Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  The qualities of The Big Sleep are self-evident. It is, as Hawks intended it to be, massively entertaining on a moment-to-moment basis, with Bogart etching the definitive Philip Marlowe, every woman in the film fairly oozing sexuality, a mood of sinister uncertainty draping the action, and a mystery being unraveled whose dubious clarity is at least matched by its scandalous fascination. The sense of intangible threats lurking in the darkness of the world at large, the Conradian danger present in so many Hawks films, is especially helpful to this deeply mysterious puzzle in which everyone is suspicious and most are guilty of something. It is not the personal film that To Have and Have Not was, but it does reflect the steel-eyed, unsentimental, sly, sexually excitable, and ruthless sides of its director, all of which serve this material extremely well. As Cecelia Ager wrote in PM in the most perceptive contemporaneous review, the film “evokes the fond indulgence that a blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, good little boy meets when earnestly relating the very naughtiest daydream the dear little fellow is able to think up.” She also put the dazzling skill evident in individual sequences in perspective by comparing it to “cutting and polishing rhinestones to simulate diamonds, instead of just cutting and polishing diamonds. They are marvelous fakes.”

  With The Big Sleep, Hawks had now scored seven major hits in a row, a record all but unmatched in Hollywood. His commercial success had earned him a virtually free hand at Warner Bros., where his position was condusive to his doing just about any project he wanted. And yet he chafed at being under contract, at not truly controlling his own destiny. He still looked back at the unfettered manner in which he and Hughes had made Scarface as an ideal he had been unable to recapture since. More than anything, Hawks wanted his independence, to not have to deal with Jack Warner or Sam Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer, to own and profit by his own work. Due to his tremendous success as a director, Hawks was able to get what he wanted. But knowing how to handle it when he got it was another matter altogether.

  27

  The Urge to Independence: Red River

  As the war years began drawing to a close, Howard Hawks, who was approaching his fiftieth birthday, acquired some curious new pastimes. Long gone were his days of flying, sailing, and tennis, and even his taste for hunting began to subside as he got older. But his passion for all manner of engines and vehicles, preferably fast and unusual ones, persisted. During the making of To Have and Have Not, he distracted himself by building an automobile from the ground up on the Warner lot, joined occasionally by David, who as a teenager was beginning to share his father’s interest in hot cars. But the most unusual, and almost comical, manifestation of this mania was the middle-aged men’s motorcycle gang that gathered every Sunday morning at Hog Canyon. Sporting the curiously proper and British name of the Moraga Spit and Polish Club, this informal group “didn’t care too damn much about the usual social life that centered around how big you were,” according to Hawks, but nonetheless consisted largely of prominent Hollywood names: Hawks, Vic Fleming, Clark Gable, Ward Bond, Keenan Wynn, Andy Devine, Van Johnson, William Wellman, and, as the only woman with a chopper, Wellman’s wife, Dotty, who, according to Slim, had the biggest bike of all and was the best rider. Other regulars included the stuntman Cary Loften, the test pilot and certified wild man Vance Breeze, the aviation innovator Bill Lear, later of Learjet fame, and Al Menasco, whose Menasco Aircraft Company made airplane engines in Burbank.

  Sometimes numbering as many as twenty cyclists, the gang would gather at Hawks’s house at 10:30 A.M. in full leather gear and special jackets. The men then spent at least an hour polishing their machines to showroom conditions while discussing their machines’ performance and fine points, whereupon they would peel off for a couple of hours of noisy cruising through the hills off and around Mulholland Drive or into the San Fernando Valley. Afterward, they either returned to Hog Canyon, where Slim dutifully served up a big lunch she’d spent the morning preparing, or adjourned to Andy Devine’s ranch, where the jovial Western character actor “had this long ‘Liar’s Bench’ made for our house. All the riders would sit and drink beer and tell lies about what they’d been doing on their motorcycles.” The only biker who tried to outdo the others in terms of speed and fancy maneuvers was Fleming. Otherwise, the main competition, such as it was, stemmed from having the spiffiest, most polished machine. Most of the bikes at that time were Harleys, although Hawks and Gable each had a four-cylinder Ariel Square Four. In addition to his own Harley, Hawks along the way acquired a Triumph, a Zundapp, and, just to one-up the others, a rare German BMW, which he bought from a policeman.

