Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Hawks also gave all the principals in the film “Red River D” belt buckles based on the design Wayne’s Tom Dunson draws in the ground. Hawks went to a silversmith in Nogales to have these gifts made, and each of the beautiful buckles, on which gold inlays marked the banks of the river, was initialed for its intended recipient, with the men, including Wayne, Clift, Walter Brennan, Russ Harlan, David Hawks, and a few others, getting full-sized buckles and the women, Joanne Dru, Slim, and Barbara Hawks among them, receiving smaller versions. Wayne wore his in many subsequent pictures, and at one point, he and Hawks exchanged buckles in a gesture of friendship. Hawks lost his—the one initialed J.W.—but David Hawks was extremely impressed years later when he noticed that the enormous sculpture of the Duke in front of the airport in California’s Orange County that bears his name correctly has the initials H.W.H. engraved on the buckle’s facsimile.

  The company originally intended to start shooting by August 26, but there were too many loose ends for Hawks to get away that soon. Clift, Joanne Dru, and Coleen Gray were cast only at the last minute, the logistics were demanding, and the script needed more work, which would persist right through shooting. Even the title continued to be a topic of much back-and-forth. Chase’s original Break Of Dawn had been abandoned in favor of the more historical The Chisholm Trail, which is the title the Saturday Evening Post wanted to use for its serialization. It was Hawks who came up with Red River, which everyone else objected to for many reasons: it had only incidental relevance to the story, it didn’t begin to suggest the epic scope the film would have, and it smacked of such previous Republic B Western titles as Red River Valley and Red River Renegades. Feldman hated it so much that he tried to buy the title of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s aviation novel Wind, Sand, and Stars and, when that proved impossible, implored his staff to come up with a close approximation. At one point, Stampede was announced as the new title, but Monogram already owned it. Hawks, who naturally wanted the serialization to serve as advance promotion for the picture, was upset when the Post refused to substitute his title for Chase’s.

  There were also uncertainties about key production personnel. Hawks desperately wanted Gregg Toland, who had done such dramatic work with western landscapes and parched faces on Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, to be his cinematographer. Toland had just finished Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and was technically available, but Sam Goldwyn, to whom he was under contract, knew very well Hawks’s tendancy to go way over schedule and, needing Toland to be free for The Bishop’s Wife, declined to loan him out. Instead, Hawks picked Russell Harlan, who had been shooting for ten years but was just beginning to move up from B Westerns to more prestigious projects. This began a close association that continued through seven films and seventeen years. A rugged, no-nonsense former stuntman with a rarified artistic side, Harlan could easily have played one of the parts in the film.

  Hawks debated at length whether or not to shoot in color, as Selznick had done with his giant Western Duel in the Sun, but he felt that color film at that time still looked “garish” and was not as conducive to evoking a period look as black-and-white. To compose the score, Aaron Copland’s name was advanced; he had just won a Pulitzer Prize for Appalachian Spring, but Hawks, who liked the music in his films to be minimal and self-effacing, went instead with his good friend Dimitri Tiomkin, who had first worked for him on Only Angels Have Wings. Tiomkin created an outstanding soundtrack for him this time and would go on to score four more pictures for him.

  Just before leaving Los Angeles, Hawks also had to spend a great deal of time on the screenplay to placate Joseph Breen, who found it “wholly unacceptable” for approval under the Production Code for numerous reasons: the various killings by Dunson and Matthew seemed like outright, unpunished murders; Dunson was unduly brutal in general; the women were all clearly prostitutes; Matthew and Tess Millay clearly had “an illicit sex affair,” and animals seemed to be in store for abusive treatment. On August 23, Hawks had a long meeting with Breen, at which he assured the industry’s morality watchdog that all of those problems would be reversed, to the point of consulting the American Humane Society regarding the animals.

