Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  In his will, Hawks divided up his holdings among all his children but Kitty, whom he excluded on the basis that “her mother is well able to make such provision.” Royalties rolled in on many of Hawks’s films, and do so to this day, which David, Barbara, and Gregg continue to collect. Gregg inherited the Palm Springs house and was the beneficiary of a considerable trust set up by Hawks and Dee upon their divorce.

  In the months after Hawks died, Cary Grant would periodically telephone Peter Bogdanovich, a brilliant vocal mimic, and say, “Peter, do Howard for me.” Bogdanovich said, “The last times I saw both Cary Grant and John Wayne, they both talked about Howard, about missing him.” Hawks was gone, but there was no forgetting him.

  40

  Posterity

  All of Howard Hawks’s wives outlived him. Athole spent the remainder of her years in a country club–like nursing home in the San Fernando Valley. Though she lived the quietest of lives and could not have been further from the limelight, she still managed to stir up some unwanted controversy before she died when a tabloid journalist visiting the home under false pretenses managed to get her to say some scurrilous things about her famous sister Norma’s deteriorated condition toward the end. Athole passed away, at eighty-four, on March 17, 1985.

  Slim, after her generally exciting and socially illustrious marriage to Leland Hayward came to an end in 1959, wed an even wealthier man, the British banker Kenneth Keith, in 1962; when he was knighted, she became Lady Nancy Keith. However, this marriage was virtually stillborn from the outset, and it ended in 1972. Slim spent the remainder of her years as a doyenne of New York society, with a circle that included Babe Paley, Lauren Bacall, Irene Selznick, Jerome Robbins, Mike Nichols, and, most famously, Truman Capote; she was one of Capote’s closest confidants until she broke with him forever over what she saw as his betrayal of her in his catty story “La Côte Basque.” She died on April 6, 1990, and her entertaining autobiography, Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life, was published posthumously later that year.

  Married to the fabulously wealthy, CIA-connected businessman Stuart W. Cramer III, who was formerly wed to Jean Peters and Terry Moore, Dee was a fixture on the Bel-Air–Beverly Hills social circuit until she and her husband moved to Palm Springs several years ago. Dee says she intends to write a book about both Hawks and Groucho Marx, claiming, “No one understands them the way I do. I know things nobody else knows.”

  Peter John Ward Hawks, Athole’s son by John Ward adopted by Howard Hawks, worked in aviation in the San Francisco area all his life. His first wife, Shirley Godfrey, died in 1973, and he subsequently married and was divorced from Norma Baldwin, who piloted her own private chartered plane. Peter and Shirley had three daughters. The eldest, Jamin, is an attorney, while Kate, who has a son, and Celia, who has two sons, work in aviation as did their father, who died on July 22, 1989, at his home in Woodside, south of San Francisco.

  David Hawks, married in 1975 to the film costumer Virginia (Ginger) Hadfield after his divorce from Judy Webb, had a long career as an assistant director, working for many years on the M*A*S*H TV series before retiring in the early 1990s. He has two daughters by his first marriage, Darren and Jessica. In the early 1990s, producer-director Irwin Winkler asked David to appear as his father in Guilty by Suspicion, a film about the Hollywood blacklist that included a scene of Darryl Zanuck watching dailies from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. When David turned the offer down, Winkler decided not to actually show “Hawks” on-screen in the picture.

  Barbara Hawks McCampbell and her husband, Don, moved from the western San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles to Palm Springs in the early 1990s, as Barbara always wanted to do. She works in real estate in the area and rides her horse regularly. Both of their daughters, Carrie and Tracey, are married, and Carrie has a daughter and a son.

  Kitty Hawks worked for a number of years as a Hollywood agent with ICM. From 1976 to 1983 she was married to Ned Tanen, a high-powered executive and producer who, at the time of their marriage, was in charge of production at Universal Pictures. After their divorce, Kitty returned to New York City, where she works in interior decoration.

  Gregg Hawks sold his father’s Palm Springs house, has continued racing motorcycles, and for some years now has run a motorcycle repair and customizing business called Sport Engineering in Van Nuys, California. He and his wife, Penny, live in Santa Monica.

