As for Hoagy Carmichael, the enormously successful and personable songwriter had written tunes for numerous films and had performed a bit in one but had never harbored any ambitions as an actor. Virtual neighbors, Slim and Carmichael’s wife, Ruth, became very friendly, and the Carmichaels were shortly frequent guests at Hog Canyon. “I was rather fascinated with Hawks because I knew he had what you call class and understanding and intelligence,” Carmichael said. “I was delighted we could be friends. Before I knew it, when I was in New York, I got a wire from him asking me if I’d like to be in the picture.” When Carmichael got back to California, Hawks shrewdly made him feel comfortable by testing him playing “How Little We Know” on the piano, accompanied by Bacall. Carmichael was right at home sitting at the keyboards, and no one could have seemed more natural portraying a sympathetic saloon pianist than the genuine article himself. Among Hawks’s crew members, most important to him was his favorite assistant director, Jack Sullivan, who set the quiet, somewhat formal tone on the set as much as Hawks himself did. Dan Seymour described him as “a deadly Irishman and, just like Hawks, he never showed any emotion. He was not someone you could be intimate with.” The picture also marked Hawks’s first collaboration with the film editor Christian Nyby, who became a good friend and longtime associate of Hawks. A protegé of Harry Warner’s, Nyby was always on the outs with Jack, who fired the young cutter, only to find himself overruled. Reserved and physically not dissimilar to Hawks, Nyby, at his director’s request, was on the set for most of the shooting. “Howard never gave me cutting instructions,” Nyby said. “He felt it was up to me to do my job.”
Hawks kept Furthman working on the script through January and into February but, feeling he could use a couple of extra minds bearing down on the material, called in two mystery-writer friends, Cleve F. Adams and Whitman Chambers, to provide additional help. Working separately, they came up with very little and, in Adams’s case, less than that, as he proceeded to replace Furthman’s great, tough dialogue with a weak watered-down alternative. For his part, Furthman got through most of one more revision by mid-January and delivered his final solo draft in mid-February. Still set in Cuba, this version beefed up Marie’s role even further, modeling her more explicitly on the characters he had written for Dietrich in Morocco and Shanghai Express, and even stealing a couple of his own lines from the latter. When Shanghai Lily is asked why she is going to Shanghai, she flippantly replies, “To buy a hat,” the same reason Marie was now given for coming to Cuba. He also attempted to recycle that film’s most famous line, “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” but Shanghai Express had been made before the Code, and this did not slip past the watchful eye of Joseph Breen. Another lift, this time from Morocco, was Marie’s sarcastic remark when she sees Morgan carrying a woman who has fainted: “You trying to guess her weight?”
Now that he felt Bacall had what it took to put his idea of the character over, Hawks urged Furthman to push Marie’s hard-edged dialogue and one-upsmanship lines as far as he could. Explaining his intentions to Bogart, Hawks said, “You are about the most insolent man on the screen and I’m going to make the girl a little more insolent than you are.” When Bogart told him there was “fat chance of that,” Hawks replied, “I’ve got a better than fat chance.… In every scene you play with her, she’s going to walk out and leave you with egg on your face.”
Among Furthman’s other changes for this draft, the “whistle” scene is worked in, although in a different way. Also in desperation, Morgan agrees to transport some Japanese for a sinister Mr. Kato, whom he subsequently kills. On a second illicit voyage with the Cuban bank robbers, one of them kills Eddie, but Morgan manages to shoot them before they do the same to him, whereupon he returns the stolen loot to the authorities. At the end, Helen still believes Morgan is going to return to New York with her until Morgan changes his mind just before getting on the seaplane with her.
