Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Working at a deliberate but not painfully slow pace over three and a half months, Hawks wrapped the picture in the final week of March, and the editor, Stuart Gilmore, had it ready for its first sneak preview on May 31. At this point it ran 145 minutes, unimaginably long for a light romantic comedy, but Hawks claimed that it played tremendously well in this version, that Universal had never gotten such positive cards from a preview audience. Then executives decided that footage had to come out, and the next sneak, on June 7, was rather less successful than the first. At this, the studio began panicking and, rather than restoring material, deduced that more needed to be removed. The result was an even poorer third preview; inexplicably, this is the version that Universal decided to release.

  Hawks always claimed, inaccurately, that forty minutes were cut—it was actually twenty-five—and insisted that the film was sabotaged in the process. “A comedy can really be ruined by being shortened,” he told Peter Bogdanovich. “If you take out the scene which is planted to make the following scene funny, then the following scene is not funny. It suddenly becomes slow. And every ‘plant’ we had in Man’s Favorite Sport? was taken out.” But there are things that just don’t add up in Hawks’s account of what happened. Paul Helmick, the associate producer, doesn’t remember the reactions to the various cuts having been appreciably different, and there was a full half year between the time of the final sneak preview and the film’s release, time enough for Hawks to fight for a version he liked. At the time of the second preview, Hawks was “very high on his picture,” according to Charles Feldman’s secretary, Grace Dobish, and the director was very pleased with the attention and promotion Universal was lavishing on it. Even in retrospect, while admitting the film’s failure, Hawks refused to blame its shortcomings on Rock Hudson. “Rock tried hard … but Rock is not a comedian,” he told Joseph McBride. “And when you have visualized one person in it, and you’re trying to get that, it’s an awful tough job to do it because you just don’t come out right. And even then we ended up with a pretty good picture.”

  Since his death from AIDS, much has been made of Hudson’s private lifestyle and the veiled homosexual content of some of his films; critics might even point to the opening scene, in which he accidentally produces a driver’s license that identifies him as Abigail, as one example of it. Paul Helmick swears that neither he nor Hawks “had any idea” that Hudson was gay, assuming, along with the public, that he was a he-man just as his image suggested.

  One frustration for Hawks, Leigh Brackett, and everyone else was that Brackett was denied screen credit by the Writers Guild of America, despite the fact that Hawks pushed for it; even the initial writers, Murray and McNeil, felt she deserved it. Brackett noted on her personal copy of the script, “I worked on this final version for four months, writing ahead of the cameras during the shooting but got no credit. The Guild said it was a polish rather than an original contribution.” An outraged Paul Helmick wrote to her, “When I think of all the time you trudged from the office to the stage in the wind and the cold with five different versions of the same scene, it makes me wild to think that such an injustice could happen.”

  Even though numerous Hawks pictures—The Air Circus, Scarface, Come and Get It, Red River—were tampered with after they left the director’s hands, The Big Sky and Man’s Favorite Sport? are the only ones he felt were seriously compromised by studio cutting. The recent reappearance of the full, original The Big Sky proved that there was little qualitative difference between the two versions after all, and there is reason to suspect that Hawks exaggerated the damage done to Man’s Favorite Sport? as well, as a way of rationalizing its relative commercial failure. In fact, the picture performed quite acceptably in its initial engagements, beginning February 5, 1964, and ranked sixth, ninth, and eighth at the box office for three weeks from late February through early March, a time when the top hits in the country were the more sophisticated and astringent comedies Tom Jones and Dr. Strangelove, and the broad, all-star slapstick farce It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Man’s Favorite Sport? ended up with thoroughly average domestic rentals of $2,325,000, twenty-eighth on the charts for the year.

