Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Leaving Los Angeles with both his status in Britain and the final cutting of Red River still unresolved, Hawks alit briefly in New York before sailing on the Queen Elizabeth on Saturday, August 21. At fifty-two, he was traveling to Europe for the first time; prior to this, his only trips out of the country had been to Hawaii, Mexico, and Cuba. His traveling companion was the effervescent, worldly Charles Lederer, and the two would spend the voyage working on the script and hanging out at the first-class bar. Following on the next sailing would be Cary Grant, who would stop in England to introduce his girlfriend, Betsy Drake, to his mother, and Ann Sheridan and Marion Marshall.

  The German shoot was based in Heidelberg, and despite the status of the picture, as well as Hawks’s and Zanuck’s military connections, conditions were far inferior to what Hollywood artists were accustomed to on foreign locations. The hotel was mediocre and the food so poor and unvarying that Grant and Drake would fly to Strasbourg or Switzerland whenever possible for gastronomic relief. The players were paid in U.S. Army script, which they could then convert into marks. But the cast and crew were initially startled by the flourishing black market and the chaotic political conditions, from which they were only partially protected by their prestigious status. Although one of Zanuck’s staff producers, Sol Siegel, had been on the picture longer than the director and received producer credit, Hawks still ran his own show. Lederer kept hammering away at the screenplay, and shooting began on September 28, as the bite of fall was first being felt. Virtually every scene scheduled for Germany was an exterior, and many of the locations were rural, which placed the filmmakers very much at the mercy of the elements. Unfortunately, while the weather in the film looks uniformly splendid, clear, and bright, this was hardly representative of what the company faced most of the time. Many days were spent sitting around waiting, and Hawks remembered one occasion when they were in a valley and the sides of it became entirely black with clouds.

  Coincidentally, on the same day Hawks began filming, one of his favorite collaborators and best friends, his neighbor Gregg Toland, died at his home of a coronary thrombosis, at only forty-four years of age. Just before he died, Toland had perfected something he had been tinkering with for a decade, an “ultimate focus” lens that would stop down to f/.64 and was designed to achieve many times the usual clarity and depth of focus. Although Hawks’s straightforward visual aesthetic never pushed Toland to the heights of greatness the cinematographer achieved with other directors, the two loved working together and Hawks wished he could have teamed up with him more often. So much did Hawks admire his friend that he named his last child after him.

  The story of War Bride was one of humiliation and frustration, both bureaucratic and sexual, as one barrier after another prevents Captain Rochard from consummating his marriage to Lieutenant Gates; it takes the entire length of the film for him to get into a position to do so, and then only after he’s been forced to pose as his wife’s bride. It was a situation that, in real life, could only be taken as grim, if not tragic, so the film stands as a definitive example of Hawks’s talent for turning any piece of material into comedy if at all possible. As he said, “Whenever I hear a story my first thought is how to make it into a comedy, and I think of how to make it into a drama only as a last resort.”

  As in Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, his inspiration was Chaplin, whose genius made great comedy out of everyday adversity, setbacks, and inequities, and he hoped to take it much further in I Was a Male War Bride. In this line, he wanted Cary Grant to play it straight, especially in the climactic section in which the actor must wear a clunky-looking woman’s uniform and a horsehair wig. (Grant only appears in drag for ten minutes of screen time, although people remember it as the dominant piece of business in the picture.) In one of his more amazing stories, which unfortunately can’t be verified but which one would like to have seen to believe, Hawks said that after Grant had behaved very effeminately in rehearsal, he decided to show his actor how straight he wanted him to play it: “Without saying anything, I got into a WAC’s costume with my legs sticking out and put on a red wig, you know, and went over to this general’s party—he didn’t know who I was. I pulled out a cigar and asked him for a light and he had the strangest expression you’ve ever seen. He didn’t know what was happening. Grant started to laugh and said, ‘You’re right.’ So we did that same thing—being completely straightforward—not a bit feminine at all.”

