Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Even more than with most Hawks shoots, the filming was leisurely and very often rare, uproarious fun. But it was also highly charged, with erotic currents coursing in sometimes conflicting directions on and off the set, secrets dearly kept when the truth was clear to all, games being played between the filmmakers and the studio brass, a director alternately thrilled-with and infuriated at his young discovery, and writing that was barely staying one step ahead of the staging of scenes. If there are a half dozen film shoots in Hollywood history one might like to have witnessed—Intolerance, Queen Kelly, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, and Rebel Without a Cause might rank among them—To Have and Have Not would certainly be one.

  Hawks said that the one thing he liked about the novel To Have and Have Not was that “the two leading characters were marvelous in their relationship with each other,” and he claimed that he and Hemingway spent several days knocking around ideas about how Harry Morgan and his wife, Marie, had met, which is what Hawks wanted to make the film about. Even if Hawks and Hemingway did have these discussions, very little of what the author suggested can possibly have ended up in the script, so far removed from Hemingway are the picture’s characters and viewpoints. As James Agee commented at the time, “It has so little to do with Ernest Hemingway’s novel that I see no point in discussing its faithfulness!”

  In fact, the first four of the book’s twenty-six chapters supply the film with some basic characters and what was intended, until the last minute, to be its setting: Harry Morgan, a struggling charter-fishing-boat operator during the Depression; his refusal to transport to Florida some Cuban revolutionaries, who then get gunned down; his rummy friend Eddy (later abetted by another mate, Albert); his pathetic day with the chiseling American client Mr. Johnson, who not only loses two big fish but Morgan’s costly rod and reel, then skips town without paying him; Morgan’s being forced, for financial reasons, to carry human cargo he could do without, and the Pearl of San Francisco Café, a waterfront hangout in Havana. Beyond this, however, the novel charts choppy waters the film never contemplated: Harry’s loss of an arm and his boat, a wife and kids back in Key West, and a bifurcated focus between the desperate Morgan and a bunch of alcoholic society layabouts centered around a self-important writer, Richard Gordon, whom Hemingway cruelly based in part on John Dos Passos. The story is one of inexorable decline and destruction, climaxing thematically with Morgan’s defeatist rumination, “No matter how, a man alone ain’t got no fucking bloody chance.”

  Furthman’s first screenplay draft, which he finished in early October and which ran an exhorbitant 207 pages, does reorient the story toward how Morgan meets a provocative young lady, but it also includes a heavy dose of Only Angels Have Wings and a precursor of Rio Bravo in the balance. Set in Cuba under Machado, most likely in early 1933, it begins with the Mr. Johnson fishing episode, includes the Rummy’s line, “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?,” and prominently features a couple, Decimo and Benicia, who own the Pearl of San Francisco and very closely resemble the Mexican owners of the hotel and bar in Rio Bravo, except that here Morgan was once involved with Benicia. Corinne (later Marie), bluntly described as a “wench,” picks up Johnson in the bar and steals his wallet, occasioning the first encounter between Morgan and Corinne, who already call each other Steve and Slim. Three Cuban student revolutionaries offer Morgan five thousand dollars to run them to Cienfuegos in order to rob a bank, but he refuses, stating his political sympathies: “It’s nothing to do with me one way or the other.” Soon thereafter, one of the students mistakes Mr. Johnson for Morgan and guns him down, which brings in the Cuban police investigator Caesar, a “slick,” sophisticated pal of Morgan’s (later transformed into the film’s obese Captain Renard). Morgan is forced to kill one of the revolutionaries after they kidnap the Rummy; then, in an episode similar to the smuggling of Chinese to Key West in the book, Morgan and a Negro mate carry a shipment of what they’re told is liquor but is actually dope across the straits, where they are attacked and injured by Coast Guard guns. Unlike Morgan in the book, however, the film’s leading man does not undergo an amputation.

