Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  As usual, Hawks beefed up Walter Brennan’s part, almost a nonentity in Chase’s original story, as filming progressed, particularly using it as a way to give many scenes a humorous, upbeat tag, which effectively preempted any sour aftertaste Dunson’s remorseless behavior might have created for some viewers. Aside from the ending, the most significant story change Hawks made on location was the radical hatchet job he did on Cherry Valance’s character. This was due almost entirely to Hawks’ displeasure with John Ireland. In stark contrast to Monty Clift, Ireland didn’t take his big break seriously, didn’t work hard, didn’t become a cowboy. Instead, he was usually drunk or stoned, and unreliable in his scenes. He also started an affair with Joanne Dru, whom he later married. (It has often been claimed that Hawks became incensed because the director himself was involved with Dru, but it was her husband, Dick Haymes, who would have had cause to be jealous.) Everything about Ireland’s approach to his work rubbed Hawks the wrong way, and he reacted by whittling his part down as much as he could, giving his lines to others, and depriving him of his pivotal role in the story’s climax.

  Nonetheless, Ireland did get to share one of the film’s most memorable scenes, the one in which Cherry and Matthew compare guns and have a tin-can-shooting competition. As soon as Cherry signs on for the drive, he and Matthew head off together for their mutual sizing up. “That’s a good-looking gun you were about to use back there. Can I see it?” Cherry remarks, to Matthew’s amusement. “Maybe you’d like to see mine,” he adds, as they swap weapons. “Nice. Awful nice,” Cherry enthuses, before they match each other shot for shot hitting the can. The scene, not in the script, was an inspiration Hawks had on location and has often been cited as a prime and quite funny example of the homosexual subtext in much of Hawks’s work. Real Hollywood insiders have long chuckled at an even more private meaning to the “mine is bigger than yours” motif of the scene, since John Ireland was well known to pack one of the biggest pistols in town, right up there with Milton Berle and Dan Dailey.

  Red River marked a poignant transition in the lore of the cinematic Old West as the only film in which Harry Carey and his son, Harry Carey Jr., appeared together, even if they didn’t work in the same scenes; it was the father’s second-to-last picture, and the son’s third. Carey Sr. and Hawks had maintained a mutual admiration society ever since Air Force, the actor feeling that he gave the best performance of his life in that film and his director expressing his regard by giving him a Tennessee Walker, even though Carey already had fourteen horses. All the same, while Carey’s wife, Olive, adored Hawks and was very friendly with Slim, Carey himself found Hawks too distant and reserved for his taste and did not enjoy his experience on Red River. Already quite ill, Carey played the cattle buyer at the end of the picture, and Hawks became unusually severe with him when the actor couldn’t give him a certain look he wanted. “There was no problem with the dialogue,” his son said, “but he didn’t do it the way Howard wanted and Howard wasn’t nice about it.”

  Harry Jr., then twenty-five and fresh from Raoul Walsh’s Pursued, wasn’t part of the original cast of Red River but was hired after Hawks fired an actor who called in sick when he was actually drinking in Tucson. Since the character doesn’t make the long trek to Abilene, Hawks decided not to bother recasting it until returning to Hollywood, at which point John Wayne suggested Carey. Hawks, the actor remembered, wrote most of the character’s dialogue on the set and suggested giving him a slight stutter. This gave Walter Brennan the opening he needed, and the great character actor continually pestered the kid about how he wasn’t stuttering right and demonstrated by “doing this stuttering thing like it was an affliction,” to the vast amusement of the director. Hawks also found a typically indirect way of bolstering young Carey’s confidence. “When we started shooting it, Howard said, ‘Cut’ during the first take. I thought, ‘Oh, God, that’s it,’ and Howard said, ‘Duke, you got out of character there, you were smiling,’ and Duke said, ‘Well, I guess I did it because he was doing such a good job,’ and that made me feel great.” At another point, Hawks asked Carey if he knew any cowboy songs and had him sing his choice, “Ridin’ Old Paint,” to the accompaniment of actor Glenn Strange’s guitar, as the scene began; a year later, Burl Ives sang the same tune at Harry Carey Sr.’s funeral.

