Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  That the old days were quickly coming to a close was signaled by any number of events. In 1967, Jack Warner, one of Hawks’s oldest associates in Hollywood, sold controlling interest in Warner Bros. to Seven Arts. In May 1968, Hawks was devastated by the death of Charles Feldman, at sixty-three. Except for Victor Fleming, Hawks had probably been closer to Feldman than to anyone else at the peak of their friendship, and much of what Hawks had accomplished in his career could not have happened without him. Despite warnings at the time of his operation for prostate cancer, Feldman had, if anything, accelerated his career in its wake, producing a string of films through the 1960s that included The Group, the smash hit comedy What’s New, Pussycat? and the extravaganza Casino Royale. Feldman had also brought Woody Allen into motion pictures with the latter two films and was preparing to produce Allen’s directorial debut, Take the Money and Run, before his death. The month before he died, Feldman married a French socialite, Clotilde Barot, a move controversial among his friends since it entitled her to at least 50 percent of his vast estate. Hawks and Feldman’s lives had not been as intimately entwined in recent years as they had been before, but his friend’s death clearly marked the end of something for the director, and coincidentally gave him something less of a foothold in Hollywood. Eight months later, on January 10, 1969, Hawks’s brother William died after enduring a three-month respiratory illness.

  By now, Hawks was spending more time in Palm Springs and less in Los Angeles. In late 1967, he gave up his rented house at 502 North Hillcrest Drive in Beverly Hills, but he was charged by the owner for damage to the premises in a suit that was settled out of court. Hawks then moved to a penthouse apartment at the fabled Sunset Towers, a bit past its heyday but still a classy address, with its share of models and young actresses, whom Hawks liked to invite to his balcony to have a drink and watch the sunset. One of the resident girls he struck up a close friendship with was Sondra Currie, a petite redhead barely out of her teens who took to Hawks in a big way. “He was a gas,” she enthused. “A tremendous sense of humor, a real old-fashioned man’s man. I really didn’t know that he was as important as he was. My mother did—she used to say, ‘Sandy, don’t you realize who he is?’

  “We really hit it off.… I think I was more of a mild amusement to him, but we did have a close friendship for quite awhile.” Currie often accompanied Hawks and Gregg on off-road racing trips to Baja California and had quasiromantic feelings about the old man. “I used to get very angry at him that there was such a big age difference,” she admitted. “I felt very deprived, because we really, genuinely had such a good time together.”

  As Gregg entered his teens, Hawks spent an increasing amount of time with him, spoiling him with an array of dirt and racing bikes and riding with him and his friends in the desert around Palm Springs. If Hawks ever doted on anyone and loved someone completely, it was Gregg, who was far from the easiest kid to be around much of the time. But he became an excellent rider; he began entering races as soon as he could, winning quite a few of them.

  In 1969, in the wake of the success of Bonnie and Clyde, Hawks briefly flirted with a story about the Kate (Ma) Barker–Alvin Karpis gang, which was written by William Faulkner’s young brother, Murry Faulkner. Though the project was dropped, Murry Faulkner wrote to Hawks, saying that the director was “one of the two men in Hollywood of whom I heard my brother speak in frank and voluntary admiration.”

  Later that year, Hawks received overtures from a new company in town, Cinema Center Films, which had a distribution agreement with another start-up firm, National General Pictures. Developing a slate of pictures under the auspices of the company chief, Gordon Stulberg, and a young executive named Jere Henshaw, Cinema Center was anxious to sign some big names in order to establish instant credibility. Along with William Wyler, Hawks was one of the last of the great generation of directors who started in the silent era and could still, with the right project, deliver big stars and big grosses. As far as the company was concerned, Hawks’s name meant money in the bank as long as he stuck to Westerns, so they offered him a choice.

  First was Monte Walsh, an adaptation of a Western novel by Jack Schaefer about aging, obsolete cowboys that might conceivably have served as a vehicle for Wayne and another actor suitable to Hawks, such as Mitchum or Holden. But Lee Marvin was set to star, and the actor instantly dashed his hopes of working with Hawks by turning up for his meeting with the director roaring drunk. Jack Palance ended up costarring with Marvin under first-time director William Fraker, with dull results.

