During the hiatus, it had fallen to a young second assistant at Fox named Paul Helmick to try to make sense out of the footage shot thus far and help determine exactly what was still needed. Hawks didn’t forget the outstanding job he did at this, and an association began that would last the rest of Hawks’s life. Subsequently, the film editor, James B. Clark, had one of the most difficult jobs on the picture, linking up all the disparate pieces shot in three different countries at different times.
An even greater problem, however, were all the changes demanded by the Breen Office. Because of the ongoing rewriting and the company being far away in Germany, Lederer’s script was not even received by the MPAA until the end of October, a month after shooting had begun. To the filmmakers’ dismay, Breen found the entire project unacceptable “because of the great amount of sex-suggestive lines and situations. This is particularly true of the element of sex frustration on the part of the leads after they have been married.” Since several weeks of film was in the can by the time the MPAA expressed its objections, there wasn’t much Hawks could do but hope for the best when he finally presented it with the finished picture. An example of a line that Hawks was later ordered to cut was Catherine’s early warning to Henri, “If you lay a finger on me this trip, you’re going back to France minus a couple of parts you probably value.” There were also references to the French as “frogs,” innuendoes about the sexual urges of dogs and bulls, and a shirtless backrub that all eventually had to go. However, it was the entire premise of the story’s second half that turned Breen red. In his notes, the chief censor stated that “playing around with the deferment of the marital act could not be approved.” He also pointed out that “comedy derived from the fact that a married couple are unable to consumate their marriage would be unacceptable.”
Hawks and his editor did have to cut a great many of the more overt sexual innuendoes from the final print, but, his confidence bolstered by his past ability to slip some surprising things past the censor, the director took a big chance in the second half that Breen and his cronies would approve on the screen what they had objected to on paper. While they forced him to cut a joke in which a bystander was startled to see two women—actually Catherine and Henri in drag—eagerly kissing, Breen and company were won over by Hawks’s treatment of his risqué subject and approved the picture more or less as filmed.
Fox rushed the picture through final postproduction to have it ready for release by August, and most critics were similarly disarmed by Hawks’s sly treatment of what seemed like a potentially silly story. Even Cary Grant was delightfully surprised by the result. Grant attended the premiere in New York the final week of August despite his apprehension that a good film could never have resulted from such a problem-plagued shoot. The next day he told the New York Times,“I just saw the picture and the audience laughed themselves sick. I’ve been in many comedies but I’ve never heard an audience react like this one. I honestly feel it’s the best comedy I’ve ever done.”
Some viewers find I Was a Male War Bride virtually unbearable for the excruciating humiliation and sexual torture Cary Grant’s character is forced to endure; young men, in particular, often find nothing funny in it. War Bride is very much a middle-aged man’s film, the work of a man in his early fifties who, however much he had always enjoyed putting his male comic figures through the wringer, was now disposed to take a more dispassionate view of the urgency of sexual consummation. The most prolonged and overt of the numerous examples of cross-dressing and sex-role flip-flopping in Hawks’s films, it also runs bracingly counter to the perception of Hawks as a conservative upholder of the status quo, for very few non-noir films of the late 1940s ridicule bureaucracy, the establishment, and conventional mores as disrespectfully as does I Was a Male War Bride.
The film certainly did the trick with audiences. After first opening in Los Angeles in mid-August to excellent returns, the picture grossed a sensational $376,000 in its four-week run at New York’s Roxy Theater and rang up comparable returns nearly everywhere else. It was the number-one film in the nation for two weeks running in late September, was the third biggest money picture for October, and ended up as the number-three attraction for the entire year with $4.1 million in rentals, tied with The Snake Pit behind Jolson Sings Again and Fox’s Pinky. This made War Bride Hawks’s third most popular film ever, after Sergeant York and Red River. The budget overages meant that Fox’s profit was not as great as Zanuck would have liked, but the mogul was still more than happy with the first fruits of his new collaboration with Hawks.
