One rather less illustrious filmmaker with whom Hawks became involved was Max Baer Jr. Best known for having played Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies and as the son of the heavyweight boxer whom Hawks had briefly directed before being replaced on The Prizefighter and the Lady in 1932, Baer sought and received Hawks’s help in writing, producing and even editing his first production, Macon County Line, a cheap period melodrama. Hawks didn’t think much of it but was genuinely impressed by how much money it made.
Hawks admitted that he didn’t see much he liked. He hated Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, dismissing it with the often-quoted line, “I can kill four men, take ‘em to the morgue, and bury ’em before he gets one down to the ground in slow motion.” Nor was he thrilled with The Godfather, suggesting that he had long since done it all, and better, in Scarface. Easy Rider he found interesting because “it was kind of a new style and it was well done.” At the same time, he rightly predicted, “I don’t think the picture is going to live as an outstanding picture.” Pierre Rissient took him to see Abraham Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, which he liked, as he did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. By inference, one can conclude that Hawks was both a Robert Redford and a George Roy Hill fan, since the picture during this period that he seemed to like most was Hill’s The Sting. It is easy to see why, since it recapitulated the best of Old Hollywood and represented the sorts of things Hawks himself did well: it was centered on a strong buddy-buddy relationship, traded heavily upon star personalities, injected considerable humor into a dramatic story, and didn’t pretend to be anything more than it was.
Hawks considered some of his early film festival visits to be promotional stops, since he very much regarded himself an active filmmaker who intended to make more pictures. In November 1970, a month before Rio Lobo was released, he participated in a tribute at the Chicago Film Festival. He also made time to visit the Hawks-fanatical Doc Films group at the University of Chicago, which possessed one of the few prints of Scarface then available in the country and published the magazine Focus, which ran the legendary cover article “Who the Hell Is Howard Hawks?” Charles Flynn, who picked Hawks up at the airport on behalf of the group, recalled that the director asked to be taken directly downtown to Abercrombie & Fitch, where he spent a long time inspecting the store’s stock of guns.
In July 1972, Hawks did what nearly every major director of his generation did when they were perceived as being put out to pasture: he served as the president of a film festival jury. Hawks did the honors at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where he was forced to sit through quite a few European art films of the type he generally abhorred and avoided. But in the company of a few admirers, he made a pilgrimage to Pamplona for the running of the bulls, something he had considered filming twenty years before for his unrealized adaptation of The Sun Also Rises. While in Spain, he was approached by the Russian delegation about directing what would have been the first U.S.–Soviet co-production, a dubious distinction that was subsequently claimed by George Cukor’s The Bluebird. Hawks had been responsible for giving the Russian entry at San Sebastian a special prize and, apparently in return, he was told that he could have carte blanche to make whatever he wanted. Provocatively, he proposed “a story that you might call pretty political,” but one that might also be called a direct steal from Some Like It Hot, about a pair of Americans who “are trying to get away from the Russian police, and they go in the back door of the Ballets Russes. And when the cops come in, they’re dancing in the chorus.” Discussions never went very far, but Hawks’s idea was no doubt not quite what the authorities had in mind from the director of Red River and Rio Bravo.
During this period, the project Hawks spoke about more seriously was one based on the World War II friendship of Ernest Hemingway and the photographer Robert Capa. Aside from Sergeant York, Hawks had always steered clear of biographical stories, but he thought that putting the two colorful personalities together in a film could be effective; “the story of one man gets kind of boring, but the story of a friendship is something that lets you make better scenes,” Hawks argued. He never developed a screenplay for it, but he seemed intent upon focusing on numerous seriocomic incidents in the two men’s relationship that he had either witnessed or heard about firsthand; Hemingway he considered fascinating on any number of levels, while Capa was “crazy as a bedbug.” To play Hemingway, Hawks had in mind George C. Scott, who in 1977 so effectively played the Hemingway figure in Islands in the Stream.
