Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Finally, on August 6, 1951, at a time when High Noon was the most popular film in the country, RKO held the world premiere of The Big Sky at the Woods Theater in Chicago, with Douglas, Martin, and Hawks flying in for the hoopla. (Jane Russell was in town at the same time to promote the opening of Son of Paleface at the renovated Oriental a half block away.) Hawks later accurately stated that initial business was outstanding (it did $35,000 opening week), but fancifully claimed that RKO immediately shortened the picture in order to cram in more shows per day, only to see the grosses plummet. In fact, the original long version was used, not only through the quickly tapering four weeks of the Chicago run, but upon the film’s major openings at the end of August in New York and Los Angeles. Benefiting from mostly outstanding reviews, the film performed strongly at the Criterion in Times Square (although not nearly as well as The Thing had at the same theater) but was unaccountably soft on the West Coast, an accurate forecast of the mixed public turnout that followed throughout the country. For one week in September, it was the number-two film in the nation, and it ranked fifth at the box-office for the entire month. But it generally struggled, and the ultimate domestic take of $1.65 million didn’t come close to matching the large production nut. It was also the lowest return for any Hawks film in well over a decade, the first one significantly under $2 million since the 1930s. Hawks’s extraordinary winning streak, of eleven hit films (including The Thing) in thirteen years, was officially over.

  Among the most interesting of the numerous rave reviews The Big Sky received was that from Hollis Alpert in the highbrow Saturday Review. He began by complaining that Howard Hawks was nowhere to be found in Who’s Who, a shocking omission, and noted, “He is one of the select Hollywood few, a man who may choose, not only his own pictures but his studio connections as well.” It was an astute insight for the time, one that not only foreshadowed by many years the eventual serious attention Hawks received, but points up how Hawks, despite his incredible track record and the prominence of his name above the titles of all his films since the 1930s, had not managed to make himself a national brand name. His career remained incoherent, his touch invisible, to most critics and viewers.

  After years of inaccessibility, the 138-minute version of The Big Sky recently resurfaced on cable television, albeit in a highly variable print in which certain sections, particularly the reinstated scenes, look like bad 16mm dupes. The two versions are not radically different, and in a way, the long-lost material is more of the same—if you like the picture at 122 minutes, then there’s more to like. If you don’t care for the ambling pace and anecdotal structuring, then the picture is apt to seem even more leisurely. Hawks maintained, “They took out most of the story of the Indian girl and Dewey Martin. The scenes that made the relationships good were gone so all of a sudden you were hit with this strange relationship and you didn’t know where it came from.”

  Hawks was only partially right. The sixteen minutes of cuts came from four significant scenes, or portions of scenes, having been chopped wholesale from the picture. The first major elision was of a scene between Jim and Boone; after they meet, fight, and agree to travel together, the two young men bed down together by a campfire and have a long talk during which Jim makes a major breakthrough by getting the dead-serious Boone to laugh. The scene has an important function in cementing their friendship, but most interesting is that it is written virtually like a romantic seduction, with one man trying to break down the resistance of the other and achieve an intimacy. The longest deleted sequence was a skirmish with Indians, which ends when the not-all-there Indian, Poordevil, kills another Indian with a bow and arrow and then scalps him. The entire sequence is very gracefully filmed, although it is arguably of minimal importance from a dramatic point-of-view. The third excision, much later on, was of a bullet being removed from Jim’s leg; in the short version, there is an awkward cut from the preparation for the procedure to Boone handing his friend the bullet; the actual extraction was deleted. The final cut took out the second half of a key scene, in which Boone, having now unwittingly “married” Teal Eye, gives his rifle to her father, the Blackfoot chief; missing is a chat between Jim and Zeb in which the latter talks about a man he knew who married an Indian squaw then left her, only to come back to find that she had killed herself. This speech obviously lends more weight to what Teal Eye has done and raises the stakes over Boone’s eventual decision whether or not to stay with his bride.