  Mainstream critics, who had begun hearing the isolated proclamations of Hawks’s genius, were not impressed, finding the film slow, old-fashioned, and not up to the level of the director’s revered earlier comedies. It certainly looked bad, as Russell Harlan bathed the studio sets with what appeared to be floodlights, which only emphasized their artificiality, and the lakeside and forest “locations” fairly screamed “back lot.” In addition, some of the early scenes, notably a visit to a touristy music gallery, where Hudson starts up all the machines so that he won’t be overheard when he tells Prentiss and Pershy his deep secret, and a hokey interlude in a revolving hotel bar, where Hudson has to walk to keep up with the seated women, are as creatively impoverished as anything in Hawks, unimaginable in his work during his prime. Yet another reprise of the famous Bringing Up Baby gag, with Hudson walking in step close behind Pershy after she rips her dress, further suggested that Hawks had reached the point of merely recycling old ideas. This put more pressure on the cultists to defend their hero, and no doubt the brightest reading of Man’s Favorite Sport? came from Molly Haskell, who, in a reappraisal seven years later, found herself “moved by the reverberations of a whole substratum of meaning, of sexual antagonism, desire, and despair.” She saw Hudson and Prentiss as Adam and Eve figures in a Garden of Eden, where “Hudson is a virgin, who has written a ‘How to’ book on sex while harboring a deep, fastidious horror of it. His masculinity is a lie.” Prentiss, therefore, “must take the initiative in Hudson’s sexual initiation, for which the fishing exploit is metaphor. Fish are phallic symbols, of course, and there is even a scene in which a loose fish thrashes around inside Hudson’s pants, causing him to jump and jerk uncontrollably.” Haskell less convincingly argued that Hawks was not “an unconscious artist,” positing that he was “far more deliberate and articulate in his vision of the American male than, say, John Cassavetes.”

  Of course, this is just the sort of analysis that Hawks would have gaped at in disbelief, but one could actually go further, to suggest that the film was a send-up, if not a devastating critique, of the entire, vaunted Hawksian ethos of professionalism. The film hinges on the fraudulence of the “expert,” upon there being much less to the great professional than his reputation suggests. To Hudson, Prentiss says, “Of course you’re a phony!” or something close to it, on several occasions. By the time Hudson’s fiancée, played by Charlene Holt, turns up, he’s got a reputation as a ladies’ man, although nothing could be further from the truth. Finally, after winning the tournament, Hudson, in a very uncharacteristic scene for Hawks, confesses his unworthiness to his boss and the other contestants. For those who would make a case against Hawks, they have all the ammunition they need right here, a private confession from the director himself that he isn’t all he’s cracked up to be; it recalls Slim’s indelible private put-down of him: “a great pillar of nothing.”

  But veiled, encoded, symbolic messages were not Hawks’s way. For him, Man’s Favorite Sport? was a decent comedy that was not quite as good as it might have been. In the context of his career, it marked another stage in the lessening of his artistic grip, of his absolute power to make a film come out the way he envisioned it. It was just a hint of how far off the track he would go next time out.

  37

  Fast Cars and Young Women

  “Howard liked young people,” the actor Robert Donner said. “And he had young people around him. I mean, for him it was fast cars and young women or fast women and whatever.” As Howard Hawks got older, the circle he drew around him grew younger and younger; and it wasn’t simply that he was turning into a dirty old man. “He loved the ladies,” said Paramount producer A. C. Lyles, who recalled that for a while in the mid-1960s, there was a constant parade of young lovelies streaming through the Paramount gate to meet with the eminent producer-director. “Yo
u could always tell when someone was going to see Howard on the lot because it was always a willowy blonde with a husky voice.” More than any other active director, the grey fox had the reputation of a starmaker, and while some budding starlets found him alternately intimidating, uncommunicative, and behind the times, others were struck by his extreme cordiality, youthful attitude, and great storytelling abilities.

  But young actresses weren’t the only people who attracted his interest. New actors, writers, assistants, and friends also entered his life. As Gregg entered his teens and found like-minded buddies interested in go-cart and dirt-bike racing, Hawks hung out a great deal with them, giving advice and continuing to ride motorcycles and drive a souped-up car himself. He continued to prefer men and women of action, who liked sports and the outdoors and whom he at least imagined shared his purposeful, uncomplaining, straight-ahead view of life. Hawks had few true close friends as it was; John Wayne he would sometimes see socially, while others, like Cary Grant, he would speak with occasionally over the phone. But his life in Palm Springs was not at all like that of the vast numbers of other desert dwellers in their seventies; due to his son, he was mostly around teenagers and, often, young women.