In October 1972, Hawks received a special tribute at the San Francisco Film Festival, where the other special guests that year were his old Warner Bros. colleague Raoul Walsh and his Only Angels Have Wings discovery, Rita Hayworth. Hawks and Walsh, who had never been close friends, were cordial and sociable with each other, but Hayworth, whom Hawks had not seen in many years, was in particularly bad shape at the time, embarrassing herself, and turning off Hawks, by becoming falling-down drunk at both the opening-night party and a VIP dinner at Étoile. The Sunday tribute to Hawks lasted practically all day long. Hawks attended a San Francisco 49ers football game while the packed house of mostly young buffs at the Palace of Fine Arts feasted on hours of clips from his films. When he finally appeared, to a standing ovation, he dazzled everyone with his deep tan, aviator glasses, snug suit, imperious air, and repertoire of fabulous stories. He conveyed the impression of a proud military commander who had never lost a battle, a winner, a man apart.
While Hawks seemed quite formidable, intimidating and austere to visitors, even if he was, as always, utterly approachable, Walsh was considerably warmer and more affable. Both Pierre Rissient and his sometime publicity partner in Paris during the 1960s, Bertrand Tavernier, spent a good deal of time with both men. Tavernier placed the comparison on the intellectual and artistic plane: “I can say Walsh is a wider director; his interests were wide, but he … was never able to do anything as controlled as To Have and Have Not and some of Hawks’s comedies. Hawks is a great director, but narrow; he always did the same three or four films. There are people who have a narrow vision of the world, and Hawks is one. You don’t feel the world as you do in a Walsh film.… From [Hawks’s] range he made masterpieces. Sometimes he was a genius.”
In 1973, both Hawks and Walsh were moved significantly further into mainstream recognition by Richard Schickel’s widely seen documentary series, The Men Who Made the Movies, which featured an installment on each of them as well as on Capra, Hitchcock, Wellman, King Vidor, George Cukor, and Vincente Minnelli. As he had done with Bogdanovich, Hawks took Schickel out to the desert for his interview, and a good deal of footage shows Hawks surrounded by off-road motorcyclists, including Gregg, during and after a cross-country race. Schickel guessed that “Howard sees these little adventures as tests for would-be interrogators, a way of determining that your intellectual understanding of his work is matched by a willingness to put theory into practice.”
Schickel also surmised that after having abandoned Los Angeles for good, Hawks led “a rather isolated life,” one that revolved mostly around Gregg for its social side. This was largely true. Hawks’s routine in Palm Springs consisted of twenty laps in the pool upon rising at seven, breakfast, sketching out architectural or design plans and then going into town for a haircut and a chat with his barber, who was one of his few close friends, or just taking a walk before lunch. In the afternoons, he worked on one of his stories or scripts, attended to some business, tinkered with motorcycles, or did some wood or metal work. Some days he would get in a round of golf. Almost every weekend was devoted to Gregg’s teenage-level racing career, starting with quarter midget racing and moving up to motorcycling, in which he’d started winning races when he was fourteen. Among the most frequent visitors to the house were two hulking young auto mechanics named Bunny and Winkie, who helped work on all the Hawks vehicles. A good cook—Hoagy Carmichael always remembered his outstanding lamb stew—Hawks ate healthy, “clean” food and often planned and prepared an entire week-end’s menu
in advance.
During the summer of 1973, when it was clear that John Ford was dying, Hawks went over to see his neighbor several times a week. Hawks said that his one acknowledged superior in the business of directing movies spent most of his time in bed watching old Westerns on television and that the two of them would have a drink and joke about who had stolen what from whom and how they approached things differently, with Hawks ribbing Ford about being so corny and Ford sniping right back about how sarcastic Hawks was. When Hawks visited Ford on August 30, he could tell the end was near. He called John Wayne, who chartered a helicopter to see the great man one last time. Ford died the next night in his sleep.
Among Hawks’s few remaining old friends in the desert were Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Capra, although he saw neither of them often. Between Hawks and Capra there was always a lingering competitiveness and, on Capra’s part, a bit of a condescending attitude that often came out in put-downs of varying tartness. One night Cissy Wellman prepared a dinner party for the two venerable directors, each of whom said, “I can’t stay late,” when he arrived. Naturally, they both stayed until three in the morning. George Kirgo, Ted Wiener, and their wives were among the other guests, and Kirgo swore that he never laughed harder than that night, when the two old men kept topping each other with increasingly far-fetched stories and outright lies. Kirgo recalled how they started getting their stories mixed up, with Capra saying, “Howard, that didn’t happen to you, it happened to me!” and Hawks just sallying forth as if no one had noticed. Later in the evening, however, Capra turned, and, Kirgo recalled, “Capra was never so mean as he was that night. Capra kept putting Howard down, and Howard wouldn’t defend himself. He just laughed. Finally I sensed that Howard felt out of his depth intellectually.”
