Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Late that summer, Hawks bumped into Jack Warner in the lobby of the Georges V Hotel, and again on the Riviera. In the course of just a couple of meetings, the two men sketched out the sort of deal no studio head would have dreamed of offering a director just a few years before, quite like the one George Stevens had just made to produce and direct Giant: complete financing from Warner Bros., $100,000 plus 50 percent of the profits for Hawks, and a $35,000 advance for an optional second picture. On such an arrangement, the studio normally insisted on a provision stipulating that for every $10,000 the film went over budget, the producer would lose one percent of his profit share. Hawks’s attorney Gregson Bautzer was able to whittle his client’s loss down to half that and also excised a clause that would have permitted the studio to take over the production if it exceeded its budget by 10 percent. Hawks also obtained possessive billing above the title, à la Alfred Hitchcock, $1,000 in weekly living expenses, a car, and a secretary.

  Warner and Hawks didn’t agree upon a project immediately. Feldman had been telling his old client for months that, with the industry currently in such disarray, a man with such a distinguished and successful record as Hawks was in a position to make a killing. Big films on the wide screen seemed to be the ticket, a suspicion confirmed on September 16 when the first CinemaScope production, 20th Century–Fox’s The Robe, debuted. In its opening week at the Roxy in New York, it grossed $264,500, far more money than any film had ever made at any theater in a single week in the history of the medium. Suddenly, of course, everyone rushed to imitate it, and Feldman just happened to own a script that Hawks and Warner could move on immediately. “Song of Ruth” was a Biblical screenplay by Maxwell Anderson and Noel Langley, and Hawks was tempted to do it on the basis of The Robe’s success. Feldman also had a “Solomon” project in the works with, of all people, John Wayne interested in the part of the wise Hebraic leader. Warner was lukewarm on both proposals but was interested in another epic idea Hawks had mentioned, one about an Egyptian pharaoh and his obsessive construction of the first pyramid. Such a film wouldn’t be “Biblical” per se, but Fox was already going ahead with its CinemaScope production The Egyptian, so perhaps the lack of a Judeo-Christian religious theme didn’t matter.

  Hawks’s idea at that point amounted to no more than a vague notion, but it was enough for Warner to immediately advance him money. According to Noël Howard, Hawks’s new right-hand man in France, the director got the final go-ahead from Warner while staying at the luxurious Eden Roc in the South of France. “Where is Egypt?” Hawks asked Howard, looking out over the Mediterranean. When Howard pointed to the horizon, Hawks stared out across the dark blue sea for the longest time, then drawled, “Nooooël, I’m going to build a pyramid.”

  Hawks went right to work in September, setting up a new production firm, the Continental Company, and looking for a writer. He first approached Anthony Veiller, who had recently worked for John Huston on The African Queen and Moulin Rouge, and then tried to recruit Ben Hecht, a rather unlikely choice for a story about the glory days of Egypt. Feldman kept pushing “Song of Ruth,” telling Warner, “Hawks feels it can outgross any De Mille film and can be made in Egypt immediately while he is preparing the pyramid story.” Backing off “Ruth” entirely, Warner instructed Hawks to get on with building his pyramid.

  To this end, Hawks made it his first order of business to hire the great Hungarian-French art director Alexandre Trauner, who had designed Le Jour Se Leve, Children of Paradise, and Orson Welles’s Othello. The impish, cherublike Trauner was Hawks’s precise physical opposite, and the two were to make an amusing-looking pair throughout production as they traipsed around the desert, with Hawks calling his new friend Troy instead of his usual nickname, Trau. Hawks hired Noël Howard as his second-unit director. An American expatriate and bon vivant, Howard was an aspiring director who had worked for Victor Fleming on Joan of Arc and got the best tables in restaurants by deliberately slurring his name when phoning for reservations: “A table for two for this evening for Monsieur Noël C-h-oward, s’il vous plaît.”