  One woman who was as close to him as anyone was Cissy Wellman. Born in 1943, she was the fifth child of film director William Wellman and the former Dorothy Coonan, but she did not get along well with her father. “We were too much alike. We had friction and, you know, personality conflict. Dad loved me, but he said, ‘I love you in my own way. I’m just a cantankerous son of a bitch.’ And I loved my dad more than anything.” Hawks was Cissy’s surrogate father. “We understood each other so well that, you know, he was the dad that I always wanted.” Her own father, she recalled, was actually jealous of her relationship with Hawks, with whom he had always maintained a friendly professional rivalry. “He used to say, ‘How come you’re always going out to Palm Springs … with Howard?’ I said, ‘Because we get along.’ Simple. But he would be strange about it.”

  Living mostly in the desert, she felt, cut Hawks off a bit from what was happening in Hollywood, and he rarely attended new movies, preferring to watch television or look at magazines to spot models. Wellman reflected on how even as he entered old age, “Howard had a little-boy way about him. When he laughed, when he would get something, he would get this little-boy, cat-that-swallowed-the-canary grin and he would just … I loved the way he was and his … I miss him. The human, the man that was.… We were friends, we would get into fights, we would just talk and laugh. Go play golf, go fishing. Books he loved. He loved to cook, he taught me about baked potatoes and sour cream and caviar and artichokes. I’d do the artichokes, that would be our dinner. He loved my husband [Robert Donner] and used him in films and they became best friends. It was just wonderful to have that kind of relationship. I loved Howard. I miss him a lot.”

  Donner was impressed by Hawks’s stamina both at work and at play. On the set, he recalled, “He very seldom sat down. Always remember he’d be standing alongside the camera and I was just amazed at his endurance.” When he wasn’t shooting, if he was in Los Angeles Hawks would get into his custom-engineered Corvette “and he used to pride himself on the fact that late at night he could make it from here to Palm Springs in about an hour and a half,” a trip that normally takes two hours. “I mean he just screamed down there. Another thing I remember about him was that his idea of a dry martini was half vermouth and half gin.… And when we would go out to dinner, Howard would have a couple of martinis before dinner, and it amazed me at his age that he could put away a couple of those martinis. And then drive home.”

  Considerable speculation centered upon whether or not Hawks continued to enjoy a sex life in the 1960s and 1970s. Chris Nyby swore that Hawks was basically impotent from the late 1950s on. Robert Donner wasn’t sure, but said that it was his gut feeling that Hawks “was active right up till the day he died.” Pierre Rissient, a French publicist and friend who introduced him to many actresses and shot screen tests for Hawks in Europe, said, “It was very important for him to have the company of women, and there was the sexual impulse behind much of his casting, but he rarely took advantage of his position to do it. He was always trying to impress, but not to seduce.…” On one of Hawks’s European trips, Rissient accompanied him to a festival in Gotenberg, Sweden, “where there were lots of sexy girls. Hawks was stimulated but didn’t take advantage of the situation. But he was interested in the sport of it.”

  Hawks’s good friend Bruce Kessler, a former race-car driver in his twenties who was the script supervisor on Man’s Favorite Sport? and the second-unit director on Red Line 7000, insisted that Hawks did take advantage. “He was very active for a man his age, very interested in women. Not like a dirty old man, but interested. He admired women, and if I was sitting here talking to an attractive girl and Howard walked in, he would say, ‘Well, let’s screen-test her.’ I’d say, ‘Howard, she’s a waitress here, she doesn’t want to be an actress.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, that’s okay, we’ll screen test her anyway.’”

