Periodically through 1955 and 1956, Dee would return to Los Angeles with Gregg and stay with her sister and Groucho Marx, who were now married. As Groucho described the situation in a letter to Arthur Sheekman,
When I casually invited Eden’s sister to spend a week or two, I had no idea it would lengthen into six. And the way she eats, one would think that the baby is still inside of her instead of fouling up my house with baby toilet seats, wet bed sheets and flying rattles. Her nurse is very eager to appear on my show as a contestant, and nails me every time I come out of my bedroom. My bedroom exits are becoming more infrequent all the time. Beginning Monday, I am holing up in my boudoir until the taxi (with Mrs. Hawks) leaves for International Airport.
As a matter of fact, Dee is a charming girl—both pretty and bright—and if she were here alone, without the nurse, the baby and Eden, I’d have a hell of a time.”
One reason Groucho didn’t mention for Dee’s prolonged stay was that she had an unspecified operation, from which she recuperated partly in Palm Springs. Not long after her return to Europe in November, the family was off again to Klosters, this time to the Haus Am-Taoback, for another winter of skiing and socializing. This season, however, proved to be much less enjoyable than the last. Slim sent Hawks a late Christmas present by way of a lawsuit. Having gotten wind that Hawks was putting Hog Canyon on the market, Slim saw this as her chance to collect the $40,000 that her ex-husband owed her, as well as the $11,300 he had neglected to pay for Kitty’s child support. The following spring, Hawks, with his brother Bill handling the transaction, sold his beautiful home for an underpriced $58,000 to the Tower Oil executive Howard Keck, and later that summer he was able to have Slim’s suit dismissed on the promise that he would meet all his existing obligations under their original property settlement. He then chose to ignore the matter entirely, forcing Slim to take legal action repeatedly in years to come in an attempt to get her ex-husband to live up to his legal responsibilities. Hawks’s behavior in relation to Slim and Kitty is hard to fathom, although it certainly stemmed from some combination of arrogant stubbornness, a conviction that he needn’t pay since Leland Hayward and Slim had far more money than he did, a lack of liquid cash, and a lingering resentment of Slim for having left him. Relations between the two were strained when they existed at all, and Hawks undoubtedly knew that Slim bad-mouthed him to her show-business and society friends. Slim remained very close with such former mutual friends as Bacall, Bogart, and Hemingway, whereas Hawks did not. When Slim had an affair in the mid-1950s with the writer Peter Viertel, she described Hawks to him as “a great pillar of nothing.”
Setting Hawks further back in early 1956 was an accident on the slopes at Klosters. When Hawks took up skiing, Chris Nyby warned him to start on short skis and gradually work up to long ones. The proudly self-confident Hawks would have none of this and gamely used full-length skis from the outset. He got by with this for a couple of seasons. Lorrie Sherwood, who by now had become both secretary and girlfriend to John Huston and was working for him in Europe, by chance met Hawks skiing at Klosters that winter and said, “He was doing all right. He wasn’t what I’d call a good skier; he was a good learner.” His mishap had nothing to do with fast, reckless skiing down treacherous, steep runs. Rather, Hawks tripped up in slow, sloppy conditions near the bottom of the mountain, where people often don’t pay close attention to what they’re doing. Hawks broke his leg and was laid up at the Haus Am-Taoback for weeks, well into April. Feldman wagged his finger at him in a letter, saying, “Always told you to lay off those goddamn skis [sic]. It is for the ‘young uns,’ believe me, Howard.” A month short of his sixtieth birthday, Hawks was forced to concur, and he willingly gave up his short-lived skiing career.
On his feet again, Hawks returned to the Hotel Raphael in Paris and, in May, filed suit against Warner Bros. for breach of contract, fraud, and deceit over the Africa project. Hawks claimed he was out of pocket $43,742 in payments for the screenplay and further demanded $136,000 for his fee and $1 million in “lost profits.” The real bone of contention was the issue of Gary Cooper’s script approval: Hawks maintained that the studio had deliberately withheld the information that Cooper had such rights “in order to induce and secure the plaintiff’s agreement to the terms” of the contract. The suit was to sit in limbo for some time to come.