  While Howard and Trauner launched into research as to how the pyramids might have been constructed, Hawks flew from Paris to Rome on October 17 to join Jerry Blattner, assigned by Warner to look after the studio’s interests in the production. The next day, they flew to Egypt, where they met with Wing Commander Waguih Abaza of the Ministry of National Guidance. Advised that the short-lived Naguib government was determined to abolish graft, Warner had warned them against making any payoffs. After another meeting, with Abaza and heads of various other administrative departments, Blattner told Warner, “It is obvious that they are bending over backwards to have a big production made in their country.” On the downside were the tiny Egyptian studios, with their limited equipment and power, and the fact that the authorities were very clear about not wanting anyone “directly concerned on the side of Israel” to be brought in to work on the production. Hawks was inspired by seeing the actual pyramids and settings for his epic, telling Warner, “The more I go into the story and conditions of making it the more sure I am we’ve got a big one, real big.” Privately, Blattner, whom Hawks liked—surprising, given his customary disdain for middle-level functionaries and yes-men—cabled Warner, saying that while Hawks was “enthusiastic,” he suspected the director was “lacking experience how organize energetic company away from America,” and he recommended appointing a strong producer. Knowing Hawks’s position as actual producer could not be encroached upon, Warner determined to select a reliable unit manager and assemble as much of the company as he could himself. “This has to be this way,” Warner advised Blattner, “otherwise Hawks not only slow but may never finish picture.”

  After being accompanied on an exploratory trip to Upper Egypt by Dr. Mohamed Anwar Shoukri, a historian assigned to the picture, Hawks brought Noël Howard to Egypt, where for a few days they scouted around, admired the gold relics at the Cairo Museum, and were outfitted by tailors for the most fashionable desert wear. But what most excited Hawks was the unexpected opportunity to take the inaugural flight of BOAC’s jet service between Cairo and Paris. Howard said that Hawks, who had never flown in a jet, was so delighted he jumped for joy like a little boy, exclaimed, “Gee whiz! A jet!” and actually slapped him on the back.

  Soon thereafter, Hawks and Dee took a villa near Cannes, where he began assembling a team of collaborators. Art Siteman, last with Hawks on The Big Sky, became associate producer; Paul Helmick, assistant director on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, would work again in that capacity, and Hawks had no problem with Warner assigning Chuck Hansen, who had been unit production manager on The Big Sleep, as unit manager. In his biography of Robert Capa, Richard Whelan claims that Hawks made an offer to the celebrated still photographer to codirect the picture, but this is a highly unlikely prospect for which there isn’t a shred of evidence in any of Hawks’s or Warner Bros.’ documents relating to the film.

  By mid-November, Hawks still had not signed his contract. Blattner signaled his concern to Warner, fearing that Hawks might be thinking of taking the deal elsewhere. While he shared Blattner’s anxieties, Warner was nevertheless proceeding with the financing. Based on Hawks’s reports of how cheaply everything could be done in Egypt, Warner initially fixed the budget at an absurdly low $1.36 million, not including a fee for a leading actor, and allocated the use of blocked funds in several European nations, South Africa, and possibly other countries as well, payable in Egyptian pounds through a special account. Warners actually became the first American company to receive a financial concession from Egypt under which the government would not insist upon payment in U.S. dollars but would accept the importation of unlimited amounts of foreign currencies. Blattner predicted “a considerable book profit on such transfers.” Warner Bros. had so many frozen lire in Italy that Warner decided to make two films in Rome at the same time, Helen of Troy, directed by Robert Wise, and the interiors on Land of the Pharaohs.

  Now installed with Dee at the lux
urious Plaza Athenée Hotel in Paris at Warner Bros.’ expense, Hawks was finally forced to confront the fact that he still had no story, much less a script. Unable to engage Veiller or Hecht, Hawks pursued the august historical poet and novelist Robert Graves, but this went nowhere, so Hawks turned to his old friend Faulkner. Despite the thirty thousand dollars that had come with winning the Nobel Prize, the writer was still far from flush, admitting a need to do “hack work of some sort,” so the fifteen thousand dollars plus living expenses to work for Hawks again were enticing. He by no means felt like taking off and spending months in Europe and Africa, but, he took the job because “Hawks asked me.”

