Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  It is safe to say that very few people in the United States in 1959 looked at Rio Bravo within the context of Howard Hawks’s entire career. Not long after, however, Peter Bogdanovich had the insight to observe that John Wayne’s character in the picture was an extension of the roles played by Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings and Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not, which suggested that there lurked within Hawks’s work some consistencies, themes, motifs, and preoccupations that had previously gone undetected. It was a number of years, though, until the image of Rio Bravo was transformed from “one of the better class oaters of the year,” as Variety called it at the time, into a film about which Robin Wood could say, “If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo.” Even for those unwilling to go that far, the film fully justifies serious appreciation of Hawks, since it represents the most detailed and elegant expression of his typical concerns—self-respect, self-control, the interdependence of select chosen friends, being good at what you do, the blossoming of sexual-romantic attraction—as demonstrated by characters utterly removed from the norms of routine existence. The Hemingway imperative of grace under pressure could not be rendered more perfectly, and the stoicism is shot through with fun, a full statement of a philosophy of life by a man whose instinctive but deeply thoughtful artistry lay in his seasoned ability to use a highly collaborative shooting process to his own ends.

  Rio Bravo is also, of course, Hawks’s consummate “boy’s fantasy,” fitting snugly with Hollywood mythmaking and escapism, which is what has helped make the film so enduringly appealing, especially to young men. And while many films that one loves as a teenager reveal their shallowness later on, Rio Bravo ultimately shows itself to be an exceedingly mature film within the trappings of an adolescent adventure; Rio Bravo is Hawks’s most resolved film in the sense that it is a thorough expression of the man, without any tension whatever among its narrative, genre, personal, and commercial ambitions. As Jean-Luc Godard put it, Rio Bravo “is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed.… Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all that he holds most dear into a well-worn subject.”

  Robin Wood’s analysis of Hawks’s masterpiece still stands as a model of film criticism and exhibits as deep an understanding of, and appreciation for, what Hawks was all about as has ever been written. Not surprisingly, the film’s richness has drawn out the best in numerous critics and scholars. While noting the exclusion of women from the atmosphere she found “clubby and reassuring in the male enclosure,” Molly Haskell described it as “a movie one loves and returns to as to an old friend.” Jean-Pierre Coursodon, in his book American Directors, found it “an all but perfect movie.” Describing it as “rigorously abstract,” Greg Ford confirmed the film’s position as “the consummate working epitome of Hawks’s most talked-about overview-blueprint for movies.” Among the current generation of working filmmakers, Rio Bravo stands among the greatest of all movies: John Carpenter essentially remade it as Assault on Precinct 13, and Martin Scorsese excerpted it in his first film.

  Ironically, while making so mellow and confident a film, both Wayne and Hawks were losing a grip on their marriages. Dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol, Wayne’s wife, Pilar, sank into a deep depression with which Wayne was completely unprepared to deal. In September 1958, the couple separated, and soon thereafter, while Wayne was making The Horse Soldiers, Pilar attempted suicide. They eventually patched things up and remained married another fifteen years, but the period during Rio Bravo represented a low point in their relationship.

  As for Hawks, his keen interest in Gregg was unlike anything he had shown in any of his previous children. Despite his age, Hawks displayed an enthusiasm for and an engagement in his young son that far surpassed the energy he was devoting to Dee. Various friends, notably Chris Nyby, suggested that Hawks’s libido, low to begin with, all but vanished after Gregg’s birth. Dee, barely thirty, certainly didn’t feel like spending the next twenty years watching her husband slip into dotage. By 1958, it was clear that the marriage was beginning to gasp. Although Dee and Gregg temporarily continued to live with Hawks at the house at 914 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, they officially separated on September 15 of the following year, and Dee filed for divorce two weeks later, citing unspecified mental and physical cruelty. In her complaint, Dee listed among their holdings 13,924 shares of Lafitte, property at 930 Stradella Avenue in Los Angeles, as well as the house and a vacant lot in Palm Springs, several stories and screenplays, a Rolls-Royce, a Ford station wagon, a Thunderbird, a deposit on a Porsche, and interests in Hawks’s various film companies. As of June 1959, she stated that they had $49,817.74 in the bank, whereas by August all of their accounts showed deficits because during the summer Hawks spent $74,000, including $20,000 on a racehorse. Dee also contended that in 1956 Hawks hid $85,000 “some place in Europe” and mentioned other expenses that were never accounted for.