As soon as Hawks returned to the United States, he began trying to find a picture he could slip in between Fox assignments. The Sun Also Rises, which Burgess Meredith, Paulette Goddard, and Franchot Tone desperately tried to buy from Hawks that year for themselves to star in, remained the project Hawks most frequently mentioned, and he maintained that he intended to do it independently, with Montgomery Clift and Margaret Sheridan starring, then sell it to a distributor. Feldman even took the step of registering the title with the MPAA. All the same, little work was being devoted to solving the script problems, and it remains a mystery why Hawks didn’t hire one of his usual crack writers, such as Lederer, Hecht, or Furthman, to get the upper hand on the celebrated story that attracted him, and many others, so much.
At the same time, Hawks wanted to pursue his idea of an ongoing partnership with Cary Grant. The project Hawks most fancied was a comic version of Don Quixote starring Grant in the title role and the Mexican comedian Cantinflas as Sancho Panza. Hawks always pointed to the example of Chaplin when people objected to his intention to turn this tragedy into a comedy, even speculating, “I think that Don Quixote’s the basis really for the Chaplin character.” There is no evidence that Hawks ever even engaged a writer to begin an adaptation, but certainly Don Quixote would have provided a supreme opportunity for Hawks to cross the lines between tragic adventure and comic misadventure as often as he pleased. It also represented the only time Hawks thought about tackling such a revered literary classic, which may be one reason he never pursued it more seriously. Nonetheless, it was an idea that never went away, for as late as the early 1970s, Hawks was still talking about doing it, “Before Cary gets too old or I get too old.”
Meanwhile, Hawks and Zanuck jousted and parried as to what film the director might next do at Fox. Zanuck tried to sell Hawks on Fourteen Hours, a drama about a man threatening to jump off a building which Hawks said he’d be willing to do only if he could turn it into a Cary Grant comedy. Zanuck also pushed a Philip and Julius Epstein script called “Mable and Me” and proposed “Angel Face,” a curious Charles Schnee political melodrama that featured such in-joke character names as Eva Lang, Governor Fuller, candidate Joe Huston, Molly Keyes, George Kirkwood, and a drunk named Mickey Nolan and that bore no relation to the 1953 Otto Preminger film. But while his clout was at its peak in the wake of War Bride, Hawks was still unable to push through either of the projects that seemed most immediately feasible. Dreadful Hollow remained unexceptional to Zanuck, but the alternative at least seemed to have possibilities.
Once again delving into the Saturday Evening Post for material, Hawks became interested in “Morning Star” through, of all people, Leland Hayward, who had bought the rights when Robert Spencer Carr’s science-fiction love story was first published in 1947. The story centers upon a strong, brilliant scientist, Brian Dale (to have been played by Gary Cooper), who is working at the atomic bomb lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, testing a new rocket designed to make the first flight to Venus. Among the other resident geniuses is Eva Morgenstern (Morning Star), an alleged Russian refugee who seems both overpoweringly bright and oddly disturbing to Brian (Margaret Sheridan, again, was intended for this part). After a meteor shower, Brian induces Eva to acknowledge her true identity: she is an emissary from Venus. What’s more, her kind has been here before, but they were taken by earthlings to be angels or saints. It is clear that Brian and Eva were meant for each other in a cosmic sense, that it is throug
h this couple’s love that alien worlds can come together. Eva eventually returns to her mother planet on her own, whereupon Brian quickly volunteers for the first flight to Venus, from which he returns in triumph.
There are obvious Ayn Rand elements here, as well as an expression of the popular sci-fi theory that Venus is populated by beautiful women. The material had the potential to be dangerously corny, but it was written with great conviction and warm appeal. It would certainly have provided Hawks with the challenge of creating his most sincere love story, and would appear to have contained great commercial potential. But while admitting that the story was “unique,” Zanuck put Hawks off by insisting that the treatment was not sufficiently developed and that the production would probably be exceedingly expensive. As late as 1952, Ray Stark at Famous Artists, working on behalf of Hawks, tried to interest Dore Schary, Jack Warner, and Stanley Kramer in backing the picture, but to no avail.
What was slowly becoming clear was that Zanuck was happy to have Hawks aboard his ship but had no intention of letting him steer the course; Hawks would make films Zanuck wanted him to make, never the other way around; nor would Zanuck play the sucker as Jack Warner so often had and pay advanced prices for material Hawks had bought for far less. Partly because Zanuck and Hawks were friendly and similar in some basic ways, Zanuck had Hawks’s number and wouldn’t let him get away with the sorts of things Hawks would pull repeatedly on Warner and even Goldwyn. From Hawks’s point of view, his deal at Fox was a one-way street in terms of doing projects he really cared about. In this sense, he really had been better off at Warner Bros., and as soon as he realized this, his eye, quite understandably, began to wander.