  Faulkner had always worked with other writers on any of his scripts for Hawks that got produced, and the director knew that the plot needed any help it could get. Hawks made a last-ditch effort to get Hecht, but when that proved impossible, he hired someone he had never worked with but who came highly recommended: Harry Kurnitz, a sophisticated screen-writer, playwright, and novelist who, plagued by political suspicion and memories of a painful divorce, was living in Europe at the time. Rangy, bespectacled, very funny, and a close friend of Hawks’s future brother-in-law Groucho Marx, he had a reputation for great facility and productivity, which, in the end, proved to be lifesaving qualities.

  Hawks always claimed that he and Kurnitz were waiting at Orly Airport on December 1 to greet Faulkner, but Noël Howard insisted that he alone was there to receive the news that due to bad weather, the writer’s TWA flight had been diverted to Zurich, where the passengers were put on a train for Paris. When Howard nervously went the next morning to tell his boss that Faulkner was missing, Hawks had gone to play golf. Moments later, a couple of gendarmes delivered Faulkner to Hawks’s room, inebriated and bleeding from a head wound. After Faulkner slept for a while, Howard took him briefly to Harry’s Bar, then directly to his rooms at the Hotel Crillon because he didn’t want Hawks to see Faulkner in his ghastly condition. It seemed that Faulkner had drunk his way across the Atlantic, thought he was in Paris when the plane landed in Zurich, and resisted getting on the train. Upon arriving in Paris, he headed straight for the all-night Bar Vert, where he was assaulted by some ruffians. Picked up by the police, he managed to get out the words, “Hawks—Plaza,” whereupon he was escorted to the hotel.

  One of Hawks’s Egyptian acquaintances, a man named Raoul, had a villa in the Italian summer resort town of Stresa, on Lake Maggiore, that he was happy to let Hawks use; with the town virtually shut down as winter closed in, there would be no distractions from the job of coming up with a script for Land of the Pharaohs. In a spasm of last-minute panic, Hawks decided to hire yet another writer, Harold Jack Bloom, a twenty-nine-year-old New Yorker who had just earned his first screen credit, as cowriter of The Naked Spur, for which he would soon receive an Academy Award nomination. His agent, Alain Bernheim of Famous Artists, mentioned Hawks’s plight to him at Alexandre’s one night, and the next day, while Bernheim set up a meeting, Bloom hit the library to research pyramids. That night, Bloom met Hawks at the Ritz Hotel, and, he recounted, “I told him my premise, which became the premise of the movie, about the Greek who is able to figure out a way to build a pyramid so it couldn’t be broken into.… He looked at me sideways, but said, ‘I like that.’ Then he asked, ‘Are you prepared to go to Italy?’ I said, ‘Of course.’”

  Shortly thereafter, Hawks, Dee, and Faulkner began driving south, through the Alps, into Switzerland, and on to the Lake District. Bloom took a train from Paris with Raoul, whose wife met them in Milan and drove them to Stresa. “When I got there,” Bloom recalled, “who should open the door but Faulkner. ‘Hello, you must be Bloom,’ he said. He always called me Bloom, and Kurnitz Kurnitz. I had no idea when I met Hawks that Faulkner was going to be on the picture. By the time I got to Italy I had it all figured out how to do the whole picture. But Faulkner had talked to Hawks about doing it all as a pirate movie, with the treasure and the evil girl who tries to take it away from the pharaoh. It was a joke, because he didn’t see movies and didn’t like them. He thought they were for children.”

  Kurnitz arrived in short order, and, surrounded by glorious pine forests where the writers could seek inspiration, the group began getting down to work. Faulkner simplistically felt the film was “Red River all over again,” and both Kurnitz and Bloom quickly began to see that their celebrated colleague’s heart wasn’t in it. Hawks, whom Bloom sensed “was intimidated by the literary stature of Faulkner,” remained the picture of generosity and indulgence to his old friend, even offering him a profit share of the film. Feeling excluded from the older men’s club of two, Bloom and Kurnitz formed a fast friendship of their own. Faulkner, Bloom said, “frustrated me. He didn’t like films and he wouldn’t read new books. I asked him what books he’d read recently and he said, ‘I don’t read new books. I only reread the classics.’” By contrast, “Harry Kurnitz was maybe the funniest man I’ve ever met in my life. To me he was salvation. If it wasn’t for Harry, I think I would have been out of there in a week or two.”

