Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Dee and her younger sister Eden were originally the Higgins sisters from Salt Lake City, but they left a difficult home life for New York, where they launched careers as teenage models and girls-about-town and adopted their new surname. Ironically, they wound up in Hollywood thanks to Howard Hughes. Walter Kane, a Hughes aide whose most important duty was recruiting new girls for his boss, brought a photograph of a model with a knockout figure to Hughes’s attention. Hughes predictably responded by having Kane track her down and sign her up, but more than a year later, when she appeared in an RKO comedy ironically called A Girl in Every Port, Hughes realized he had the wrong girl. It had been Eden that Hughes was interested in.

  Dee soon realized that RKO had signed her up by mistake, but by then it was too late. Fate played its hand heavily in 1950–51 in determining the lives of the Hartford sisters, for when Eden came to the set to visit, she met the film’s star, Groucho Marx. Although she was twenty-four to his sixty, they began dating; and though Groucho, like many in town, suspected that the Hartford sisters might be gold diggers, Eden eventually landed her man.

  Thirty-two years separated Hawks and Dee, and there was little question about what appealed to one about the other. The relationship heated up so quickly that by June Hawks had to deny widespread rumors that they were engaged. With his own financial condition quite the opposite of Groucho’s, Hawks similarly felt there was no reason to rush into a third marriage. In late 1950, Hawks was still in trouble with the IRS, and RKO and Winchester were instructed to advance him no further money until $19,353 in back taxes were paid up. So urgently did Hawks then need cash that for a while in early 1951, unable to wait for a lump-sum payment, he asked the studio to put him on a straight salary basis so he would get weekly paychecks. Hawks’s financial strain even induced him to embarrass himself by asking his respected friend and colleague John Ford for five thousand dollars while driving him somewhere. Ford just listened as Hawks explained his predicament, and the older man procrastinated about giving an answer until they arrived at his destination. Ford then said, “Howard, I appreciate your plight. But I’ve just managed to save one million dollars, and if I gave you that money, I wouldn’t be able to put away the million,” whereupon he got out and walked away.

  Also to get more money rolling in, Hawks set in motion the third and final project under his RKO contract. One of the big best-sellers of 1950 was William E. Barrett’s timely and inspirational novel, The Left Hand of God, about an American flier trying to escape the embattled China of 1947 disguised as a priest. The trappings of the story—the resourceful pilot hero, a gorgeous young nurse, the endangered outpost of humanity trying to stave off violent and unpredictable forces—had obvious outward appeal to Hawks, who certainly would have played up the adventure and romance angles.

  Hawks managed to spring Faulkner from his lingering commitment to Warner Bros. to adapt the book, and even though the writer had, in December, reached the pinnacle of his career by receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Faulkner didn’t want to let his old friend down and accepted the assignment. Flying out to Los Angeles at the beginning of February, Faulkner installed himself at the comfortable Beverly-Carlton Hotel in Beverly Hills, instantly resumed his affair with Meta Carpenter, and agreed to a deal with Hawks whereby he would receive two thousand dollars a week and a substantial bonus if he finished the job within four weeks. Very occasionally, he would meet Hawks at his offices at RKO, then venture across to Lucey’s for a few drinks. More often, he would meet Lorrie Sherwood for double bourbons at Musso & Frank’s or at Hawks’s house, where he would dictate to her “so slowly,” as she recalled. Faulkner turned in his 198-page first draft with one day to spare and about a week later returned to Mississippi, from where he did periodic revisions for additional pay. But the results, while craftsmanlike, were disappointing—rather dull and sincere, with an abundance of narration—and the project was put on the back burner.

  With The Thing finally finished and released in the spring, Hawks turned his full attention back to The Big Sky. As before, the main frustration lay in the casting. Despite his promise from the previous summer, Hughes now adamantly refused to make Robert Mitchum available. Hawks, Lasker, and Nyby all assumed it was because Hughes still harbored a grudge over the Outlaw–Red River issue, but adding fuel to the fire may have been Hughes’s double frustration over Lasker’s marriage to Jane Greer and Hawks’s relationship with Dee Hartford; taking professional revenge on men over women he wanted was standard practice for Hughes.