Peter Hawks, now twenty-five, married Shirley Godfrey in the summer of 1949, but his stepfather did not bother making the trip north to San Mateo for the wedding. Although Hawks avoided formal occasions whenever he plausibly could, one reason he may have steered clear of this one is that he knew Athole would be there, and the two were on the outs to such an extent that she sued him later that summer. In her complaint, filed on August 31, Athole stated that Hawks owed her four thousand dollars in alimony, as well as the stipulated 10 percent of his net income, or an additional $39,112 for the relevant period of November 1, 1943 through August 17, 1949. Hawks had been through this once before, in 1943, and this time he resisted by employing every legal stalling tactic he and his lawyers could think of, even though it meant halting work on the home Hawks was building in Palm Springs, which Athole attached to the suit. He paid her a small amount in 1952, but it wasn’t until 1955 that the matter was finally settled by a judgment that forced Hawks to pay Athole $55,382, including accumulated interest.
As the decade drew to a close, with his next-door neighbors Vic Fleming and Gregg Toland dead and no one else living at Hog Canyon, Hawks revved up his outside social life, dining out and partying often at La Rue’s, Romanoff’s, Chasen’s, Ciro’s, and the Mocambo, often in the company of Feldman, Gregory Ratoff, Cyril Gardner, George Raft, Clark Gable, and Otto Preminger. The social season reached its peak with an enormous party at Feldman’s on December 17, which Hawks attended with Marion Marshall and which boasted such other guests as Gable, the Goldwyns, Jane Wyman, Kirk Douglas, Gertrude Lawrence, the Arthur Kennedys, the Charles Boyers, the Tyrone Powers, the William Holdens, the David Nivens, Anatole Litvak, Clifton Webb, Spyros Skouras, Arlene Dahl, Irving Rapper, and a young politician from Massachusetts making the rounds of Hollywood, John F. Kennedy.
Hawks’s romance with Marion Marshall had proceeded in fits and starts. In May, word slipped out that they were on verge of getting married, which prompted a denial from Marshall that they were even engaged. On New Year’s Eve, the couple went public with the announcement that they would be marrying soon, probably on February 26, the second anniversary of their first date. Plans went ahead accordingly but, suddenly, on February 24, amidst rumors of serious problems, the wedding was abruptly called off. Jane Greer, a good friend of Marshall’s, suggested that the young actress was disappointed that Hawks wasn’t proposing her for any big film parts, and Marshall, who fancied herself a new Carole Lombard, was particularly irked that Hawks didn’t more aggressively pursue remaking Twentieth Century at Columbia, with her in the female lead. When the wedding was canceled, Hawks disappeared to Arizona, while Marshall commented, “There is nothing to say, it’s just over. We came to the decision some time ago. We just decided not to say anything about it.” Ironically, Marshall promptly signed a contract with Hawks’s old nemesis Hal Wallis, who cast her in films opposite Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis; in 1952 she married the director Stanley Donen. Through the l960s, Marshall was married to the actor Robert Wagner. She eventually became a prominent Beverly Hills dress designer with her own shop.
30
An Old Boss, A New Mate
Although no one, with the probable exception of Feldman, knew the full extent of Hawks’s financial problems, Hawks was treading on thin ice by the time 1950 arrived. Unable to induce Zanuck to back “Morning Star” or “Dreadful Hollow,” Hawks told Feldman to set up another deal for him at a different studio so he could receive a new infusion of cash and have a card to play against Zanuck. Hawks put his middle name on the shingle of his new production company, formed to supplant the moribund Monterey, and Winchester Pictures struck a three-picture deal with RKO, agreed upon in the final week of February, when Hawks was to have married Marion Marshall, and finally signed in May.
