It was kept quiet, but Valentin de Vargas said that during the shooting “there was a mishap every week.” Three native Africans were accidentally killed during production, and while, miraculously, none of the actors or American crew members were ever seriously hurt, Willy de Beer was badly mauled when a baby leopard got loose and jumped on him from a tree. “He came back with his arm covered in bandages and throat completely wrapped, but he just shrugged it off,” de Vargas recounted.
After de Vargas, Elsa Martinelli was the next cast member to turn up, at the beginning of November, arriving with her photographer boyfriend Willy Rizzo, who had the enviable double assignment of covering the shoot for Paris Match and working as the official Paramount stills man. A few days later, Hawks came down with a serious virus that landed him in the hospital for a week. While there, he heard from Feldman, who was in discussions with Spyros Skouras in London about a long-term deal for Hawks at 20th Century–Fox, for six to eight pictures at $150,000 apiece, $75,000 in annual expenses, and 50 percent of the profits, with Paris as Hawks’s probable base of operations. Paramount would probably match this deal, Feldman said, while Columbia might be willing to go as high as $200,000 per picture.
By the third week of November, the principal cast members began filtering in. Some of the best homes in the area were vacated in order to accommodate the stars in luxury; Gerard Blain, along with much of the crew, stayed at the New Arusha Hotel. Hawks showed footage of some of the good catches to the enthusiastic actors, and then gave them a pregame pep talk, telling them that they were privileged to be going on perhaps the most expensive safari in the world, costing millions. “He told us he expected strong nerves and a lion’s energy,” Martinelli recalled. “He was witty and very calm, and for half an hour before shooting started, he told the actors all the good and bad things they’d have to face.” When Hawks left the room, all the other actors ran over to John Wayne to ask if he had a copy of the script. “He paused a moment, as though posing for a fashion plate by Avedon,” said Martinelli, “then he said, ‘Listen, kids. I’ve shot a hundred movies. Well, the greatest directors, including Hawks, never handed me a script. I’m an actor, and when they call me for a film I know they need me, that’s all.… You just have to trust them. If you’re good, they’ll show you to your best advantage day by day.’”
Privately, Hawks told his leading lady, “This is a film I wanted to make for years and I wanted to make it like it was a vacation.” It became clear to Martinelli that the conditions under which they would be making the picture precisely paralleled those depicted in the story, with Hawks as the boss figure and the uncertainty prompted by the lack of a script directly analogous to the unpredictability of the animal hunts. It was a thought picked up on by François Truffaut when he saw Hatari!, which he always considered to be Hawks’s disguised account of the process of filmmaking. In any case, for Hawks it was a realization of his lifelong urge to merge his fictional ideals with his real life, a boy’s fantasy being played out every day. Even though the dreamer was now sixty-four years old, he couldn’t have been happier.
Like the actors, Paramount simply had to trust Howard Hawks. With Jacob M. Karp having taken charge of production only in 1959, there was no veteran big boss like Jack Warner or Darryl Zanuck who had a clue how to control Hawks. All the studio could do was to pay the bills and hope for the best. There was no fixed budget per se and no absolute shooting schedule—what would it have been based on with no script?—although everyone, including Hawks, intended to finish in Africa by mid-February, before the rainy season arrived.
For the first part of principal photography, the company moved seventy-five miles west of Arusha to the shores of Lake Manyara, set in the middle of plains that teemed with all manner of game. While Hawks, the cast, and some top first-unit crew members stayed at the Lake Manyara Lodge, a sort of British colonial outpost, the general company, much as on Red River, was put up in large canvas tents, in an area that was floodlit by portable generators all night to discourage animals from coming in. Principal photography started on November 28 with scenes involving Wayne, Martinelli, and Buttons at Ngasumet Wells, in the middle of the arid Masai Steppe. Martinelli recalled that on that first morning, “Hawks was there waiting for us, shaved and dressed as though for a garden party.” She said that even after the longest of days, Hawks never tired. “He was the only one capable, after a day of wild adventure, of returning to camp with his shoes shined.” He was a tough boss on his crew. He went through at least three first assistant directors on the picture, pushing the first one, Danny McCauley, to the breaking point and giving a hard time to the next, Bud Brill. “He was very hard on the people he worked with,” Brill testified. “He wanted his own people, and the studio wouldn’t let him.”
