Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Bloom and Kurnitz worked out a suspense element to the climactic sequence of the sealing of the pyramid, with Dewey Martin and a young girl successfully escaping and Joan Collins trapped behind. Dramatic as it might have been, Hawks did not use it, probably, Bloom noted, because it would have been difficult to stage.

  Faulkner was not oblivious to Dee’s unhappiness. According to A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax, Faulkner confided, “Mizz Dee, I wouldn’t want to be a dawg, a hoss, or a woman around Mr. Hawks.” Dee also recalled that Bogart admitted that he felt badly for her. “He was cute about it; he felt sorry for me. Everybody felt sorry for me—married to the monster.” Harold Bloom noted that Hawks and Dee didn’t give the impression of a normal husband-and-wife relationship: “He acted like he was her husband and she acted like she was his daughter, even his granddaughter.” It didn’t take long for Dee to become restless and bored in Stresa; there was absolutely nothing to do, and all the restaurants were closed. According to Bloom’s Israeli girlfriend, who got to know Dee fairly well, Dee had another reason to be frustrated: there was no way she could see her French boyfriend, whom she had met in Paris. A ski resort setting, however, would attract less notice, so Dee persuaded her husband to move on to St. Moritz for the holidays, which they did on December 19. They were soon joined at the new, ultra-luxurious Suvretta House by Noël Howard, as well as Charles Feldman and Jean Howard, who were long since divorced but still close friends. Even King Farouk turned up. Although he was a beginning skier, Hawks lived up to his reputation as a sportsman, joining Dee for regular outings on the slopes, while the writers managed to get considerable work done in the mornings. Things slowed down quite a bit however, after the substantial imbibing done at lunch. Faulkner habitually fortified himself with two martinis and a half bottle of Chassagne Montrachet ’49 at midday and became pleasantly distracted when Jean Stein, the nineteen-year-old daughter of MCA founder Jules Stein, attached herself to him at Feldman’s Christmas Eve party and wouldn’t let go. Warmed by her attention, Faulkner was nonetheless depressed by the collection of wealthy international frolickers and flew off the day after Christmas to Stockholm, passing through London before returning to St. Moritz on January 6. Jean Stein was still there, waiting for him.

  On January 5, the group had a big party to celebrate Harry Kurnitz’s forty-fifth birthday, and the following day, when Faulkner got back, Hawks mailed a fourteen-page outline of the story to Jack Warner in Hollywood. “I really believe it is the best thing I’ve ever worked on,” Hawks enthused to Warner. He summarized the story as that of “a Pharaoh who accumulated the greatest treasure in the world, takes twenty years to build a tomb where he can be buried with it. He makes the mistake of falling for a beautiful young bitch.” Hawks also cited the historical fact that pharaohs, even when they became old, were periodically required to run about a mile in public to prove they were in good physical condition and proposed a sequence, never shot, in which “the Queen gives him a hard night the night before the test and the poor bastard barely makes it.”

  As had happened previously with Hawks scripts on which Faulkner worked, each of the writers tackled different sequences separately. Bloom recalled, “I had difficulty with it because I would write twelve pages a day but then I wanted to edit it, but Howard wanted everything, the unedited pages. Faulkner was not writing anything at all, it was all verbal. Harry wrote twenty pages a day, out of which Hawks would find one or two pages.”

  Curiously, Hawks never considered a major star for the leading role. After toying with the idea of Sydney Chaplin as Pharaoh, Hawks settled on the English actor Jack Hawkins, who had been appearing in films for more than twenty years and was well-respected but not a box-office name. Hawks made the point to Warner that “almost every one of our actors should be fairly good figures because the costumes make a fat man look pretty bad.” As far as the females in the cast were concerned, he said, “The evil young queen should be the most beautiful, sexy girl we can find. I hope to find a new one and ran across one whom we will test. She is Swiss, speaks English, French, Italian and German. Saw a little test that is awful good but will reserve an opinion until we make our own.” That girl turned out to be seventeen-year-old Ursula Andress. Thanks to the test Hawks saw, however, Paramount quickly signed her up, making her unavailable to Warners.