One reason Hawks felt more comfortable with young people than with old contemporaries is that they wouldn’t challenge or doubt him and would accept whatever he said at his word. Certainly, he found willing acolytes whenever he ventured out. Between April and July 1974, Tom Luddy at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley ran the most complete Hawks retrospective ever organized to date, in that it included the silent films until then thought to be lost: Paid to Love, The Cradle Snatchers, and Trent’s Last Case. Attending the long-delayed American premiere of Trent on the afternoon of April 24, Hawks was so appalled by it that he demanded that the print be thrown out immediately afterward. However, he recovered sufficiently to appear that evening for His Girl Friday and To Have and Have Not, which received the usual rapturous receptions.
At a small discussion with some students and locals, Hawks was challenged by some feminists as to why, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes aside, he had never made a female equivalent of his films about male friendship. Hawks replied straightforwardly that in all his life he had never witnessed the same kind of bonding relationship between women, but he good-naturedly challenged anyone in the group to come up with a good story on such a theme. One of the group, a young actress and writer named Robin Mencken, followed up and spent a couple of days with him. “Howard’s initial problem,” she explained, “was that he could never think of a compelling story that would lead two women to bond with a code of ethics.” But together they fleshed out an idea about two women who become united when one of them has to go to jail and leaves her child with her best friend. Mencken found Hawks incredibly sharp, open, and generous with his time and ideas. Just then, Mencken was up for the leading female part opposite Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in The Fortune, a role that eventually went to Stockard Channing, and Hawks helped her enormously in preparing for her screen test, coaching her on movement, keeping her momentum going, and her best angles. Because she was in Hawks’s hotel room for so many hours, everyone else suspected something else was going on, but Mencken said that there was never a hint of a sexual undercurrent between them.
While in Berkeley, Hawks agreed to speak with three representatives of a radical leftist film journal called Jump Cut. The interviewers’ agenda was to try to pinpoint Hawks’s politics, to steer him away from his usual anecdotes and get him to express his personal philosophy and outlook on relevant issues. From the outset, they knew what they were dealing with, since before the recording session even started, Hawks told them, “If I want to have fun at a party, I’ll tell the Duke, ‘See that guy over there?’ He’s a Red.’” But they wrote that they were prepared to suspend their “aversion to his reactionary romanticism and hail him as a closet subversive, a repressed populist, perhaps even a right-wing anarchist.”
The result was undoubtedly the oddest, most rambling, but in some ways most personal interview with Hawks ever published. In it he railed, as much of his generation did, against the “biased” media that “has turned people against Nixon,” against newfangled school textbooks, against messages—political and otherwise—in motion pictures, and against “sick” pictures, which he defined as “pictures of psychopaths, pictures of strange people, pictures that are nauseating, people that you don’t like to look at or follow—those are sick pictures.” He expressed a revulsion at politics in general and at the “gradual erosion” of ideals he attributed to political life. On the subject of Vietnam, he said, “America lost all over the world by fighting there.” He agreed that it was never a winnable war, saying, “I think that whoever started it in the first place was wrongly advised. They should have said, ‘Go over there and drop a couple of big bombs, and if you don’t feel like doing that, stay out of it.’”
The interviewers actually tried to argue Hawks into supporting the actions of the Symbianese Liberation Army, which had recently kidnapped Patty Hearst, insisting that the radicals were independent, strong-minded individuals with an “adventurous spirit,” just like Hawksian characters. Saying “I think you’re nuts,” Hawks called the SLA members “nitwits” and stated, “I have absolutely no respect for kidnappers or anybody else who tries to get something that way, ’cause I don’t think they’ve got a chance in the world of getting it. I’ve yet to see that these protesters who come into a place and tie themselves up are gaining anything by doing it.”