  With several of Hawks’s films more or less officially installed as classics by the time he died, his work enjoyed renewed life on the revival, retrospective, university, and museum circuits in the years that followed. Five years after his death, three major books on his work were published: Joseph McBride’s career interview, Hawks on Hawks, assembled from the many discussions the author had with the director over the years; academic Leland A. Poague’s learned critical study Howard Hawks; and the late Gerald Mast’s Howard Hawks, Storyteller. Dauntingly detailed, impressively erudite, and exhausting at times in its thorough reading of the films, Mast’s work stands, after Robin Wood’s book, as the most convincing and strongly argued full-length case on behalf of Hawks’s status as a major artist. Then, in 1987, came the exceedingly bizarre labor of love, Clark Branson’s Howard Hawks; A Jungian Study.

  Any number of other spirited celebrations of Hawks’s achievements appeared over the years. Molly Haskell’s essay in Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary is particularly outstanding, and in a 1993 selection of the thirty best American movies ever made, the L.A. Weekly, a very film-wise alternative newspaper, ranked Rio Bravo third and His Girl Friday fifth; Chaplin and Welles were the only other directors to also claim two titles on the list.

  In this light, it is surprising that James Bernardoni would assert, in his stimulating 1991 book The New Hollywood, that there was a “lack of solid, definitive criticism in support of Hawks’s growing reputation” within the literature on film. In evaluating the work of significant directors since the late 1960s, the late Bernardoni persuasively writes that Hawks and Hitchcock have yielded by far the greatest influence on younger filmmakers, but that this influence has not been very much to the good, for complex reasons that he carefully elucidates. Bernardoni felt that it was the lack of strong criticism that “resulted in a rather misleading interpretation of his achievements gaining currency in the New Hollywood, an interpretation that seemed to hold that the lesson to be learned from Hawks was that the most blatantly escapist entertainments would be transformed by the same mysterious alchemy at work in Hawks’s films into works of genuine art. The result was that a number of New Hollywood directors who apparently admired what Hawks had achieved … set out to work within the same genres without fully understanding how Hawks had managed to transcend their inherent limitations.” Bernardoni pointed out Jaws as an example of “another indicator of the aesthetic decline that has befallen the American cinema during the New Hollywood era.”

  Bernardoni concluded that the legacies of both Hawks and Hitchcock were ill-served by their imitators. “The Hawksian tradition in film comedy has been all but ignored; the Hawksian adventure melodrama has been distorted into films that … [lack] Hawks’s subtle (and audience-involving) renderings of action as the expression of morality.”

  The work of Howard Hawks has been called to mind by a great many films by young directors since the 1960s. These homages run from brief tips of the hat, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s prominent placement of Hatari! posters in the background of shots in Contempt, to “stealing,” such as Peter Bogdanovich’s lift of Bringing Up Baby for What’s Up, Doc? and John Carpenter’s appropriation of the basic setup of Rio Bravo for Assault on Precinct 13, to Carpenter’s outright remake of The Thing and Brian De Palma’s contemporary version of Scarface, written by Oliver Stone.

  But the range of filmmakers who have felt moved to acknowledge Hawks’s influence is exceptionally wide; the one consistent element is that most of them are, or have been at certain periods of their careers, very good directors. Other than the oblique, nonverbal one in
Contempt, possibly the first explicit, self-conscious reference to a Hawks film in the work of another director came in Bernardo Bertolucci’s second picture, Before the Revolution, in 1964. In it, the leading character spends a good little while trying to convince his friend to join the Communist Party, then bids him goodbye and heads off into a house. As the friend departs, the hero comes back out and shouts to him, “Agostino, go and see Red River. Don’t miss it.”