  Similarly, there was a scene in which a military clerk asks Grant’s character if he is pregnant or has ever had any female trouble. When Grant instinctively answered in an embarrassed manner, Hawks had the actor reverse it by responding to the questions very earnestly—“Nothing but, Sergeant”—and letting the sergeant be the uncomfortable one, which made the scene much funnier. As Hawks pointed out many times, his comedies were not filled with one-liners and jokes but were made amusing purely through the attitude of the teller to the story. “The only difference between comedy and tragedy is the point of view,” he said, and Hawks’s point of view toward men being dominated by women was to crank up their discomfort as much as he could.

  As adept as any director Grant ever had at encouraging the actor’s imagination and setting him loose, Hawks filmed scenes repeatedly to milk as much humor from them as Grant was able to give. As he had done on many previous pictures together, Hawks urged his actors to ad-lib, and Lederer was on hand throughout the German portion of the shoot to help them polish their impromptu dialogue and business. Ann Sheridan, who loved making the film despite all the problems, described the prevailing work method this way: “Howard Hawks would sit on the set and he’d say, ‘Well, I’m not quite satisfied with this scene. What would you say in a situation like this?’ So we’d sit and think, and it was inevitably Cary [who] would tell you what to say. Howard is a very clever man. He picked brains. And he had a very clever brain to pick [in] Cary Grant, believe me.”

  Although his days as an acrobat and vaudevillian were now far behind him, Grant still liked to do his own stunts, and the silent film–like gag of his being lifted up on a railroad crossing gate was one he, Hawks, and Lederer devised on the spot. Many of the early sequences have Sheridan driving a military motorcycle with Grant in the sidecar, and normally, doubles would probably have been used for everything other than closeups. But Grant saw no reason not to do the scenes himself, and with a little prodding from Hawks, the always cooperative Sheridan agreed to drive the motorcycle herself, even in a downpour. Nonetheless, she was always scared doing it, and she broke down and cried when she accidentally ran over a goose and killed it. However, this was the only blemish, at least until they got to England, on what Sheridan otherwise always considered the happiest experience she ever had shooting a picture.

  Waiting out inclement weather at every turn, the company shot briefly in the fifteenth-century village Zuzenhausen, marked by narrow cobblestone streets and stone houses, before pushing on to the port of Bremerhaven. The only labor problem in Germany was triggered by Hawks’s decision to use American officers’ wives as extras and to compensate them at the low rate being paid to the Germans. Surprisingly, it was the Germans who complained about this, pointing out that using real Americans cheated the Germans out of much-needed work. The Germans insisted that everyone should receive normal Hollywood scale for extras, and Hawks, not wishing to rock the boat and not needing a great many extras anyway, complied.

  After several weeks, Cary Grant began feeling nauseated and short of energy, but he continued working. In early December, after nine weeks of slow progress, the company finished on the German locations and, within seventy-two hours of its arrival in England, was filming again on the biggest stage at Shepperton Studios, where the interior sets representing U.S. Army Command Headquarters had been built. Although ensconsed in luxury at the Dorchester, Hawks was instantly hit with unwelcome frustrations. When cinematographer Russ Harlan, who had shot in Germany, was not allowed in because of union restrictions, Hawks settled for a Canadian
, Osmond H. Borradaile, who had started his career with Jesse Lasky in Hollywood in 1915 and whom Hawks had known at Paramount in the 1920s. Still, he was an odd choice to light all the black-and-white interiors, since he had mainly distinguished himself with his spectacular location cinematography. For a director whose comedies generally have an unusually dark, high-contrast look, I Was a Male War Bride, particularly in the studio interiors, has an especially glum, under–art directed look. This can be rationalized as being a visual correlative to the oppressive bureaucratic conditions and the ravaged postwar German landscape, but it still makes the film rather less welcoming initially and less pleasing to savor in retrospect.