  As Hawks, Faulkner, Kurnitz, and Bloom toiled on the script, they realized that none of them knew a great deal about antiquity or had a distinct point of view on it. Hawks himself was especially interested in only two elements of the story: the idea of a megalomaniacal leader who spent his life on a mammoth building project, and the physical mechanics involved in sealing off the tomb chamber so that no one could ever break into it. The germ of the former idea actually lay in an earlier project of Hawks’s about the building of a Chinese airfield during World War II, which for political reasons was never produced. In Trauner’s view, “Hawks thought of the pharaoh like a tycoon in Hollywood.” For Bloom, the director’s identification with the lead was total: “He was like a pharaoh himself, a Hollywood pharaoh.” At the very least, the pharaoh represented Hawks’s fanciful notion of himself, entranced with wealth and power, bewitched by a sexy young wife, and invaluably aided by his (perhaps not coincidentally Jewish) designer-architect. Given his lack of fleshed-out ideas for the story and his urgent need for them, this influence should not be underestimated.

  To make any serious headway on the script, Hawks and the writers had to be clear on how they were going to show the pyramid was built, since this was the point of the story, and their savior here was Trauner. Although the pyramids have been the focus of endless fascination and study over the centuries, no one has entirely figured out how they were constructed, how the five-thousand-pound stones were transported and then lifted into place on what were, for centuries, the tallest structures in the world. Having “called all the Egyptologues around,” Trauner consulted Jean Philippe Lauer, considered the world’s leading Egyptologist, who laid out all the leading theories about pyramid construction, then proposed his own notion, which involved a series of ever-narrowing ramps running alongside the pyramid, upon which man-drawn sleds carried the stones. Trauner was convinced that this approach “was correct in an archeological sense.” Trauner also had long sessions with Hawks during which he sketched out his plans for the pyramid at various stages of construction; although he said Hawks, the former engineering major, never drew anything himself, some photographs do reveal the director hovering over architectural plans, pencil in hand.

  As for the crucial matter of the ending, in which the dead pharaoh’s burial chamber is forever sealed with his entourage of loyal servants as well as his treacherous wife inside, Lauer presented an assortment of ideas, given the fact that each actual pyramid was sealed with a different system. Later, in Egypt, Lauer showed Trauner and Howard one small and quite recent tomb that had been sealed in a clever way: at the appointed time, sand-filled pottery encasements were smashed, allowing sand to spill out and the stones above to lower, enclosing the sarcophagus. Presented with this technique, Hawks expanded it to apply to the entire interior of his pyramid, turning it into an ingenious hydraulic device that would lower the giant stones into a closed position, from which they could never be lifted. Trauner found t
hat Hawks became uncommonly involved in these matters, noting, “Once a propman, always a propman.”

  Hawks had a particular disdain for the Cecil B. De Mille school of filmmaking and was never partial to spectacle per se. All the same, according to Bloom, “He wanted to do a Cecil B. De Mille epic all of a sudden.… and he wasn’t really suited to that. It became a drawing room story.” Scholars have often chuckled at the director’s explanation for the artistic failure of Land of the Pharaohs—“I don’t know how a pharaoh talks”—but this problem really does lie at the heart of the picture’s difficulties. Hawks’s art was based on dialogue, gesture, and behavioral exchanges, and his not knowing how a given character would react in a specific context deprived the film of the kind of spontaneity and nuance that can be found in his best work. When Hawks posed the question to his collaborators, Faulkner supposedly suggested that perhaps he should speak like a Kentucky colonel, while Kurnitz proposed that King Lear might serve as a better model. Hawks told them to go ahead and do whatever they liked, because he would rewrite it anyway. Hawks, of course, tended toward modern colloquialisms, and successive script drafts reveal a clear progression from somewhat arch, occasionally pompous writing to material that was sparer, swifter, and sometimes jarringly contemporary.