  A bit more than halfway through, two sophisticated New Yorkers arrive at the bar, Sam Essex and his “sleek, beautiful” twenty-five-year-old wife, Sylvia. Fulfilling the identical role that Rita Hayworth’s Judith did in Only Angels Have Wings, Sylvia is the woman who jilted Morgan and then ran off with his best friend, who has since died and been replaced by Essex. Morgan and Sylvia engage in some ferocious verbal sparring, making clear that the spark is still there, prompting Corinne to get drunk. Corinne has a real liquor problem and has good reason to feel inferior to the much cooler and wiser Sylvia. Essex intends to hire Morgan to take him fishing, but the revolutionaries kidnap the Rummy again and Morgan is finally obliged to take them, with Essex and the Rummy in tow, to Cienfuegos, where the Cubans pull off the bank job. With some overlapping of incidents from the novel, the aftermath is messy, as Morgan again abjures any political kinship with the insurrectionists, the Rummy is killed, and Morgan, with Essex’s help, manages to turn the tables on the rebel criminals.

  Back at the hotel, Sylvia is waiting for Morgan in his room and, in a warped and cynical reworking of the Casablanca climax, proposes a sneaky scheme in which Morgan will come along with her and Essex back to New York, her husband will set Morgan up in a job, and then Sylvia will leave Essex. But Morgan now likes Essex, and Sylvia correctly guesses that Morgan is taken with Corinne, so she hands him her pearl necklace to give to Corinne with a parting line from Othello: “The robbed who smiles steals something from the thief.”

  As Bruce Kawin has pointed out, aside from specific plot and character points, the overriding difference between Hemingway’s and the Hawks-Furthman version is that the Harry Morgan of the novel is progressively beaten down by events until he is destroyed, whereas the film’s Morgan, specifically written with Bogart in mind, manages to prevail and come out on top after his assorted setbacks (the only irreversible tragedy, the Rummy’s killing, is eliminated in later drafts). Hawks always detested stories about “losers,” which is probably the main reason he disliked Hemingway’s novel in the first place, so it was elemental for him to turn Harry Morgan into a winner. It is also clear that Hawks and Furthman originally intended to create two women characters of equal weight who kept outdoing each other in insolence and toughness; at this stage, Hawks didn’t know who might be capable of filling the roles and therefore wasn’t certain which to emphasize, but he had his hopes.

  “Slim” would never have come to life on the screen as she did without Slim. In the February 1943, issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Slim Hawks noticed a full-page color photograph of a striking, frank-looking young woman posed in front of a door marked “American Red Cross Blood Donor Service,” a woman she felt had “a bit of the panther about her.” Knowing her Svengali husband was looking for another girl to mold and develop into an actress, and quite certain that he would respond favorably to this kid who looked so very like herself, she wasn’t surprised when, upon seeing the model, he called Charlie Feldman at once to have him contact her and arrange to bring her to California for a test.

  The legend has come down through the years that Hawks asked his secretary to find out about her and that, instead, she mistakenly sent her a ticket, landing eighteen-year-old Betty Jean Perske on the unsuspecting director’s doorstep. (the Bacall name, which came from her mother’s side of the family, had just one “l” until Hawks added a second one to make the pronunciation clear; he also came up with her new first name.) However, Bacall makes it clear that her Uncle Jack was fielding several offers in response to the photograph and accepted Feldman and Hawks’s invitation west only after due deliberation and first meeting with David O. Selznick’s New York representative and turning down an offer from Columbia. Uncle Jack was familiar with Hawks’s very successful recent films and recommended accepting his offer of the trip plus fifty dollars a week until the test was made.

  Bacall arrived at Los Ange
les’ Union Station on April 6 and was taken directly to meet Feldman at his office. Put up at the modest Claremont Hotel, in Westwood, she dined with Feldman that night and quickly developed a terrific crush on him, but naïvely felt safe because he was married. Jean Howard told A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax, “Betty, really, was not his type. She was a little tough, maybe. A little too … Jewish. I don’t like to say that; he didn’t have a prejudice against them, but I know that he never had affairs with them.” The next day, she met Hawks for the first time, at lunch with Feldman at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills. Although Bacall was shaking with nerves, Hawks was impressed as she related the routine details of her life to him. He also flatly rejected Feldman’s suggestions about fixing her teeth, emphasizing again that he preferred a natural look. For her part, Bacall found Hawks imposing and terrifying, “an odd person,” undemonstrative, “inscrutable,” and “very sure of himself.”

