As for Monroe’s limited but prominent appearance in the picture, it was the last of the initial, pneumatic sex-kitten phase of her career—her next picture, Niagara, gave her a full-blown lead and true stardom. Forced to wear a dress she detested, she was out of sorts during the shoot, and even though she was only in a few scenes, the company was forced to work around her. The reason, everyone learned later, was trouble with her appendix, which was removed as soon as she completed her role. Neither Hawks nor Grant responded to her allure in the least. Hawks, in Cornthwaite’s view, was disdainful of Monroe as a talent and a person and was using her services only because, as Hawks put it to Cary Grant and John Wayne, “I think the overdeveloped quality in that little girl is going to be kind of funny.” Grant remarked, “I had no idea she would become a big star. If she had something different from any other actress, it wasn’t apparent at the time. She seemed very shy and quiet. There was something sad about her.” Cornthwaite shared a scene with her and flatly said, “Marilyn was terrified. She had just a few words, and she rehearsed them again and again.… She was very determined to do the things she was scared of.” Hawks believed that Monroe had a horrible inferiority complex, and he invariably noted inaccurately that “nobody dated her, nobody took her out, nobody paid any attention to her.” In fact, it was during the shooting of this picture that she began dating Joe DiMaggio; she often had to be torn from long phone calls with him to go to work. They were a serious item by the time of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and they married in 1954, so it is hard to imagine what Hawks was thinking. Putting it charitably, one could say that Hawks and Monroe developed no special rapport with each other on their first collaboration; more bluntly, Hawks considered Monroe “so goddamn dumb” that she was wary and afraid of him from then on. Still, Hawks admitted that she did a fine job in the film and that “the camera liked her.”
Monkey Business, as the picture was retitled toward the end of production, fairly flew through shooting, especially by Hawks’s standards, wrapping after eight weeks on April 30. Scarcely three weeks later, on May 22, Hawks was back behind the cameras, directing perhaps the most desultory twenty-seven minutes of footage he ever exposed. Hollywood had never been especially partial to omnibus films, but the recent success of three British pictures based on stories by W. Somerset Maugham—Quartette, Trio, and Encore—inspired the studio to allow producer André Hakim to give the format a try with O. Henry’s Full House, from tales by one of America’s most famous authors and with segments directed by top in-house talents. The episodes had begun shooting the previous November, and all but the final one were in the can—Henry Koster’s The Cop and the Anthem, Henry Hathaway’s The Clarion Call, Jean Negulesco’s The Last Leaf, and Henry King’s The Gift of the Magi.
Saying he did the job simply as a favor to Zanuck but talked into it by a $28,000 paycheck for one week’s work, Hawks didn’t care at all for the story, an eight-page ironic comedy about two small-time con men in rural Alabama who kidnap a ten-year-old boy with the intention of collecting two thousand dollars for his safe return. The child turns out to be a terror, however, and they end up accepting his father’s demand of $250 in cash to take the kid off their hands. Nunnally Johnson had done a straightforward adaptation, but when Hawks inherited the oddball cast of radio humorist Fred Allen and professional cynic Oscar Levant to play the kidnappers, he called in Hecht and Lederer to do a quick rewrite. This, along with the performers’ ad-libs, threw the tone off more than it altered the course of the story itself; Hecht and Lederer concentrated on the cynical kibitzing between the two men, which was elaborated upon by the comic performers themselves, but in the end it really didn’t matter. The Ransom of Red Chief was a lost cause, a silly little story that holds the unfortunate, if not unique, distinction of being a comedy without a single laugh in it. Hawks managed a couple of scenes of boldly protracted slow-burn comedy, but the only truly Hawksian touch, and only noticeable by a sharp eye at that, is the outrageous attention seeking of a sexy Tobacco Road floozie (Gloria Gordon) in the background on a porch as the men visit town. If this represented Hawks’s idea of the sort of backwoods nymph he imagined for Sergeant York, one can only be relieved that Hal Wallis put his foot down in that instance. Also rather startling is Hawks’s view of children as expressed by this episode and the films he made on either side of it. Granted, the boy in Ransom was portrayed by Lee Aaker very much as written in O. Henry’s story, but the depiction of children here, in Monkey Business, and in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes makes kids, collectively, out to be nothing short of little terrorists, and there are very few other children in Hawks’s films to balance this perspective out.