  Hawks was always accustomed to working at his own leisurely pace, into lunch hours and past dinner if necessary, in order to get scenes working right. He rarely kept his eye on the clock, and he believed in anyone on the set being able to pitch in if it could help the quality of the film. In the union-dominated Britain of the new Attlee Labor government, however, the working hours were rigidly set and adhered to, and God forbid if an actor or an assistant director should pick up a prop and move it a few inches. Hawks complained to an English journalist at the time, “Sometimes I go home at nights feeling I haven’t earned my salary.… In Hollywood we knock off for lunch because we’re feeling hungry, but here I may have to break off in the middle of a take, because everybody has to go off to lunch on the dot.” In exasperation, Hawks one day offered the crew triple pay for a half hour’s incursion into their lunch break, but the union wouldn’t permit it. The strict regulations shortened the workday and decreased efficiency, and left Hawks feeling that the union’s uncooperative attitude was reason enough not to shoot again in Britain; at that time, he was planning to make The Sun Also Rises with locations on the Continent and studio work likely for the U.K. Now, he was completely turned off the plan and would look elsewhere.

  Then there were the health problems. The first to succumb was Randy Stuart, who played the small role of the smart-talking WAC named Mae; she contracted jaundice. Hawks himself came down with the hives or something like it, “an itch that started on the top of my head and went right through my balls and everything down to my feet.” Navy personnel who had contracted something similar during the war had relieved the condition with seawater, so Hawks soaked endlessly in a bathtub filled with salt-water and finally got better. Then, shortly after arriving in England, Ann Sheridan came down with pleurisy, which turned into pneumonia. There was little Hawks could film without her, so shooting was suspended for two weeks beginning in late December while she recovered. Marion Marshall said that as elemental as conditions had been in Germany, things were much worse in England, and she blamed the many illnesses of the cast and crew on the lack of decent food. “Pickings were slim; at least it was difficult to obtain food we were used to—like eggs, for instance.” Although he never mentioned it, Marshall said that Hawks lost twenty-five pounds while in England. For her part, Marshall was the only principal in War Bride who managed to survive the shoot without getting sick.

  During the layoff, Hawks received shocking news: Victor Fleming was dead. Hawks’s best friend had spent the previous year directing his biggest picture since Gone with the Wind, a $4.6 million production of Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman. Fleming had had a passionate affair with the actress during the shooting of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1941 and had resumed it when they began working together again. Not only did he agonize over his relationship with Bergman, who was married and also conducting simultaneous love affairs with the photographer Robert Capa and musician Larry Adler, but Joan of Arc proved to be an artistic, logistical, and financial nightmare that strained Fleming’s abilities to the breaking point. Uncertain that he had found the right approach to the always daunting story and tortured by what he felt was a doomed love for his intoxicating star, he worked incessantly, ate little, and drank far too much.

  After Dr. Jekyll, it had been Fleming who had left Bergman, but this time it was the other way around. In the summer, with filming and the affair over, he had flown off to the Canadian Rockies to get away and try to pull himself together, and by year’s end, Joan was doing strong business in the big cities, although it never really had a chance of making back its cost. He made his final public appearance at the Joan premiere at the Beverly Theater in Beverly Hills on December 22.

  At New Year’s, Fleming, his wife Lou and their daughters Victoria and Sally stayed at the Beaver Creek Guest Ranch, owned by the Hollywood producer Louis Lighton. Located about twenty miles east of the small town of Cottonwood, Arizona, the ranch was very remote and off the beaten path. On the afternoon of January 6, 1949, Fleming complained of chest pains and returned to his cottage. When the pains got worse, however, he summoned the operator of the lodge, Charles Stimpson, and they started for the tiny Marcus Lawrence Hospital in Cottonwood. They never made it, though, as Fleming died en route.