  With Hawks preoccupied with Corvette K-225 and Battle Cry, his new discovery’s test kept being put off, first for a week, then for another. Entertained and catered to attentively by Feldman and his wife, Jean, Bacall met with Hawks occasionally, was mesmerized by his boasts about what he done for other actresses, and was absorbed by his many stories about his various cinematic triumphs. She had no reason not to believe them all, but even at this stage she noticed that “he always came out on top, he always won.” She was stunned when Hawks made a casual anti-Semitic comment; it suddenly occurred to her that Hawks didn’t know she was Jewish, and now, terrified of losing her chance, she determined to keep it a secret. One day sometime later when Hawks took her to lunch, she was caught up short once again when he abruptly said, “Do you notice how noisy it is in here suddenly? That’s because Leo Forbstein just walked in—Jews always make more noise.” Again, she said nothing but was so upset that she confided it to Feldman, who just laughed it off and said, “That’s the way Howard is. Just don’t pay any attention to it.” Confronted years later with Bacall’s charge of anti-Semitism, several of Hawks’s Jewish friends swore that Hawks always knew Bacall was Jewish and calculatedly dropped these comments just to see how she would react.

  At the end of April, Bacall went for the first time to Warner Bros., where Hawks told the makeup artist in no uncertain terms that he did not want his protégée’s eyebrows plucked, hairline shaved, or teeth straightened. He also ran her through a scene from Claudia with Charles Drake, one of his actors from Air Force. The next day Hawks shot a full-blown test and decided at once to sign Bacall to a seven-year contract, which he shared equally with Slim, beginning at one hundred dollars a week and escalating by the end to $1,250. With this, the young actress took a small apartment in Beverly Hills within walking distance of Feldman’s office, brought her mother out from New York, and embarked upon Hawks’s patented training program for lowering and strengthening her voice. As she remembered him explaining his approach, he said, “When a woman gets excited or emotional she tends to raise her voice. Now, there is nothing more unattractive than screeching. I want you to train your voice in such a way that even if you have a scene like that your voice will remain low.” Bacall’s method was to project passages from The Robe into the empty canyons off of Mulholland Drive in as low and loud a voice as possible. Bacall’s speaking voice tended to be low anyway, but this training, along with her ceaseless smoking, accentuated it and helped keep it that way.

  By summer, Hawks was considering his discovery for the part of the pregnant Russian pilot in “The Diary of a Red Army Woman” episode of Battle Cry. All through these months of waiting, Bacall took singing lessons, socialized frequently with the Feldmans, soaked up Hawks’s wisdom about acting and filmmaking, came to like Slim enormously, and, in September, turned nineteen. That season, the Hawkses threw one of their few enormous Hollywood parties, with innumerable celebrities in attendance but, as Bacall noted to her consternation, virtually no Jews, an almost impossible anomaly in Hollywood. “Slim told me that her husband didn’t want any Jews in his house,” Bacall revealed. “The only Jew he let in was Feldman.” When To Have and Have Not was set as Hawks’s next picture, he was tempted to use Bacall in one of the roles, but he still wasn’t sure about which woman’s role to favor, nor if Bacall would be up to carrying the picture paired one-on-one with Bogart. Wanting to see how they looked together, Hawks took Bacall to the set of Passage to Marseille to meet Bogart, but it was a brief, unremarkable encounter. Bacall had never found Bogart attractive or particularly interesting on-screen, and the same held true in person; her dream was to costar in a movie with Cary Grant.

  Furthman completed his second script draft by the end of December, reduced in length by nearly sixty pages. Here, Slim seems like more of a straight-out prostitute than ever, and the degree of insolence between her and Morgan is cranked up high from the outset, with Morgan objecting when she calls him Steve, her responding by changing it to Stephen, and him one-upping her by calling her Skinny instead of Slim. Eddie’s part is enlarged, Colonel Caesar is replaced by Captain Renard, Sylvia is transformed into Helen, who now has no husband, and the piano player Cricket is introduced. The sense of Morgan’s and Slim’s financial desperation is increased, and the ending is changed, with Morgan taking the decision to leave Helen and return to Slim into his own hands, rather than letting Helen sacrifice herself.

  Toward the end of the year, Hawks told Warner Bros. he wanted to go to Cuba to consult with Hemingway, not so much about the script, which could only have roiled the writer, but to engage his help in smoothing over any problems with local politicians. There was already some concern that a major Hollywood film depicting crime, revolutionary students, and general licentiousness in Cuba would not foster goodwill between these allies during wartime, and Hemingway made an initial gesture to mend matters by talking to State Department representatives in Havana and by offering to intercede with top Cuban officials, including Batista himself. Hawks also insisted that he wanted to scout locations for a second unit, but Warners flatly ruled out any foreign shooting.