It was one of those pictures that was a lot more fun to make than to watch. Lorrie Sherwood said that, because of Fred Allen and Oscar Levant, “I never had so much fun in all my life, and Mr. Hawks had a wonderful time.” Hawks liked both men enormously and socialized frequently with Levant in years to come. Levant also developed a big crush on Dee. In one important scene, the kidnappers were supposed to be asleep on the ground in their nightgowns when a large bear prowls through the camp. At the last minute Hawks decided to use stuffed dummies for the scene, and the entire crew was then stunned when the bear, named George, went directly over and clamped his jaws around the head of the dummy that was supposed to be Fred Allen.
Dampening the high spirits were the reactions of studio executives, who, Hawks admitted, were “horrified” when they saw that he had turned the story into something of a slapstick burlesque. Critics and audiences weren’t much better disposed to Hawks’s episode. Having made the film in imitation of some English art-house hits, Fox decided to launch it on September 19 at the tiny Beverly Canon Cinema in Beverly Hills, just around the corner from Feldman’s Famous Artists offices. To everyone’s amazement, it broke the house record with a $9,200 opening-week gross and went on to a fourteen-week run. Clearly, then, the film had an appeal to the same upscale audience that patronized foreign films. However, it was obvious to everyone that Ransom, which was placed next-to-last in the sequence of stories, was a misfire. By the time the film debuted in New York City, on October 16, Fox had removed Hawks’s episode entirely, telling the press that it was felt that the overall feature, which ran 117 minutes with Ransom included, “would be a better picture without it.” With the Full House title no longer truly applicable, wisecracks ensued about how Fox ought to change it to O. Henry’s Four of a Kind. It enjoyed extended runs at the TransLux in New York, the Surf Theater in Chicago, and at similar big-city art houses around the nation. The highest it ever ranked at the national box office was number eleven one week in early November, but this was achieved in limited release. In this light, its eventual earnings of $1 million were hardly disgraceful.
While The Big Sky was still playing at the Criterion, Monkey Business opened at the Roxy in New York on September 5 for a strong three-week run. Reviews and audience response were mixed, however, bearing out Hawks’s contention that miscalculations in casting and structuring hurt the film. As it fanned out around the country, the picture failed to live up to the studio’s hopes that it would be the comedy sensation of the year, on a par with I Was a Male War Bride. It peaked at number seven in popularity nationally in mid-October, ranked number eleven for the month, and finished the year in a disappointing forty-seventh place at the box office, with just $2 million in rentals.
Ironically, Monkey Business, an overtly commercial comedy of no particular distinction, shortly became the unlikely rallying point for a handful of French critics advocating recognition for Hawks as a serious artist, as Hawks would discover to his surprise when he got to Europe. Some of the most sophisticated students of Hawks’s work have made cogent cases for the preeminence of the film among the director’s comedies. Robin Wood described it convincingly as his most “organic” comedy, matched it intriguingly with Scarface as a portrait of the reversion to primitivism, and admired the way the subsidiary characters—elderly Oxly, the naked baby boy, Edwina’s disappro
ving mother, the immature Miss Laurel—fill in the various stages of life not embraced by the age-reversing trips. Gerald Mast praised its immaculate structure; convincingly presented the film as, in many ways, the mirror image, or extension, of Bringing Up Baby; and pointed up the Shakespearean parallels in both pictures. Both critics applauded the manner in which Monkey Business interlaced its thematic concerns with humor, as well as the way excess pushed an ostensible comedy to the brink of tragedy.
Still, the best Hawks films are those in which one feels that the process of making the film helped it find its natural and proper form, and this is nowhere evident in Monkey Business. Aside from some of the unusually muted moments devoted to discussion of the Barnaby-Edwina marriage, most of the action seems mechanical and laborious, almost as if done by rote according to a preexisting plan. In fact, the film remains most resonant for its depiction of a long-term marriage—unique in the director’s work—and its utterly fantastic means of reviving a dwindling relationship, something Hawks could never do in life. The sweet renewal of Barnaby and Edwina’s marriage by the end of the film was, as far as Hawks was concerned, purest fantasy.