  Hawks was always ready to work with Wayne if he could find a good story, an increasingly difficult proposition given the great star’s age, girth, and health; in his one outstanding film after El Dorado, True Grit, Wayne virtually parodied his usual persona. Hawks found some potential in a story by Burton Wohl, who had written a handful of films through the 1960s, involving a series of train robberies of Union gold shipments by the Confederates and the efforts of a U.S. captain to track down the informers on his own side. Although at sixty-three now rather old to be playing the vengeful officer, Wayne would still be accepted in such a part, and Hawks was hopeful of getting Mitchum to play opposite him again as his Rebel counterpart who, after the war, teams up with him to find the culprits.

  To write the script, Hawks tried straightaway to hire Leigh Brackett, but she was just about to leave on a trip around the world and could not accept. Instead, he went with Wohl, who, like numerous other writers who had never worked with Hawks, was unnerved by his lack of clear instructions and his long absences. As Brackett put it, “Howard drives writers right up the wall. He will throw you a whole bunch of stuff and say: ‘This is what I want.’ And then he goes away and you don’t see him again for weeks.… He doesn’t go into all the ramifications of motivation—that’s what he’s paying you for.”

  Motivation and background were particularly lacking in Rio Lobo: after two hours of the finished film, one knows absolutely nothing about John Wayne’s character except that he was in the army; he exists as a completely abstract creation, a functional figure only. It was Hawks’s desire to bend the story as much as possible back toward Rio Bravo and El Dorado, which is what the second half of the tale became in reworked form. When Brackett returned from her travels at the beginning of December 1969, Hawks got rid of Wohl and brought her onboard, where she remained for nearly four months, working against her better instincts for avoiding repetition by providing just that, a reconfiguration of her, and her boss’s, previous hits. “Most of what I did on Rio Lobo was to try and patch over the holes.… I was unhappy that he went back to the same old ending of the trade, because it was done beautifully in Rio Bravo and done over again in El Dorado.”

  In the form the script finally took, Wayne’s Cord McNally, for strictly private reasons, becomes involved in yet another battle over land rights, trying to help the little guy fight off yet another big bully with a raft of gun-slingers in his employ. This time, the ragtag group consists of his former Confederate foe, now his friend, the dashing New Orleans-born Lieutenant Pierre Cordona; a crazy old coot, Phillips, whose land is threatened; Phillips’s son, Tuscarora, who lands in jail; and a beautiful young woman, Shasta, who has reasons of her own for fighting the bad men who have taken over the town. Working his variations, Hawks had his writers make the sheriff one of the villains so that Wayne and his cohorts had to break into the jail in order to hold out there until the federal marshal arrives, and he played with the exchange-of-hostages climax so as to have the outlaws attempt to throw the dynamite, with less successful results than in Rio Bravo.

  Aside from Wayne and Jack Elam, whose walleyed looniness made him an excellent successor to Brennan, the casting was Hawks’s biggest hobgoblin on the new picture. Like Paramount, Cinema Center was not disposed to paying another star salary in addition to Wayne’s, and Mitchum’s price had gone up since El Dorado. As he had done on Hatari!, Hawks split the intended second lead into two parts for younger men. For the southern lie
utenant, Hawks made the unlikely choice of Jorge Rivero, the handsome young star of some two dozen Mexican movies who was being promoted for a Hollywood career after his first American picture, Soldier Blue; the director decided to go ahead with him after a screen test with Wayne. For Tuscarora, Hawks was determined to hire Chris Mitchum, Robert’s second son. Jere Henshaw was just as adamantly against him, and the stand-off was resolved only when Hawks fulfilled his threat to shut down production in Mexico, which he did for two days, until Mitchum arrived. “I just asked if they wanted to go on their record or mine,” Hawks said. “Chris was on the next plane.”