  In mid-November, the company decamped for Los Angeles, where filming resumed at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios. One of the stages contained an enormous, 110 × 120–foot simulated desert that was used for all the nighttime camp scenes, the Indian raid, and various close-ups. Red River remains lodged in the memory as an expansive, outdoor film, but if watched closely, it reveals itself to be shot significantly inside. The opening scene, for instance, is striking for its wagon-filled landscapes and the sight of Dunson and Fen cutting well-defined figures against the sky. Jarringly, however, most of their dialogue exchanges were done later in the studio against a rear-projection screen and intercut with the location footage to less than graceful effect. The entire film is marked by this technique, something numerous other pictures, such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, were also guilty of during this transitional period from traditional studio work to vastly increased location shooting.

  After the adventure, uncertainties, camaraderie, competition, grudges, and overall excitement of the Arizona expedition, the Hollywood shoot was altogether more routine. John Ireland continued in his provocative behavior, launching an affair with Shelley Winters—visible in just one shot in the finished picture as a dance-hall girl—that was at least partly carried on, according to more than one cast member, in a covered wagon on the soundstage. One day when Ireland was needed for a scene, Hawks sent Harry Carey Jr. and stuntman Cliff Lyons to find him, which they did, in the selfsame wagon, snoozing away. Lyons awakened him by giving him a powerful kick in his side. Later, Hawks said that Ireland apologized for his lack of professionalism during the shoot and, promising to change his ways, begged for another chance on another picture. But Hawks had had more than enough.

  With the main company ensconced at the studio, Arthur Rosson remained in Arizona to stage the stampede. Using several cameramen and thirty-five wranglers, it took Rosson thirteen days to shoot the monumental sequence and its related footage, which may have involved more large animals than any sequence filmed up to that time. Seven men were hurt, thirteen horses and mules were crippled, one steer died, and sixty-nine steers were injured or crippled in the course of the filming. Rosson headed back to Hollywood in late November, and Hawks finished with the actors just before Christmas, one month over schedule.

  All along, Hawks and Feldman were facing a financial whirlpool, as the logistical considerations, the constant rewriting, and the director’s usual slow pace sent the budget way beyond initial projections. In late August, Monterey took an additional $200,000 loan from Security-First Bank, so that when shooting began the budget had already inched above Feldman’s $1.75 million ceiling; anything beyond that would result in the Monterey partners losing percentage points in the picture. By the time the company returned to Hollywood from Arizona in early November, Feldman and Hawks were trying to figure out if there was any way of retaining a participation position in the film, but they soon saw that they had overspent their way out of their anticipated windfall. After borrowing another $111,000 from the bank, Monterey was forced to go to Eddie Small and his MPI partners, who were in a position to extract stiff terms for the money the filmmakers needed. MPI invested a further $639,000, bringing its total exposure to $1,314,000, or a bit more than half of the film’s final $2,836,661 budget. In exchange, Small’s group essentially got virtually all of Monterey’s share of the profits.

  Hawks would end up with his $125,000 producer-director’s salary and nothing more for many years, meaning he would make less than he had under contract at Warner Bros. when he directed Air Force several years earlier. Worse, in December, Monterey was required by the IRS to attach $34,051 of monies payable to Mr. and Mrs. Howard Hawks. He was hoisted with his o
wn petard, his entire reason for leaving Warners shot down by his own fiscal irresponsibility. Naturally, Hawks would point the finger elsewhere: sneaky moneymen, incompetent budget-makers, the elements. But this time, he truly had no one else to blame but himself. He and Feldman were the producers and had arranged the financing, and both of them knew that Hawks hadn’t finished a picture on schedule in years. They in no way planned for this, and Hawks paid dearly for it, not even so much financially—he could always earn plenty of money as a director for hire—as in independence, in the control he had sought over his career. Like virtually all the other big directors who thought they could control their own destinies after the war, Hawks’s dream of life without meddlesome moguls and irritating executives collapsed, even though he made a tremendously successful picture. His failure to monitor his own spending forced him directly back into the clutches of the studios from which he had spent years working to free himself.