Through the summer of 1952, Hawks considered many changes he might want to make in his life. The mess and construction going on around Hog Canyon made him think for the first time about selling it; many of his friends were heading off to Europe to make films and even to live, and there were stories, especially The Sun Also Rises, that he wanted to make there; if he did this, he would want to unload his horses and reduce his entanglements at home. Making the whole plan more enticing were the hefty tax benefits he would accrue if he were to work overseas for eighteen months to two years. And perhaps he would marry Dee after all; if Hawks made the right deal with a studio, they could live lavishly overseas while he prepared some pictures, and Feldman told him that there were plenty of European producers ready to drop bags of money at the feet of a director of Hawks’s stature. His parents were now dead and his boys were basically on their own. Barbara, now sixteen, would soon be sent to board at a girls’ school. She had been refused by the exclusive Marlborough School, as were all girls from show-business families, including the Disney daughters, and enrolled instead at Westlake School near UCLA, where her cousin, Katherine Thalberg, was entering her senior year. It wasn’t a boarding school per se, but two “old maid” teachers lived there, and they watched over Barbara and the few other girls who needed a place to stay. Basically, there was little standing in the way of Hawks turning over a new page and possibly making a lot of money in the process.
However, he still owed Fox one more picture and was open to trying something new there too. A Song Is Born to the side, one of the few genres Hawks had never tried was the musical comedy. In 1947, Hawks had spoken to Feldman about trying to do a movie musical, so when, surprisingly, Zanuck and Siegel proposed one to him, he was game. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a title that had already resonated throughout show business for more than twenty-five years. Anita Loos’s 1925 book was one of the sensational and defining works of its era, a frank and ultimately rather downbeat look at a socially ambitious girl’s life in the Roaring Twenties. Loos and her husband, John Emerson, turned it into an equally successful play in 1926. In 1949, a Broadway musical version, with a book by Loos and Joseph Fields and songs by Jules Styne and Leo Robin, became the rage, and Carol Channing became a star playing Lorelei Lee and singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
Two years later, the show was still packing them in in New York, and with movie musicals at one of their all-time peaks of popularity, the film studios were outdoing themselves to win the rights. In November 1951, 20th Century–Fox won out, paying $150,000, with Zanuck intending it as a vehicle for his biggest musical star of the 1940s, Betty Grable. By the time Hawks and Lederer were assigned to the project the following June, shortly after Monkey Business wrapped, Zanuck and his staff had seriously rethought their intentions for it. Grable’s star was on the wane, her salary was up to $150,000 per picture, and Zanuck, although he had no personal sense of Marilyn Monroe’s potential, was allowing himself to be persuaded that perhaps this phony blonde was for real and ought to star as the musical stage’s ultimate blond gold digger. His greatest incentive was her price, which had reached its contractual ceiling of fifteen hundred dollars a week, with five years to go. Monroe was so incensed by this that she left the William Morris Agency in favor of Charles Feldman, but even he, who was so close to Zanuck, couldn’t twist the tycoon’s arm on this point. Monroe ended up earning only eighteen thousand dollars on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
But if Zanuck was to cast Monroe, he wanted insurance in the way of a major costar in the role of Dorothy; at Hawks’s suggestion, he got it in the form of Jane Russell. Howard Hughes, to whom Russell was still under contract, only rarely loaned out his most famous female star, but Hughes owned a minority share of Fox and could sense that the musical would be a winning vehicle that would only raise her stock in Hollywood. Furthermore, Hawks had waived his financial interest in Russell on the understanding that he would be able to borrow her anytime he wished. The time had come to cash in this chip, but it still came at a steep price: Hughes demanded, and got, two hundred thousand dollars for Russell’s services and forced Fox to also engage her entire RKO entourage, including the cameraman Harry J. Wild and the makeup, hair, and wardrobe personnel. When Russell and her team arrived on the Fox lot, it was like Cleopatra arriving in Rome, and the good-natured actress played it to the hilt just for the fun of it.