  It hardly escapes notice that several members of the group, notably Bond, Wynn, and Fleming, were extremely right-wing, and vague stories have circulated over the years about how Hollywood’s first motorcycle gang was actually a bunch of celebrity thugs prone to roaring through the streets of Hollywood on the lookout for liberals and lefties. While Bond and a couple of his cronies apparently indulged this fantasy from time to time, it wasn’t on Sunday mornings with the rest of the bunch, who were in it for the social and mildly macho gratification. Any political views voiced were no doubt conservative, but the Moraga Spit and Polish Club was as innocuous, and somewhat silly, as its name.

  Hawks’s chronic preoccupation with vehicles, which Slim tolerated with no enthusiasm, assumed its most peculiar manifestation when he bought, at untold expense, an elaborate land yacht that he imagined would take Slim and him off on fabulous journeys to unknown destinations. The two-toned green contraption consisted of a special cab attached to an enormously long trailer that resembled the inside of a yacht. After Slim stocked it with the requisite utensils, Hawks decided to take the unwieldy thing on its inaugural voyage. By the time they reached the end of Moraga Drive, Slim felt so ill that she insisted that they return home at once, so Hawks made an ungainly U-turn and, while attempting to park, did not clear the eave of the stable, which sliced like a can opener through the top of the trailer. Neither Hawks nor his wife ever took it out for a second spin.

  Shortly after the war ended, a new sport was taken up by the Hollywood elite: croquet. Commonly thought of in America as a children’s pastime, the game, when pursued seriously, is as vicious as polo and second only to cricket in the length of time required to play. In addition, the necessity of a large, perfectly flat, immaculately manicured, expertly measured grass playing field, as well as costly English equipment, restricts access to the privileged few, annointing it with further snob appeal in the film capital. The sport had long been popular in society and show-business circles in the East, with the critic Alexander Woollcott as its “high priest” and other enthusiasts including Averell Harriman, Richard Rodgers, Vincent Astor, Moss Hart, Herbert Bayard Swope, and George S. Kaufman. It was Hart who was most responsible for bringing croquet west by introducing it to Darryl Zanuck. Soon Hawks became one of its prime adherents as well, followed by such others as his brother Bill, Tyrone Power, Cesar Romero, Samuel Goldwyn, Gregory Ratoff, Otto Preminger, André Hakim, Joseph Cotten, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Louis Jourdan, who was the best player. William Powell, Slim’s friend from the mid-1930s, was the official cheerleader of the Palm Springs club.

  Because of the vast acreage of Hog Canyon, Hawks’s compound was easily able to accommodate an impeccable regulation croquet lawn. Matches could easily last all day and sometimes continued well into the evening. While Hawks, Zanuck, and the other diehards feverishly pursued their new game, nonparticipants, including Slim, Robert Capa, Lew Wasserman, and Constance Bennett, would play ruthless poker inside.

  Naturally, the East Coast veterans looked down on the Hollywood neophytes, and Zanuck took Moss Hart’s joking put-downs as a slap in the face that demanded satisfaction. Thus was born the East-West croquet championship, which pitted Hart, Tyrone Power, and the agent Fefe Ferry for the East against Zanuck and Hawks for the West. The three matches were played on July 6–7, 1946, before some three hundred spectators seated in a gallery set up at Hawks’s home. Special floodlight
s were installed to allow play to continue after dark, and the playoff was considered such an event that Life magazine covered it with a two-page spread highlighted by photographs taken by Jean Howard. Zanuck and Hawks won the first game, but, as Hart observed, “they became drunk with success and lost control very early” in the night game, then lost again the next day, giving the tiny winner’s cup, presented by Slim, to the East. Among those in the crowd on the first day was Howard Hughes, who the next afternoon would nearly die when he crashed his experimental XF-11 plane into two homes in Beverly Hills.