With shooting due to begin in two weeks, Warner Bros. was obliged to send the script to moral watchdog Joseph Breen; the studio was not pleased by his response. In a six-page, single-spaced rebuke of Furthman’s screenplay, Breen wrote, “The general unacceptability of this story is emphasized by its overall low tone and by the suggestion that your sympathetic lead, Morgan, is a murderer, who is permitted to go off unpunished.” Objecting strenuously to the “scummy” feel and “a kind of flavor of ‘pimpery’ to the entire proceedings,” he insisted that all the characters be “softened,” that all the women characters be changed “to get away from any possible suggestion that they are prostitutes,” that the studio “remove from the script the business of the men sleeping in the women’s rooms,” and that Morgan’s killings of Kato and the Cubans be clearly made acts of self-defense. Breen then enumerated three dozen instances in which the script willfully violated the Production Code, making it impossible to approve unless many changes were made.
But another problem suddenly sprang up that, for a moment, at least, seriously threatened the picture’s proceeding. The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs decided that the nature of the story ran directly counter to the interests of the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy with Central and South America and intimated that the film would therefore not be granted an export license, thereby placing all overseas markets off-limits. Jack Warner wanted to cancel the production, but Hawks obtained permission from Inter-American Affairs to set the action in Martinique, a French-controlled territory that lay outside its domain. Hawks called on his most resourceful script doctor, William Faulkner, to perform some emergency surgery.
Faulkner solved numerous problems on the script. Having recently written an unproduced epic screenplay for the studio on Charles de Gaulle and the Free French, the writer was au courant with issues regarding the anti-Vichy movement and saw at once how the the conflicts in To Have and Have Not could be updated and altered to reflect war intrigue in the Western hemisphere. The film would now begin politically, with some local blacks appreciating the large “V” torn into a Pétain poster. The Cuban revolutionaries cum criminal terrorists would become members of the Gaullist underground, the local authorities became personified by Captain Renard, both smuggling missions were eliminated, Helen and her husband were “Casablancanized” into resistance fighters in need of Morgan’s help, Marie became his sole romantic interest, and Eddie was not only beefed up as a character but spared from dying as well. Faulkner solved the problem of sleeping arrangements by simply having everyone stay in the same hotel, and he facilitated the Morgan-Marie encounters by placing their rooms directly opposite each other. He also cut down the quantity of Marie’s drinking and, by jettisoning the smuggling, effectively did away with what appeared to be Morgan’s murderous side. To suit Hawks’s taste for compressed storytelling, Faulkner also boiled the time frame down to a very eventful three days, a far cry from the three seasons of the novel.
Faulkner had about a week to make these major conceptual adjustments; the rest would have to be done as shooting progressed. Between January 19 and February 16, the ever-reliable Roy Davidson shot twelve days of second-unit footage of fishing, boat maneuvers, rum running, and robbery coverage, off Balboa and Laguna Beach; after a break, he subsequently shot five more days of related material. Principal photography began on Tuesday, February 29, with scenes involving Morgan, the American fisherman Johnson, and sixty-five extras in the San Francisco Café. The very next day brought the first exchange between Bogart and Bacall, in which Morgan meets her with Gerard in the hallway and tosses her a box of matches so she can light her cigarette. Bacall was beside herself with nerves, trembling so much that she couldn’t even catch the matchbox or light her cigarette without her hand shaking. However, Bogart was a prince, making light of it and joking around with her until she relaxed. The next day was devoted to the two stars’ first scene alone, with Morgan roughly threatening to take Johnson’s wallet away from Marie, then quarreling with her about what she’s done and how they will dispose
of the money. At this early stage, Hawks took things slowly to make sure the two actors got off on the right foot, and he made things easier for the still nervous Bacall by breaking the dialogue down into very short shots. In the beginning, he uncharacteristically did as many as fifteen takes of each setup, introducing a fair amount of new dialogue into the scenes on the set, shaping the scenes, and his new star’s performance, until he was fully satisfied. Eventually, as Bacall’s confidence grew, along with Hawks’s faith in her, he was able to reduce the number of takes.
The modus operandi had Faulkner working just one to three days ahead of the shooting. Generally, the reclusive writer preferred to work in Hawks’s bungalow, which was directly across from Hal Wallis’s. Occasionally, when a scene hadn’t quite gelled, the director asked him to the set, where they would confer sotto voce or repair to Hawks’s portable office whenever Hawks needed a line, and where Faulkner could quietly observe the efficient work of the script girl, Meta Carpenter, with whom he had resumed his passionate love affair from the 1930s after the failure of her marriage to the pianist Wolfgang Rebner. Dan Seymour recalled that Faulkner would sometimes sit in a chair next to Hawks, who would ask, “‘How did that sound, Bill?’ Faulkner would nod, go off for a shot of Scotch and come back with a new line that was always better.” Faulkner also made a point of visiting the set whenever Hoagy Carmichael was due to perform.
