Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  In fact, within a five-month period, the dramatic incidents and even the characters of Hatari! changed innumerable times. Based on various outlines and character notes, the tone of the piece was originally fairly dark and melodramatic, quite reminiscent of Only Angels Have Wings both in setting and attitude. As it evolved over the months, Hawks and his writers helped themselves to motifs from many of Hawks’s other previous successes. Initially, Wayne and Clark Gable were meant to costar as two veteran hunters who, à la A Girl in Every Port, still competed for the same women. An overlay from Rio Bravo was added to this in that one of the men, an alcoholic, would have to be looked after by the other. Others may come and go but, as Leigh Brackett put it in one of her jottings, “Clint and Robbie are constants. There is a grim joke between them, a sardonic rivalry—which of them will last the longest. There is a special bottle of brandy on the top shelf, waiting to be drunk by the survivor. Though they quarrel over methods, they love each other.” From The Dawn Patrol and The Road to Glory were drawn the ideas that casualties along the way would simply be replaced by others and that the man who used to receive the orders to place himself in harm’s way would one day become the man who had to order others to do the same. From Red River came a marksmanship duel to prove which young man was better, from Ceiling Zero the character of an invalid who used to be a great hunter but is now, due to an accident, reduced to menial chores around the camp. From many films, notably Only Angels Have Wings and To Have and Have Not, was derived the stray beautiful woman who arrives, penniless, and is instantly resented by the tough hero, who has been burned by a woman before and has to be convinced to let her stay. In one draft, less than three months before photography began, there was a central Moby Dick theme of a wild rogue elephant, “old one-tusk,” who kills a man in the opening sequence and must be hunted down by Clint by the close.

  In mid-June, Hawks brought Leigh Brackett out to begin work, at $750 a week, but also hired the brothers Waldman, for a flat $35,000, to work separately from her, much as Brackett had worked apart from Faulkner on The Big Sleep. The sons of a Wall Street banker, Frank and Tom Waldman had been writing separately for television during the 1950s until teaming up to work for Blake Edwards on the Peter Gunn series and their first feature, the lightweight Bing Crosby comedy High Time. Aside from advising them about key incidents and ideas they might take from his previous pictures, Hawks gave them little guidance, and they hammered away in many directions that had no bearing on the finished film.

  For the woman who shows up at the camp unannounced, Brackett came up with “a sexy cherub” named Scarlett who was invited there by the man killed in the opening scene and now finds herself at sea, and Hawks initially thought of including a blond seductress, inspired by Jean Harlow in Red Dust, who might be played by Stella Stevens and would throw all the men off balance. But he reconsidered, deciding that he didn’t want anything to interfere with the basic focus of the material, and finally suggested a character based on the famous Ylla, a beautiful German considered the top animal photographer in the world, who was killed when she fell off a truck in South Africa.

  For the other female role, Brackett invented a woman named Sandy, a “superbly able” deaf-mute who works, drinks, and sleeps with Clint but doesn’t want him, or any man, to tie her down. Again, Hawks shied away from something so unusual and, again, found inspiration in real life, a girl with a well-known father who had been killed by a rhino but whose African farm she then continued to lease to other hunters. Brackett’s draft also included a cocky Frenchman, “a tough kid with a chip on his shoulder and a rifle in his hand,” as well as the death of Robbie, which occasions the drinking of the bottle of brandy and its replacement by a fresh bottle, “symbolizing that the game begins again.”