Through the spring and early summer, Hawks lived a gentleman’s life of leisure. He socialized frequently with Charles Boyer and the recent Parisian transplant Preston Sturges and went to Longchamps racetrack with John Huston and Huston’s friend the former jockey Billy Pierson. Huston, who didn’t find Hawks to be his kind of boon companion but didn’t mind his company, observed that Hawks seemed to place only moderate bets. When Billy Wilder came to town and joined Hawks for drinks at Hawks’s hotel, Hawks boasted to Wilder about how he had just made $2 million on a lucky oil investment. Wilder knew from experience to take this with a grain of salt, and when Hawks excused himself, a member of the hotel staff approached Wilder and asked if he knew his companion very well. Wilder said he did, whereupon the hotel man explained that he was concerned only because Hawks had been at the hotel for more than a month now and had not paid for anything. Beneath his casual countenance, however, Hawks was highly agitated about his lack of a new project and insisted upon seeing Feldman every day and called him up to ten times a day. Feldman complained in a wire home, “I have been besieged daily by Hawks to extent I am going nuts!”
When it became evident that nothing was going to break soon, Hawks and his family again returned to the South of France for the summer, splitting their time between the exclusive Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo and the Villa Loi et Moi in tony Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. It was the usual round of golf for Hawks, Dee tanning by the pool or at the beach, cocktails and long dinners with whoever happened to be around, plus a rather loud little boy approaching his second birthday. One visitor reported frequently “hearing words” between the husband and wife, while another said it was clear that “Dee wanted more excitement” than she was getting sitting around the glamorous but languid pleasure capitals of Europe with a child in tow.
During one of Dee’s trips to Los Angeles, Hawks met a woman who would remain in his life until he died. Hawks was at the Longchamps racetrack with a small group when one of his party, the actress-model Lise Boudin, saw a friend and asked her to join them. She was Chance de Widstedt, generally known just as Chance, a twenty-year-old Chanel model. Tall, slim, and with a natural look rather like Bacall’s, Chance made an immediate impression on Hawks, and the feeling was mutual. Chance had never heard of Howard Hawks and had no idea who he was but found him “tall, handsome, very elegant, très chic, athletic, attentive.” The fact that he was older was even a plus, “because I was attracted to a father figure. I’d had no father.”
Quite taken with this stylish young beauty, Hawks took her out to dinner, always in the company of other people, two or three times in Paris. Although her limited English and his nonexistent French made communication difficult, Hawks found out that she was born in Clichy, just outside Paris, was raised by her maternal grandmother, had begun her working life at sixteen as a figure skater with the Bouglione Circus, and was rebaptized Chance by Ted Lapidus of Dior in the back of a taxi as they sped through the Place de la Concorde. At the time Hawks met her, Chance was on the verge of quitting modeling and launching a career as a photojournalist.
During the time they knew each other in Paris, Hawks did not come on to his elegant new friend. “He was too scrupulous for that. Hawks,” Chance said, “was not the type of man to have affairs. Dee, from what I heard, did have affairs, but not Howard.” Chance felt Hawks was too much of a gentleman to provoke something tacky. “He liked women, lots of them, but one after the other, not all at the same time. At least that’s what I believe.”
By the fall of 1956, Hawks was living at the Hotel Prince de Galles on Avenue Georges V, but with nothing clicking into place with projects in Europe, he began to fe
el it was time to return home. When he returned to California at year’s end, Hawks had been away for just short of four years, during which time he had made one film, sired a son, entered the seventh decade of his life, had a good deal of fun, spent quite a bit of money, become acquainted with some of the French critics who would further promote his reputation over the next few years, and, toward the end, reassessed the kinds of movies he had been making recently and what he wanted to be doing.
34
Bravo
The home front looked markedly different when Howard Hawks returned to Los Angeles after nearly four years in Europe. Humphrey Bogart had just died, and Hawks shocked Dee by refusing to visit Lauren Bacall to pay his respects. According to Dee, Hawks said, “They never had me while he was alive, why should I go now?” Now that Hog Canyon was no longer his, he took up residence for a short time at the Westwood Manor apartment hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. The previous summer, his daughter Barbara, now twenty, had married Donald McCampbell, a gregarious, athletic man. Barbara was a theater arts major at UCLA before she went to work for the writers Bill Orr, Jack Warner’s son-in-law, and Hugh Benson at Warner Bros., while Don studied music before trying his hand at different fields. Hawks hadn’t bothered to return for the wedding, but Barbara said, “Slim was wonderful to Don and me when we got married. She and Leland and Kitty were at my wedding, they invited us for dinner a lot.” Carrie Dane McCampbell, Hawks’s first blood grandchild, was born on May 30, 1957, her grandfather’s sixty-first birthday.