  Four years later, Martin Scorsese, in his first feature, the low-budget Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, devoted the first encounter between the central character, played by Harvey Keitel, and an attractive young woman, portrayed by Zina Bethune, to a protracted discussion of John Wayne and The Searchers. Later in the picture, Keitel and Bethune are seen emerging from a revival-house showing of Rio Bravo, discussing Angie Dickinson’s performance. Keitel says, “Well, let me tell ya something. That girl in that picture was a broad.” “What do you mean, a broad?” “A broad! You know, there are girls, and then there are broads. A broad isn’t exactly a virgin.”

  Elsewhere, Scorsese has evinced a special enthusiasm for the “guilty pleasure” of Land of the Pharaohs, and the critic David Ehrenstein, the author of a book on Scorsese, has argued that Sharon Stone’s character in Casino, aside from being based on an actual person, is drawn heavily from Joan Collins’s Princess Nellifer. Scorsese has also said that Scarface was a particularly important influence on him; speaking of Scarface and Bonnie and Clyde, he remarked, with interesting application to his own career, “It’s strange that we don’t normally like people who are killing other people, but the way they’re presented in these films is extremely glamorous.”

  Among other members of the late 1960s film school generation, Walter Hill, at his best, resembles Hawks in his proclivity for terse dialogue, lack of psychological orientation, taste for tough male characters, occasional bent for comedy, and definition of character through action. Although primarily a Fordian, John Milius also displays an affinity for Hawks, as does Michael Mann. Robert Zemeckis is an enormous fan of Rio Bravo, and when he was a critic, Paul Schrader wrote knowledgeably about Hawks’s achievements.

  John Carpenter, who was a student at the University of Southern California when Hawks spoke there, has said, simply, “I consider Howard Hawks to be the greatest American director. He’s the only director I know to have made a great movie in every genre. Critics mention the one-take, moving camera style of Ophüls and Welles but somehow never get around to the amazing one-take opening shot of the original Scarface, made in 1932. Hawks’s sense of comic timing is unsurpassed. Just take a look at His Girl Friday if you’re not convinced. In my opinion, the man literally invented American cinema. He showed us ourselves, the way we are, the way we should be.” After his early success with Halloween, Carpenter announced that his dream was to do a remake of Only Angels Have Wings. Fortunately, he and everyone else who has considered this idea has dropped it, except for Jean-Jacques Annuad, whose medium-length IMAX 3-D venture, Wings of Courage, about real-life fliers in the Andes in the 1930s, draws heavily, and clumsily, upon Hawks’s aviation classic. Equally unfortunate was a remake of The Front Page in 1988 called Switching Channels, which updated the story into the modern television age and reused Hawks’s innovation of turning Hildy Johnson into a woman. Even the special-effects extravaganza Twister lifted its basic romantic triangle directly from His Girl Friday, with the central characters, who are obviously meant for each other, poised for a divorce, and Jami Gertz in the Ralph Bellamy part of the new fiancée who doesn’t fit into the professional group.

  In ways that didn’t necessarily result in on-screen homages, some older directors had a keen appreciation of Hawks’s talents. Some years ago there was a revealing exchange between the late, great English director Michael Powell and a good friend, the old-time Hollywood press agent Max Bercutt, also now gone:

  BERCUTT

  Hawks was a sour man, sour about himself and sour about other people.

  POWELL

  I think he had a very deep understanding of people, what was inside people.

  BERCUTT

  He was a mean man, he didn’t like his wives and they didn’t like him. He had some personality problem, which I think, frankly, concerned his libido. He couldn’t hold his wives. He didn’t have a coterie around him, he didn’t have very close male friends.

  POWELL

  I think you have to dislike people in order to direct great comedy.

  Not surprisingly, Clint Eastwood has named as his top three influences Ford, Hawks, and Anthony Mann, and two of his six favorite films of all time are by Hawks: Red River and The Big Sky. More surprisingly, Robert Benton, the cowriter of Bonnie and Clyde and the director of several films, including Kramer vs. Kramer, has also named Hawks as one of his decisive influences, noting, “I love Hawks. I don’t pretend he’s a greater director than Ford is, but I love who I love.”