Hawks and Russell, who had remained friendly over the years, were delighted to be working together at long last. Part of the understanding was that Dorothy’s role, more of a supporting part originally, would be built up to equal status with Lorelei’s in order to justify the top billing Russell, by Hughes’s decree, would receive. After it was decided that the 1920s setting should be updated and that only the two lead characters, theme, and locales would be retained, Lederer, assisted by Lorrie Sherwood, sweated through the summer to drastically overhaul the material. Pointing out that the film had virtually nothing to do with the book and little to do with the play, the writer observed, “I had to make it up from scratch because there wasn’t any story.… What amazed me was that the musical had no book to speak of, and you realize that it was actually a success as a revue rather than a musical story of a book.” At the same time, it had to be decided which songs from the show would be kept and how many new tunes might be needed. Ultimately, three of Styne and Robin’s Broadway originals were used: “I’m Just a Little Girl from Little Rock” (transformed into the duet “We’re Just Two Little Girls from Little Rock”), “Bye Bye Baby,” and the immortal “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Hawks’s friend Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson collaborated on two fresh compositions, “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” and “When Love Goes Wrong, Nothing Goes Right.” In the end, songs and dances filled roughly 40 percent of the finished film.
Although he had no gift for it himself, Hawks loved music, and in his nonmusical pictures, he often created scenes of group singing, which served to bring his diverse characters together in a communal activity. Hawks insisted, however, upon not directing the musical numbers in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He had no background in musical theater, of course, and no feel for choreography, and he probably realized that an expert in the field could do a much better job. The expert Fox chose was the ace choreographer Jack Cole, who had put Rita Hayworth through her paces in Cover Girl, Tonight and Every Night, and Gilda. Intense, wiry, neurotic, demanding, and personally shy, he was a highly gifted man who frankly described his role with female stars as a combination brother and mother, which is what he became for Monroe on six pictures through the end of the decade.
To give everyone an idea of what he had in mind for the numbers, Cole staged a test run of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” with Monroe lying on a black-and-pink Empire-style bed “wearing nothing but diamonds with a little horse’s tail coming out of her ass
with a little diamond horsefly on the tail,” as Cole remembered it. With Monroe seeming to be nude in her diamond-studded tights, the number was a knockout, but everyone agreed it was far too sexy for the finished film. Still skeptical of Monroe’s talent, Zanuck refused to believe that it was actually her voice on the playback and insisted that she come sing for him in his office to convince him, which she did. Monroe sang all her own numbers in the picture, with the exception of the brief “No, definitely no …” introduction to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” which was dubbed by the band vocalist Gloria Wood.
Given the problems he had recently gone through on Monkey Business, Lederer knew that the Breen Office would be vigilant in the case of this new film. While the MPAA was able to accept the basic premise of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it took immediate exception to the “Two Little Girls from Little Rock” number, which it found “a glorification of immorality.” This was eventually ironed out with some changes in the lyrics, but Breen vetoed such suggestive phrases as “bosom companions” and “for two reasons,” as well as part of what became the most-quoted line in the film: “Those girls couldn’t drown. Something about them tells me they couldn’t sink”; the latter was resolved by eliminating the second sentence from the line. However, the MPAA went on breast alert, insisting on seeing costume stills for all the outfits the stars would be wearing in the picture, just to make sure that they did not “attract focal attention” to their breasts or leave them not “fully covered.”
Zanuck, active as always on story points, insisted that the film maintain its credibility by emphasizing the love story between Dorothy and the detective Malone, as well as Dorothy’s genuine affection for Lorelei. Zanuck also invented the entire dockside opening sequence in which the Olympic athletes become mesmerized by the sight of the two women approaching the boat, ending with the “couldn’t drown” line. In the studio head’s view, “This is not a satire. It is a solid and honest comedy in the same terms as I Was a Male War Bride, for instance. In War Bride, the audience knew that our people had a very real problem and they never lost sight of that no matter how ludicrous the comedy seemed at times.” Hawks couldn’t have disagreed more, as he was about to turn what had been a satire into a burlesque.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 68