  Ten days later, as promised, Hawks sent the ninety-one-page rough draft to Burbank, confessing, “Am very pleased with it as it represents only five actual weeks work,” and terming it “the most adaptable yarn for Cinema-Scope that has yet been found.” Hawks bluntly stated that Pharaoh’s obsession is an effort to provide meaning for his life, while the evil young queen is trying “to make their work meaningless.” Nellifer, the Cypriot princess who becomes the pharaoh’s bride, was clearly being written on the highly insolent model of Slim in To Have and Have Not, and the big initial sex scene in this draft was arresting. After Nellifer has been put in the dungeon for disrespect, the pharaoh goes to visit her there. With Nellifer bound by chains, they launch into passionate sex, and the next scene sees her happily installed in the pharaoh’s apartment. In the final film, the equivalent sequence takes place in the pharaoh’s quarters without any bondage accoutrements, his passion provoked when she bites him.

  Hawks warned Warner that because both MGM and Fox were having some trouble with pictures they were making in Egypt, some “trained help” there would be valuable. Approving the outline, the first draft, and Hawkins’s casting, Warner upped the budget to $1.75 million, although he was privately advised by Blattner that $2 million would be a more realistic figure, given the various unpredictable elements involved.

  In St. Moritz, Hawks welcomed many of his key crew members, including Russ Harlan, Chuck Hansen, Paul Helmick, and about a dozen others, for an initial production meeting. When the special-effects man announced that he was about to begin construction of thirty chariots for the pharaoh and his officers, Noël Howard, who was in charge of research and historical accuracy, was obliged to inform the group that, as the wheel didn’t exist in Egypt at that time, neither did chariots. Nor, according to the hieroglyphics of the period, did horses or camels. The film’s animal wrangler was devastated by this news, and at the end of the meeting Hawks took Howard aside and said, “I’ll make a deal with you.… I give up the horses but, for God’s sake, Noël, let me have camels.”

  At the end of the stay in Switzerland, Hawks let Harold Jack Bloom go, with both realizing that the collaboration had not been a terribly fruitful one, as their sensibilities were too different. Faulkner, too, bothered Bloom for many reasons. Not only was the great writer not interested in contemporary fiction, but, Bloom said, “I couldn’t make Faulkner laugh. Only he could make himself laugh. He also said things about blacks that were, to say the least, not very nice, although publicly he cultivated a paternalistic stance toward them.” Bloom never sensed anti-Semitism in Hawks, but he speculated, “He could have been anti-Semitic in the specific sense that he resented his bosses, who were all Jewish. On the other hand, he adored Ben Hecht.”

  From St. Moritz, Hawks moved on to Rome, where he took rooms at the Ambassador Hotel and worked further with his remaining screenwriters, who were staying on the Via Veneto and socializing with Bogart and Bacall, themselves in Rome on John Huston’s Beat the Devil; for his part, Hawks kept his distance. Not only had Hawks frozen the celebrated couple out after their work together was completed, but he disapproved of their political activism during the blacklist period.” Dee reported her husband saying, “Howard hated it,” she told Bogart biographers A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax. “He was violently non-political, and every time something came up in the Bogarts going to Washington, he would just throw up his hands.” On January 25, Hawks dispatched another revision of the script to Warner, one in which the story was more fleshed out and the dialogue more colloquial, and on February 10, he and his closest associates made the flight from Rome to Cairo.

  Hawks and the other company VIPs lodged at the luxurious, touri
stic Mena House at Giza, some forty-five minutes from downtown Cairo. Built in the nineteenth century, set amid beautiful gardens at the desert’s edge, the Mena House was literally across the street and two hundred yards away from the three great pyramids, Cheops, Chephren, and Mykerinos. There was also a huge pool, a first-class bar, and room service, major considerations for this group. Non-golfer Noël Howard was dragooned by Hawks into a round on the hotel’s nine-hole golf course. Howard duffed his way through a few holes until finally calling it quits when one of his drives sliced violently to the side into the desert and scored a direct hit on the behind of a mangy camel, which galloped off in panic, dropping its female passenger to the ground. Fortunately for Hawks, Kurnitz, a fine golfer, was available as a replacement partner.