  While the divorce and disposition of their community property was being adjudicated, Hawks was ordered to pay Dee $3,450 per month. Dee and Gregg temporarily moved to New York City in April 1960, and when a settlement was finally reached in 1963, Dee got custody of Gregg, 37.5 percent of Armada Productions (that is, of Hawks’s share of the Rio Bravo profits), the property on Stradella and the lot in Palm Springs, some furniture, and the Thunderbird. Hawks was also obliged to pay $500 a month in child support. After all of this, Hawks and Dee remained on good terms. Barbara said, “They became much better friends after they split up,” and Hawks even gave Dee a small part in Red Line 7000.

  Even before Rio Bravo wrapped, the word was around town that Hawks was back in a big way. In July 1958, he turned down an urgent request from Universal to quickly take on a Western called Viva Gringo, in which Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson had agreed to star, and was also paged by Burt Lancaster and his partner Harold Hecht to direct a version of A. B. Guthrie’s Pulitzer Prize–winning follow-up to The Big Sky, The Way West, which Hecht had to wait eight years to get made. Despite his stated objections to the wide-screen format, Hawks initiated plans to next team up with John Wayne on a big production in Cinemiracle, a new three-camera process akin to Cinerama that was first used on the semidocumentary adventure film Windjammer. At first they considered doing a Western, and subsequently discussed Africa for the format. When Cinemiracle didn’t catch on, Hawks and Cinerama executives began months of talks; Hawks eventually passed because the heavy equipment wasn’t portable enough for the mobile, spontaneous shooting needed for the animal-chasing scenes.

  For some time, especially after the disappointment on Africa, Hawks had been feeling that Feldman wasn’t doing a whole lot for him. Feldman himself was spending the majority of his time on his own pictures, and Hawks began to notice that the vast majority of projects his friend offered him were those he personally owned. Hawks, with some justification, felt that Famous Artists hadn’t done much for him lately, that he wasn’t being offered the best material, and that the deals he made, he basically made himself. But it wasn’t Feldman’s fault that Land of the Pharaohs flopped or that Hawks turned down The Bridge on the River Kwai. Pointing out to his longtime client that he had “the best deal in the business,” Feldman nonetheless tried to placate Hawks by helping him with his continuing financial and tax problems by setting up a Swiss corporation in which he could stash some of his money.

  Hawks and Feldman continued to socialize constantly. They spent New Year’s 1958–59 and much of the winter in Palm Springs, where the season’s crowd included William Holden, Sam Goldwyn, Buddy Adler, Sam Briskin, and Mervyn LeRoy, and their wives. Feldman also had some private tête-à-têtes with Dee, no doubt partly about the Hawkses’ failing marriage. Hawks had bought land on Stevens Road in Palm Springs years before and had actually started construction on his own home there before leaving for Europe. Now he pushed ahead to complete th
e job, giving him a place in the desert he so loved.

  In the wake of Rio Bravo, Warners gave Hawks the green light on a second Western. Hawks found a novel by Steve Franzee, Desert Guns, that he thought could be combined with elements of two of the writer’s other stories, “Singing Sands” and “The Devil’s Grubstake,” to strong effect into one film. The director once again brought Leigh Brackett out from Ohio, and Feldman negotiated a new two-picture deal at Warner Bros., under which Hawks would receive $150,000 for the new screenplay, $250,000 as producer-director of each film, and 10 percent of the net profits—a deal, in other words, that gave him considerably more up-front cash but a significantly reduced percentage.