  Rightly judging that Hatari! was going to turn into a very expensive production and setting a provisional budget of $4,275,000, Paramount executives insisted that one enormous star salary was enough and that they weren’t going to match Wayne’s fee with an equal one for Clark Gable. (Gable was just coming off an arduous shoot on The Misfits opposite Marilyn Monroe for John Huston; he died on November 16, twelve days before Hatari! started filming.) To play the Frenchman, Hawks was leaning toward Yves Montand, having seen one reel of the unfinished Let’s Make Love. Montand was interested, but, insecure about performing in English, he insisted upon seeing a script, which didn’t exist, so he moved on. These casting problems created further delays in writing Hatari! and even in deciding what the characters would be. The Robbie role was diminished somewhat and reconceived for Peter Ustinov, just then at the apex of his popularity. Burly, British, and a droll scene-stealer, he would have been a curious foil indeed for John Wayne. But when he proved unavailable, the part was dropped altogether, although the need for some sort of equivalent comic relief was recognized. To this end, the quickly ascendant Peter Sellers was sought, followed by the Australian-British character actor Leo McKern, who retained vivid memories of his one meeting with Hawks: “I have never met anyone who spoke or moved slower; a broad gesture with an arm took so long that it became an effort not to take the eyes from his face and follow its movement like a stoat-thralled rabbit; and yet the word it accompanied … ‘e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e …’ lasted as long as the gesture. Not that there was any sense of weakness conveyed; on the contrary. I believe that it was simply that he had long ago decided that if anyone was going to come down with an ulcer, it was not H. H.” While a previous commitment prevented Sellers from taking the role, McKern declined it for the simple reason that he could not fathom working with John Wayne, whose politics he abhorred.

  Hawks, of course, was the producer of Hatari!, but with so much undecided in the writing and casting areas, more responsibility than ever would fall on the shoulders of Paul Helmick, who was put in charge of organizing the staggering logistics in Africa. Helmick and Paramount’s production manager Don Robb had gone to Nairobi in January, but they soon wired Hawks that “new restrictions prevent photographing animal catching sequences in Kenya.… Tanganyika appears more suitable for our purposes.” Moving on to Dar Es Salaam, the men secured full cooperation from Sir Ernest Vasey, acting minister of natural resources in Tanganyika, which was in its final year of British colonial rule. They also met sixty-five-year-old Willy de Beer, the only licensed game catcher in the country, who became the production’s indispensable technical adviser. In all, Helmick and Robb’s advance work was invaluable in terms of securing cooperation and choosing good locations where game could be found. Helmick shot lots of 16mm film for Hawks’s perusal, and in preparation for the animal catching sequences, Hawks also looked at several documentaries on the subject, especially one called Operation Rhino, which he watched repeatedly.

  Base camp was set up near Arusha, a colonial center sixty miles southwest of Mount Kilimanjaro and about eighty miles east of the enormous Ngorongoro Crater and the eastern edge of the wildlife-abundant Serengeti Plain. At Helmick’s suggestion, a compound was built twenty-one miles from town to serve both as a ranch for the production’s domesticated animals and as the fictional home base for the film’s characters. Of course, all necessary equipment and amenities would have to be brought in, with the additional caveat that most of the shooting would be done from vehicles moving in unpredictable directions across very rough ground. Every make of all-terrain vehicle was tested, and forty were eventually ordered from Willys Motors in Toledo and then shipped from Brooklyn to Mombasa; alert to the new possibilities for product placement and promotional tie-ins in pictures, Hawks suggested lots of publicity ideas for Willys, just as he did for Nikon, which agreed to supply all the camera equipment seen in the film. A unique camera mount was designed to facilitate the smoothest possible action filming in the days before the Steadicam, and this would be placed on a special aluminum, automatic-transmission camera vehicle, which, like the beat-up-looking catcher’s truck, was outfitted with the most powerful possible engine to enable it to zoom across the landscape at eighty miles per hour. Beyo
nd that, there were dozens of animals to be gathered, kept, and, in some cases, trained. Animals arrived on trains prominently marked by the word Hatari!, or “Danger!” in Swahili.

  Hawks was originally supposed to leave for Africa on August 29, but the casting remained entirely up in the air. He screened many new European films looking for attractive new faces. Among the pictures he saw was one of the key films of the French New Wave, Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins, which starred the darkly intense, compact Gerard Blain, who was being touted as “a French James Dean.” Hawks didn’t even watch the whole film, turning it off and immediately requesting a voice test by the actor in English. Blain’s English was just passable, but Hawks had him brought to Hollywood and to his home in Palm Springs. Blain was stunned because “Hawks did everything. He cooked, he cleaned up, he brought all the drinks.” There was a young woman hanging around whom Blain scarcely met and whose identity was a mystery to him. “She just sat in a rocking chair by the pool and did nothing,” he recalled. For the other principal male role, Hawks looked at footage of the young British actor Patrick McGoohan but selected instead the blond German actor Hardy Kruger, who, unlike Blain, spoke excellent English.