  Hawks maintained an older man–younger man sexual camaraderie with Kessler. “Quite often after a picture was over, not before, he’d invite an actress with a bit part that he’d gotten friendly with to come down to his house in Palm Springs. Then he would call me and say, ‘This girl’s bringing a girlfriend. Would you please come down here?’ … And Howard was sexually active. I mean he was a man who was seventy who was still sexually active. He also gave me some very sage advice. He once said to me, ‘I’ve been married three times, Bruce. And I want to tell you something. Every one of my wives, they loved boating and fishing and playing golf and all these things, and hated Hollywood parties and going to premieres until the day they got married, and from that point on that’s all they wanted to do. And they wouldn’t care about doing the other things.’” Other visitors to Hawks’s Palm Springs house remembered regularly seeing one or more young beauties lying around his pool topless or completely nude, although they never saw Hawks being physical with any of them.

  Yet one more perspective came from George Kirgo, the young writer Hawks hired for Red Line 7000. One morning Kirgo arrived at the studio and was told that Hawks urgently wanted to see him. “I went into his office and he told me to close the door and come sit next to him. I drew up close to him and asked him what it was, and he had the most pleased look on his face and then, in a hushed, very confidential tone, he said in that drawling way of his, ‘George, I got laid last night.’ I didn’t know what to say … and then he went on to explain that he was alone at home in Beverly Hills and he saw someone moving outside his window. He went to look and, of course, it was a beautiful woman who said she was lost or couldn’t find an address or something. So he invited her in and talked to her and gave her a drink, and one thing led to another and so on. It was all just too fantastic, so I didn’t know whether to believe it or not.… Howard did have a very active fantasy life.”

  What is certain is that Hawks needed to have beautiful young women, preferably with a good sense of humor, around him as “ornaments,” as Chance put it, and that they did stimulate him and make him feel younger. Privately, some of his friends maintained that Hawks, in his old age, could become sexually excited given the right incitement, and one recalled overhearing two of the actresses in Red Line 7000 comparing notes on their expertise at getting Hawks aroused. Chance, who saw him whenever he visited Paris, was sure that she was the last important woman in his life, but that doesn’t account for Charlene Holt, who was regularly Hawks’s date in Los Angeles during the mid-1960s and appeared in three of his films during that time. Hawks liked her enormously, and several of Hawks’s friends swear that they were physically intimate; at the same time, no one would exactly describe her as his “girlfriend,” and by 1966 she had married the multimillionaire Los Angeles real estate and construction executive William Alan Tishman. “She was a marvelous, impudent woman,” Kirgo said of her. “No one could one-up Charlene.”

&nb
sp; Much further from his daily thoughts was his first wife, Athole, now sixty-two, who had been living quietly in West Los Angeles for years, seeing few people and basically holding her own. In late summer 1963, she had another relapse and was taken to Edgemont Hospital. Following doctors’ advice, proceedings were initiated to have Athole declared legally incompetent, with her daughter Barbara declared official guardian. Thereafter, Athole was cared for in a series of nursing homes.

  Before Man’s Favorite Sport? came out, Hawks figured he might be staying at Universal and told top production executive Eddie Muhl that he was interested in doing a low-budget car-racing movie as his next production. When the studio manhandled his comedy after the sneak previews, however, he became disgusted with Universal and returned to Paramount, which gladly took him back. At that moment, his agents at Famous Artists tried to push Hawks into an intriguing new project, The Americanization of Emily, but as usual, Hawks preferred pursuing his own ideas.

  Two ventures took precedence. Dating back to the silent days and his fascination with Marshall Neilan’s multipart Bits of Life, Hawks had been intrigued with the possibility of telling multiple stories in one overall narrative. Finally, he saw his chance to try it. “I had three good stories about the racetrack, but none of them would make a picture, so I thought maybe I can put them together.” Paul Helmick felt that Hawks embarked on this ensemble piece, his only film to deal with the 1960s generation, because he “wanted to show that he could make a film without paying John Wayne a million dollars. ‘There are plenty of young people out there who can do it, and I don’t have to pay.’ He was trying to prove something.” But Cissy Wellman, who was in the picture, said, “Red Line he only did because of his son. Gregg was ten and was into cars, and that’s the only reason he did it.”