Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  In the second half of October 1950 the most memorable showdown in the history of the Screen Directors Guild took place between factions of the right and the left. Cecil B. DeMille and his fellow archconsevatives unsuccessfully tried to oust guild president Joseph L. Mankiewicz over the issue of a loyalty oath. Tensions ran high, with John Ford publicly rebuking De Mille after the latter cast aspersions on such eminent directors as Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Fred Zinnemann because of their foreign accents. No longer an SDG officer, Hawks was nowhere to be found during this crucial episode in the guild’s history. As Ed Lasker remarked, “He would never get involved in something like that.”

  Shooting on The Thing started on October 25, but more in theory than in reality. With the actors remaining on call in Los Angeles, Hawks, Nyby, and the crew flew up to Montana in two TWA Consellations provided by Hughes. The art department had done its job, building a small compound on which the eaves of the roof were only two feet above the ground, so that even the slightest amount of snow would make it look as though it was buried nearly up to the top. But the problem was that there was no snow at all. Due to stay in Cut Bank for just a few days, the company waited. And waited. And it never snowed.

  After a while, the men began to go stir crazy. One day, the script boy Richard Keinen and some other crew members were forlornly hanging around the airport site, about ten miles outside town. A couple of little boys turned up to play and asked the men what they were doing there. When told that they were waiting for snow in order to shoot a movie, one boy said, “It doesn’t snow here.” Keinen assured them that it snowed more here than just about anywhere else, but the boy corrected him: “It snows a lot in town, but it doesn’t snow here at the airport. That’s why they built it here, because the wind keeps the snow away and the runways clear.”

  Not quite willing to decamp based on the word of a little kid, Hawks decided to stick it out, certain the snow was bound to arrive as winter neared. A lot of poker was played and liquor drunk to sooth the frayed nerves. Lasker, who was new to it all, learned one lesson about working with Hawks the hard way. “After one week, I went to Howard and said, ‘Howard, we’ve been up here for a week and we’re already six days behind schedule.’ Howard just froze and said, ‘Don’t ever talk to me about that.’” In desperation, the crew created artificial snow and the cast was flown up in the hopes of doing some general shots, but Lasker said that the company “finally got perhaps only one shot up there.” The seven weeks on location were a total waste, to no avail on-screen.

  Abruptly, an act of God brought everyone back to Hollywood. On December 15, Hawks’s father, Frank Winchester Hawks, died quietly at the family home on Bellefontaine Street in Pasadena, at the age of eighty-six. When his son got the news in Cut Bank, he said not a word to anyone and spent the evening bowling with companions as if nothing had happened. The next day, however, he announced that the location jaunt was over and that everyone was to return home. Upon arriving, Hawks went directly to the house, where Barbara, who was just starting high school, was still living. She was there along with Hawks’s mother and Aunt Katherine. Private services were held at the home. Helen Hawks went into a decline upon her husband’s death, from which she never recovered, and she died on August 27, 1952, at eighty-one. Aunt Katherine moved to Santa Barbara and lived into her nineties in a residential hotel.

  Improvising their way through the scenes they intended to shoot in Montana, the company relocated to the eighty-nine-acre RKO ranch in the San Fernando Valley, which was made to look like a frigid wasteland by treating the ground with salt, tempered Masonite, and photographic solution, which froze everything. The salt caused problems when the solution melted, however, running off into adjacent orchards and contaminating the water used to irrigate them; RKO was forced to pay damages. The most famous exterior scene, that of the crew forming a ring around the submerged flying saucer, was filmed while cast members baked in their heavy garments in one-hundred-degree-plus weather. Dewey Martin testified, “It was terrible. We had to wear those huge parkas, the fur-lined jobs. They were using plastic and cornflakes for the snow, and they had these big wind machines blowing it in our faces. And it would get down in the neckline, and down into our heavy underwear. I’m telling you it was rough.” Sharp-eyed viewers have noted that a crease is visible in the enormous cyclorama, revealing that the skyline in the scene is actually a backdrop, while Nyby admitted that in one of his aerial shots for the same scene, taken in Montana, there are briefly visible a horse, trailer, and some men sweeping the ice, although no one ever complained about it. The company generated no goodwill when it filmed the blowing up of the flying saucer; the explosion was much bigger than anyone anticipated, and Nyby was only slightly exaggerating when he said, “We broke all the windows in Van Nuys and North Hollywood.”