In her autobiography, Bacall cogently described what she considered Hawks’s “brilliantly creative work method.” Each morning, “We would sit around with only the work light on and read through the scene, and he’d throw in lines that he or Slim or someone had come up with the night before. We’d try things, or he’d say, ‘Why don’t you try that?,’ or someone would suggest something and he’d say fine. He always had Furthman around because he always said, ‘If there are five ways to play a scene, Furthman will always come up with a sixth.’” Several published accounts have stated that Furthman left the picture after Faulkner was engaged, but in fact he was always on call to help punch up dialogue or find a new angle on a scene; for example, he completely rewrote the bullet-removal scene in the cellar, including its withering repartee between Marie and Helen, just before it was shot in mid-April. Only after the actors had digested all the changes and worked out their movements did Hawks bring in the cinematographer, Sid Hickox, to set the lighting and camera angles. Dan Seymour said that Meta Carpenter had the hardest job because she was always “furiously writing down everything while Hawks would suggest ways of doing it.… Lots of times, only a half hour before shooting a scene would we decide how it would be done.” Bacall considered it “the perfect way for movie actors to work,” but only a director with Hawks’s confidence and power at the studio could get away with such a relaxed approach in the film-factory climate of the era.
Meta Carpenter, a vastly experienced pro by this time, considered this approach “a dangerous way to make a motion picture” and credited the fact that it worked this time to Faulkner’s industriousness, craftiness, and superb sense of story structure. While the writer slaved away to add heart to Furthman’s clever, playful, often intoxicatingly sexy surfaces, the company of filmmakers and actors had an exhilarating time, charged with professional as well as personal tensions. Artistically, the film was a high-wire act in which one of the nation’s great writers created a taut line on which a great director and a core group of uniquely inspired actors danced some breathtaking variations, always landing on their toes. Emotionally, the arrows of desire, suspicion, jealousy, and resentment were pointing in potentially deadly cross patterns.
Unlike his relationships with Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and, later, John Wayne, Hawks was not a close friend of Bogart’s. They scarcely knew each other before starting work together, they were at opposing ends politically, and Bogart didn’t hunt, ride motorcycles, or indulge in Hawks’s other would-be manly pursuits. As if to show that he could boss around even the toughest actor in Hollywood, Hawks self-servingly told a story about how he noticed that Bogart returned from lunch on the first day having had several drinks. He immediately upbraided the actor, saying, “Either I get a new leading man or you get a new director. I don’t want anybody who’s gonna drink during the day. I don’t think anybody’s that good. I have to get the best out of ’em, and if I don’t get it, I don’t want to make the picture.” Thus chastened, according to Hawks, Bogart said he wouldn’t drink, paving the way for a strong working relationship in which Hawks actively sought the star’s suggestions, as he always did with anyone he felt was “any good.”
Bogart’s domestic situation was founded upon drinking and fighting. Not a philanderer in the Cooper-Fleming-Hecht-Hawks mold, Bogart had twice been married to and divorced from actresses before wedding Mayo Methot, another actress, who then let herself go physically, could land only minor film roles, and could keep up with her hard-drinking husband shot for shot. By this time, six years into their marriage, a customary evening chez Bogart consisted of Methot’s becoming so loaded that she hurled both insults and objects such as ashtrays at her husband, often driving him out of the house. Once she actually stabbed him, and another time she attempted suicide by cutting her wrists. They were known around town as the Battling Bogarts, but despite the chaos and unhappiness, Bogart felt a strong responsibility toward his wife and had not really come close to leaving her, much as he might have thought about it. According to the biographer Joe Hyams, Hawks once asked Bogart if he could get an erection without first having a fight with Mayo. At first taken aback by Hawks’s bluntness, he then replied, “You know, I guess you’re right. I probably couldn’t.”