  Breen, however, still had dozens of specific objections to the script, which in its first draft was, for a Western, unusually loaded with sexual references. In particular, Walter Brennan’s character of Groot, the cook, was constantly making off-color comments, such as “It’ll make a better man out of me in less time it takes a rooster to make a chicken grin,” and “Women don’t seem like much till you ain’t been getting none,” all of which had to go. Groot was also used as an exasperated witness to Dunson and Fen’s leave-taking, making faces as Dunson tells his woman he loves her and will send for her, then fingering his long black whip as they embraced and kissed; Breen didn’t care for this at all. Cherry Valance and Matthew also got off quite a few suggestive remarks, and in general, the original script was spilling over with what, for the time, were very frank and natural remarks from men without women—dreams, fantasies, braggadocio expressed in terms unlike anything ever heard in a Hollywood Western. Hawks was forced to eliminate the Donegal’s women because they were all, bluntly, whores, as well as to cut anything that suggested that Matthew and Tess slept together, especially the night before Dunson was to arrive in Abilene, when Tess tried using sex to convince Matthew not to face the older man; in the finished film, the only tip-off as to the extent of their relations is the reappearance of Fen’s bracelet on Tess’s arm. Breen was also upset that Tess agrees to bear Dunson a son with no mention of marriage, and any number of references to Matthew’s many past affairs had to go. In short, the Red River script, originally so sexed up, was almost entirely sanitized by Joe Breen.

  Hawks finally got away at the end of August and stayed briefly in Tucson before moving on to Nogales and finally Camp Anderson at Elgin. Filming started September 3, on a seventy-six-day schedule, with scenes between Dunson and Groot and then the introduction of Clift’s Matthew. John Ford had sent along a fare-thee-well note to Hawks saying, “take care of my boy Duke and get a great picture.” With Wayne, Hawks’s main challenge was helping him find a comfortable approach to playing a man who was, presumably, fourteen years older than he was. At first, Hawks felt that Wayne was overdoing it, and as he had done before, notably with Walter Catlett and Katharine Hepburn on Bringing Up Baby, he asked Walter Brennan to give the Duke some pointers. But Wayne rightly rejected Brennan’s suggestions to shuffle and slump more when he walked, feeling it would detract from Dunson’s stature. In fact, Wayne had never looked bigger on-screen than he did in Red River, and he subtly conveyed middle age through the exertion necessary for his physical scenes and his fatigue at the end of the day.

  As for Brennan, Hawks remembered his initial meeting with Brennan at the start of Barbary Coast and asked the actor to work “without”—teeth, that is. Brennan initially balked but Hawks goaded him into it, resulting in the funniest running gag in the picture, in which his Indian pal Chief Yowlachie wins his dentures in a poker game and gives them back to Brennan only at chow time. But Hawks could not talk Wayne into performing a scene in which Dunson gets his finger caught between a saddle horn and a rope and some of the boys cut it off. Wayne didn’t think it was funny, and it is hard to imagine Dunson submitting to this, but the Duke admitted he was wrong when he saw how well the gag worked for Kirk Douglas in The Big Sky a few years later.

  In a very short time, Clift had acquired the look, the saddle skills, and the diffident attitude of a fine cowboy; Hawks himself taught him the distinctive little hop he made into the saddle’s stirrup and suggested the business of putting a strand of wheat in his mouth, rolling cigarettes and lighting them for his costar, and rubbing the side of his nose while in thought. But while the skeptical Wayne soon came to see he was working with a good actor, he simply couldn’t believe that compact, refined-looking, five-foot-ten kid could stand up to him or look believable in a fight with him. “He’s a little queer, don’t
you think?” Wayne had asked his secretary after his first, off-putting meeting with Clift in Hollywood.

  Hawks’s initial direction to Clift was to not compete with the big man on his own level. “No, don’t try to get hard, because you’ll just be nothing compared to Wayne,” the director instructed, suggesting instead that Clift underplay his scenes with a pensive cool that Hawks was betting would contrast well with Wayne’s ferociousness and overpowering physicality. Clift’s stage-trained approach, in which he studied his lines for hours, was “baloney” to Hawks, and he decided to cure him of it at once by performing an improvisation with Wayne on a subject of Clift’s choosing. For Hawks, it was a character’s attitude that mattered more than the specific lines, and that the actor be alive to the possibilities of a scene and the other actors; The last thing he wanted was an actor who was locked down, in another world. The improvisation opened Clift’s eyes; as Slim had predicted, he would learn a lot working with Hawks and the Duke.