  Initial interiors were shot at the RKO Studios, but Hawks soon came up with the idea that the Thing should turn off the heat in the compound as part of its battle against the earthlings. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see the breath vapors?” Hawks mused, which meant that somebody had to figure out very quickly how to accomplish this. After some half-baked experiments with putting ice, hot soup, or coffee in actors’ mouths, it was decided that the entire set would be rebuilt at an icehouse on Seventh Street on the east side of downtown Los Angeles. The temperature remained at a constant twenty-five degrees, and script boy Richard Keinen recalled it as being “so cold that you could only stay in there for twenty-five minutes at a time. The only nice thing I ever saw Howard Hawks do by way of showing camaraderie with common workers was to send out for this whole bunch of hand-warmers.” Lorrie Sherwood said, “The only time I saw Mr. Hawks somewhat disheveled and not well dressed was in the icehouse. Usually he was all Abercrombie & Fitch, but in there, he had to wear the blankets and earmuffs and hand-warmers and everything else, just like the rest of us.”

  As a publicity gimmick, Hawks insisted upon a closed set throughout the shoot and even prohibited the RKO publicity department from releasing any photographs or information about the picture. James Arness, who was replaced by a stuntman for many of the more violent scenes that required the Thing to catch on fire or jump out a window, was not even allowed to venture off the soundstage once he was in makeup. In the end, though, it wasn’t one of the more physical scenes that proved the most difficult to shoot, but one in which George Fenneman was required to spout a page of scientific gobbledygook; as Ken Tobey remembered it, “George didn’t even know what he was talking about, and it took him thirty takes to get through the speech.” Keinen said that Fenneman was so terrified that he called a halt to his acting career then and there.

  The perennial question surrounding The Thing has always been, Who actually directed it, Christian Nyby or Howard Hawks? The sum of participants’ responses make the answer quite clear. Putting it most bluntly, Ed Lasker said, “Chris Nyby didn’t direct a thing. One day Howard was late and Chris said, ‘Why don’t we get started? I know what the shot should be.’ And I said, ‘No, Chris, I think we’ll wait until Howard gets here.’” Ken Tobey testified, “Chris Nyby directed one scene. Howard Hawks was there, but he let Chris direct one scene. We all rushed into a room, eight or ten of us, and we practically knocked each other over. No one knew what to do.” Dewey Martin, Robert Cornthwaite, and Richard Keinen all agreed that Hawks was the director, and Bill Self said, “Chris Nyby was a very nice, decent fellow, but he wasn’t Howard Hawks.”

  Hawks was always a diplomat and a gentleman on the subject; for once, he didn’t attempt to take credit, even though it was due him. Having prepared the production so carefully and attended rehearsals, Hawks explained that on “the very first day of working, Chris came in and said, ‘Look, I’m in trouble. It’s a lot different making scenes than taking the stuff you give me and putting it together. I need help.’ So I used to be there. I’d come in and watch him rehearse a scene in the morning and I’d say, ‘I think I’d tackle it this way.’ People say Nyby didn’t have anythin
g to do with it. Well, he did have something to do with it. But he needed some help.”

  It was really Nyby who, for the rest of his life, would walk the tight-rope of not taking too much credit away from Hawks but at the same time trying to hang onto his one claim to fame. Nyby explained, “Each morning Hawks would come in and sit down with the actors around a table and go over the script. Then we’d rewrite the scene. Everybody had a hand in it. I had never directed actors before, so Hawks had more of a hand in talking to the cast. He was the—well, you might call him the chairman of the board.” Richard Keinen said, “People have no idea how strangely that picture was made. We’d come in in the morning, and no one knew what we’d be doing that day. We sat around in a big circle and Hawks would read off the lines but with no characters assigned to them. He’d talk it out and get suggestions and write it out while everyone waited around. We’d finally shoot the scene at four or five in the afternoon. It was weird for the actors, because they never knew when they would be gotten by the Thing, so they never knew when they came to work if it would be their last day. But we had a lot of fun on the picture.”

