Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Hawks often got up very early in the mornings for brief hunting expeditions, although he never got the leopard he wanted to bag. For publicity reasons, it was felt that great white hunter John Wayne could not leave Africa without shooting an elephant, so it was arranged. As Red Buttons remembered it, it was a disgusting affair. “There was a lot of silent controversy about that.… They really let him take a pot shot. There was a queasy feeling about it.” A still photograph shows the rifle-toting star standing uncomfortably in front of the slain beast, with Hawks looking on impassively. While he later admitted that “there’s no particular thrill in killing an animal,” Wayne added, “When you get over there and you wake up in the morning and you hear the savage sounds of these animals and everything, your hair curls and you grab that gun and you take a different attitude than you did when you were at home saying, ‘Well, I’d never shoot a little deer.’” Wayne occasionally had to exercise his macho in other ways. One night, he decided to challenge Willy Rizzo, who was not much taller than Gerard Blain, to a cognac drinking match. After Rizzo matched him through twelve glasses of the stuff, Wayne finally said, “You’re okay, a real man.”

  The rainy season arrived a month early in 1961, making it virtually impossible to shoot anything but the monkey-tree rocket launch during the first ten days of February. With mostly some chase scenes involving the baby elephants in downtown Arusha left to film, Hawks, Wayne, Martinelli, and Buttons all became ill for a few days, delaying completion of first-unit work until March 5. When the second unit wrapped things up the following day, the exodus out of Africa and back to Hollywood was on. By then, Red Buttons said, “We were ready to go home.”

  After a couple of weeks’ layoff for travel and recuperation, production started up again on the soundstages of the Paramount lot in Hollywood. Ironically, it was the only major studio in town where Hawks had never made at least one film before, and he hadn’t been employed there since working for Jesse Lasky nearly forty years earlier. Many of the animals that had been brought over were temporarily housed on the stages at Paramount. “They were in cages,” Bud Brill remembered, “and they were so dejected.” After the adventure of Africa, coming back to finish the picture on the faux-lodge sets was quite an anticlimax, even if working in Hollywood represented something of a dream come true for all the foreigners. Martinelli was flattered when John Wayne complimented her by inviting her and her four-year-old daughter to stay at his home for the duration of the shoot. “I realized that his way of showing his esteem for me was to insert me in his private sphere,” she said. For moral support and a degree of protection from Hawks, Michele Girardon brought her mother over to stay with her.

  Once the company was back home, the main challenge fell to Leigh Brackett: laying out all the action scenes and looking for ways to connect them. Brackett and Hawks approached it like a puzzle, and for Brackett, the chief satisfaction came from “doing a good job of putting all the pieces together, taking the disparate parts and making it look as though it grew that way.” During the subsequent shooting, she acknowledged, “I was on the set every day, working till ten o’clock at night writing the scene they were going to shoot at nine o’clock the next morning.” Although Bogart remained her favorite, Brackett was impressed with Wayne’s professionalism: “I remember his working with the baby elephant in the scene at the end of Hatari, when the critter gets on the bed and it crashes down. They tried about eighteen takes, and he said, ‘He’s doing it right. I’m not.’ The elephant had his cues down perfectly, but it was Duke who was blowing it. He’s a much more complex person than people give him credit for being.” Wayne was also personally ill at ease, at fifty-three, about playing the romantic scenes with twenty-eight-year-old Martinelli. Hawks took advantage of this by poking fun at his discomfort in the hilarious scene in which Martinelli’s Dallas, forced to be forward if she wants anything to happen with Wayne’s Sean Mercer, corners him and asks, “How do you like to kiss?” He’s so adolescent about it that she’s driven to inquire whether he’s ever been kissed, whereupon he blusters, “Of course I’ve been kissed!”

  Red Buttons was impressed with the atypical way Hawks handled the man-woman relationships. “He was completely unsentimental,” he felt. “The word nostalgia is not in his vocabulary. You’d call him cool, especially the way he treated romance. It was the battle of the sexes, unvarnished.” Gerard Blain found this approach downright weird; he is one of the few people who knew Hawks and worked with him (as opposed to film theorists and critics) who dared to say, “I detected a submerged homosexual in Howard Hawks.”

  Hawks stole from himself in sending Blain and Kruger off to Paris à la A Girl in Every Port, having Kruger say, “It turns out we both know a girl there.” He lifted the ending from The Front Page when he had Wayne call the airport after Martinelli has left to tell authorities not to let her on a plane because “she stole something.” Some of the work was good, some less so, the atmosphere was relaxed, businesslike, and less intense than in Tanganyika. As filming was winding down, word came on May 13 of the death of Gary Cooper, for whom Hatari! had originally been intended. After Bogart, who had died in 1957, and Gable, here was another Hollywood giant gone.