  As Hart noted, croquet, when properly played, “is a fascinating adult game, requiring skill, stamina and iron nerves,” and Hawks possessed those qualities in spades. Unlike the emotional and ill-mannered Zanuck, Hawks approached the contests with the calm precision of the engineer that he was, which took nothing away from the fearsome power with which he knocked opponents’ balls away. The fad for croquet continued into the next decade, but it reached its peak at Hawks’s home that weekend. Hawks received official recognition for his standing in the sport when he was inducted into the Newport, Rhode Island, Croquet Hall of Fame.

  Later in July, the summer’s other major social event at Hog Canyon took place: the wedding of director Jean Negulesco to Dusty Anderson. A wild-spirited Romanian whose prankishness and competitiveness made him good company for Zanuck, Negulesco was a quickly rising director at Warner Bros. and met Hawks socially through Feldman. He had Hawks’s number, knowing full well that the director was “a preposterous, imaginative, and inspired liar,” but thought it better just to grin and bear it than to challenge him. But he also admired Hawks tremendously, calling him the “Great White Father” and coming to him whenever he had a story problem. Negulesco was also crazy about Slim—”I considered her to be perfection,” he admitted—and actually asked her to get to know Dusty Anderson and give him her opinion before he proposed marriage. Slim not only approved but threw the wedding, which took place in an idyllic spot at Hog Canyon on a little rise surrounded by trees, blooming flowers, and buzzing hummingbirds. Hawks stood in as best man, although he slipped away from the wedding celebration as quickly as possible to get a croquet game going.

  It was during the war years that the first noticeable cracks began to appear in the monolithic studio system. Provoked by Jack Warner’s wresting away of the best picture Oscar for Casablanca at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1944, the film’s producer, Hal Wallis, left Warner Bros. later that year to form his own production company, releasing through Paramount. After long flirting with a partnership with Hawks, Gary Cooper created his own company, International Pictures, and personally produced Along Came Jones; it wouldn’t be long before numerous other top stars, including Bogart, would follow suit. Mervyn LeRoy became the first director with his own autonomous deal at Warners, something Michael Curtiz would later emulate. Directors whose careers had been interrupted by military service came back in a new, more serious mood, determined to make films that said something, that had social and thematic weight. To this end, Frank Capra, William Wyler, and George Stevens, along with the producer Sam Briskin, formed their own company, the short-lived Liberty Pictures, and John Ford formed Argosy Pictures with Merian C. Cooper. Other prominent directors who hadn’t gone to war also broke their studio chains: despite grave warnings from Hawks, Preston Sturges made the ill-advised decision to leave Paramount after a string of hits and become partners with Howard Hughes, and even Victor Fleming, by then in his early sixties, left MGM after fifteen years to join the independent producer Walter Wanger in making the giant-budgeted Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman, with whom Fleming became involved in a desperately intense May-December love affair.

  For years, Charles Feldman had shrewdly made his clients far more money than they would have seen otherwise by generally steering them clear of long-term studio contracts in favor of picture-by-picture deals. By the late 1930s, he began having some luck in pioneering the packaging of clients and material, thus giving talent a bit of leverage in a system in which the studios held all the cards, and in the early 1940s he had muscled his first producer’s credits on The Spoilers and Pittsburgh. In February 1943, during the effort to get Battle Cry off the ground, Feldman and Hawks had formed H-F Productions. At first it was a simple partnership whose function was to acquire literary properties that Hawks wanted to make into films, with the idea of selling them to the studios for far more than it had paid. Toward the end of 1944, while in the middle of production on The Big Sleep, H-F bought three very interesting books, all of which were turned into excellent scripts that Hawks was very serious about directing.

  In October 1944, Samuel Fuller was a G.I. who, having made the D-Day crossing four months before, was pushing through France toward Germany. The publication of his mystery novel The Dark Page during some of the toughest days of the war was later immortalized by Fuller himself in The Big Red One, when the Fuller character has trouble convincing his fellow dogfaces that he is the author of the book they’re reading on the front lines. But the true story went further than that. Hawks and Feldman bought the screen rights to the novel for fifteen thousand dollars, an unimaginable windfall for a soldier about to enter the final winter of the war. When he finally managed access to a typewriter in Germany in December, Fuller made only one request of Hawks: that the premiere be held for the entire First Division. The novel combined elements of The Front Page and Double Indemnity, telling of a newspaper editor who commits murder and pushes his favorite reporter to try to solve the case.