  For the female lead of Shasta, Hawks had no front-running candidates but was determined to follow his habit of finding a newcomer rather than casting an up-and-coming actress who might have demonstrated some acting talent. Pierre Rissient made tests of a dozen young European prospects for Hawks; one, a beautiful German named Katrine Schaake, interested Hawks greatly. She had played a bit in What’s New, Pussycat? and, according to Rissient, Charles Feldman had been willing to give her a leading role if she would sleep with him, but she refused. Hawks was ready to cast Schaake as Shasta, but at a crucial moment, much as had happened with Françoise Dorléac on Red Line 7000, she couldn’t be found; then, with the start date looming, immigration would not issue her a work permit.

  With this, Hawks was forced into a hasty decision. Cinema Center had tested a beautiful twenty-three-year-old model named Jennifer O’Neill, who had already been under contract to Joseph E. Levine and Paramount but had acted in just one film, Glass Houses, directed by Alexander Singer, the director, coincidentally, of the Burton Wohl–written A Cold Wind in August. Hawks liked what he saw and hurriedly signed her. Married and the mother of a three-year-old daughter, the dark-haired, highly photogenic O’Neill was from a wealthy family; since she was seventeen, she’d been earning $100,000 a year as a model. But she had undergone little acting training, and Hawks had no time to groom her in his preferred fashion.

  On a preproduction trip to Mexico City, Hawks found a local actress, Susana Dosamantes, who had been in a number of films, to play Maria. For the other Mexican woman, Amelita, he tested a model and actress who had appeared in Irvin Kershner’s new film Loving, Sherry Lansing. “He had a very fixed image of what a woman should be,” Lansing observed. “Tall, long hair, long legs, big eyes—a very specific type. Basically, she had to be Lauren Bacall, and I just fit right into the image.

  “He made me go through the exercises. You’d strain your voice so you’d get a husky thing on your vocal cords, and there was a way to push it down to lower it,” Lansing said. Once he cast an actress, “He attempted to control every aspect of your life, how you dressed, what you did in your spare time. The attitude was, ‘If you do this movie, you are required to come to dinner, to be available.’ In his world, you were required to be the image, not the person. It was all illusion.”

  Unlike many of Hawks’s other would-be discoveries, Lansing was not easy to mold. College-educated and with a teaching degree, she was not certain she wanted to act at all and was in therapy at the time to try to resolve her dilemma. Her inclination to introspection and analysis made her a particularly bad match with Hawks, and she was frustrated that “talk with him never went beneath the surface. There was a lack of self-examination. It sounds cool when you read it, but it’s terrible in real life.” Allowing that she was “very conflicted and confused” through the entire experience, Lansing still confessed, “I liked him. I liked him a lot,” adding, “we never had a personal relationship. He never did anything improper.”

  Along with script and casting difficulties, there were other annoyances. To save approximately $1 million in production costs, Hawks and Cinema Center agreed to base the production in Durango, Mexico. However, when the English director Michael Winner, who was preparing a Western called Lawman with Burt Lancaster, got wind of this, he immediately flew to Durango to nail down a lease on the standing movie set there, preempting Hawks by a matter of hours. The title was another problem. The story’s original name was San Timoteo, which everyone knew needed to be changed. Sherry Lansing said, “I remember being in a liquor store with Hawks and he was looking at bottles to try to find a title for the film.” Finally, in the hopes of reminding the public of past glories, Rio Lobo was settled upon.

  Paul Helmick, who had now been with Hawks for more than twenty years, was back again as associate producer, and John Woodcock was paged for another stint as film editor. To shoot the film, Hawks picked William Clothier, who was nearly as old as Hawks, had shot a dozen of Wayne’s pictures, and was known almost exclusively for his fine work on Westerns.

  The film’s most spectacular sequence would be the opening-reel train robbery and getaway, and shooting it required that the company work in Mexico, after all. A usable vintage train and sufficient track were found at Cuernavaca, not far south of Mexico City. A start date of March 16, 1970, was set; after two weeks, the company would move to the familiar standby, Old Tucson, for twenty-five days, followed by a week in Nogales. Twenty-two days back at the Cinema Center Studios in the San Fernando Valley would round out the sixty-five-day schedule on the $5 million production.