  Production finally came to a close on May 24. Including the break for travel, Hatari! was before the cameras for six months and cost $6,546,000 to make, an unusually high sum for the time, more than the contemporaneous West Side Story. Before the actors departed, Hawks thanked them and talked about doing a follow-up in India called Bengal Tiger with mostly the same cast. As assistant director Bud Brill remembered it, Hawks told a couple of Paramount executives that he had a great idea for a film that he’d like to sell to them. “So he started telling them the story of Hatari! and finally they said, ‘But that’s the story of the film you’re making.’ He said, ‘No, not at all. That’s the film we were supposed to make.’”

  Dimitri Tiomkin had scored most of Hawks’s films since Red River and assumed that he would be doing so on Hatari! Hawks, however, did not want a traditional, bombastic, swellingly exciting soundtrack for this picture, and he instructed the composer to use native instruments when possible and to absolutely avoid strings or woodwinds. Hawks recalled, “He said, ‘That’s a great idea, boss.’ Then he called me the next day and said, ‘You were fooling, weren’t you?’ And I said, “You’re fired, Dimi.’” After a wrong turn with another composer, Hawks called the hottest up-and-coming music man in Hollywood. Henry Mancini had already written a few film scores, but he had recently stirred up excitement with his theme for Blake Edwards’ television series Peter Gunn and was a particular pet at Paramount for his recently completed score for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, due for release in the fall. Excited to work on such a big picture, Mancini was even more impressed when, at their first meeting, Hawks opened up a big box containing all sorts of exotic musical instruments he had brought back from Africa—thumb piano, shell gourds, and two-foot pea pods with seeds inside. “I was entranced and immediately decided to use them in the score,” said Mancini, to whom Hawks also gave tapes of Masai chants.

  Working more closely with Mancini than he normally did with a composer and making a point of sitting in on the recording sessions, Hawks came to him with the specific problem of what to do with a little vignette Stuart Gilmore had cut together of the three baby elephants following after Elsa Martinelli and splashing around in a muddy pond. He shot the unplanned sequence only because the elephants were so crazy about Martinelli, but he was leaning towards cutting it out unless Mancini had any bright ideas. The movements of the elephants put Mancini in mind of boogie-woogie, so he wrote the eight-to-the-bar “Baby Elephant Walk” and thereby created one of the most fondly remembered interludes in the picture.

  For Hatari!, Mancini composed one of the genuinely great film soundtracks, full of lyricism, unusual rhythms, unfamiliar instrumentations, hints of jazz, and African motifs, music that quickened the pulse during the animal chases, deepened the mood created by the setting, accompanied the
action perfectly, and also stood on its own. As Red Buttons put it, “The score is Africa. If you’ve been there, you know.” The album was a bestseller, and Mancini remained a lifelong friend and fan of his director. “Howard was a great gentleman, and he never raised his voice,” Mancini enthused.

  Within three weeks of the wrap, Stuart Gilmore had the film in sufficiently presentable form for Hawks to host a private screening at Paramount. At dinner beforehand and over drinks afterward, Charles Feldman, who had recovered well from his prostate operation, predicted that Hatari! would be a smash, a cinch to gross $20 million or more, a sentiment echoed by Paramount executives, who boldly foresaw it becoming their second biggest hit of all time, behind only The Ten Commandments.

  Feldman also apprised Hawks of the progress on negotiations on the Columbia contract. Columbia was still very interested in the deal, but Hawks was beginning to make impossible demands, such as final say in the event of any dispute with the studio over casting and cutting, from which Feldman had to dissuade him. Hawks told his friend that, for personal and financial reasons, he was leaning toward making his upcoming pictures in Europe. They also discussed John Wayne. Members of the inner circle knew there were concerns about his health, but more pressing was Wayne’s insistence upon being paid tens of thousands of dollars for six weeks of overages on Hatari! It was a situation painfully reminiscent of what had happened on Red River, where the star felt he was getting shortchanged by his friend and boss. Hawks told Feldman he could take care of things man-to-man with Duke and get him to compromise, but Wayne wanted every penny owed him and had to threaten another lawsuit to get it.

  In late June, after completing Hatari! to his satisfaction, Hawks de-camped for Palm Springs to bake in the heat and unwind after the unceasing yearlong effort of making such an ambitious film. He was reasonably pleased, he said, that “the picture turned out to be pretty good, but I think we could have had a hell of a picture. You have to put Wayne with somebody who’s good. Every time I put him with somebody who’s good I end up with a good picture.” For him, Gerard Blain and Hardy Kruger, while perfectly decent actors, simply didn’t combine to equal one Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin, or, specifically, Clark Gable in screen weight or star power.

  In late July, Hawks received a surprising offer. Darryl Zanuck was just then preparing his most ambitious personal project, an adaptation of Cornelius Ryan’s best-selling book about the D-day invasion, The Longest Day. Part of the producer’s plan to maintain absolute control over every aspect of the massive production was to hire three different directors, one to handle the French aspect of the story, another for the German angle, and a third for the Allied side. The last would be the most important, and Zanuck provisionally offered the job to Hawks, but when Hawks’s agent Jack Gordean informed Zanuck that his client would require “a lot of money” and would need to see a script before discussing it, it was enough of a red flag for Zanuck. Another submission Hawks received during this time was The Rounders, a Max Evans novel about two contemporary cowpokes that Burt Kennedy brought to the screen in 1965. Hawks felt the material was initially very funny but ultimately a one-joke affair.