  John Wayne, Hawks’s other leading candidate, was booked solid and simply couldn’t fit in what promised to be a shoot no shorter than that for Red River. So for the role of riverboat explorer Jim Deakins, Hawks settled on Kirk Douglas, one of the top new postwar stars. Douglas was scarcely his first choice, but Hawks figured his intense physicality and confidence would serve the film well; ironically, his $125,000 price was exactly what Marlon Brando had asked for the year before, only to have been rejected out of hand by Hawks as too high.

  Where the producer-director now intended to save money was with the role of Boone Caudill, the leading character in the book, a “White Savage” ultimately at home neither in white society nor among the Indians. The choice came down to two young actors from The Thing whom he had under personal contract, Ken Tobey and Dewey Martin. After watching them closely on The Thing, Hawks decided to give the plum part to Martin, a perfect fit for the role physically but still callow and inexperienced as an actor. Hawks did save money, however, paying him just $6,325. For the key female role of Teal Eye, the Blackfoot princess who comes between the two men, Hawks cast his fashion-model discovery Elizabeth Threatt, who was said to be of Cherokee and English descent and had used the middle name Coyotte, adapted from her actual middle name Coyote, during her New York modeling career, although she dropped it when she came to Hollywood.

  With The Big Sky, Hawks believed that he could follow up on the achievement and reputation of Red River, not only with another story of early Western trailblazing but as a deeper exploration of his perennial interest in “a love story between two men” in which serious emotional sacrifice is required to maintain the friendship—one that has been placed in jeopardy, as usual, by a woman. The working out of the conflict between sustaining the male relationship and allowing one of them to go off with the woman they have both loved is accomplished here with a maturity and complexity new to Hawks.

  Even if the picture is not fully realized, the two men are forced to confront the dilemma head-on, transcend it, and embrace it to the benefit of all three people involved. As Arthur Hunnicutt’s Uncle Zeb deftly summarizes the situation that pertains to so many Hawks films, “Ain’t it funny. Two men is friends, then a girl comes along, and then pretty soon they ain’t friends no more. And now with one of ‘em walking out on what the other one woulda give his right arm fer, I kept wonderin’ what they’d do to settle it.” Fortunately, in The Big Sky there is no forced confrontation or melodramatic showdown; each man simply acts wisely and maturely, accepting nature’s course.

  Emboldened by the success of his fast-and-loose attitude to narrative in Red River, Hawks took an even more casual approach with the structure here, figuring that if the individual scenes were strong enough, the film would be too. The confidence behind such an attitude is evident in the film. By the start of shooting, Dudley Nichols had gotten the script down to 187 pages, and with Hawks operating autonomously at his own production company, no one at the studio was in a position to question it.

  Hawks still, however, had to answer to the Breen Office, which saw much to object to in Nichols’s script. The censors were concerned about such matters as the potential for great brutality in the fight scenes, the vulgarity of many of the French expressions, the prominent role of Boone’s dead brother’s scalp as a prop, Uncle Zeb’s many lewd expressions, and the characters’ heavy drinking. Although the censors objected to it, Hawks got away with the line “She’s wild and pretty like a virgin woman”—sur
prising, given all the fuss over the word virgin in The Moon Is Blue two years later.

  But the central problem, because it was so crucial to the resolution of the story, was Boone’s sleeping with Teal Eye, only to awake the next morning to discover that he has “married” her, an event signaled in the original screenplay by having Teal Eye finish putting on her clothes and fastening her belt. It took a long meeting between Hawks and Lasker and the MPAA to work out an acceptable alternative: when she symbolically cuts the thong holding back the flap to her wigwam with Boone’s knife, she initiates an unknowing Boone into marriage, Blackfoot style, and he has nothing to say about it.

