlike York, Rickenbacker played it cool while half of the top producers and agents in Hollywood courted him, including Selznick, Jack Warner, Feldman, and brass from MGM, Fox, Paramount, and United Artists. Feldman’s pitch, of course, was that only the director and star of Sergeant York could do justice to Rickenbacker’s story. Feldman was in the midst of negotiating potentially unprecedented percentage deals for Hawks and Cooper at Universal and Fox on the Rickenbacker project, urging Hawks to go to New York to convince Rickenbacker, when he abruptly accepted another offer. Hawks and Feldman had no choice but to turn their attention elsewhere; in this instance, in the direction of a beautiful young woman who had turned both their heads.

  Ella Raines was a saucy twenty-one-year-old fledgling model when David O. Selznick made a screen test with her and a young Broadway actor, Gregory Peck, in New York in 1942. Charles Feldman happened to be sitting in with Selznick when he ran the test, and much to the producer’s consternation, the agent decided to sign the young lady immediately. Inviting her to California, Feldman had a green Dodge and an apartment on Durant Drive in Beverly Hills waiting for her, took her to the Brown Derby, and began plotting her motion picture career.

  One of Feldman’s key clients was the French émigré actor Charles Boyer. In another of his money-making schemes, Feldman discussed with both Boyer and Hawks the idea of forming a company that would discover, acquire, and train new talent, then turn around and lease the performers to the studios at great profit. In addition to the financial side, this prospect appealed to Hawks enormously because he always preferred working with young performers he could shape and mold as he saw fit, who wouldn’t resist his methods or feel like they knew it all already. As soon as he saw Raines, he knew she was someone he definitely wouldn’t mind spending long hours with in training. Trim and coltish, she had the clear-eyed, direct look he so liked, a wholesome countenance with just a hint of sophistication and earthiness.

  Introduced by Feldman, whom Raines liked at once, Hawks took her to the Brown Derby, and after droning on about business and her career, turned the conversation with the subtlest of come-ons. “Do you ride?” the director inquired. Raines took him up on his invitation, and, she said, “I spent the next two weeks out at his ranch.” She knew that he was married, of course, but thought better than to ask any questions. She put it simply: “I never saw Slim.” Hawks even showed off his latest conquest to some of his movie-star friends, including Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Raines, of course, could barely contain herself over all this attention and said of Hawks, “I loved him and adored him. I didn’t think he was a cold person at all. He was very charming, very thoughtful, very kind.”

  Already the gears were turning for Raines to do another, more elaborate screen test, which Hawks would direct, and for Raines to become the first and exclusive property of the new Boyer-Hawks outfit, called B-H Productions. This professional association gave Hawks a good excuse, once Slim returned from another of her “rests,” for having Raines come around the house on Sundays, when he would go over scenes with her in preparation for the test.

  The fling with Ella Raines may or may not have been Hawks’s first since marrying Slim, but it was the first significant one, and it was at this time, scarcely a year into their marriage, that Slim began to figure out that her husband was no different from most of the other famous and powerful men in Hollywood. Hawks often would not show up for dinner when his wife was expecting him, pleading late work or an important meeting. He would quietly slip in at four in the morning, and she would lie in bed, wide awake, pretending to be asleep; she even had to confront the old telltale sign of lipstick on his collars. Slim started hearing the rumors, eventually even learning the names of some of his dates, but, remarkably for such a spirited young woman, she never confronted him about his philandering, accepting it as a fact of life for a successful, famous man in Hollywood.

  Virtually anyone who could fool around did, and Hawks, even more so now that he was keeping company with Feldman, had constant opportunities. The number of major directors who did not stray outside their marriages could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand, and in Hawks’s macho crowd it was considered de rigueur. Before, he had always competed with Vic Fleming and come in second, but now he could imagine that he was taking up the slack, sin
ce Fleming had changed his womanizing ways after his marriage. But Fleming was the real thing, a man innumerable women lost their hearts and heads over. In his own diffident way, Hawks managed to fill up his scorecard but left no one swooning in his wake; Harlow aside, women rated Hawks “a gentleman” in the sack as in the rest of his life, not someone who went wild once the doors were closed. In Slim’s opinion, Hawks didn’t have the sexual compulsion to be a Don Juan but pursued constant conquests to fulfill his own fantasy of himself as a great lover. Even though Slim represented his ideal woman, the sexual dynamic between them was never vital or overwhelming. As she lamented, “Even at the height of our courtship he was a tentative partner. Sex was simply a physical need that had no relation to the person he was with.”