  28

  Slim Walks, Money Talks

  Ironically, Mrs. Howard Hawks received more publicity when her marriage was essentially over than she had at any time during it. After Hawks returned from Arizona, he was seldom at home, but when he was, the big chill was on. Knowing full well what was going on but, like Slim, not about to bring it up, Hawks stonewalled his wife, froze her out of his life. Even after he finished shooting Red River, he seldom saw Slim, and even when he was around the house, he could spend days and not say a word to her. It was bizarre behavior that no one, not even Slim, could ever fathom; they had agreed during Slim’s quick trip to Arizona in September that there was little left between them, and yet they were caught in a no-man’s-land where the next step had not been decided. Despite his general absence from Hog Canyon, Hawks’s simple presence in town prevented Slim and Leland Hayward from seeing each other every day as they were now accustomed to doing, and Slim was too nervous to accept Hayward’s suggestions that his lover join him in La Jolla or Palm Springs.

  What brought Slim and, by extension, Hawks into the limelight during this trying period was Slim’s unexpected coronation in 1946 as the Best Dressed Woman in the World. There was never any question that Slim Hawks sported one of the classiest and most original wardrobes in the United States. Shunning the pretentions of haute couture, she selected clothes that bespoke health, physical activity, the outdoors, comfort, a vaguely masculine refinement, and smart good sense. Expensive clothes and jewels also looked great on her, of course, and at five feet, eight and a half inches and 125 pounds, she appeared at home in virtually anything from work clothes to the most elegant gown. But winning the title voted by 150 designers and fashion editors of the New York Dress Institute was a shock. The favorites were always women like the Duchess of Windsor, a four-time winner, or the Duchess of Kent, and the bias was otherwise entirely in favor of vastly wealthy East Coast socialites; for a member of the movie colony and native Californian to be recognized was simply unheard-of. Also unusual was the fact that most of the voters had never met Slim, knowing her only from her photographs in Harper’s Bazaar, where editor Carmel Snow had promoted her for several years and advanced her as the first “California Girl.” But Slim’s fresh look and “specifically American type of chic” won the voters over, with a Vogue editor defining the winner’s appeal as “the sexiness of the sultry sports girl—the ability to wear a skirt and a shirt and a pair of thong sandals and still outdo the girl in the black slip.”

  A major spread in Life magazine featured Slim in five poses and another photograph of her with Hawks (sporting his silly mustache). The write-up claimed that she spent ten thousand dollars a year on clothes, not including jewelry, furs, and her maid’s salary, and that her glass-doored wardrobe contained nine fur coats, twenty-four suits, forty-seven dresses, thirty-five evening gowns, and so on, right down to 120 pairs of shoes. Also in her collection was a solid gold barrette she had copied from a ten-cent-store model and which clamped her hair back in a simple way that became popular after she wore it in a magazine photograph.

  Honestly surprised and amused by her honor, Slim joked of the voters, “If they ever saw me running around in my blue jeans and wild shorts they might change their minds,” then revealed that she changed clothes twice a day “in jig time,” mostly wore shorts or slacks, did not own a Paris gown, hated white fox and see-through Lucite bags, and lived by the following fashion rules: “Never dress for other women, dress for men, don’t follow fads and always be mysterious.” Even though she had never really worked, Slim said that she was considering taking a regular job, either for her close friend David O. Selznick or as the West Coast editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Such was Slim’s standing in the fashion field that she became the first “consumer” to receive the Neiman-Marcus award, normally reserved for designers of great talent and influence.

  While Slim was receiving all this public notice for her terrific taste, as well as ardent personal attention from Leland Hayward, Hawks tried to overcome the humiliation of his cuckolding through the usual course of younger women. One of his discoveries in early 1947 was a strikingly beautiful dark-haired model named Katherine Cassidy, née Icede. More voluptuous than the usual Hawks protegée, Cassidy, already earning top modeling fees at twenty, was noted for designing many of her own clothes. Very taken with her, at least physically, Hawks put Cassidy through his usual dramatic and vocal hoops, although her Hollywood career never progressed beyond a major photo spread Hawks arranged in Life magazine.