  At one point in early January, while Hawks directed what was officially called second-unit footage of the Thing burning up, Nyby and thirteen others were sent back to Cut Bank to try to supplement the paltry footage obtained earlier, but ferocious weather turned this into another useless trip. The one crew member to speak up on Nyby’s behalf was the soundman Clem Portman, who pointed out, “Chris was in charge of postproduction. I don’t remember Howard being in the dubbing room at all. I assumed Howard had stepped aside and let Chris handle things.” Of course, this was nothing unusual for Hawks, who typically wasn’t around for postproduction on any of his films.

  Nyby suffered when the film was released to critical and commercial acclaim because everyone, particularly members of the industry, believed that Hawks was responsible for it. “Unfortunately, it was too big a success for my own good,” Nyby lamented. “Nobody believed a first-time director could have such a big hit. They gave all the credit to Howard.” Hawks even gave trade interviews in which he bolstered his protegé’s contributions to the film, but it didn’t help Nyby get any further first-class assignments. He was offered a couple of B horror movies at Universal and Columbia. “But,” Nyby explained, “after doing a successful picture, being relegated to cheap schlock would be admitting that Howard Hawks directed The Thing. So I refused their offers.” Nyby later went into television before directing a handful of feature films, none of them at all notable. Robert Cornthwaite subsequently worked with Nyby several times in television and was struck by one characteristic: “Chris was so much a disciple of Hawks that he was the only director I knew who didn’t say ‘Action’ but instead only said ‘Camera’ when a scene was to start, in imitation of the unique way Hawks did it.”

  Years later, Nyby put it this way: “When you are being taught to paint by Rembrandt, you don’t take the brush out of his hand. You listen and watch him paint. The same when you’re working with a great director like Howard Hawks.”

  Making just his sixth picture, Robert Cornthwaite, whose own mother, he was amused to say, used to babysit for the young Howard Hughes in Beaumont, Texas, adored working with Hawks. “If there was ever a dictator on the set, it was Howard Hawks. He was an autocrat. But he was very considerate in explaining things, he would take an actor aside. He was a good writer, particularly good at trimming a line down to where it was witty. He always went for humor. I felt inspired by his approach to things, because he encouraged the actor to contribute. He told me, ‘I’d like you to take that last scene and write it yourself.’ I tried it myself and he said, ‘That’s the way we’ll shoot it.’ There was a real sense of participation.”

  Even in this open, collaborative atmosphere, however, Hawks kept his distance from the others. Keinen testified that, “He was standoffish, but a very clever man. He was a sphinx-like character. I had gone to high school with his son David and I mentioned this to him as a way of possibly breaking the ice, so to speak. But he just stared at me. It didn’t mean a thing to him.” At one point, one of the actors made the mistake of calling Hawks by his first name. “He was just frozen out,” Cornthwaite recalled. “Hawks just walked away. It simply wasn’t done.”

  Richard Keinen attested that The Thing “was Hawks’ baby right from the beginning. Hawks did everything. He dreamed up the idea, he had the script put together and he rewrote everything on the set. Nobody else had any input at all.” The surest sign that Hawks, and no one else, was in charge was the way the schedule and budget soared. Completely contrary to Hawks’s later claim that “it was shot very rapidly,” what was originally intended to be a nine-week shoot finally finished on March 3, 1951, after nineteen weeks. However, due to the cheap cast, sets, and, especially for a science-fiction film, minimal special effects, the overall cost only increased by 25 percent, to $1,257,327, including overhead.

  Bill Self was told at the time that Hawks didn’t take directing credit on The Thing because it was planned as a low-budget film, one in which RKO didn’t have much confidence. But, as critics have been saying ever since it was released, The Thing is a Howard Hawks film in everything but name. The opening scene of various members of the team bantering is so distilled as to be a virtual parody of Hawksian overlapping dialogue. Even more than Only Angels Have Wings, the picture presents a pristine example of a group operating resourcefully in a hermetically sealed environment in which everything in the outside world represents a grave threat.