  Hawks and Howard scouted locations around Giza and met intermittently with authorities, while Kurnitz did the lion’s share of the writing. In the wee hours of February 15, Hawks and Kurnitz waited together at the Cairo airport for Faulkner to arrive. Alarmingly, he had drunk a bottle and a half of brandy on the flight from Paris and had to be taken directly to the Anglo-American Hospital. He was slow to recover, and after moving to the Mena House, he came down with a bad cold. Unexcited by Egypt and with other things on his mind, Faulkner worked mechanically, feeding some mediocre material to Kurnitz, who reworked it. Kurnitz later claimed that only one line of Faulkner’s wound up unaltered in the finished film: the pharaoh asks the architect Vashtar, “So … how is the job getting along?” Realizing how unhappy and unproductive his friend was, Hawks had him polish a few sequences, which earned him an additional five thousand dollars, then let him go on March 29 after a stay of five weeks, and just before the beginning of principal photography.

  One of the most taxing scenes, involving the extraction of granite blocks from a quarry, was scheduled to be staged first, on April Fool’s Day; it was part of Hawks’s strategy to send back some amazing shots right off the bat to keep Warner Bros. off his back. Working at Aswan, they took over an actual ancient quarry and filled it with extras for a setup of truly awesome dimensions. Repeating an effect Hawks had made with cattle in Red River, a panoramic shot showing three thousand extras in the enormous quarry was designed to be even more impressive by splicing together two such camera moves, the cut hidden by placing a giant plastic boulder in front of the camera mid-pan. It took a day to pull off and lasts for only a few seconds on-screen, but it was worth it.

  To get all the extras to work in unison, the assistants had to come up with little singsong phonetic phrases that the men could chant. After running through a few, such as “Lift that barge!” and “Get a little drunk!,” the three thousand sweating, nearly naked men were taught one more slogan, which shortly came roaring repeatedly out of the quarry: “Fuck Warner Bros.!” When Hawks heard this, he nearly laughed, and his driver said that in the car on the way back to the hotel that day, Hawks smiled all the way and kept quietly repeating, “Fuck Warner Bros., Fuck Warner Bros.”

  A bit later, Hawks wrote to Feldman, “A funny thing happened. Tenny Wright, who is an old friend of mine, came in the other day and had just finished telling me he had to get back to Rome on Monday because Helen of Troy had their big day’s work then. They were using 800 people. My assistant came up about our next day’s call and said ‘Mr. Hawks about tomorrow … I’ve ordered 2,200 people but I think we’re a little short. What about making it 2,600?’ Tenny sat there with his mouth open and two days later saw us use over 6,000.” Determined to break the all-time record for number of extras, Hawks pressed his lieutenants and the Egyptians and one day used twelve thousand extras, visible for just a few seconds in the finished film. Near Cairo, Trauner and Howard had located the foundation of an actual unfinished pyramid, then excavated and dressed it for use in further scenes of unprecedented spectacle. Habitually dressed in khaki safari shirt and pants and a wide-brimmed hat, Hawks quietly commandeered his troops like a veteran general; Noël Howard noted, “He had the look, the immobility and the muteness of an Egyptian statue.” Hawks got some very impressive footage of men pulling the massive blocks around the construction site; it had taken some three million stones weighing five thousand pounds apiece—and thirty years—to build the actual Khufu pyramid.

  Uncertainties surrounding the casting dragged on even after the start date; ten days later, Jack Hawkins still had not been signed. Hawks sent Warner an urgent cable: “Hawkins agent Al Park causing great deal trouble. As each situation cleared Parker makes new and difficult demands.” If Hawkins’s arrival was delayed any longer than April 14, the film would have to shut down. Tackling the problem personally, Warner cabled J. Arthur Rank, to whom Hawkins was under contract, and the British film tycoon arranged matters just in time for filming to proceed uninterrupted.