  Hawks saw The Dark Page as “a very unusual relationship between two men … a form of love story between two men, where the love of the editor for the reporter and the editor’s pride in the work of the reporter allows him to egg the reporter on to uncovering the crime committed by the editor.” Hawks hired Jules Furthman for $25,000 to write the adaptation after the writer finished his work on The Big Sleep, and when Hawks later left Warner Bros. and formed his first production company, Monterey Productions, along with Feldman and Slim, he essentially sold the novel and script to himself for a five-thousand-dollar profit. Monterey hired Fuller, now returned to Hollywood, to write a new script, for which he received an additional five thousand dollars.

  After considering Edward G. Robinson, Bogart, and Cary Grant, and failing to interest Gary Cooper in the material, Hawks briefly entertained doing it with unknowns, but when Feldman convinced him it was the sort of story that demanded stars in the leading roles, Hawks decided to sell. Edward Small’s syndicate, Motion Picture Investors Corporation, which not so coincidentally arranged the financing for Hawks’s Red River, bought The Dark Page from Hawks for $100,000, and Small ultimately produced a disappointing version of it, Phil Karlson’s Scandal Sheet, starring Broderick Crawford and John Derek, in 1952. When Fuller found out about the sale he exploded, and he threatened legal action over the fact that Hawks had made more than fifty thousand dollars’ profit horse-trading his work. He also accused Feldman, who was his agent as well, of sharing in the profit, a charge Feldman denied by claiming that his only payment had been 10 percent of the original fifteen-thousand-dollar sale. Fuller, who became a director himself in 1949, finally calmed down and, in later years, was sorry only that Hawks didn’t make the film himself as originally planned.

  Within two weeks of acquiring The Dark Page, in October 1944, H-F bought two other novels, The Black Door and Dreadful Hollow. Written by mystery specialist Cleve Adams, whom Hawks had hired briefly on The Big Sleep, The Black Door, for which H-F paid four thousand dollars, had the potential to rival that film in its portrayal of rampant corruption and pervasive evil. As adapted by Leigh Brackett, it was a lewd, licentious tale that would have offered Bogart an opportunity to take the sexual insolence of his Philip Marlowe to an even greater extreme. The story, later variously known as The Turning Door and Stiletto, sees former narcotics agent James J. Flagg pulled into a convoluted drugs-and-gambling scheme on the pretense of being hired by a senator to keep track of his wildcat daug
hter. Brackett wrote it in breezy, highly entertaining style, and her dialogue, particularly in the provocative sex scenes, is notably sophisticated. While derivative of both Chandler and Hammett and no less confusing than The Big Sleep, it would seem to have had all the makings of a winning commercial picture if done by a combination such as Hawks and Bogart. As had been the case with The Dark Page, the pair’s mutual disaffection, and the director’s departure from Warner Bros., left it by the wayside.

  Dreadful Hollow was something altogether different and would have marked a radical departure for Hawks had he ever made it. H-F purchased Irina Karlova’s gothic horror novel for $2,500 two years after its publication, and Hawks never considered anyone other than William Faulkner to adapt it. Because the only known copy of the script reposed in Hawks’s possession, this major screenplay remained utterly unknown to Faulkner scholars for decades, as it was not even mentioned in Joseph Blotner’s exhaustive 1974 two-volume biography. Even now, it is not entirely clear when Faulkner actually wrote the script, since he did not date it, but the best guess would be around 1947. Although quite different in surface intent from “A Ghost Story,” Dreadful Hollow bears an equally fascinating kinship to Faulkner’s work as a novelist, recalling his frequent theme of grievously inbred, twisted families, with the difference that these characters have roots in Transylvania rather than the American South.

  Jillian Dare, a pretty nineteen-year-old, takes a job as a paid companion to the Countess Ana Czerner, at an English house called the Grange, which is also occupied by a threatening woman named Sari. Strange events, including a rabbit found with its throat torn out and its blood removed (this after Sari has been glimpsed in the kitchen with a bowl of blood), and a large, batlike shape that flies at Jillian and spits out a curse in a foreign tongue, make her fear she’s going mad. Sari confines her to her room, which leads Dr. Clyde, whose father knew Czerner’s secret, to appeal to the police.