  Hawks was too hard on himself when he judged The Big Sky a failure. Accepting all the blame, he said, “It should have been a really good picture. It’s my fault.” The film has a great deal to recommend it if one gets in sync with the pace, which corresponds to the slow mode of transportation depicted and the far-from-straightforward progress of wilderness exploration; this is a journey marked by bends in the river rather than the flat plains of Red River. It is true that the drama is seldom urgently compelling, that it lacks the stark conflict and magnetic characters of Red River. It is also the case that Hawks, despite his best attempt to present not only an Indian character but the colorfully assorted French-speaking pioneers of the period, didn’t find a way to bring Teal Eye to meaningful life. Granted that Hawks was never adept at portraying cultures other than those with which he felt a personal affinity, he still managed a reasonably evenhanded portrait of the Indians here, showing some to be good and some bad, but respecting them on their own terms. All the same, the film is genial in the manner of several of the more relaxed Hawks films to come, deeply appealing for the innumerable times the characters help and support one another in unspoken ways, and quite successful in giving the viewer a feeling for the discovery of the land, of pushing known boundaries, physical and emotional. The film also rewards multiple viewings, offering up further riches upon deeper investigation. Truly, the problem lay in the casting; if Hawks had made the same film with, say, Brando and Mitchum in the leads, it could have made all the difference.

  31

  The Fox at Fox: Monkey Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

  By the early 1950s, the real world began to encroach upon Howard Hawks’s paradise at Hog Canyon. An immaculately manicured preserve throughout the previous decade, the 105-acre estate was surrounded by hills in a way that seemed to ensure against the city crowding in on its owner. However, the Los Angeles postwar boom knew few limits, and the property on the hills above Hawks’s home to the north and west was bought in April 1950, by one Elwain Steinkamp, who planned to divide it up into thirty-six lots for houses. In due course, excavation, clearing, and grading were done. Hawks foresaw, to his annoyance, that he would soon have dozens of neighbors looking down on his private domain.

  But annoyance became fury during the first three months of 1952. A phenomenal deluge pounded Los Angeles, playing the usual havoc on the streets and mountain passes of a city seriously unprepared for anything more than light rainfall. Down and down it came, until one day Hawks found—literally—tons of mud, rock, and debris covering his property. Steinkamp, his associates, and his contractors had stripped the land of vegetation and moved the earth above around with no regard to the consequences of a rainstorm. The result was a lavalike flow that rolled over the lawn, trees, shrubbery, and fences and despoiled, to varying degrees, Hawks’s house, stables, barns, and horse paddocks. In some spots, the mess was several feet deep. Rivulets formed in the surrounding hills, channeling even more water straight into Hog Canyon; erosion was severe on Hawks’s property immediately beneath the development, and a great deal of topsoil was washed away. One of the unfortunate consequences was the ruination of much of Hawks’s career memorabilia, including the scripts from all of his films, which he had carelessly left out in the barn.

  Naturally, Hawks filed a lawsuit against Steinkamp and his numerous partners, charging that his work had been pursued “in a careless, negligent and improper manner” and that nothing had been done to compact and stabilize the earth or to install any drainage controls. The suit asked double Hawks’s estimat
ed $185,000 in damages. The defendants tried such tactics as claiming that the avalanche was an act of God and an unavoidable accident and even that Hawks should have known better than to build a house at the bottom of a canyon where one day such a thing was bound to happen, but the court found that there was no question that the defendants had been negligent. It took until 1957 for the final judgment to be rendered, at which point Steinkamp was ordered to pay Hawks $64,596 in damages, plus court costs. By this time, Hawks didn’t even own Hog Canyon anymore.

  By the spring of 1952, RKO already looked like a slowly sinking ship, and Hawks was searching for a good way to jump off. Like just about everyone else, the director couldn’t pin Hughes down to a meeting or even get him on the phone, even though he was anxiously awaiting his approval of his cut of The Big Sky. Dore Schary, now at MGM, wanted Hawks to direct a Cary Grant film, but Hughes couldn’t be reached in time to obtain the clearance. Hughes did want Hawks to go ahead with The Left Hand of God, but only if he could do it for $1.5 million with Kirk Douglas in the lead. By this time, Hawks had cooled off entirely on the project and adamantly refused to consider using Douglas. With Hughes determined to hold Hawks to his contract, numerous counterproposals were made, but time went by, Hughes sold The Left Hand of God to Fox, and, in the fall of 1952, Hughes relinquished control of the studio, if only temporarily. But it was the opening Hawks needed to escape any further commitments to RKO.