  On the first of June, Hawks chartered a DC-3 from Paul Mantz to take the second-unit director, Arthur Rosson; the cinematographer, Russ Harlan; the unit manager, Art Siteman; and a few others up to Jackson Hole for another location hunt. Virtually all the exteriors would be shot in and around Grand Teton National Park, with the Snake River filling in for the Missouri, and Hawks later proudly claimed that The Big Sky was the first major outdoor picture without a single process shot. The budget, including 25 percent overhead, was set at $1,712,174; the first unit would shoot for forty-seven days (revised upward to fifty-seven days by the start of production), with twenty-eight days allotted to the second unit. Despite its growing popularity, especially in big period films, color cinematography still did not appeal to Hawks. “Dirt looks more like dirt in black-and-white,” he reasoned. “If you photograph a picture like mine in color you expect someone to suddenly come forth and sing ‘By the Waters of the Minnetonka.’” After final preparations were made in Hollywood, Hawks, along with his son David and most of the top crew members, left for Wyoming the second week of July and stayed at the luxurious Teton Lodge in Moran while a new Camp Anderson was put up.

  Art Rosson, who had now been doing this sort of thing for Hawks for twenty years, began shooting his second-unit coverage of river men working the keelboat in the second half of July. Hawks and the rest of the company arrived by the end of the month, and the director nearly had a calamitous mishap before he ever got to work. On the day that he was supposed to have his mandatory physical, Hawks decided he’d rather go fishing and invited Lorrie Sherwood out on a small boat. When a dam on the Snake River was opened, the torrent of rushing water swept them swiftly downstream until Hawks managed to grab onto an overhanging tree. It was only when Russ Harlan and some of his camera crew happened to notice them that Hawks and Sherwood were rescued.

  Nor did principal photography begin auspiciously on August 3, as inclement weather nearly kept Hawks was from shooting his first scene. He couldn’t start up again until August 8, but even then filming proceeded at a slow pace because of the combination of highly changeable weather conditions and Hawks’s usual relaxed pace, which included extended visits from Dee, Jane Greer, and Famous Artists agent Ray Stark, who brought up his son Peter as well as Douglas’s six-year-old son Michael. Hawks’s fifteen-year-old daughter Barbara spent the summer on location, was given a bit part as an Indian girl, and developed a major crush on Kirk Douglas. “He said, ‘When you’re eighteen, call me,’” she remembered. Hawks, dapper in his custom-made cowboy gear, rewrote constantly on his omnipresent yellow legal pad, handing his revisions daily to Lorrie Sherwood, who typed them up while working from the back of a truck. Coordinating the crew, the movements of the boat, and the ever-changing locations was an enormous, time-consuming task, but Hawks’s decision to hire mostly real river men to crew the Mantan paid off both in efficiency and authenticity.

  Plenty of journalists rolled through, especially since two major locations could be visited on one trip to Wyoming that summer—George Stevens was filming Shane just forty miles away on the other side of the mountains. For his part, Kirk Douglas was soon shacked up with his costar Betty Threatt, and they carried on a hot affair that continued on past the shoot. Before long, Douglas was encouraging her to behave like a star and demand to be treated as one (although she was getting all of $5,000 for her work). As Lasker recalled, “In one scene she had to dive into the water, and, with Douglas’s backing, she told Howard that she wanted the set clear. Howard said, ‘We’ll clear the set when you’re a star.’” It never happened. After testing for but losing the role of the prostitute in From Here to Eternity to Donna Reed, Threatt disappeared from the film scene.

  Although no open animosity developed, Hawks and Douglas never hit it off in a big way, and the director realized early on that while Douglas was in his element playing heels and heavies, he wasn’t terribly convincing portraying friendship or warmth. Hawks’s films depended greatly on casting, and he quickly knew that this time he had gotten it wrong and should have held off making The Big Sky until he could get the proper actors. At the same time, the strong-willed Douglas, who would shortly start producing his own pictures, didn’t particularly cotton to Hawks’s leisurely working habits. “Nowadays, with the tremendous emphasis on costs, you couldn’t do that,” Douglas observed, “nor is it my concept of how a movie should be made.”