Kitty, now eleven, had not seen her father at all during his stay in Europe. Peter Hawks, who was working as a district manager for TWA at the San Francisco Airport and hadn’t seen his adoptive father in years, already had three daughters, Jamin, Kate, and Celia. David, now twenty-seven, had been working as an engineer at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica since graduating from Princeton in 1952.
Professionally, Hawks was raring to go. His four-year layoff, he said, “sort of gave me a fresh attitude,” and he was sure that the frustration built up over his several unrealized projects would be broken by his return. No sooner did he arrive than Feldman presented him with a tantalizing “adulterous comedy” that struck a particularly responsive chord in Hawks. The agent-producer had bought a play in Europe about a handsome rogue whose ability to juggle a wife and mistress becomes more difficult when he meets a beautiful young woman. Feldman hired I. A. L. Diamond, who had just begun his collaboration with Billy Wilder on Love in the Afternoon, to write the script. Hawks liked it very much and had Diamond rewrite the lead for Feldman’s client and their mutual friend, William Holden. Capucine, Feldman’s new twenty-three-year-old French amour, would play the wife, Brigitte Bardot was proposed as the mistress, while it could be left to Hawks to make a new discovery for the girlfriend. The project, however, stalled while Holden, on location in Ceylon for The Bridge on the River Kwai, delayed making any future commitments, and Hawks’s attention soon turned elsewhere.
One thing that surprised and impressed Hawks upon his return to the States was television. When he had left at the beginning of 1953, TV was mostly variety, comedy, and game shows supplemented by a measure of serious live drama. Now, prime time was dominated by filmed series, and it can’t have escaped Hawks’s attention that fully a third of them were Westerns, including the number-one show, Gunsmoke, starring his embarrassed “Thing,” James Arness. Lots of good actors, both veterans and young, good-looking kids, were now appearing on television, and Hawks watched a lot of it to bring himself up-to-date. In fact, Westerns seemed so commonplace and unexceptional in 1958 that Jack Warner yawned when Hawks told him he wanted to do a Western for his return to the screen. The director told a journalist at the time, “I got bored and decided I might as well be doing what I know best.” Although highly identified with the genre because of the success of Red River and his general demeanor, Hawks had only made two Westerns in his career to date; of the six films still ahead of him, however, half would be Westerns.
Famously, Rio Bravo was born out of Hawks’s visceral abhorrence of Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman’s highly acclaimed 1952 hit, High Noon (for which Hawks’s friends Gary Cooper and Dimitri Tiomkin won Oscars), a simple tale of a middle-aged small-town sheriff who asks for help from the local citizenry when faced with the return of some revenge-minded criminals. The picture was also seen as a liberal political allegory for the McCarthy era (surprising, given the highly conservative Cooper’s involvement), in which normal people are shown as being easily cowed and afraid to take action against intimidating tyrants. Hawks’s objections were not aesthetic but deeply personal and, one could even say, ideological; the film ran counter to everything he believed in. As he put it, “I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him.” He decided to “do just the opposite, and take a real professional viewpoint: As Wayne says when he’s offered help, ‘If they’re really good, I’ll take them. If not, I’ll just have to take care of them.’ We did everything that way, the exact opposite of what annoyed me in High Noon and it worked, and people liked it.”
Hawks was to have similar objections to another film, Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma, based on a story by Elmore Leonard, when it came out in August. In that one, as Hawks remembered it, “the sheriff caught a prisoner, and the prisoner taunted him and made him perspire and worry and everything by saying, ‘Wait till my friends catch up with you.’ And I said, ‘That’s a lot of nonsense, the sheriff would say, ‘You better hope your friends don’t catch up with you, ’cause you’ll be the first man to die.’” Though Hawks’s interpretation is off (the “sheriff” he spoke of was actually just an impoverished rancher, not a professional), Rio Bravo arose from Hawks’s reaction against aspects of two popular Westerns of the period, which made it easy for him to create certain key scenes by just taking scenes he disliked and turning their attitudes upside down or inside out.