  In any event, Hawks did not make the trip, and while Slim oversaw a full array of Christmas festivities at Hog Canyon, he concentrated on preparing Bacall for her test to see if she was capable of standing up to Bogart. For the test, Hawks had ready what later became known as the “whistle” scene, ultimately the most famous in the picture. Beginning with Morgan, played by John Ridgely in the test, and Marie about to call it a night, it has her coming into his room and offering him a bottle, then making the first move and kissing him, him asking why she did that, her answering “I’ve been wondering whether I’d like it,” kissing him again, and then uttering the famous parting lines: “What’s more, you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” (Her equally famous “It’s even better when you help” was added to the scene only during the actual shooting.)

  Hawks always claimed in interviews that this “was a scene I wrote as a test for her. I had no idea it was going to be in the picture, but it worked out so well that I wanted to use it.” Slim had a different view, remembering that her husband used not only her name, look, and clothes for the character but her manner of speaking and expressions. She said that Furthman insisted that she deserved script cocredit for To Have and Have Not “because so much of the material is yours. The character certainly is,” and Slim implied that many of the most memorable lines came right out of her mouth. Hawks or, more likely, Furthman may also have had a long memory, since the “whistle” scene dialogue is very similar to that in the intertitles for a sequence in Rudolph Valentino’s last film, the 1926 The Son Of The Sheik, which concludes with the line, “When I want her, I whistle.”

  Unless Bacall completely crashed in the test, Hawks was pretty sure going in that he wanted to use her in the film; the main question was whether he would have to split the female interest between two roles or place all his chips on her. Warner Bros., however, which preferred developin
g its own stars to indulging the whims of prima donna directors, was opposed to Hawks’s discovery on principle, and Jack Warner’s lieutenant, Steve Trilling, told his boss that he would “try, as much as possible, to talk him out of Betty Becall [sic].” All the studio could realistically do, however, was ask Hawks to test some of its own actresses along with his discovery, so on December 31, Hawks made short tests of the aspiring actresses Dolores Moran, Carol Matthews, and Georgette McKee, along with Bacall.

  After rehearsing all through New Year’s, however, Hawks gave over all day on January 3 to Bacall. She and Ridgely rehearsed all morning with the cinematographer, Sid Hickox, and a full crew working as if on an actual shoot, and after lunch Hawks spent six hours slowly taking them through the entire scene for the cameras. Hawks was patient and, in his understated way, endlessly encouraging to the novice, making her feel, as she said, “secure.” By the end of the day, Bacall felt she had done well; for Hawks’s part, he was positive now that he’d found a sensation, and it was only a matter of showing it to Feldman, Warner, and Bogart before he could tell his terribly anxious young hopeful that she had the role.

  The rest of the casting quickly fell into place. When the Sylvia/Helen role was meant to be as, or more, important, than Marie, there was some talk of casting Ann Sheridan, whom Hawks had recommended to Warner after testing her for The Road to Glory years before. But the diminishing size of the part, as well as Sheridan’s suspension from Warners at that moment, tabled this idea. No longer in need of a big name, Hawks became interested, in more ways than one, in Dolores Moran, and decided that her fleshier, more voluptuous looks would contrast effectively with the willowy Bacall. Walter Brennan was the only possible choice for Eddie the rummy and he was borrowed, not without the usual difficulty, from Goldwyn. Dan Seymour, a rotund former nightclub performer who had just played the doorman at Sydney Greenstreet’s Blue Parrot club in Casablanca, was originally tested to play one of the Cuban revolutionaries, which he found absurd. Not long after, he said, “I got a script and I read it, and it’s nothing like the scene I did. On the front it said, ‘Dan Seymour, Capt. Renard.’ I read it and found out it was the Vichy policeman.” Hawks personally outfitted him in a beret, requested that he be padded to bulk him up even beyond his 305 pounds, and asked that he use only the slightest of French accents. Marcel Dalio, the superb French actor who had also appeared in Casablanca, was an easy choice to play Gerard, or “Frenchy.”