Not only had Red Buttons not tested for the role, but he had never even met Hawks before he showed up to work. “Luckily for me, he dug me immediately. He found me amusing, and he and I paired off, he became my gin partner. He was the Gary Cooper of directors. He was a ‘Yup,’ ‘Nope’ guy. He was like a ventriloquist, he barely opened his mouth. I never heard him laugh, but I saw him smile a lot.” Professionally, Buttons said, “He gave me a sense of freedom. From the first day he let me make up my own dialogue and we started to build from there.… There was something to be picked up from him that you don’t get from many other people. Even though he was taciturn, he had a special quality about him.… He was different, somehow or other. He was like a counter-puncher, he’d see the openings and fill them in with his own cement. He had a great instinctive sense.… It would be a very tall order to second-guess him or argue with him.” Unlike many people, Buttons called him Howard from the outset, and there was never a problem.
Work soon began on the action that made everyone the most nervous—the catching of rhinos. Although stunt doubles, notably Hawks’s old friend Cary Lofton, were on hand, all the actors, at their director’s encouragement, intended not to use them, particularly Wayne. Veteran hunter Willy de Beer’s truck was rigged so that the animal catcher did his work from inside the cab, but that wasn’t very photogenic, in Hawks’s opinion, so a seat was affixed to the left front fender. This made the actors as visible as a large hood ornament but also very vulnerable. As soon as Wayne arrived, he grandly announced, “That de Vargas isn’t going to ride in the bucket seat anymore. I’m going to ride in it!,” and with very little practice, he proceeded to show everyone how it should be done. Buttons was cast in the role of a former New York taxi driver now at the wheel of the catcher’s truck. “I’m the worst driver in the world, which is ironic, but they taught me,” Buttons confessed. “They doubled me only for the long shots of really tough driving.”
John Wayne always said, “The most fun I ever had on any picture was on Hatari!” But Hawks later revealed that Wayne, who admitted to being scared during much of the hunting action, “had the feeling with every swerve that the car was going to overturn as he hung on for dear life, out in the open with only a seat belt for support, motor roaring, body jarring every-which-way, animals kicking dirt and rocks and the thunder of hundreds of hooves increasing the din in his ears.
“Adding to the catcher’s problems—and ‘excitement,’ as Duke preferred to call it—was the game’s total unpredictability. They would, on a whim, suddenly switch from smooth plain to long grass, the whole territory being full of hidden holes or obstacles which could spell disaster in a second. Duke remarked that the zebras were the smartest at eluding the car as they headed for the rocky edges of the forest as though completely aware that no speeding vehicle could move through the boulders.”
Throughout December, depending upon the animals, they shot sequences with rhinos, buffalos, giraffes, hartebeests and wildebeests, elephants, and zebras. “We were always on the alert, like a military alert,” Red Buttons said, “for when the spotters would spot some animals, and then we’d all have to move out on the double.” Enthusiasm ran strong, even though the drivers were getting lost all the time and it
seemed to take forever to get the animals to do what was needed. As far as the performances were concerned, Hawks said very little to anybody. “At first, I thought, ‘I am an actor,’ you know, and I wanted to know what I should be doing,” de Vargas recalled. “But we learned a lot just from being around the men who did this, and eventually I saw that Hawks had us mesmerized, because we actually became part of it. We were animal catchers.”
Gregg arrived to spend Christmas with his father and ended up staying much longer than planned. Shortly after the first of the year, Hawks and the editor, Stuart Gilmore, put together some cut footage to send back to Hollywood to placate Paramount executives. Once they were caught, quite a few animals were shipped to Los Angeles, both for future use in the picture and for distribution, by agreement, to various zoos; Hawks was particularly concerned, probably as much for publicity reasons as emotional ones, that they be well cared for.
The last week of January, Hawks’s unit returned to the Arusha base, where all the scenes set around the fictional compound were filmed. The baby elephants really did seem to come to think of Elsa Martinelli as their mother, as it appears in the film, and the sequence in which Red Buttons captures hundreds of monkeys by sending up a rocket to drop a giant net over a large tree was a particular nail-biter. The technique had been developed in England in the 1950s, but the special-effects man in charge was terribly nervous about proceeding with the scene. “He postponed it five days because he could feel a whisper of wind,” Hawks recalled. “He didn’t want any wind. We had to move people back a quarter of a mile behind barricades because we didn’t know where the rocket was going to go. None of us thought it was going to work, really. But it worked beautifully the very first time.”