  All the same, Ella Raines was happy with him for a while, especially since he was following through on his intention to put her in a picture. After Air Force, Hawks planned a similar, if much more modest, war film as his first production for Universal. Corvettes in Action, as it was initially called, would glorify the role of the fast little ships that escorted large freighters and other vessels in convoys across the North Atlantic and that were particularly effective in battling submarines. The oceangoing equivalents of small fighter planes, they were “known for courage.” One of the film’s characters declares, “They ain’t pretty ships, maybe, but brother, they got a lot of guts.” After Air Force, the Royal Canadian Navy was more than willing to participate. Planned for a medium budget, without top stars, it was a film Hawks decided only to produce, not direct. Instead, he gave that job to his old associate Richard Rosson, who hadn’t done a picture in six years. Lieutenant John Rhodes Sturdy of the Canadian Navy, a Feldman client who lived in Montreal, wrote the script, although the prolific screenwriter Edward Chodorov did an uncredited major rewrite. Since Hawks would not be directing it, the film was placed outside his overall Universal deal. Feldman negotiated for his client to receive $35,000 plus 30 percent of the net profits.

  But just as interesting for Hawks as his renumeration was the chance to try out his new leading lady. Unlike Air Force, Corvettes was not an all-male action picture, and there was a nice, relatively undemanding part of a young woman whose brother is killed at sea and who must then stand by as her other brother and new boyfriend head off on a perilous new voyage. For both Hawks and Feldman, there was no doubt whom they intended to put in the role. In early January 1943, B-H Productions signed Ella Raines for twenty weeks at three hundred dollars a week, with an option for six and a half years. A couple of weeks later, Hawks, seeing no reason to share the actress with anyone else, deviously tried to push Boyer out of the picture, even though the deal had been finalized. Feldman was furious at Hawks for this, calling his behavior “terrible and wrong and unfair” and threatening to take on the responsibility for Raines’s contract himself if Hawks didn’t patch things up with Boyer, which he was convinced to do.

  On February 2, Hawks directed Raines’s test, a scene with Randolph Scott, already cast in Corvettes. Hawks lavished every attention on the newcomer, posing her effectively for the camera and coaching her in delivery. As a favor to Boyer, Hawks also directed the Frenchman and Raines in a scene, and Boyer came away even more ecstatic than the others, which was saying a lot. The Feldman office decided that the “girl definitely has terrific ability and with careful handling should be star material.” Boyer indicated that he would seriously consider her for a picture he was planning, and Hawks had cleverly planned the test so that, if successful, it could be inserted intact into Corvettes in Action, which it was.

  The picture, eventually called Corvette K-225 started shooting at Universal on February 4, and Hawks was there hovering over Ella Raines. “The first morning he was there with me in hairdressing,” Raines remembered. “He didn’t like what they were doing, so he took a hairbrush and brushed my hair and said, ‘I want her to look natural.’ He helped me through all my scenes.” Hawks also consulted closely with the cinematographer, Tony Gaudio, about the lighting for Raines. Knowing very well that physical action, not directing actors, was Dick Rosson’s strong suit, Hawks was on the set to supervise all the shooting done on the sound stage. This was a mixed blessing as far as Universal was concerned, since Hawks’s overcon-cern with rewrites and last-minute suggestions slowed the shooting down enormously and inflated the budget accordingly in a film whose appeal would depend much more on Rosson’s footage of real ships at sea.

  Originally scheduled for six weeks of shooting in California before Rosson’s action unit would assemble in Canada, the picture dragged on for thirteen weeks and two days, finally wrapping on May 7. Rosson left Los Angeles four days later for Nova Scotia, where he shot a convoy coming into harbor, and then traveled across the Atlantic to the British Isles, during which time he and cinematographers Harry Perry and Bert A. Eason captured exciting footage of corvettes and other ships in action. The crew also shot at shipyards in Montreal and, briefly, back at Universal before calling it quits in early July.