This, however, led Hawks into a rare discussion of rearing children and a telling illustration of his relationship with Gregg: “I have a youngster eighteen years old. I asked him to trim his hair. He says, ‘I don’t want to.’ I said, ‘O.K., fine.’ I took his car and his motorcycle away from him. He said, ‘Why’d you do that?’ I said, ‘I wanted to; I don’t want you to have ’em.’ I said, ‘I have a perfect right to think just as you do. You can do what you want to, but I don’t have to go along with it.’”
Asked what Gregg was withholding from him by not cutting his hair, Hawks said, “Any desire to do anything I asked him to do. I didn’t like the way he looked. I just said, ‘You don’t want to do it, that’s quite all right, I don’t want to help you. You sail along.’ Didn’t take him very long before he said, ‘I’d rather cut my hair and have some of the things that I get from you.’ I said, ‘Good. I think you’re smart. If you know the way to get ’em, I think you’re doing the right thing.’” Hawks added, “We get along a hell of a lot better now than we did before.”
As his partisans often pointed out, Howard Hawks had never won an Oscar and was nominated only once, but in late 1974, efforts were put in motion to change that situation. Without Hawks’s knowledge, George Kirgo spearheaded a movement to get the board of governors to present Hawks with a special Academy Award. Not only did the members of the board agree, but they also decided to give an honorary Oscar to Jean Renoir. The latter’s health did not permit him to attend, but Hawks was pleased and excited by the long overdue recognition. He was sitting in the orchestra section of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion during the rehearsal the day before when he was tapped on the shoulder. It was Lauren Bacall, there to present the costume design Oscar, to whom he had not spoken in nearly thirty years. Bacall was afraid that he might be gruff with her, but to her surprise he was warm and expressive, delighted to see her. He even invited her out to the desert for a
couple of days after the awards, suggesting that it would be nice to catch up and talk about the old days. Unfortunately, Bacall’s schedule ruled the idea out, and she regretted ever after not having had the opportunity to truly make peace with the man who changed her life.
On April 8, 1975, The Godfather, Part II walked off with six Oscars, all but shutting down its main competition, Chinatown. One of Hawks’s most faithful champions, François Truffaut, was present at the ceremony, having been nominated for directing and writing Day for Night. Who else could have presented Hawks’s honorary award but John Wayne, who ambled out, and claimed that he and Hawks had made four, not five, pictures together, omitting Rio Lobo from the list, and read off some of the more eminent titles in the Hawks filmography. “Now, he’s made a lot of actors jump,” Wayne declared, “so it’s time we made him do the same. Tonight he’s not the director, I am. Hawks, we’re ready to roll! Get your skinny whatchamacallit out here!”
Hawks was greeted with a standing ovation to receive the award that was being presented to “a master American filmmaker whose creative efforts hold a distinguished place in world cinema.” George Kirgo had written what he felt was a strong speech for Hawks to deliver, but the director decided he wanted to prepare his own. At first, he considered something “a little sarcastic,” to wit: “People usually come up here and thank everybody connected with their film, all the people they worked with, but I could stand up here all night, so I’ll just thank a few little people—like Darryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Ernest Hemingway, and Bill Faulkner.” Instead, he decided to recount a story about visiting John Ford out in the desert shortly before the latter’s death. “We got to telling each other things that we’d stolen from each other.… One day he was laughing and he said, ‘There’s something I took from you that beats the whole thing.… I made a picture that wasn’t so good and you made Sergeant York,’ he said, ‘I got the award.’ And he stopped in the middle of laughing … and he said, ‘Well, you’re going to get an award,’ and I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ He said, ‘Goddamn it, you’re going to get an award.’ So I would like to thank the Academy for making that prediction of his come true. Thanks very much.” When he finished, Hawks and Wayne engaged in a little Alphonse-and-Gaston routine of trying to lead the other offstage in opposite directions, then retreated to the pressroom, where Wayne was instantly accused by some journalist of being a racist. The star merely said, “You’re mistaken,” and Hawks backed the Duke up. When the belligerent reporter persisted in his tirade, he was escorted out of the building by security guards.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 88