  The most famous of the latest generation of Hollywood directors feels the same way about Hawks. Quentin Tarantino has expressed his love for Hawks in numerous ways. When asked to name his favorite director, the answer is always Hawks; identifying his favorite film, he has said that if he had one film with which to spend his last fifteen minutes on earth, it would be Rio Bravo, and he has insisted, “When I’m getting serious about a girl, I show her Rio Bravo, and she better fucking like it.” When he was in Amsterdam writing Pulp Fiction, he spent many of his evenings attending a Hawks retrospective running at a local theater; he based the look of the giant restaurant-nightclub in his film partly on Red Line 7000, and he was inspired in writing his dialogue by His Girl Friday. Ultimately, he believes that “Howard Hawks is the supreme storyteller and entertainer. He’s just too damn enjoyable.”

  One must not judge the master by the work of his pupils. By and large, however, Hawks has attracted a high caliber of students, and it is difficult to agree with Bernardoni that Hawks’s lessons have been misunderstood, even if the salutes and imitations rarely measure up to the originals; after all, how could they? What Hawks achieved in the 1930s and 1940s, when the studio system was at full throttle and movie stars were designed to inhabit a glamorous and rarified world of the imagination, is no longer terribly feasible or even applicable. More important, the way Hawks asserted his personality, his view of the world, and his fantasies was complex and unique; there is no victory to be gained in trying to reproduce it.

  As for Hawks’s own thoughts of preserving his legacy, of ensuring that his accomplishments would live on, his vast, proud ego would certainly relish the appreciation of his work that has continued unabated since his death. As for the rest, as highly as he thought of himself, he never considered writing an autobiography; the thought of immaculately preserving the record of his life and career, as Capra, Cukor, and many others did, couldn’t have been further from his mind. Years after water and mud destroyed many of his papers, scripts, and photographs in the barn at Hog Canyon, Hawks stashed the fraction that remained in his garage in Palm Springs, along with the cars, motorcycles, and tools. When James D’Arc, an enthusiastic young archivist from Brigham Young University, rang the great director’s doorbell in the mid-1970s and asked if he had any papers he would consider donating to a permanent collection, Hawks said, “Sure. Whatever I’ve got is just sitting in the garage gathering dust. Take whatever you want.” For Hawks, a man who lived completely in the present and, in his work, excelled at expressing the living moment between characters and actors, the moments those papers represented were already past. He had already lived them, and posterity was welcome to them.

  Filmography

  Films are listed in order of theatrical release, although some were shot in a different order.

  Silent Period

  Hawks directed a few scenes of The Little Princess (Artcraft Picture Corp. for Famous Players–Lasky, 1917) during the absence of director Marshall Neilan. He also had a hand in directing, probably uncredited, between three and five one-reel comedies starring Monty Bank
s. The first in the series was His Night Out (CBC Distributing Company, 1919), but documentation of titles and accurate credits is scant.

  In 1919, Hawks became involved on the financial end of a company called Associated Producers with producer-directors Marshall Neilan, Allan Dwan, and Allen Holubar. Hawks was not a producer per se and exercised no control over the content or artistic aspects of the pictures, but he was involved on the production side and was present during some of the filming. Again, credits are imprecise at best, but Hawks had a hand in the following productions:

  1920:Go and Get It (Neilan), Dinty (Neilan), The Forbidden Thing (Dwan)

  1921:A Perfect Crime (Dwan), Man-Woman-Marriage (Holubar), Bob Hampton of Placer (Neilan), A Broken Doll (Dwan), Bits of Life (Neilan), The Lotus Eater (Neilan)

  1922:Penrod (Neilan), Fools First (Neilan), Hurricane’s Gal (Holubar)

  1923:Minnie (Neilan), Slander the Woman (Holubar)

  1923

  Quicksands (Agfar Corp. for American Releasing Corp.)

  Producer: Howard Hawks. Director: Jack Conway. Story and screenplay: Hawks. Cinematographers: Harold Rosson, Glen MacWilliams. Length: 6–7 reels. Filmed in Texas, late 1922. Released February 28, 1923. Subsequently acquired by Paramount Famous Lasky Corp., cut to 4,593 feet, rereleased May 21, 1927.