As it happened, John Wayne also hated High Noon, and the idea of working together again after more than a decade appealed enormously to both Hawks and the star; whatever animosity Wayne may have harbored over having had to sue Hawks to receive his full payment from their previous film had long since subsided. There was no actor in Hollywood busier or more popular than Wayne, but he had recently been in a bit of a slump; he hadn’t appeared in a Western since Ford’s The Searchers in 1956, and his four films in the interim had not measured up to the star’s usual commercial standards. So perhaps a good Western was what both actor and director needed.
To write the script, Hawks turned to the two writers who, aside from Faulkner, he liked the best and trusted the most, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, although he had worked with neither since The Big Sleep some twelve years before. Furthman, now seventy, had grown more cantankerous and disagreeable than ever and hadn’t worked much since the early 1950s. For her part, Brackett had left Hollywood entirely, marrying the pioneer science-fiction writer Edmond Hamilton and moving to Kinsman, Ohio, where she turned out many sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery stories and novels, including the highly regarded The Sword of Rhiannon and The Long Tomorrow. When she returned in July 1957, taking an apartment above the beach at Ocean Avenue and Wilshire in Santa Monica, it was only because it was Hawks who asked. Even though they were credited together, along with Faulkner, on the script to The Big Sleep, Brackett had never met Furthman. Fortunately, she said, “We got on famously.” The writing responsibilities were divided up, but not as they had been with Faulkner on The Big Sleep. On what was initially entitled El Paso Red and then briefly called Bull by the Tail, the two writers would huddle with Hawks for hours as the director offered up his ideas. As Brackett explained the process, “I was used to writing by myself, alone with my typewriter in a little room. Jules Furthman, on the other hand, just hated to put anything down on paper. So, in story conferences with Howard Hawks, Jules did most of the ball-carrying. He and Mr. Hawks would talk the scenes out, and I’d
contribute as much as I could.… Basically, though, I would put down on paper the scenes that Mr. Hawks and Furthman had talked out, shape them, reshape them if necessary, and put them together, adding a few things of my own in the process.” The two writers’ pay scales were outrageously disproportionate: Furthman received $2,500 a week, while Brackett, who did the lion’s share of the actual writing, got only $600 weekly.
The first written document pertaining to the film, dated August 3, 1957, a thirteen-page incomplete treatment, has virtually nothing to do with Rio Bravo as it ultimately emerged but bears every resemblance to a Western remake of To Have and Have Not. From this short sketch began the real work. Clicking now, Hawks, Brackett, and Furthman came up with a new story line in August and finished a preliminary draft before the end of September. They then went through it again, fleshing out characters, adding and strengthening scenes, and sharpening dialogue, until a 123-page first draft, signed by Brackett alone, was completed on November 13. In terms of the basic dramatic situation, centering on the efforts of a sheriff and his motley crew to hold a man prisoner in their small jail while under siege by an outlaw gang, the script was quite well along at this stage. The relationship of Sheriff John T. Chance, named after the beautiful French model Hawks had on his mind, and a gambler woman called Feathers, the name of the female lead in Sternberg’s Underworld, was all there. But the central male relationship was very different from what finally ended up on-screen. The second lead here was a man named Jim Ryan, a hired gun whom the sheriff, initially wary, finally takes on. Ryan resembled a combination of the eventual Dude and Colorado characters; at the same time, in the way he makes those around him uncertain of his sympathies because of his tendency to go where the money is, Ryan recalls Bogart’s Harry Morgan and prefigures John Wayne’s Cole Thornton in El Dorado. As Hawks explained, “When we came to a certain place in Rio Bravo, we had our choice between going in this direction and going in that direction. But we made notes to remember, because we said, ‘This is so good we can use it sometime.’ We ended up with enough good notes to make another movie, so we made another movie.” The final shootout, including the throwing of dynamite into the barn where Burdette’s men are hiding, exists in this early version, although there is no exchange of prisoners by the two sides beforehand.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 74