  Brackett turned out a good script, peppered with lively dialogue, but Hawks dragged his feet in getting it moving; his real interest remained his great African adventure. In a meeting at the end of September 1959, Hawks and Feldman frankly told Jack Warner that they wanted to abandon Gold of the Seven Saints, as they were calling the Western, and proceed with something else, preferably Africa. Warner repeated his overwhelming lack of enthusiasm for that project and countered with a couple of properties the studio already owned, William Inge’s hit play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and something called The Saga of Pappy Gunn.

  Thereafter came several weeks of secret skirmishing, mutual suspicion, and growing bad blood, culminating in a blowup that severed Hawks’s forty-year relationship with Warner once and for all. Given Warner’s lack of interest in Africa, Famous Artists started shopping it around town, with Paramount and Fox the first to bite. In early November, Warner got wind of this and fired off an angry letter to Feldman: “You are up to your old tricks again! Instead of working on the story both you and Howard promised would arrive here on October 30 you are selling Hawks to other studios.… [This] is uncalled for, unwarranted, unnecessary and unbusinesslike, and also unethical.”

  With Feldman out of town, one of his agents, Jack Gordean, responded, stating that Famous Artists had done nothing out of line, that Hawks’s deal with Warners was nonexclusive, and that it was perfectly normal to take Africa elsewhere after Warner turned it down. He continued, “I am sure you know that Howard has been in great demand and that we have had many, many propositions offered to us for him. He is certainly one of the most sought-after directors in the business.”

  Unlike Hawks, Warner was still enthusiastic about Gold of the Seven Saints so, after more unpleasant exchanges and recriminations, Warner settled with Hawks by agreeing to let him keep the eighty thousand dollars the studio had already paid him to prepare the Saints screenplay. Warner quickly put the film into production, directed by Gordon Douglas; it is a film of no reputation, not even available on videotape. Initially, Warner had intended for Hawks’s fee to be applied to another film, but a few days later, fed up with what he viewed as Hawks’s and Feldman’s game-playing, he simply canceled the contract altogether. After having watched Hawks walk out on him several times before, he no longer needed the aggravation.

  Hawks always did what he wanted to do; loyalty, a mutually beneficial friendship, and professional understanding counted for nothing. He was bent on making the African film and would go where he could get the best deal he could. But within six weeks in October and November 1959, his third wife left him and he willingly concluded his relationship with the studio where he had entered the sound era, directed ten pictures, fought many battles that he usually won, and consistently got his pick of material and been allowed to shape and cast it his way. In short, Warner Bros., Hal Wallis notwithstanding, had been the studio most agreeable to letting Hawks be Hawks, and the result was much of his most successful work, both artistically and commercially. Now he closed the door on it, and there would be no going back.

  35

  Fun in the Bush: Hatari!

  At Christmas 1959, Hawks wrote Chance de Widstedt a letter. For more than a year he had been thinking about her, he’d written and talked to her occasionally—and how many women had ever had a John Wayne character named after them? Since Hawks had last seen her in Paris, Chance had quit modeling to become a reportorial photographer, initially free-lance for the Herald Tribune and then, principally, for the photodominated magazine Jours de France. In his letter, Hawks informed her that he was now divorced from Dee and proposed to Chance that she come to Los Angeles and marry him. Although quite surprised, since she and Hawks didn’t know each other that well and had never slept together, Chance did feel that there was something special between them. “I decided to go and have a look,” she said, telling Hawks that she would like to come stay with him for a while.

  When she arrived, early in 1960, she moved right into Hawks’s house but stayed in a separate bedroom, as his wives always had. “This shocked me,” she confessed, “because I thought it was more important to be tender. After all, la nuit n’est pas seulement pour dormir. But he had trouble sleeping sometimes because he had so much in his head. For his creativity he wanted to be alone, to read, to make notes, to dream, to wake up and write things down. He didn’t need daily tenderness and affection. He liked to be solitary.” Chance implied that they did become physically intimate during this period, but ambiguously explained that their relationship was one of “sensualité, pas sexualité. I admired him. I had no father. I was his friend, and he was my father and friend. And I wasn’t with him because he was Howard Hawks.”