  Although there were no dramatic parallels, the idea of a runaway train actually dated back to a sequence Hawks never got to shoot for his very first film, The Road to Glory, forty-five years before. For this elaborate episode, which involved the holdup, the placement of a sack of hornets inside a car, a skirmish between troops, Wayne’s horseback pursuit of the detached cars down an incline, and the train’s precarious stoppage by a series of ropes strung around trees, Hawks engaged the legendary stuntman and second-unit director Yakima Canutt. Though Hawks habitually delegated second-unit work, he was present and involved through the entire shooting of this critical scene. Since the only usable track was the heavily traveled line between Mexico City and Cuernavaca, at times regularly scheduled trains were held on sidings for hours so Hawks could get his shots, resulting in angry words and objects being thrown at the crew.

  One day, an accident was averted when an engineer managed to jump on a rolling train that had lost its brakes and stop it fifty yards from a flatcar on which Hawks and Jorge Rivero were working. The very next day, however, they were back on the flatcar when a car appeared on the tracks, forcing the engineer to jam on the brakes. Hawks was thrown into the camera platform, his left leg cut to the bone, landing him in the Cuernavaca hospital. The seventy-three-year-old director shrugged off the incident, saying, “I get thrown off my motorcycle about once every three weeks when I go riding cross-country in the Palm Springs desert.” In fact, his leg would be much more seriously injured shortly thereafter when, during a long delay in staging the train sequence, he disappeared for some dirt-bike racing and took a bad spill, shutting production down for nearly a week.

  The high altitude at Cuernavaca was not friendly to Wayne, who huffed and puffed and was more reliant than ever upon his longtime double Chuck Roberson to handle the physical scenes; Roberson had exactly the same physique, had long since mastered the star’s walk and movements and was still able to approximate the familiar old Wayne moves. “Hawks and Wayne were really kind of on their last legs at that point,” John Woodcock observed. Hawks himself was a bit taken aback by how much the Duke had changed since they last worked together more than four years before: “Wayne had a hard time getting on and off his horse; he can’t move like a big cat the way he used to. He has to hold his belly in; he’s a different kind of person.”

  But no matter how old Wayne and Hawks were getting, they both still possessed plenty of authority, and Hawks handled himself the same way he always had. Peter Jason, a young actor cast in the secondary role of Lieutenant Forsythe, maintained that Hawks “was one of the clearest directors I’ve ever worked for, even though I never saw a script—he’d just tell you what to say.… So … you knew exactly what to do. But he left it open for you to do it any way you wanted. But there was no question in your mind what you wer
e supposed to do.”

  Jason was also thoroughly impressed by Wayne, especially in the light of his jingoistic, even racist reputation in some circles. “My first day on the set, when John Wayne arrived, was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. Forty people lined up, forty Mexicans, and he walked up to every one of them, shook their hands, and knew their names—‘Hi, Raoul’—knew their families, knew everything about all of them. So they’d all obviously worked on many movies together. It was very impressive to watch the real guys do it. As opposed to today, when nobody even knows who the hell’s on the set. It was a great adventure.”

  Relieved to get the heavy action and Mexico behind them, the company flew by chartered jet to Tucson at the end of the month. The Academy Awards ceremony took place on April 7, and when John Wayne, a heavy sentimental favorite for his rambunctious performance as the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, was leaving for Los Angeles, Hawks told him, “Don’t come back without it.” He returned, victorious, to find the entire cast and crew of Rio Lobo waiting with their backs to him. When they turned around, Wayne was greeted by the sight of everyone, including his horse, wearing an eye patch.

  Hawks rewrote as much as, and very likely more than, usual on location, forcing the actors to memorize several pages of dialogue on the spur of the moment just before the cameras rolled. Wayne was long since used to it, but some of the newcomers to the Hawks method had problems, particularly Jorge Rivero, who “had to translate everything from English to Spanish and back again,” according to the director. But Peter Jason remembered that no matter how many times Hawks instructed Rivero to put some urgency behind his dialogue, “He did it exactly the same every time.” Hawks quickly realized that Rivero “was really too slow, and he didn’t have any authority at all.”