  Still, Hawks got Douglas to perform a scene that John Wayne had refused to do in Red River . It was one of Hawks’s favorite stories, about how he tried to convince Wayne that his character should mangle his finger between a rope and saddle horn and need to have it amputated by Walter Brennan. “Wayne said, ‘You think that’s funny?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘if you’re not good enough then we won’t do it. I’ll do it sometime with somebody who’s a better actor.’ So I did it with Kirk Douglas, who is not as good an actor, but Kirk did it, and it was very funny. Duke saw it, and he told me, ‘If you tell me a funeral is funny, I’ll do a funeral.’”

  What Hawks’s method sacrificed was money and hard-driving narrative momentum. What it generated was a tremendous feeling for territory being penetrated by white men for the first time, for the humor and tragedy emanating from the diverse cultures present in the West in 1832, a sense of life being lived in a curious and adventurous way. The one actor in the cast who hit exactly what Hawks was looking for was Arthur Hunnicutt, who was only forty but, like his counterpart in old-coot roles, Walter Brennan, looked much older. The Arkansas native was seasoned and seemed part of the landscape in a way that the other actors did not.

  As shooting pushed on through the second half of August, the company was plagued by intermittent rain and, more frequently, bad light, which kept the average number of pages shot down to under one per day. When a surprise early storm of rain, sleet, and snow hit on September 11, Hawks decided to pack it in and return to Hollywood the next day. At that point, the production was fourteen days behind schedule. Anyone else would have been exasperated by the problems, but Hawks was still thrilled with the landscapes they were able to capture and particularly by Russ Harlan’s beautiful black-and-white photography. Shooting the St. Louis street scenes on the Fox backlot but the remainder of interiors at RKO Pathé, Hawks continued at his sluggish pace while two second units continued on location. Art Rosson shot a great deal of needed river footage, while Chris Nyby had his usual bad luck attempting to shoot in Montana. He was supposed to film a buffalo hunt on the Crow Reservation, but the animals were spooked and run ragged due to the annual thinning of the herds that had just taken place. It then snowed heavily, forcing him to give up.

  The scene Kirk Douglas had to perform on his last day required him to swim in water on a soundstage. As he was coming down with a bad cold, he told Hawks he didn’t want to do it that day, especially with all the wind machines blowing. According to Ed Lasker, “Howard said, ‘You can stay in bed all day tomorrow once the picture’s finished.’ So Kirk did it, and ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. He was sore that neither Howard nor I ever came to see him in the hospital.” What Lasker didn’t add was that Douglas was staying in a room that Lasker had donated to the hospital. Douglas recalled, “I heard Eddie was telling people: ‘Isn’t it funny that Kirk’s in the room I donated?’” The actor was sick for weeks and weak for months thereafter.

  When product
ion closed on November 12, Hawks was thirty-five days behind schedule, having shot for an incredible ninety-two days. The budget wound up at $2,546,336, including overhead, not quite as much as Red River but very high for a film without a heavyweight cast and far more than RKO was spending on any other picture at the time.

  As before, Hawks gave Nyby free rein in the cutting, telling him basically what he wanted but leaving the detail work to his trusted editor. For one scene that Hawks hadn’t covered properly in which a bulldozer in high gear had pulled a raft downriver too fast, Hawks had said, “Don’t worry about Chris, he’ll figure out a way to cut it together.” With all of Hawks’s and the cast’s additions, the script as shot came to 216 pages, enough for a three-and-a-half-hour feature. With tremendous difficulty, Nyby cut the film down to somewhere around two and a half hours and, after a series of public previews, pruned it further to 138 minutes. All through the trimming, Hawks kept redoing the voice-over narration, with input from Dudley Nichols, until finally he told RKO production executive Ned Depinet he could remove nothing more. (At one point, Nyby reversed gears to add some footage: For a private screening of one version at Ed Lasker’s house, Nyby cut some hardcore stag film footage into a wrestling scene between Dewey Martin and Elizabeth Threatt.) Further sneaks were successful, but the widespread view among audiences, studio executives and the trade reviewers was that it was still too long. Hawks told Depinet that “it gets down to a decision either we want a shorter picture that definitely is not as good or let it stand.” Hughes balked endlessly at approving Hawks’s cut, and no one, including Hawks, could even get him on the phone for his comments. Lasker said that, on their own, he and Nyby managed to take out nearly another twenty minutes, but that Hawks put it all back.