  As far as Red River was concerned, Hawks was sure he had something special: his gamble with Wayne and Clift had certainly paid off, the size of the picture was suitably impressive, and everyone in his circle smelled a box-office winner. But the film posed by far the biggest editing challenge of any of his films to date, as the episodic narrative, the absence of some seemingly inevitable confrontations—between Matthew and Cherry or with the much-discussed border gangs or with Indians—and the sheer quantity and diversity of the filmed material made the picture far tougher to shape and mold than the much more tightly controlled, dialogue-dominated films he normally made. Chris Nyby was under contract to Warner Bros., but Hawks managed to borrow him as soon as the cutter finished Pursued for Raoul Walsh, and Nyby spent several months, both during shooting and after, splicing and pruning the picture into shape. In late February, Hawks showed the rough cut to a small group of trusted friends, including Zanuck and Gregory Ratoff, with the latter telling the director that the people who saw it thought it was “out of this world.”

  Still, during the spring of 1947, Hawks had to face the hard fact that no matter how well Red River did, he was highly unlikely to make any more money from it, at least not anytime soon, and he had better take another job fast. Not only did a divorce from Slim promise to drain his resources, but the government was taking a great deal of money to pay off back taxes, and he was even way behind in alimony payments to Athole. His gambling debts continued to mount as well. Hawks left behind no accounts, but his losses easily totaled in the tens of thousands during this period, and he persisted in eluding bookies when he owed them money. Instead of coming to the house, however, certain bookies now knew to approach Famous Artists, where Feldman was also a heavy player, and demand payment on Hawks’s behalf. The agency always obliged, with reimbursement handled internally later on.

  As always, Hawks appeared and pretended to have far more money than he actually did, but much as he hated to face it, he was forced to instruct his agent to find him the highest-paying job possible. Feldman confided to his associates at Famous Artists that “he is desperately in need of funds” and began sizing up possible deals. Most of the studios, of course, were anxious to hire a director with such a track record, one who could automatically bring with him a big star, and hefty percentage deals for top directors were now a reality. Jack Warner, for starters, was willing to take Hawks back with the same sort of autonomous production deal that he’d given Michael Curtiz; Hawks was very interested, but Harry Warner stalled the deal. Columbia seemed on the verge of offering
him a minimum of $150,000 plus 50 percent, and Hawks, who owned 50 percent of Twentieth Century with the studio, said he would be willing to remake that film for them. As before, Harry Cohn remained willing to do “anything that Howard wants.” Zanuck wasn’t offering a profit participation but had a staight $200,000 standing offer for Hawks’s services that would include a substantial advance, but when Hawks tried to press Dreadful Hollow on him, Zanuck could muster no enthusiasm. There was even talk of Hawks making an independent deal at the longtime B-movie studio Republic, which had just initiated a new premier class of production with bigger budgets to attract major directors. Ben Hecht had been the first with Specter of the Rose, Feldman would produce Orson Welles’s Macbeth there that summer, and Hawks’s friends Allan Dwan, Lewis Milestone, and John Ford were among the others who would shortly be lured to Republic by the promise of wide artistic latitude. Hawks immediately considered trying to revive The Dark Page with Bogart and Cary Grant starring, but when it became apparent that it might take a year or more for them to be available at the same time, Hawks proposed doing it without big stars, which interested Republic boss Herbert Yates much less.

  The best bet for Hawks was to set up a deal for a property he already owned, and by far the most interesting one was The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway’s first great novel, about the so-called Lost Generation after World War I, had long tempted filmmakers and actors anxious to capture the glamorous ennui of Jake Barnes, Lady Brett, and the others as they made their way from the bars and bistros of Paris to the running of the bulls and the corrida at Pamplona. But since the novel’s publication in 1926, no one had been able to lick the script, at least in part because the censorship problems bound to accrue from such matters as Jake’s impotence, Lady Brett’s adultery and promiscuity, and the drunken, lascivious behavior of the other characters. As part of their divorce settlement, Hemingway had given his first wife, Hadley, the screen rights, and she sold them to RKO in 1932 for $14,500. This was far less the novel’s potential worth, which Hemingway remained bitter about for years. The following year, the rights were sold for $25,000 to Fox, which came the closest to making it, with Clive Brook as Jake and Constance Bennett as Lady Brett, but the project was flatly rejected by the Hays Office. Ann Harding, a patrician star of the early 1930s, bought it in 1935 and for ten years harbored the dream of producing it as a vehicle for herself. Rowland Brown, acting on behalf of Feldman and Hawks to keep the price reasonable, purchased the rights from her in 1945, and a year later the agent-director team assumed full legal possession.