Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  When Hawks read Chase’s screenplay and the parallel short novel in late March, he brought in a bright, Yale-educated twenty-nine-year-old named Charles Schnee, who had recently dropped law in favor of screen-writing. His only credit to date was on John Berry’s From This Day Forward, for which he wrote additional dialogue, but he would shortly break through with his scripts for They Live by Night, The Furies, and The Bad and the Beautiful. Working under Hawks’s guidance in Palm Springs while Slim was off on her East Coast spree, Schnee made numerous changes in Chase’s narrative. The first was to give Dunson a woman he leaves behind at the beginning of the story. When she turns out to have been killed in an Indian attack on her wagon train (information imparted in the typically Hawksian manner of a found bracelet Dunson had given to her), it enriches the story’s meaning and Dunson’s character in multiple ways: when he quits the wagon train, Dunson is thus parting company not only with the other men’s laws but with the “civilizing” influence of women, thereby freeing him to establish his own rules. It also makes him at once embittered and more ruthlessly determined than before; as Hawks said, leaving the woman he really loved “would make him all the more anxious to go through with his plans. Because a man who has made a great mistake to get somewhere is not going to stop at small things.” Matthew, with his cow, serves to replace her as the sole object of Dunson’s love, an affection for “love stories between two men” being something Hawks and Chase had in common.

  In the interests of streamlining, Schnee eliminated Matthew’s trip back from the war, thereby delaying Tess’s entrance until far into the story, which many have viewed as a flaw. He tightened the time jump between the two sections from twenty to fourteen years. He took out Cherry’s injuring Dunson in the shoulder during the mutiny, removed the Donegal, made Tess into a professional card sharp (foreshadowing Rio Bravo and El Dorado) to get away from the suggestion that she was a prostitute, excised the hard-to-film nocturnal storm scene as well as Cherry’s death, and added the Indian attack, in which Tess is shot with an arrow.

  The climax, however, remained up in the air. To Chase’s disgust, Hawks, who increasingly refrained from killing off remotely sympathetic characters, would not allow Dunson to die in the end. As the Schnee-revised shooting script had it as the film went into production, Dunson stalks Matthew to the Abilene Hotel, which has an enormous wheel of fortune on the front of it. When Dunson yells at Matthew to draw, the young man points out, “You’re always saying what’s to be done.” Finally, Dunson draws and fires but repeatedly hits the wheel of fortune, spinning it round and round. Then Cherry Valance steps out of the crowd and challenges Dunson, but Matthew is quicker on the draw and shatters Cherry’s gun hand. At this, Dunson, an interesting antecedent to John Chance in Rio Bravo, screams, “I’ve told you! And told you and told you! I need no help from you or anyone!” He twice slaps Matthew full across the face with the back of his hand, pushing his head back against the wheel of fortune so that it stops, and finally takes Matthew’s gun from him and smashes it. At last, Matthew hits Dunson, but Dunson beats him to a pulp. Once Matthew is knocked out, it’s discovered that Cherry’s bullet hit Matthew in the shoulder so that he couldn’t use his left, to which Dunson says, “Of course. I could see. Do you think I’d’ve fought him fists if he hadn’t? He’d’ve killed me. Don’t forget! I taught him how to fight!” The film then ends with the three principals crossing a river in a wagon and Dunson, upon touching, smelling, and tasting it, asking if this isn’t the Red River and then getting out on the other side.

  To play the three main characters, Hawks originally wanted Gary Cooper as Dunson, Cary Grant as Cherry Valance, and the good-looking nonactor Casey Tibbs, then the reigning national champion rodeo rider, as Matthew. Cooper was initially cool to his intended part, feeling Dunson was too mean and unsympathetic for an audience to tolerate. Hawks was sure he could bring him around, so he was quite surprised when Cooper declined the role in favor of Cecil B. De Mille’s pre–Revolutionary War “Western” Unconquered.