  Hawks’s RKO contract did provide for him to continue meeting his preexisting obligations to 20th Century–Fox. Zanuck was anxious to get him back in the fold, Hawks needed to keep earning money, Cary Grant was under contract to the studio, and Zanuck and producer Sol Siegel had a comedy for which they felt the Hawks-Grant combination would be ideal. The Fountain of Youth, or Darling, I Am Growing Younger, as it was soon called, was originated by Harry Segall and handed off to I. A. L. Diamond, a young writer shortly to become renowned as Billy Wilder’s partner. Both Zanuck and Siegel were pleased with Diamond’s elaboration on the original, but when, in early October, Hawks signaled his availability, Diamond was off and Hecht and Lederer were on. As soon as The Big Sky wrapped in mid-November, Hawks and Zanuck spent a weekend in Palm Springs sorting through the story in detail, at which point the writers shifted into high gear, delivering their rewrite on December 10. Siegel read it overnight and raved to Zanuck that “they have rescrambled all the elements of our script and have done an amazingly good job considering the short period of time they were on it. My feeling is that if Cary likes their version there is nothing to worry about. This can still be the funniest picture of the year.”

  The story turned on the discovery of a youth serum that makes adults behave like spirited college kids or, with an extra dose, schoolchildren. It was an age-old theme, and, like The Thing, it gave Hawks the chance to needle scientists, which he did right from the beginning by having a monkey be the one who “discovers” the youth potion. It was a premise pregnant with both farcical and serious potential, and while the film was intended primarily as a broad comedy, Hawks was not oblivious to its serious aspects, nor was Zanuck.

  Following his usual instinct, Hawks wanted to cast a very young actress opposite Grant and show that Grant’s character, Professor Barnaby Fulton, a close relative to the paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby, had “turned into sort of a fogey; then he was rejuvenated and remained younger for the rest of his life. That was the point.” No theme could have been closer to Hawks’s heart at that very moment, as, at fifty-five, he was in the flush of a major romance with a woman in her midtwenties. He was very partial to the script’s summation line, “You’re only old when you forget you’re young,” and until the end of his life, Hawks rarely spent time with people anywhere near his own age, preferring to socialize with men and women decades younger than himself. Hawks kept suggesting well-known young actresses, particularly Ava Gardner, for the film, but even then Grant had begun resisting costarring opposite such young women (not always successfully), and Fox finally decided to give the part to Ginger Rogers, a choice that didn’t thrill the director. At forty-one, she was the oldest leading lady ever to appear in a Howard Hawks film; remarkably, she and Grant played the only leading couple in any Hawks sound film already married when the story begins. Furthermore, Hawks had originally envisioned that only Grant’s character would regress into childish behavior by using the drug. But Rogers insisted upon doing the “getting young thing” as well, and Hawks was forced to acquiesce, though he realized that the antics performed by Grant would seem tiresome when Rogers repeated them.

  In all events, Rogers’s casting helped prevent Hawks’s personal conception of the piece from coalescing, something he unkindly took out on her during filming. From the start, he kept the relationship formal and remote by addressing her only by her real name, Virginia. Rogers was a first-rate caricaturist, and one day she sketched a fine portrait of Hawks, accentuating his stern visage and turned-down mouth. As Robert Cornthwaite, who had a small part in the picture, remembered it, “Hawks kept walking up and down ignoring it, while Ginger was glancing up expectantly hoping for a compliment. He never said anything and, finally, she rubbed it out. I don’t know if it was a coincidence or not, but in the next scene he humiliated her, … saying, ‘No, no, no, Virginia, not that way,’ over and over, but not telling her what to do, until she was devastated.”