  This fear of the unknown exists in many Hawks films, but the socio-political climate of the early 1950s gives The Thing its extra resonance, as does its position at the forefront of countless other paranoid expressions—conscious or not—about the specter of communism. The Thing was not only the first modern “creature” film, but, more important, it was the first to link inhuman, devouring, alien beings with the Red Menace. Unlike the slightly more ambiguous Invasion of the Body Snatchers, there could be no doubt about the evil equation in The Thing: its characters, mostly military men, were explicitly placed on the front line in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and Hawks’s (and Nyby’s) sympathies clearly lay with these intuitive can-do men and against the emotionless eggheads, even if both camps were bunglers. Ben Hecht’s elitist, irreverent attitudes may have provided the springboard for the film’s nose-tweaking posture (Hecht had no use for either Marxists or the McCarthyite Right), but Hawks, Lederer, and Nyby, all conservative men, took the allegorical anticommunist warning much further through their concluding admonition: “Watch the Skies.”

  It was not in Hawks’s nature to do so, so it is therefore ironic that The Thing, for which he didn’t even take authorial credit, marked one of the rare instances in which he functioned as a trendsetter rather than a refiner: for years to come, the screen was filled with aliens and monsters that somehow carried with them the baggage of the communist, thermonuclear, antidemocratic, brainwashed, “foreign” threat. The Thing can be said to have directly spawned this entire subgenre, just as it stands as the unavoidable granddaddy of the more recent wave of Alien-style mutant beast shockers.

  For both reasons, The Thing was one of Hawks’s most influential creations, still cited as a key film in the lives of such prominent directors as Ridley Scott, John Frankenheimer, Tobe Hooper, and John Carpenter, who went so far as to remake The Thing, with gory and horrific explicitness, in 1982. Carpenter recalled seeing the original at the age of six and said, “The Thing was the first movie that made me jump out of my seat—literally.” The picture provoked a more divided reaction among science-fiction writers, but it is admired by some prominent authors in the field, including Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Crichton, who went so far as to say, “I am convinced that The Thing is the best SF film ever made.” As for the original’s author, John W. Campbell Jr. rather regretted the enormous extent to which the filmmakers changed his story, particularly the elimination of the shape-shifting element, but had to admit
they did something right since it was so successful.

  At least one woman fainted from fright at the film’s sneak preview in Pasadena, but the only significant change made after this first public showing was the elimination of the love scenes between Tobey and Sheridan, which were felt to slow down the action. No doubt because it was so prominently touted as a “Howard Hawks Production,” in the manner of most of his other films, The Thing received the sort of serious attention from the press that was customarily denied to examples of culturally despised genres. Most critics found it scary, entertaining, not unintelligent, and well made, almost as if Hawks had directed it himself.

  Even with Hawks’s name looming above the title, theater owners were skeptical that a black-and-white science-fiction film with a no-star cast could do strong business in class first-run situations. RKO, concerned that the public might associate the picture with Phil Harris’s hit 1950 comic novelty song of the same name, lengthened the title to The Thing from Another World. But all fears quickly proved groundless, as an effective campaign and intense local ballyhoo in particular cities kept the film between second and fourth place at the box-office nationally for five weeks running between mid-April and mid-May. It was the number-two film for the entire month of May, behind The Great Caruso, and enjoyed particularly outstanding runs at such prestigious theaters as the Criterion in New York and the Pantages in Los Angeles. In London, it shocked the trade by breaking the twenty-one-year-old box-office mark in its first week at the London Pavilion. Its eventual earnings were less than sensational but, with rentals of $1.95 million, it ranked as RKO’s sixth-biggest earner of 1951 and forty-seventh overall, moderately ahead of the other alien-invader classic of the year, The Day the Earth Stood Still, which arrived in September.

  In late 1950, Hawks was squiring around a young Powers Agency model and hopeful actress, Elizabeth Threatt, with whom he often went dancing, and was also dating Jane Wyman, Ronald Reagan’s ex. But at a New Year’s Eve party, Hawks met a young woman seemingly made to order for him: very attractive and stylish, slim, vivacious, and forthright, twenty-two-year-old, Donna Hartford, who went by the name of Dee, was a model with ambitions to make it big in pictures, the sort of striking, perfectly groomed woman who turned heads wherever she went.