  But Charles Feldman had the right actor waiting in the wings: his longtime client John Wayne. Duke, who was about to turn thirty-nine, had won World War II on-screen in a series of action pictures and had just produced his first film, Angel and the Badman, at Republic. But he was still hovering vaguely in the B-plus picture category and not working for top directors except occasionally for John Ford, whose cavalry trilogy was yet to come. Delighted at the prospect of working with Hawks, whom he knew a bit through Feldman and Ford, Wayne was not so much concerned about Dunson’s brutal personality as about playing an older man. Hawks supposedly said, “Duke, you’re going to be one pretty soon, why don’t you get some practice?” and Wayne was won over. Not hurting matters either was his compensation, which was set at $50,000, $10,000 more for every week over twelve weeks of shooting and 10 percent of the profits, with a profit of $75,000 guaranteed.

  Despite their best-laid plans, Hawks and Cary Grant hadn’t found a way to work together again since their sparkling back-to-back-to-back trio in 1938–40. As originally written, Cherry Valance would have been an amusingly different sort of character for Grant to play, but he didn’t feel it was a big or important enough part and understandably begged off. Not needing a star for the film’s third role, Hawks remembered John Ireland from his screen test for The Big Sleep and signed him to play Cherry for the bargain rate of five hundred dollars a week.

  To play the many cowboys, Hawks rounded up a colorful combination of reliable old friends, such as Walter Brennan, Harry Carey Sr., Paul Fix, and Noah Beery Jr.; newcomers; and the almost inevitable loan from the Ford stock company, Hank Worden. (Brennan made five thousand dollars per week, an incredible amount for a character actor.) But the plum role, of course, was Matthew. Directing a real-life cowboy like Casey Tibbs would have represented an interesting challenge, but Hawks became doubtful that the untested young man could stand up next to Wayne; when Tibbs broke his arm in a fall, his screen career was over before it started. Hawks then decided he wanted to cast Jack Buetel, whom he had directed ever so briefly on The Outlaw, but Howard Hughes seemed intent upon thwarting Buetel’s career, refusing to loan him out to anyone. Buetel, of course, was beside himself, but there was nothing he could do, and he made only a few B Westerns in the 1950s before vanishing from films.

  So Hawks had to look elsewhere. Biographies of Montgomery Clift state that Hawks had been impressed with the rising Broadway star in the Tennessee Williams–Donald Windham play You Touched Me! The director, however, never spoke about it, and there is no indication that he even visited New York anytime during its run. Ironically, Leland Hayward was Clift’s agent, and it was Hayward who played the aggressive matchmaker between Hawks and the actor. By this time, the beautiful, hypersensitive Clift had been around Hollywood a bit. He’d even signed a six-month contract at MGM but wisely refused Louis B. Mayer’s tearful entreaty to extend it to seven years. Snobbishly disdainful of the place he called “Vomit, California,” the twenty-six-year-old Clift wanted to become a movie star, but on his own terms.

  It wasn’t until late summer, with filming looming just ahead in September, that Hayward gave Clift the Red River script. Although costarring in a Western opposite John Wayne was about the last thing Clift ever expected to do, he was intrigued and could easily sense both the role’s star-making potential and the picture’s commercial possibilities. With his trusted New York theater friends hopelessly divided over whether or not he should do it, Clift returned to Los Angeles to meet Hawks, knowing the part was his if he wanted it but still utterly ambivalent about it.

  With Hayward anxious to clinch the deal, Slim proposed that her new lover bring Clift to Hog Canyon for a luncheon with her husband. Tickled to be seeing Hayward on her home turf, she took Clift for an after-lunch walk around the grounds, during which she claimed to have convinced Clift to take the role by insisting that he would learn a great deal from both Hawks and Wayne. When they got back to the house, Clift told the two men, “I�
�ve decided to do it. She talked me into it.” As if sleeping with Hawks’s wife was not enough, Hayward also extracted a king’s ransom for Clift’s services: $50,000, which, when extra-week overages and a bonus were added on at the end, eventually came to $75,000, putting Clift in the same ballpark as Wayne on his first trip to the plate. It was a startling fee for an unknown newcomer, and not at all easy for Hawks and Feldman to swallow; Feldman was sure he could maneuver Hayward down to $30,000 or $40,000, and he and Hawks had originally hoped to sign Clift to a long-term deal themselves. But Hayward and Clift would have none of it and got things entirely their own way.