  To Universal’s dismay, what had been intended as a modest war film with a $736,670 price tag (including 20 percent overhead) had spiraled 40 percent over budget to $1,031,630, more than many a major film with big stars. When it opened in September, it was received for what it was, a pretty routine entry with some unusually authentic oceangoing footage. Nor did its box-office returns justify the additional expense, for by the time it played itself out, Corvette K-225 had generated a thoroughly unremarkable $1,067,540 in rentals in the U.S. and Canada. Foreign business made possible by the end of the war enabled the picture to edge into profit by 1946, giving Hawks the most insignificant of returns on his percentage. As for Ella Raines, her role seemed utterly incidental to the main action and hardly worthy of Hawks’s unstinting attention.

  Shortly after Corvette was finished, Boyer and Hawks assigned rights to the actress to Universal, where she quickly won the leading role in Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady. Being peddled around by her sponsors made Raines feel “like a piece of horseflesh,” but it didn’t mean that she was out of the lives of the men who had brought her to Hollywood. Hawks’s interest may have waned after a few months, but Feldman started an affair with her and grew so deeply involved that Raines became the straw that broke the back of his marriage. Like Slim, Jean Howard knew her husband strayed, but she tried to ignore it and believed that her position in his life was never truly threatened. This time was different, however. Though by her own account she “had never been a wife to go in dresser drawers,” Howard was dismayed to come across a tie clip on Feldman’s dresser inscribed “‘For Keeps, E.R.’ And I thought, ‘Who in the hell is “E.R.?” ’ Well, it turned out to be Ella Raines.”

  During this entire period, scarcely a week went by that Charles Feldman wasn’t approached by one studio or another for Hawks to direct a major film. This would have required prying him out of his Warner Bros. contract, but Hawks seemed determined enough to do it under the right circumstances. RKO wanted him for a big adaptation of Pearl Buck’s China Sky, about a doctor fighting alongside the Chinese during the war, which finally went to Ray Enright. Hawks was enthusiastic about MacKinlay Kantor’s story Happy Land, about a smalltown Iowa druggist coming to terms with the death of his son in the war and wanted to make it “on an unpretentious basis” for Universal, but Hawks’s only choice for the lead, the inevitable Gary Cooper, decided it wasn’t right for him, so Hawks backed off as well. Hawks was also attracted by Joseph Shearing’s novel Moss Rose, a murder melodrama set in Victorian England, and maintained an interest in the project for several years, bringing Jules Furthman in to rewrite the script, planning to film it in Britain, and even fixing a budget ($734,975) and a ten-week shooting schedule. Other projects took precedence, however, and Gregory Ratoff ended up directing it for Fox in 1947.

  By the early 1940s, the Feldman-Blum Agency had become so successful that Charlie Feldman began pursuing the next stage of his career, his true goal—producing. Antitrust laws prohibited big talent agenc
ies such as MCA from producing films themselves, but Feldman got around this by agreeing not to take commissions from his own artists should they work in one of his productions. His first picture was the bruising melodrama Pittsburgh, a vehicle for two of his top stars, John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich, who, as unlikely a prospect as it may have seemed, began an affair during the shoot. Feldman was so well liked by studio heads that he was constantly being invited to take important executive jobs, but he declined them all, preferring the freedom of remaining an independent producer. His agency was doing far too well for him to give it up to devote himself entirely to producing, but, virtually alone among agents of the time, he possessed the creativity, will, and energy to do both.

  In mid-1942, in a combined surge of imagination and patriotic enthusiasm, Feldman conceived a project which, had it come to pass, would have been by far the most ambitious and all-encompassing Hollywood feature to emerge from World War II. Designed as a United Nations–themed propaganda film for the Allied cause, it dealt with virtually every front on which the war was being fought, from China and the Soviet Union to North Africa and the French underground. It would have run eighteen reels and cost $4 million. Had Feldman had his way, it also would have broken down the usual narrow-minded ways the studios, agencies, and labor unions did business, as he wanted the film to be a cooperative venture where altruistic ideals, not profit, would have been the motivating force. The film got to the very brink of production, but even though it was never made, it is worth examining at length since it was the most gargantuan and, in many ways, most atypical project Howard Hawks ever attempted. It also could easily have landed Hawks, Feldman, William Faulkner, and others in hot water several years later with the House Un-American Activities Committee.