  Having decided to use an Italian leading lady, Hawks seriously considered Claudia Cardinale, a voluptuous, dark-haired knockout who was just beginning to emerge, but her English wasn’t good enough. When Hawks had all but settled upon one of the most stunning actresses in Italian films, Antonella Lualdi, Paramount gave him an advance look at one of their upcoming releases, Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses, and he recalled that he had met one of its stars, Elsa Martinelli, who just happened to be a Feldman client, in Rome. A vivacious beauty whose career had actually begun in Hollywood five years before, courtesy of Kirk Douglas, Martinelli had natural, unaffected looks and a slim figure that were very much in the Hawksian mold. Hawks phoned her to check her English, had her make a test, and, when she agreed to play the role of the visiting photographer who becomes involved with John Wayne’s group leader, won a five-hundred-dollar bet with Feldman, who had predicted she wouldn’t take the part. In mid-September, Hawks met her in New York and took her directly to Brooks Brothers for the all-important wardrobe hunt. “He knew perfectly what he wanted for me,” Martinelli explained, “but spent hours thinking over what type of ensemble a photographer would wear in the heart of Africa. He went with the saleswoman to choose the clothes I was to wear, then, when I came out of the dressing room, he sat there checking everything.… Only towards evening did Hawks make up his mind.” They left the store having bought ten pairs of very simple safari clothes.

  “We ate together, talking about everything except the movies,” Martinelli continued. “He asked me questions about many things and was very witty, but in an obvious, almost childlike way, in contrast to his personality, his intelligence, his elegance. Leaving for California he said to me: ‘I’m going to invent your role. Now that I’ve met you, you’ll come out much nicer than I planned.’”

  For the role of the girl raised in Africa who is both a sister and a wished-for lover to the young men, Hawks had tested, incredibly, Ingrid Thulin, a highly serious stage and screen actress from Sweden whose cool beauty had already graced several Ingmar Bergman films. Three French unknowns were also tried, and Hawks’s choice, Michele Girardon, was brought to Los Angeles in mid-September. Attractive, open-looking, and a bit gawky, the twenty-five-year-old Girardon, who had appeared in a handful of films, including Louis Malle’s The Lovers, struck Hawks’s fancy at once, which got her the part but led to problems later on.

  For the role that would provide the comic relief, Hawks still didn’t know what he was going to do. He met with Art Carney and was considering Theodore Bikel when the agent Marty Baum heard about the part and promoted his client Red Buttons for it. A popular nightclub and television comedian who had won an Oscar for his serious performance in Sayonara in 1957, Buttons didn’t know Hawks but had recently worked for his brother Bill, the producer of Imitation General. Buttons balked at going to Africa on a film without a script, but Baum insisted that with Hawks and Wayne, Buttons couldn’t go far wrong. Also along for the ride was Wayne crony Bruce Cabot, whose injury in the opening scene sets the stage for the Frenchman’s entrance. Hawks wanted a Latino for the final American animal catcher and, after noticing him in a small part in The Magnificent Seven, paged Valentin de Vargas, who had been so memorably menacing as the young hoodlum in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil a couple of years before. “During our two-hour interview,” de Vargas recalled, “Hawks kept pointing out how dangerous it was going to be. He had me look at a documentary about how they caught animals and I was a little concerned, but then Paul Helmick said, ‘You can be assured that you won’t have to do any of that.’” Alone among the actors, de Vargas went to Africa with the advance crew weeks ahead of the start date in order to learn whatever he could. “As soon as I got over there, they told me they didn’t have anybody to double me.” De Vargas, like the rest of the cast, played the animal-catching sequences himself.