  Already busy working on his African project, Hawks would get up early every morning and go to work, while Chance would stay around the house, sometimes with six-year-old Gregg. “I’d have a dip in the pool, then go and get my hair done so that I would look impeccable when Howard came home from the studio,” Chance said. “I was living in luxury, after coming from a two-bedroom apartment that I shared with my grandmother.” All the same, Chance had tasted the good life in Paris, so she wasn’t particularly overwhelmed by her newly adopted lifestyle. Hawks gave her a white Chevrolet Impala convertible to use around town, and when he came home from work, usually late, they would go out to dinner, most often at Dino’s Place, Dean Martin’s popular restaurant and club on the Sunset Strip, where Martin often performed casual impromptu sets. They also went to dinner with celebrities—once at Alfred Hitchcock’s home and another time with Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “But these things only happened maybe once every week,” complained Chance. “In L.A. then there was not much I could do. I supposed it will have changed by now. But back then it was deadly. You couldn’t even go have a coffee. You have no idea. I was used to Paris, where it was a wonderful time.”

  Finally, the boredom of so many hours alone and the aridity of life in Los Angeles became too much to bear. After three months, she told Hawks she’d had enough and was going back to Paris. “If Hawks had lived in Paris, then I suppose we would have married.… Maybe if I’d had some friends to pass the time of day, then I might have stayed. Maybe it was a stupid mistake not to have married him, but c’est la vie.” Hawks was initially furious at her rejection, but he quickly came to understand the reasons for her discontent and her desire to pursue a career of her own. He also realized that they might be able to spend a good deal of time together very soon.

  His bargaining power at its peak in the wake of Rio Bravo and with Warner Bros. definitively out of the picture, Hawks began setting up his African adventure in earnest. Jack Gordean, the Famous Artists agent handling most of Hawks’s business now that Feldman was busy with so many producing projects, was in advanced discussions with Paramount about the project in early December 1959, when both Fox and Columbia stepped up with virtually identical offers. Paramount did finally land the production, with Hawks receiving $150,000 for the story, $150,000 for directing, and 50 percent of the profits after breakeven. At the same time, Feldman’s client John Wayne agreed to star for $750,000 and 10 percent of the gross after the picture had pulled in $7.5 million.

  Although it was not widely known at the time, Charles Feldman’s life was in considerable danger during this entire p
eriod. In the fall of 1959, Feldman was diagnosed with prostate cancer. On April 26, Dr. Edward C. Parkhurst performed a suprapubic prostatectomy on him in Boston, and after two weeks in the hospital, Feldman departed with Capucine to convalesce in the South of France. The majority of Hawks’s business, therefore, was handled with only the most cursory of attention from his agent.

  Paramount announced Hatari! at the end of March, with shooting slated to begin within six months. Hawks had no more idea at this point what his story was going to be than he had more than four years before when Harry Kurnitz was trying to patch something together in Paris. (An advance from Paramount enabled Hawks to finally pay Kurnitz $29,750 for his earlier work.) In fact, he wasn’t particularly interested in a story at all. “That was the year that Howard was not buying any story,” moaned Leigh Brackett. “He didn’t want plot, he just wanted scenes.” All Hawks knew was that he wanted to make a picture about people who catch animals in Africa for zoos. It was a subject that had all the requisites: a dangerous profession, a colorful milieu, a group undertaking controlled by a boss to be played by a big star, and plenty of opportunity for exciting scenes, the likes of which had never been seen on-screen before. With its mix of people and animals against grand landscapes, it would even have the feel of a Western, albeit a modern and quite exotic one. Defending its decidedly loose-knit construction, Hawks said that “the form of the picture is a hunting season, from beginning to end. It’s what happens when a bunch of fellows get together to hunt.” He also rationalized that “you can’t sit in an office and write what a rhino is going to do.”