That was the work side of things. Just as in the film, however, there were deep personal tensions working beneath the surface of what appeared to be a highly engaged, sympathetic group of people. Any film shoot creates a world of its own for the weeks or months it lasts, a feeling accentuated on a distant location that, in this case, was virtually out of touch with the rest of civilization. Red Buttons testified, “I found out for the first time that there was a world where nobody heard of Frank Sinatra.” Buttons also explained that after hours, “It was not one big group. Duke and Howard, they’d have their little drink together. Some of us lived in private houses with lots of servants. There wasn’t much social life except for those that lived in the hotel in Arusha, and they’d drink at the bar.” Buttons did not know Wayne and didn’t agree with him politically, but he was happy to find that Wayne seemed to be very fair. “We all got to Africa right after JFK was elected. John Wayne said, ‘I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president and I hope he does a good job.” For Wayne, who was initially accompanied on location by his wife, Pilar, and his young daughter, this was a vacation, a relief after the rigors of producing, directing, financing, and acting in his $12 million personal project, The Alamo, which had opened in October. Elsa Martinelli was initially apprehensive that Wayne would take his cue from the story and make life difficult for her until she proved herself, but she found him a true gentleman; she became his chess partner throughout the shoot and often cooked pasta for him and Hawks at her house. According to Martinelli, later, after his wife left, Wayne started an affair with a blond woman who lived in Arusha, but he was so discreet that no one ever found out who it was.
At one point, there was a startling showdown between Wayne and Hawks. Assistant director Bud Brill said, “Duke Wayne got mad when Gregg Hawks slapped his lovely little girl or did something physical like that, and he said, ‘If you do that one more time, I’ll break your goddamned neck.’ Then he looked up and saw Howard there with a big grin on his face.”
The filming was a great adventure for everyone, but for a few it was a moving, life-altering experience. Hardy Kruger, accompanied by his wife, was so deeply affected by Africa that he arranged to purchase a portion of the compound after the shoot and has spent a good deal of his life there since. Although he didn’t take a home, Red Buttons, also there with his wife, reacted the same way. “Of any of my locations, this one had the most profound effect on me. I never thought it would happen, but a tranquility came over me, gradually, and it really stayed with me. The reason it was so meaningful to me was that I was from cement, from the Lower East Side.… Looking at Mount Kilimanjaro, … on clear days, which they mostly were, … you’d see the snowcaps, and you could almost believe what the natives believed, that God resided up there.… Part of it has been in my soul ever since.” Even Bud Brill, who was given such a hard time by Hawks, said, “I ended up falling in love with the country.”
Most of the difficulties centered on the French contingent. Early on, Hawks confided to Martinelli that he was having trouble figuring out how to use Gerard Blain, for the simple reason that he looked so short next to all the other actors, especially Wayne. Just as he had dressed the slight Monty Clift in black to allow him to cut a stronger profile, Hawks realized he would have to do the same with Blain. “Unless I dress him up,” he confessed, “nobody will believe he’s a big game hunter in the heart of Africa capable of stealing his best buddy’s girlfriend.” His short stature also caused the director “to set him off from the others” visually and dramatically. “That’s how Hawks worked,” observed Martinelli. Red Buttons elaborated on Hawks’s technique by saying, “It was improvisational, but then again it wasn’t, because Howard had this all mapped out in his head. He played his people, he saw what they were and what they could do, who he could pair up, who he couldn’t.” It was Bud Brill’s impression that with the possible exceptions of Wayne, Buttons, and Martinelli, “The actors were all scared to death of him, but he had a great knack of developing things as they went along.” When Blain turned up all in black for his first scene—“he looked like he stepped out of a Fritz Lang movie,” said Martinelli—Wayne could barely contain himself. That evening, she noted that he told Hawks, “‘Dear Howard, only I know how much it took for you to make Montgomery Clift believable in Red River. … I hope you have the same success with this little French actor.’ They knew each other so well nothing could escape them. Hawks simply answered: ‘A great deal of Montgomery Clift’s success belongs to you, so I hope you’ll help me teach Blain at least two things, to fistfight and to hold a gun.’”