  Despite the cooperation of the local government and the supply of upward of ten thousand Egyptian army regulars to appear as slaves, there were countless problem of heat, language barriers, censored international communications, equipment failure, the arrival of Ramadan, and even a headline-causing incident in which Egypt accused Warner Bros. of smuggling because Trauner had bought a mummified bird and his assistant was caught with it at customs. At one point, a fight broke out among some extras, resulting in the death of one man; at another, some army extras mutinied and charged the film crew, resulting in Hawks and Russ Harlan actually having to fend them off by throwing rocks at them; later, the threat of hostilities with Israel caused the disappearance of virtually all the extras overnight. Although the Egyptians had been granted no say on the content and story line of the picture, they proved highly sensitive in the matter of portraying themselves as historical slaves. Furthermore, word arrived from Hollywood that the Breen Office had found many scenes in the screenplay highly “sex suggestive” and in need of revision.

  The final 138-page script felt significantly overwritten, which forced Hawks to continually streamline it as shooting progressed. The story he finally settled upon was set in the twelfth year of the reign of Cheops II. To fulfill his obsession of building an eternal monument and resting place for himself, the pharaoh is obliged to engage the services of the architect Vashtar, a member of the defeated tribe of the Kushites. Both were good characters, and the best dramatic potential in the script as written resided in the parallel stories of these two men, master and talented slave, who were working on the same task, one by choice, the other by command. This potential was only partially achieved, and the script and film were both pulled down from their initially intelligent level by the emphasis in the second half on the beautiful and duplicitous Princess Nellifer of Cyprus, who objects to her people being enlisted as slaves for the pharaoh’s massive project, becomes his second wife, carries on with his captain in charge of guarding the treasure, and ultimately brings ruin upon everyone, which allows Vashtar to lead his people to freedom.

  Throughout the shoot, Warner Bros. was convinced that it had an all-time winner on its hands. Studio representative Mort Blumenstock cabled Warner in April, reporting, “This footage … makes anything De Mille has done about Egypt look like child at play.” Equally excited was Feldman, who told Hawks that he wouldn’t be surprised if the film grossed $20–30 million. The agent added, “Jack Warner is really overboard about the rushes to date. Confidentially, he feels that [it] is the greatest stuff he has seen in his life.”

  None of the Egyptian footage involved the pivotal character of Nellifer, but as location work progressed into mid-May and a transfer to the studios in Rome grew close, apprehension mounted over her casting. Early on, Hawks had actually spoken of using Dee in the part, but her pregnancy removed the embarrassing possibility of a showdown with Warners on this question. Hawks then became quite intrigued by an English model, Ivy Nicholson. A supermodel before her time, this exceptional beauty was famous all over Europe and very much in the favored Hawksian mold—very tall and lean, with straight hair that framed her face in a way that made many think of Cleopatra. In April she flew to Cairo to shoot a test, the k
ey scene in which Princess Nellifer seduces the pharaoh. Unfortunately, she made the fatal mistake of biting Hawkins’s hand to the bone in the scene, infuriating the actor, who had agreed to do the test with her as a favor to Hawks. Suffering from a 102-degree fever and barely able to continue working, Hawks wired Warner: “After working with Nicholson decided too great risk personally to put in such important part.… Believe good chance of getting Gina Lollobrigida if can get your decision immediately.” Or, as Trauner less diplomatically put it, Nicholson “was very beautiful, but a little cuckoo.”

  It didn’t take Hawks long to figure out that he wouldn’t be able to effectively mold the Italian actress, but then he recalled a sexy young English actress he’d met in Paris the year before when Gregory Ratoff was casting his King Farouk picture. Joan Collins, like Jack Hawkins, was under contract to Rank, but after some initial hassles, a deal was worked out for the sultry twenty-year-old to play Nellifer at fifty-six hundred English pounds for eight weeks, with an option to use her in two additional films over the next three years. The dark-haired Collins, who had already appeared in nine British films, usually as a bad girl, didn’t even do a test for Hawks, and her sexuality was unusually overt for Hawks’s taste. Hawks took a greater personal interest in the young starlet Luisella (Luisa) Boni, whom he cast as Nellifer’s slave girl Kyra and whom he considered putting under personal contract; in the end, her poor command of English scotched the idea. For the first queen, Hawks used the beautiful Algerian-born actress Kerima, who had caused a bit of a stir with her debut in Carol Reed’s An Outcast of the Islands three years before.