  While Red River was getting under way, members of Hawks’s family were making some important changes in their lives. With her husband safely away, Slim was able to see a lot more of Leland Hayward, and by mid-September he had already asked her to marry him, despite the fact that they were both still married to others. Discharged from the Army Air Corps, Peter headed back to Arizona State, while David was entering junior year at Uni and sharing the Moraga Drive house with Slim. Almost as soon as his father left, David starting going a bit wild, and after a face-off, Slim was forced to call Hawks to tell him that she could no longer deal with his unmanageable teenage son and that Hawks ought to give him a job on the picture to keep him out of trouble. (No mention was made that this would make it far easier to conduct her affair with Hayward.) So Slim put David on the train and sent him out to his father, who had the prop master, Bob Landis, put him to work.

  But David’s best memory was not of the shoot but of a bear-hunting trip he took with Wayne and Clift. “We had an old Army sergeant as a guide. It was near the Mexican border. We were looking for smaller Mexican brown bears and we rode and rode through the mountains. We never saw any bear but we did get lost. The guide admitted that he didn’t know the way back. So John Wayne took charge, and he really and truly led us back. One horse fell, lost its footing and broke its leg, and we had to shoot it.” Writing to a friend about this incident, Clift joked, “You see what happens when you turn a bunch of fascists loose in the hills?” David worked all the way through the production, including on the Hollywood stages, before going back to school.

  Less fortunate was Peter, who visited the location and was driving back to Tempe on September 23 with a girlfriend and another couple from school when he had a terrible automobile accident, breaking his knee, fracturing his pelvis, and suffering severe lacerations. David went up to see him in traction in Tucson, and shortly Slim flew in to visit him while on a mission of her own: to have it out with her husband, face facts that Hawks had never acknowledged, and agree on a separation. Leland Hayward’s name was never mentioned, but the news of the Hawks’s split made both Louella Parsons’s and Hedda Hopper’s columns, with the former reporting that a divorce would be pursued as soon as Red River was finished, the latter giving the reason as “Slim’s reluctance to play mother to children almost as old as herself.”

  To remove herself from the firing line, Slim shortly made another of her escapes, this time back to Idaho to see Hemingway during hunting season. Slim, Mary, Hemingway, and the writer’s two sons spent several days shooting partridge. But on October 31, when Slim was unloading her Browning 16-gauge automatic shotgun, one shell accidentally discharged, singeing hair off the back of Hemingway’s neck. After a long pause, Slim threw her gun down and became hysterical, yelling, “I almost killed my friend.”

  Hemingway and Mary were getting along particularly well that fall, and with Slim now in love with Hayward, the edge was off their flirtation, even if the mutual attraction was still there. As Hemingway confided in a letter, Mary asked him, “‘Papa I don’t have to worry about Slim do I?’ I told her no, honestly. And there it was.”

  In Arizona, the shooting of Red River progressed slowly. Even with the reliably experienced second-unit director Arthur Rosson handling most of the heavy logistics with the cattle, it seemingly took forever to get some scenes done. As Hawks remarked, “Go out and try to tell fifteen hundred cows what to do!” Rain Valley Ranch, where about half the film was being shot, lived up to its name with downpours that delayed work. Symington instantly regretted having rented his property for the movie, complaining after only two weeks that they “are just about ruining my ranch.” Borden Chase, who came to location to keep working on the script, boozed it up constantly and was contrary with Hawks about everything from dramatic emphasis and the weapons the characters carried to the type of cattle Hawks used. Historically, all the cattle should have been longhorns, but since there were simply very few of them to be had, Hawks had no choice but to put the longhorns close to the camera (another time-consuming procedure) and leave the Herefords in the backgrounds. Chase continued to gripe about Hawks and his changes for the rest of his life, while Hawks countered “Chase wasn’t content with writing a story; he wanted to tell you how to do it.” Finally, he said, “I thought he was a goddam idiot.”