Nearly all the scenes shot during the first two weeks involved both Bogart and Bacall, and no one in their vicinity was oblivious to the heat lightning that blazed between them almost from the outset. Meta Carpenter, who was there every second, said, “That Humphrey Bogart and Betty Bacall were in love was evident after the first days of shooting.” The publicist Mickey Seltzer observed, “The electricity between them was not to be believed. It was so tangible you could feel it in the air. I knew something was going to come of it.” There were telltale signs, such as the flowers that appeared daily in Bacall’s dressing room, the way each of them would hang around the set to watch the other work, the daily lunches. For her part, Bacall testified, “I don’t know how it happened—it was almost imperceptible.” She said that around the third week of shooting, Bogart, who was done for the day, came into her dressing room to say good night, impulsively kissed her, and asked her for her phone number, which she gave him and which he called later that night. (From the start, they carried over their screen names, Steve and Slim, into their private life.) Bacall is also sure that the sharp-eyed Hawks picked up on their involvement “fairly early on” and decided to use it to the film’s advantage, even if he was boiling about it inside.
And boiling he was. As Bacall became increasingly more attentive to Bogart than to her mentor, a disturbing combination of resentment, jealousy, insulted ego, and wounded pride grew in Hawks, fostered by the knowledge that there was nothing he could do about it. Bacall knew that Hawks “had quite a crush on me, but of course he was tangling with the wrong people because there was no way he was going to get anywhere, with Bogie and me involved. He wanted to be my Svengali. He told Bogie to get a room at the Ambassador, he threatened to send me to Monogram. He was really burned up. Bogie always said he’d never send me to Monogram, he’d never do the things he threatened to do. He finally forgave me, but he couldn’t handle it.”
Part of Hawks’s fantasy about discovering a nobody and molding her into the ultimate movie star was that she would naturally fall in love with him, but in Bacall’s case he was thwarted on every front. After all, his wife had spotted her first and had become fast friends with the youngster, perhaps partly a preemptive move at first but obviously a genuine one as well, given that the two women remained very close until Slim’s death nearly fifty years later. Slim turned up on the set of To Have and Have Not with
unaccustomed frequency; Dan Seymour said, to coin a phrase, “Slim watched Hawks like a hawk.” And, unbeknownst to him, Bacall simply didn’t find him appealing “that way.” Bacall admitted, “He was an attractive man because he was so talented and smart and successful, and some women would naturally be attracted to that, although I wasn’t. He was remote.” It was against Hawks’s nature to make the first move with a woman, but so infatuated was he with Bacall that early on he persuaded an intermediary to urge her to come see him. One thing Bacall didn’t include in her autobiography was her belief that one of the reasons Hawks always kept Furthman around was that the writer acted as a pimp for his boss. “Furthman suggested to me that I give Howard a call,” Bacall said. “He said Howard would like it. But I said no way.”
In fact, through her entire life, Bacall “was always terrified” of Howard Hawks: “I always was nervous around him. He was always very intimidating.” Although there was no way Hawks could remain oblivious to what was going on between Bacall and Bogart, Bacall, not sure what he knew, desperately tried to keep the relationship a secret, just as Bogart needed to keep his wife in the dark about things if he had any hope of getting her to agree to a divorce. Bitterly aware that his protégée was slipping away from him just as he was brilliantly fashioning her image for worldwide adoration, Hawks nonetheless kept his anger on a low boil through most of the shooting, professionally capitalizing on the sparks flying between his costars on the set and, by extension, on-screen. Shortly before the wrap Hawks ordered Bacall to his house one night and, in Slim’s presence, dressed her down for her irresponsible and ungrateful behavior, threatened to sell her contract to Monogram, the lowest of the lowly Poverty Row companies, and predicted that Bogart would forget about her as soon as shooting was completed. “He had this very tight-lipped way of talking when he was mad,” Bacall vividly remembered. “He didn’t raise his voice, but he could be rough.”
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 50