  Still, Hawks took charge of his “discovery” in his usual manner and immediately challenged Clift to learn how to ride. “Now look, this is a Western,” he said. “If you can’t sit on a horse, you may as well go right home.” Total preparation and deep immersion in a part were Clift’s stock-in-trade, so he left for location in Arizona almost at once and spent three weeks with a top cowboy, learning to ride, rope, and shoot. Clift was a superb pupil, and by the time filming started he fit in effortlessly with the more experienced cowboy actors. There would be other questions about Clift, specifically in the mind of John Wayne, but those could only be answered once shooting began.

  Hawks was on the make as usual in regard to casting the women’s roles. Late in 1945, he met a striking actress in her early twenties named Jan Zweigart, who took the professional name of Jana Garth. Very much in the Hawks-preferred tall, blond, slim, high-cheekboned mold, she had made a stunning impression in a production of Saint Joan in her native San Francisco, where she was discovered by the film director George Cukor. She was madly pursued by agents, producers, directors, and men in general, but she decided to sign with Hawks because of his track record of catapulting actresses straight to stardom without years of building up through small parts.

  In the view of her close friend, the future director Curtis Harrington, “She was a natural aristocrat. She was arrogant, very high-strung and neurotic. She was beautiful and she knew it. But she was real, very honest and direct.” Sexually, Harrington said, “she was a very free spirit” and had flings with a number of prominent Hollywood men but not, it seems, with Hawks. Nonetheless, her mentor put her through the usual “yelling in the hills” training and by summer decided to cast her as Fen, the young woman Dunson leaves behind. This wasn’t good enough for Garth, who had read the script and expected to be given the female lead of Tess Millay. Impulsive and headstrong, she refused to play the smaller part and just turned her back on Hawks, his film, and her contract. Success in Hollywood continued to elude her, and eventually she moved to Italy, where she became romantically involved with the prominent author Curzio Malaparte. But things continued to spiral downward for her, until she killed herself. Malaparte proceeded to give appallingly egotistical interviews to the press about “the girl who committed suicide over me.”

  When Garth shocked him by refusing to play Fen, Hawks, on a moment’s notice, cast the up-and-coming 20th Century–Fox starlet Coleen Gray, whom Zanuck agreed to loan out. For the much more crucial part of Tess, Hawks had long since settled on another of his recent discoveries, Margaret Sheridan. This wholesome but sultry looking “lush Irish beauty,” as Hawks enthused, was a Los Angeles native, five-foot-six with dark brown hair and blue-green eyes. When Hawks noticed her photograph in Vogue in early June 1945, he instantly put out the search for her. But when he finally got her number and called her at her freshman dorm at the University of Southern California, she hung up on him because she thought it was a prank call. At that time, Sheridan’s gorgeous face graced a beer ad posted on dozens of billboards all over Los Angeles, including one next to the USC campus, and guys on campus had taken to calling her and claiming to be Darryl Zanuck or Jack Warner. As soon as Hawks could clear up the matter of his own identity, he signed Sheridan to a personal contract, and she quit school and embarked upon the Hawks program of heavy training, which included dance, singing, and gymnastics and drama and voice coaching.

  Extremely attracted to her physically and prone to giving her gifts from Saks, Hawks was more convinced of her screen potential than with most of his protegées and began having glamour and cheesecake photographs taken that made her look like a prettier, more refined Jane Russell. By the time Red River was taking shape, there was no question in his mind that Sheridan would play the main female role, and she started learning card tricks and fancy dealing techniques Hawks wanted to incorporate into some scenes. But in the spring of 1946, Sheridan suddenly fell hard for former Navy pilot William F. Pattison. They quickly married, on May 15, 1946, but in August, when Hawks could finally confirm that production would begin monmentarily, Sheridan was forced to admit to her mentor that she was already nearly three months pregnant and couldn’t possibly do the picture. Although he wasn’t pleased, Hawks was outwardly gracious, reassuring her that there would be other opportunities down the line.