  It was pointless for Hawks to even think of trying to get back for the funeral, but Leland Hayward and Slim flew in from New York, and Slim stayed with Lou, Victoria, and Sally for a week afterward. More than two hundred people turned out on January 10 for the services at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in West Los Angeles, which included a short eulogy written by John Lee Mahin. The pallbearers were Mahin, Clark Gable, Hal Rosson, and Lee Bowman. Hawks was listed among the twenty-six honorary pallbearers, who also included the likes of Leland Hayward, Jules Furthman, Lew Wasserman, Ward Bond, Spencer Tracy, Jack Conway, Laurence Stallings, Douglas Shearer, Henry Hathaway, King Vidor, Walter Wanger, and Eddie Mannix. Also in attendance were Louis B. Mayer, Sam Goldwyn, James Stewart, Andy Devine, Brian Aherne, John Wayne, Van Johnson, Hoagy Carmichael, and Mike Romanoff.

  Most people blamed the stress of Joan for Fleming’s death. What became apparent from the obituaries is that Fleming, in a gesture of vanity familiar to many movie stars, had gone to great lengths to conceal his age, which was listed in various publications as anywhere from fifty-nine to sixty-four. He was actually just short of sixty-six.

  But there was more to come. Back in England, almost as soon as Ann Sheridan had recovered enough to begin working on War Bride again, even if only for six hours a day, Cary Grant suddenly became gravely ill. At the end of January, they were filming the breakthrough love scene in which Sheridan finds Grant inside a large haystack after he’d inadvertently crashed into it riding in the sidecar of the runaway motorcycle. Henri and Catherine then admit how they feel about each other and utter lines which borrow liberally from To Have and Have Not, when Catherine says, “Well, that was a little better,” and Henri replies, “Certainly, you see. It could have been even better if I’d had some cooperation.”

  Shot through with penicillin and feeling barely ambulatory, Sheridan was just making it through when Grant complained that he didn’t like the scene. Hawks found this odd since he and Grant had just rewritten it themselves; Sheridan, seeing that Grant looked bad, felt his forehead, which was extremely hot. Sensing that something was amiss, Hawks called it a day and sent Grant back to the hotel; at two in the morning, the actor was on his way to the hospital with a life-threatening case of hepatitis. This was complicated by jaundice, and although initial press announcements stated that production would resume within ten days, it shortly became clear that Grant wouldn’t be returning to work anytime soon.

  Although they only had about three weeks of filming left, Hawks and Fox decided to close down the production in England and return to California, where they would await their star’s recovery; the $200,000 that the studio had already paid the British labor unions would have to be recouped on its next production. Thorough photographs were taken of all the sets so they could be reproduced on Fox’s stages in Los Angeles, and some of the cast, including Marion Marshall, left as early as February 10. Hawks concluded his business and was glad to leave England behind when the Queen Mary sailed from Southampton on February 19. Arriving in New York six days later, Hawks stayed there only briefly, not bothering to visit David at ne
arby Princeton, before heading for home and warmth. Despite his up-bringing in the frigid north, Hawks had entirely lost his taste for Eastern winters.

  Feeling better, Ann Sheridan visited Paris and Rome before returning to California, while Cary Grant remained bedridden for weeks. Fleeing the hospital at the earliest opportunity, he sent Betsy Drake home and spent the rest of his time convalescing at Pamela Churchill’s Mayfair flat. It was the worst illness Grant had ever suffered through, and he later confessed that he nearly died from the hepatitis. Having lost what has been variously reported as anywhere from twenty and forty pounds, Grant knew he needn’t rush home, since time was required to build up his strength and weight, and took a slow boat, the Volendam, which sailed to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal. He regained his health as the weeks passed and finally arrived home on April 7. At the end of April, after a three-month break, he made some tests to ensure that he’d gained enough weight to match what had been shot before and shortly picked up where he left off, now with Norbert Brodine as cinematographer. As Hawks puts it, “Cary ran into a haystack on a motorcycle and came out weighing twenty pounds less.” Scenes of the couple trying to make their way onto a Navy boat back to the States were shot at the San Pedro docks, and production finally wrapped on May 27, 1949, exactly eight months after it started. The budget was in the neighborhood of $2 million, although it is difficult to state precisely because of the $200,000 left behind in Britain and the layoff, which saw the cast kept on at full salary but at Lloyds of London’s expense.