Blain recalled that, since Hawks had invited all the actors to feel free to contribute ideas for scenes, he suggested a way to climax the sharpshooting scene between him and Hardy Kruger, whose character had previously decked Blain with a punch. “I proposed to Howard Hawks, … what do you think if I give my rifle to Wayne and, in the same movement, turn around and hit Kruger, knock him down, then help him up and shake hands? This was my contribution, and Hawks used it.” According to Martinelli, however, there was an unpleasant stinger to it. After the first run-through, Wayne supposedly told the Frenchman that the only way for a shorter man to knock down a taller rival was with an uppercut. After the scene was over, Blain pointedly told Wayne not to offer any more advice. The whole set froze, but Wayne just shrugged him off.
But things deteriorated between the two, mainly due to politics and Blain’s undiplomatic decision to speak his mind to the right-wing star about capital punishment, the Bay of Pigs, and so on. Wayne, who didn’t mind a legitimate argument, just got fed up. Blain should have known who would win this war, but he persisted, the result being that his part was diminished. The way Blain saw it, “At the beginning, my role was very important, more like Montgomery Clift in Red River. Little by little, it got changed. Unfortunately for me, Hawks changed it during the shooting. He improvised a lot and, because Hardy Kruger knew English a lot better, I was at a great disadvantage.”
But considerably more annoying to Hawks was Michele Girardon. The director had taken a great personal interest in her from the beginning, bringing her to Hollywood before the shoot and advising the inexperienced actress in his usual Pygmalionesque way. But there was much more to it than that. “Howard Hawks loved Michele
Girardon,” said Gerard Blain, “but she refused all his advances.” This incensed Hawks, and he punished her as well by slicing her part to the minimum, although Blain felt that he “kept cutting and changing her role because he realized she wasn’t much good. He really wasn’t much of an actor’s director. But if Michele had accepted the advances of Howard Hawks, it would have been a much different film.” Hawks’s frustration generated considerable tension on the set, which only increased when certain insiders realized that Girardon was carrying on the most furtive of affairs with Russell Harlan. No one knows if Hawks ever found out about that.
Instead, Hawks decided to forgive Chance for walking out on him in California and invited her to stay with him in Arusha. Chance arranged to cover the shoot for Jours de France, but this put her in direct conflict with Willy Rizzo, the representative of arch-competitor Paris Match. Chance and Rizzo hated each other on sight. “Since Rizzo was the lover of Elsa Martinelli, the lead, and I was the mistress of the director-producer, there was a rivalry,” she said, and the Italian team won. “Martinelli would turn away from my camera whenever I tried to take her, and Rizzo was always running me down,” Chance complained, and there wasn’t much Hawks could do about it. Chance and Paul Helmick, who was sharing Hawks’s house, didn’t hit it off either, and then Chance and Red Buttons’s wife were involved in a Jeep accident. It was all just too much for everybody, and Chance finally left to go on a real safari, returning periodically to pay brief visits to Hawks on location. According to Martinelli, Hawks also developed a serious interest in a beautiful woman who owned a ranch near Arusha.
Other visitors to the location included William Holden, who was co-owner of the Mount Kenya Safari Club to the north and spent much of the rest of his life in Africa; Rosalind Russell and Frederick Brisson; Ed Lasker; and the Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who surprised his friend Martinelli one night while on his way through Africa with Alberto Moravia. The company was advised, for diplomatic reasons, to give a luncheon for Julius Nyerere, the nationalist leader who would take control of Tanganyika when the British departed in December 1961; joined with the island of Zanzibar, the country would be renamed Tanzania. A fabulous spread of food was prepared at the compound, everyone was on his best behavior, and Nyerere even professed a familiarity with Hawks’s work. Hawks was solicitous and friendly in return, but the decorous occasion suddenly turned acutely embarrassing when Hawks, who was seated at the table between Nyerere and Gregg, heard his son blurt out, “Dad, we never eat with black people at home. Why are we doing it now?” Hawks was at a total loss to recover from that one. After Nyerere left, Wayne privately disparaged him and everything he stood for, feeling that what Africa needed was a strong dose of capitalistic enterprise, not socialism and nationalization. He even said, “I really think that if conditions had remained more to the white establishment that I would have gone back there and started a company, a safari deal, in which the men could rope the animals and tag them instead of killing them.” Blain recalled hearing Wayne say nasty things about the local blacks, but he felt that Hawks, whom he realized was an archconservative, “was neither one way nor the other” about them.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 79