  In a bind, Hawks gave the part to another actress he had just put under contract, Joanne Dru. Dru had the makings of a good comedy and musical performer, in Hawks’s opinion, but he always regretted having to cast her in Red River, for which he thought she was ill-suited. “She did a very good job for the fact that she’d had no experience or anything,” Hawks allowed, but he felt that Sheridan “would have been six times as good.” Sheridan retreated from the film world for several years to raise her daughter, while Hawks, true to his word, continued to propose her for numerous parts until, finally, she made her debut in The Thing. But she had missed her chance. “When she came back she wasn’t the same girl,” Hawks said. “If she’d only done Red River, she’d have been a big star.”

  The financing for Red River was set up by Feldman, with Hawks’s full complicity and knowledge. After considering the names Sunset, Wilshire, and Ambassador Productions, they settled on the more evocatively western monicker of Monterey Productions for their company, which was incorporated at the end of 1945 with Hawks, Slim, and Feldman as the principal shareholders. In exchange for their ownership positions, the principals all loaned Monterey amounts totalling nearly $80,000 for initial operating expenses, specifically the purchase of Chase’s story. Feldman, who would serve as executive producer, and Hawks initially set the budget at an unrealistic $1,258,000 for a seventy-two-day shoot, but by May this was increased to $1,750,000. Hawks would receive a relatively standard $125,000 to produce and direct, but he and his wife also stood to rake in 57 percent of the profits based on their majority ownership of Monterey. Feldman, who would receive 24 percent, began shopping the project around to several prospective partners, including Universal Pictures, Sam Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Joseph Schenck at Fox, and even Joseph P. Kennedy, who hadn’t been actively involved in the film business in more than a decade.

  Instead, Feldman worked out a scheme by which the film would be funded by a combination of private financing and bank loans. A crafty former actor and agent, Edward Small had for twenty years been a successful but artistically undistinguished independent producer working mainly with United Artists. Knowing Feldman and Hawks well, he rounded up a group of eight other wealthy show-business figures, mostly lawyers and distribution executives, to form a syndicate blandly known as the Motion Picture Investors Corporation. To cover the rest of the film’s budget MPI agreed to advance $675,000, with an additional $900,000 supplied by a loan from Security-First National Bank in Beverly Hills. Shortly thereafter, the picture landed at United Artists under a multipicture deal Eddie Small made for his productions. UA would receive its distributor’s share first, followed by MPI and the bank; only after they were paid off would Monterey receive its monies.

  At first, Hawks figured on shooting the picture on its natural settings in Texas. Governor Coke R. Stevenson assured the company of the state’s complete cooperation in everything from water, power, and transportation, “lenient application of State Humane Laws in ‘stunt’ scenes,” “cooperation of the Labor Commissioner’s Office in avoiding interference by unions
,” and advantageous prices on cattle. But Hawks needed a location where the diverse terrains for the separate sections of the story would be easily available, to prevent time-consuming moves of the base camp and cattle. Potential locations were scouted in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Mexico before an ideal spot turned up in Arizona. Businessman C. H. Symington of Detroit, whose brother had gone to Yale with Kenneth Hawks, owned a large spread in the remote southern part of the state, twenty-five miles from the Mexican border. The town closest to the property was Elgin, population seven, which was on a large plain with an elevation of five thousand feet. Nearby were the Whetstone Mountains and Apache Peak, and the area’s scenery was so diverse that the company never had to range farther than fifteen miles from camp.

  At once, the ranch was transformed as if it were an army encampment. The Anderson Boarding and Supply Company put up seventy-five portable tents equipped with electricity and running water for the cast and crew to stay in. No one could complain about the accommodations at Camp Anderson, or the food, which was uncommonly outstanding for a location shoot. The only set needed in Arizona was for the picture’s climax at Abilene, which consisted largely of false fronts, but construction work started on four stages at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood on sets for the interior and night scenes that would be shot there subsequently. The costumer Joe De Young quit before production began, but not before making dozens of sketches of the proper outfits for the various characters, with special attention to distinctive hats, since Hawks believed that this was the easiest way for audiences to recognize otherwise undifferentiated characters, such as the cowboys. Characters in Red River wear a stovepipe and derby in addition to the regular cowboy hats, and when he arrived in Arizona, Hawks was so pleased with Clift’s dedication to learning cowboy ways that, as a vote of confidence, he gave his young star an old hat Gary Cooper had given him, and its weather-beaten look was perfect for the picture.