Hawks had not worked at RKO since having been dismissed from Gunga Din more than a decade before, and many things had changed at the studio, none of them for the better. After producing the postwar flops Mad Wednesday and Vendetta, Howard Hughes had announced that he was once again abandoning the motion picture business. The industry was therefore stunned when, in May 1948, he bought a controlling 24 percent in RKO from Floyd B. Odlum’s Atlas Corporation. Realizing everyone’s fears, Hughes soon began running the studio into the ground.
Under his erratic, reckless stewardship, Hughes eviscerated a strong company that, in the immediate postwar period, had ranked number-three in box-office earnings after MGM and 20th Century–Fox. He drove away his successful head of production, Dore Schary, who was quickly hired by MGM; fired seven hundred employees, or 33 percent of those on the regular payroll, within four months of his takeover; instantly kowtowed to Justice Department pressure to separate RKO’s theater chain from studio operations, thus breaking ranks with the four other majors and leading the way for the splintering of the true studio system; placed himself in the fore-front of the anticommunist witch-hunt that saw many of the studio’s top talents placed under clouds of suspicion or driven from the studio; and reduced budgets and the number of pictures to a fraction of their former levels. Almost overnight, RKO became a virtual B-movie studio, for which Hughes’s patented lurid campaigns failed to compensate. Hughes didn’t want serious and talented filmmakers on the lot, and they didn’t want to work for him. After a period of peak profitability, RKO lost increasing amounts of money in each of the first three years it was controlled by Hughes, with film-generated revenues plummeting an astounding 77 percent during that period.
It was when matters got that bad that Hughes—who didn’t even maintain an office on the lot, preferring to remain squirreled away at the Goldwyn Studios—was convinced that he had to make a few A-type pictures in order to bolster the studio’s image in town and to generate some major profits. When Hawks signed on, he joined Walt Disney, Sam Goldwyn, and the producer Edmund Grainger among the group that Hughes expected to generate big grosses for RKO. Even though he still resented Hawks for Red River, Hughes implicitly believed in him as an almost infallibly commercial director. As for Hawks, he knew that Hughes would be far too busy to meddle in his productions and felt that he had a special understanding of the tycoon since, unlike most other filmmakers, he had always landed on his feet after his dealings with Hughes. Under the new agreement, Hawks would produce and direct two pictures and produce, but not direct, a thir
d, all within a twenty-seven-month period ending in August 1952. Hawks would receive $175,000 apiece for the first two and $125,000, less the director’s salary, for the third. Winchester was to retain ownership of the films, although specified penalties would reduce Hawks’s ownership and/or salary if the budgets exceeded $1.5 million on the first two, $1.25 million on the second.
Anxious to make another Western and on the lookout, after Red River, for another story about a Great First Time, Hawks settled quickly on A. B. Guthrie Jr.’s novel The Big Sky, about an early expedition of explorers and trappers who travel up the Missouri River from St. Louis to Montana in the 1830s and the subsequent lives of two of them. Ironically, the book had been passed on by RKO at the time of its publication in 1947, when a reader’s report dismissed it as “lacking any sort of plot which might be suitable for picture purposes.” Presumably, the report objected to its long, sprawling, and diffuse narrative, as well as to the fact that the two halves of the story occur seven years apart. It appears likely that the book came to Hawks’s attention through Gary Cooper, who had bought the rights to Guthrie’s new novel, The Way West, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Winchester was able to obtain the earlier book for only thirty thousand dollars, whereupon Hawks hired Air Force and Bringing Up Baby writer Dudley Nichols, who had also written numerous John Ford films, including Stagecoach.
Deeply convincing as a detailed portrait of how things were in the unexplored West, Guthrie’s novel was praised for its historical authenticity and clearly bespoke its author’s intense feeling for the land. It is also, to be sure, a rambling narrative, which begins with the journey up two thousand miles of river by a curious band of loners, adventurers, and misfits, most of them Creole French. The book relishes its characters’ antisocial attitudes, dwells at length on the hunting, and is quite rough and frank at times, discussing how such men dealt with the clap and interacted with different tribes of Indians. The main characters are Boone Caudill, a Kentucky boy in his late teens who runs away from home and meets the slightly older Jim Deakins. Together, they join the largely French crew of the Mantan, a keelboat heading upriver with a runaway Blackfoot princess, Teal Eye, who is to be returned to her people in exchange for favorable trading rights.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 63