  The first sneak preview of Hatari!, at the United Artists Theater in Long Beach on August 3, was a great success, as was a subsequent one at Stamford Theater in Connecticut. But Paramount, whose other year-end releases were scheduled to be Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Blue Hawaii with Elvis Presley, and The Errand Boy with Jerry Lewis, decided that it wouldn’t be able to book Hatari! into enough top theaters in December to maximize its potential, so the distributor put off its opening until the following summer. This was a disappointment to Hawks and, for this reason, the picture Wayne made at Paramount subsequent to Hatari!, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, was released first. Wayne’s next film, Circus World, was postponed, and Paramount and Hawks discussed a possible quick project with the actor. Jack Gordean then told Paramount executives that, “Howard has always liked The Maltese Falcon, and he feels he can make this a very exciting film with Wayne doing the Bogart role.”

  When the issue of script credit on Hatari! came up, Hawks strongly felt that credit should read, “Screenplay by Leigh Brackett, original story by Harry Kurnitz.” Given that what Frank and Tom Waldman wrote bore only occasional resemblance to the finished film and that Brackett had been on the set to write virtually all the dialogue, Hawks said, “I do not think that the contribution the Waldman brothers made to the script warrants giving them credit on the screen.” The brothers filed a protest with the Writers Guild but did not prevail.

  Despite all the extra time Paramount had to generate publicity and its boast that it would back Hatari! with “the biggest all-media showman-ship campaign in history,” Hawks began to feel that the studio was blowing it and went to New York “to raise hell,” as Paul Helmick put it, with marketing executives. There was another side to the publicity, however, that pleased Hawks enormously. Beginning on May 21, 1962, the highbrow Museum of Modern Art in New York launched a three-month retrospective of Hawks’s career, the first of its kind in the United States. Today, such an event would seem richly deserved and nothing out of the ordinary. But just then the passion for, and achievement of, European art cinema was at its zenith, with gods such as Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, and Buñuel at the peak of their powers and reputation. In this climate, an extended tribute to a Hollywood entertainer whose last four films had been a comedy about a youth potion, a gaudy musical, a lackluster Egyptian epic, and a Western featuring John Wayne and a couple of pop singers, and whose new picture was being promoted with coloring books and baby-elephant music, was greeted at best with some skepticism, at worst with outright derision.

  The series was the brainchild of Peter Bogdanovich, then an intense twenty-two-year-old film buff, occasional theater director, and aspiring critic, Hollywood chronicler, and film director. A couple of years earlier, his critic friends Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer had been raving about Howard Hawks, and Bogdanovich had admitted that he hadn’t seen much by him. “Bringing Up Baby hadn’t been seen in New York in years,” Bogdanovich recalled, “and Gene, Andy, and I made a list of all the Howard Hawks films we wanted to see.” The young men then persuaded the New Yorker Theater’s Dan Talbot to stage a two-week series called “The Forgotten Film” in January 1961. Of the twenty-eight films on the program, eleven were by Hawks. “I saw all the Hawks films and was blown away,” Bogdanovich said. “On one Saturday we showed The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not, and we had lines around the block. This was our first hint that this whole Bogart thing was happening. At Bringing Up Baby, people were screaming with laughter. I had to see it three times.”

  This, then, was the beginning of the Howard Hawks cult in America. When the Hatari! release date was firmed up, Richard Griffith, the curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art, agreed to stage the series if Bogdanovich could convince Paramount to pay for it. This done, Bogdanovich and his then wife, Polly Platt, traveled to Hollywood to meet the great man and interview him in his Paramount office. “He was very cool, very straight,” Bogdanovich remembered. “He sat there smoking Kents. He didn’t laugh much, but when Polly made a mistake with the tape recorder and taped over a half hour, it didn’t faze him at all; he said we could just do it again.” The couple spent two or three days talking to Hawks.

  When he was in New York for the Hatari! opening, Hawks appeared at the museum, where Bogdanovich saw him again briefly. The series “was very successful, very popular,” Bogdanovich said. “It was unusual for its time. People were just getting hip to the idea that Howard Hawks was good.” Bogdanovich’s pioneering monograph, The Cinema of Howard Hawks, emphasized the irony of Hawks’s relative neglect in his native land, given that “he is probably the most typical American director of all,” and stressed the fact that domestic recognition was coming only in the wake of his discovery by the French. Also published in the wake of the series was Andrew Sarris’s penetrating two-part article in Films
and Filming, “The World of Howard Hawks,” the first in-depth auteurist consideration of Hawks’s career written in English. In December 1962, the young cutting-edge British critics added their voices in support of Hawks, as the bold Movie magazine put Hatari! on its cover and devoted most of the issue to the director, with articles by V. F. Perkins, Robin Wood, and Mark Shivas, among others.