  With no script in hand on what he knew would be a $6 million picture, Hawks left Los Angeles and stopped briefly in New York before flying to Paris on September 25. He was joined by his son David, who had thoughts of working in some capacity on Hatari! But these ideas were put aside when David met a young American woman named Judith Webb. Very soon they decided to marry, and as newlyweds they spent a month driving around Europe. When they embarked upon real life in Los Angeles, David found that Douglas Aircraft did not want him back because he had been gone too long. So he applied for membership in the Directors Guild of America, and during the nine-month wait for an assistant’s job he was allowed to be an observer and unofficial trainee on various television shows.

  From Paris, Hawks proceeded to Rome, where he remained longer than expected to work out final casting wrinkles. He had been preceded to Arusha by the entire crew, but now the Fearless Leader, as Paul Helmick called him, would be arriving to crack the whip in his own quiet but firm way. Helmick and the cinematographer, Russ Harlan, had already been there a month, planning locations and working out how to cover different scenes. As a kind gesture to an old friend, Hawks had originally told Arthur Rosson, his trusty associate director from Red River, that he could supervise the second unit on the picture. This can only be seen as an exceedingly charitable gesture to a man on his last legs, as Rosson, now seventy-three, could never have handled such a rigorous job. As it happened, Rosson died on June 17, 1960, so Hawks told Russ Harlan that he could perform as an additional second-unit director along with Helmick before principal photography began, whereupon Harlan would join Hawks on the first unit and Joseph Brun would work with Helmick. Helmick and Harlan repeatedly tried to film one of the sequences Hawks most wanted for the picture; as Don Robb explained, the elephants “came right up to the tent line, wheeled and turned back. Mr. Hawks feels that the scene can be done in reduced scale with the five small elephants that we have. By split screen to double the numbers, and numerous cuts, he feels we can make it appear to be thirty to fifty elephants.” They never succeeded.

  Forty-one crew members in total were flown over from the United States to work on Hatari!, which became the final title. Hawks preferred Tanganyika, but this had been used by Universal in 1954. Some thirty other titles, including Bring ’Em Back Alive, Africa Roars, and Untamed, were proposed, but Paramount distribution executives felt that Hatari! had a ring to it and would catch on with kids.

  Hawks landed in Nairobi at 2 A.M. on October 17 and was met by Don Robb, who accompanied him to Arusha. For the next several weeks, one and sometimes two units went out every day; Helmick was in charge of covering the small-game catches, while Harlan mainly concentrated on landscapes, general wildlife, and shots of vehicle caravans. As it would be throughout production, the film was sent to Technicolor in London for processing and then rushed back to Arusha so Hawks and his team could see what they were getting. Three local garages were busy day and night for ten days, adapting al
l the vehicles for motion picture use, outfitting them with radios, extra shock absorbers, and other special features. The animals that had been assembled were quickly growing tame; these included several rhinos, three lions, two leopards, and one hippo, one lynx, and one hyena. Although it had already issued its filming permit, the government continually pressed for a copy of the screenplay but received nothing but excuses; as Red Buttons said, “There was never a script, only pages.” Hawks scouted final locations from a small plane, while much of his private time was spent plotting out who should be in the hunting sequences and what the characters’ basic attitudes and behavior should be. Watching the film closely, it is easy to see that virtually all the dialogue covered on location was strictly functional and not tied to specific, unalterable dramatic developments, leaving Hawks maximum leeway to play with his plot, such as it was, when interiors were filmed in Hollywood later on.

  Although it was not directly related to making of the picture, tragedy struck on November 1. A Nairobi-based British animal trainer not in Paramount’s employ, Diana Hartley, had arrived at the de Beer compound with two cheetahs. When she learned that a lion she had known before, purchased for use in the film, was now at the compound, she approached it. Her friends heard her speak to the lion, then scream for help. When Hartley’s body was pulled away, it became clear that the lion had bitten her on the neck, killing her. It later turned out that Hartley had mentioned to one of the other women at the compound that she was having her period; she was told in no uncertain terms not to go near the lion, but she ignored the advice.