  Hecht having moved on to other projects, Lederer continued to revise the script to Hawks’s and Zanuck’s specifications. Hawks, for example, came up with the running gag involving the water cooler as the source of the youth formula and instructed that while everything the characters did “under the influence” should be funny, it should also have serious consequences later on. For his part, Zanuck insisted that the film “should leave the audience with this thought: ‘Be satisfied; let well enough alone; let nature take its course; youth is not all it’s cracked up to be. The green pastures which we see in the distance aren’t always so green when seen close up.’”

  Although Hawks and Lederer loaded the script with nearly as much sexual innuendo as they had the much-laundered War Bride screenplay, no one expected the Breen Office to unilaterally object to the entire premise of Darling, I Am Growing Younger. But it did, stating that this comedy about a youth-restoring formula “amounts to a story of the invention of an aphrodisiac, which mainly exploits the … ‘sex-sational’ aspects of this drug.” In the submitted shooting script, the main reaction Ginger Rogers’s Edwina has to the drug, called Cupidone, is to get her husband on a second honeymoon and into bed, while Charles Coburn’s Mr. Oxly is motivated to use the formula as a sex stimulant in his relationship with his voluptuous young secretary, Miss Laurel, played by Marilyn Monroe. All of this was utterly unacceptable to the MPAA, which forced the drug to be renamed B-4 and changed Oxly’s interest in the elixir to a commercial, rather than personal, one. The censors also objected to “the light attitude towards marriage,” hardly a surprising element in a Hawks film, and innumerable suggestive lines and bits of business. Among the problems: Oxly’s continual leering at his secretary; Edwina’s far-too-explicitly revived interest in sex on the honeymoon; and a climax in which a nude Barnaby pulls Edwina into the shower with him. Also requested for elimination were lines and words, such as “Tonight, we’re staying home for intellectual reasons” and even “old poop.” Most of the revisions were made and, as a result, the tone of the film overall was shifted from one of adolescent horniness to juvenile silliness.

  With Chris Nyby just then in the throes of trying to pare The Big Sky down to a reasonable length, Hawks began shooting Darling, I Am Growing Younger on March 5, 1952. The director had Grant wear much thicker glasses than he had in Bringing Up Baby and noticeably slowed down the actor’s dialogue delivery in order to emphasize the character’s advancing age. He once again forced Grant to act opposite a scene-stealing animal, although the actor didn’t mind the chimp nearly as much as he had the leopard. As always, Hawks structured his comic gags organically from the materia
l and for his performers and had the rejuvenated Grant behave in ways that struck him as specifically appropriate to and funny for the former acrobat and music-hall performer; when Barnaby first takes B-4, he exults by executing a one-armed cartwheel. Robert Cornthwaite said, “Cary Grant contributed a lot to his part. He had a remarkable memory of the games he had played as a kid, which he used for his character, and he brought a wonderful childlike quality to it.”

  The veteran character actor Charles Coburn was a delight, and he proved adept at stealing scenes even from the seasoned Cary Grant. In one early scene, Coburn managed to make his costar all but disappear by enshrouding him in cigar smoke. Later, as Grant recalled, “he had to chase and squirt Marilyn Monroe with a siphon of soda, a moment he approached with glee. Any seeming reluctance, he later explained, was only his indecision about where on Marilyn’s … um … ample proportions to squirt the soda. Miss Monroe seemed to present so many inviting parts. Everyone on the set awaited the moment with goggling eyes. You could hear a pin drop. Eventually Charles gave it a healthy squirt, and missing Miss Monroe, he hit me full in the puss, thereby completely obliterating me from the scene again.” (In the film, Grant is nowhere seen being squirted by Coburn.) Hawks liked Coburn enormously and was willing to coddle the seventy-four-year-old actor in an indulgent way. To conserve his energy for the actual shooting, Coburn often napped in a chair he kept near the set. As Cornthwaite recalled, “He snored very loudly, and he often did so right through a take. It would often disrupt takes, but Mr. Hawks would just do it over again. He wouldn’t allow them to wake him up or interrupt him. He was very considerate of him.”