  Even though many people remembered Red River as a friendly shoot, the company was divided into opposing camps and stray offshoots. Wayne’s misgivings about Clift were mild compared to the scorn of some members of his hard-drinking, ultramacho entourage, including the makeup man Web Overlander, who sneered, “Clift couldn’t take a piss by himself. Hawks must be an idiot if he thinks that s.o.b. can act.” Later, Wayne told a journalist, “Clift is an arrogant little bastard.” Naturally, the sensitive Clift noticed the gulf between the Wayne clique and himself. At first, he tried to be one of the guys, accompanying Wayne and David Hawks on the bear hunt and sometimes sitting in with his costar and director at their frequent nocturnal poker games, but Clift later noted, “They tried to draw me into their circle but I couldn’t go along with them. The machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary.” Clift, whose moods always fluctuated dramatically, spent a good deal of time alone and even left the location entirely when he had enough time off. He shared a tent with Walter Brennan and Noah Beery Jr., and after the initially amusing Brennan started recycling his anecdotes for the third and fourth times, the two younger men “turned to each other in self-defense” and developed a strong friendship.

  Hawks may have been turned off by Clift’s intense, ultraserious personality, but unlike Wayne and the rest, he was very excited by what he was doing in front of the camera. “He worked—he really worked hard,” Hawks said admiringly. Clift also continued to learn. The young actor thought that his biggest scene in the picture would be the pivotal one in which he takes over the cattle drive from his mentor. “Don’t be too sure about that,” Hawks warned Clift, whereupon he went to Wayne and told him that Clift was looking forward to walking away with the scene. When the cameras rolled, Wayne, on Hawks’s advice, looked away from Clift, glancing at him only briefly, while quietly but fiercely delivering his devastating lines, concluding with, “Every time you turn around, expect to see me, ’cause one time you’ll turn around and I’ll be there. I’ll kill you, Matt.” There was nothing Clift could say, and Hawks, after letting him stand there for a moment, told him off-camera to just walk away. Afterward, Clift admitted to his director, “My big scene didn’t amount to much, did it?” and Hawks told him, “Anytime you think you’re going to make Wayne look bad, you’ve got another think coming.”

  But the big test would be the climactic fight scene. As in Chase’s original, Dunson is injured by Cherry, although not so seriously that he can’t shoot accurately. Building up to it stunningly by having Dunson relentlessly ride, then walk through a sea of cattle, Hawks had Dunson try to provoke Matthew into drawing by shooting all around him, even nicking him, then becoming disgusted and beating him silly one
-handed while Matthew passively takes it all. Only then, when Dunson thinks it’s all over, does Matthew respond with one big surprise slug, landing Dunson in the dust. Hawks spent four days choreographing and photographing the battle down to the most minute gesture, having Clift kick Wayne and then ram him with his whole body, thereby working around the size imbalance as much as possible. Crucially, he also kept the fight short. More than thirty years later, Hawks admitted that “My arm’s still sore from trying to show Montgomery Clift how to throw a punch.”

  The bigger problem was the resolution Hawks devised for the fight. Hawks could not bring himself to kill off either of the leading characters, by now having turned against “killing people off for no reason at all”; in a departure from his serious films of the 1930s, he wanted his audiences to leave happy. So to let Dunson live, he reworked the scene to have Tess Millay step in with a gun and tell the two brawlers that they’re being foolish, that they know they love each other and should stop acting like boys and make up. Chase was just the first of many to criticize this turn of events, calling it “garbage,” and Clift disliked it because “it makes the showdown between me and John Wayne a farce.” Hawks defended the logic of the scene but also acknowledged that it was “rather corny,” that he never really cared for it. He thought that Joanne Dru’s performance was partly to blame, but he still felt that the basic emotions and actions of the scene were valid. “If we overdid it a little bit or went too far, well … I didn’t know any other way to end it.” The only person to recognize that Hawks had stolen this ending from another picture was Borden Chase: it was the conclusion to The Outlaw that Hawks and Furthman had devised six years before. When Howard Hughes found out a few months later, it was one of the few times Hawks couldn’t just take the high road about one of his deceptions.