Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood
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1965
Red Line 7000 (Laurel Productions for Paramount)
Producer and director: Howard Hawks. Screenplay: George Kirgo (and Steve McNeil, Leigh Brackett, uncredited), from a story by Hawks. Cinematographer (Technicolor): Milton Krasner. Editors: Stuart Gilmore, Bill Brame. Music: Nelson Riddle. Songs: “Wildcat Jones” by Carol Connors and Buzz Cason, “Let Me Find Someone New” by Connors and Riddle. Art directors: Hal Pereira, Arthur Lonergan. Set decorators: Sam Comer, Claude E. Carpenter. Costumes: Edith Head. Sound: John Carter, John Wilkinson. Special photographic effects: Paul K. Lerpae. Process photography: Farciot Edouart. Second-unit director: Bruce Kessler. Assistant director: Dick Moder. Unit production manager: Andrew J. Durkus. Running time: 110 minutes. Filmed in Hollywood, January– April 1965; second unit races filmed in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, California, July 1964–January 1965. Released November 9, 1965.
Cast: James Caan (Mike Marsh), Laura Devon (Julie Kazarian), Gail Hire (Holly MacGregor), Charlene Holt (Lindy Bonaparte), John Robert Crawford (Ned Arp), Marianna Hill (Gabrielle “Gaby” Queneau), James Ward (Dan McCall), Norman Alden (Pat Kazarian), George Takei (Kato), Diane Strom (receptionist), Anthony Rogers (Jim Loomis), Carol Connors, Cissy Wellman, Beryl Hammond, Leslie Sommers (waitresses), Forrest Lewis (Jenkins), Dee Hartford (Dinah), Anne Morell (girl in café), John Gabriel (Jake), Robert Donner (Leroy), Thomas A. Stears, Craig Chudy (drivers), Joel Allen (rector), Jerry Lewis (driver).
1967
El Dorado (Laurel Productions for Paramount)
Producer and director: Howard Hawks. Screenplay: Leigh Brackett, from the novel The Stars in Their Courses by Harry Brown. Cinematographer (Technicolor): Harold Rosson. Editor: John Woodcock. Music: Nelson Riddle. Song (“El Dorado”): lyrics, John Gabriel, music, Riddle, sung by George Alexander, accompanied by the Mellomen. Art directors: Hal Pereira, Carl Anderson. Set decorators: Robert Benton, Ray Moyer. Costumes: Edith Head. Sound: John Carter, Charles Grenzbach. Original paintings: Olaf Wieghorst. Special photographic effects: Paul K. Lerpae. Process photography: Farciot Edouart. Associate producer: Paul Helmick. Assistant director: Andrew J. Durkus. Unit production manager: John Coonan. Running time: 126 minutes. Filmed in Old Tucson, Hollywood, October 1965–January 1966. Released in Japan December 17, 1966; in the United States June 9, 1967.
Cast: John Wayne (Cole Thornton), Robert Mitchem (J. P. Harrah), James Caan (Alan Bourdillon “Mississippi” Traherne), Charlene Holt (Maudie), Paul Fix (Doc Miller), Arthur Hunnicutt (Bill Harris), Michele Carey (Joey MacDonald), R. G. Armstrong (Kevin MacDonald), Edward Asner (Bart Jason), Christopher George (Nelse McLeod), Marina Ghane (Maria), John Gabriel (Pedro), Robert Rothwell (Saul MacDonald), Robert Donner (Milt), Anthony Rogers (Dr. Donovan), Victoria George (Jared’s wife), Jim Davis (Jason’s foreman), Anne Newman (Saul’s wife), Diane Strom (Matt’s wife), Johnny Crawford (Luke MacDonald), Adam Roarke (Matt MacDonald), Charles Courtney (Jared MacDonald), Olaf Wieghorst (Swedish gunsmith).
1970
Rio Lobo (Malabar Productions and Cinema Center Films for National General)
Producer and director: Howard Hawks. Screenplay: Burton Wohl, Leigh Brackett, from a story by Wohl. Cinematographer (Technicolor): William Clothier. Editor: John Woodcock. Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Production designer: Robert Smith. Set decorator: William Kiernan. Costume designer: Leah Rhodes. Men’s costumer: Ted Parvin. Women’s Costumer: Patricia Norris. Sound: John Carter. Special effects: A. D. Flowers, Clifford P. Wenger. Technical adviser (train sequence): William Byrne. Title designer and director: Don Record. Associate producer: Paul Helmick. Second-unit director: Yakima Canutt. Assistant director: Mike Moder. Unit production manager: Robert M. Beche. Running time: 114 minutes. Filmed in Cuernavaca, Mexico; Old Tucson; Nogales; Hollywood, March–June 1970. Released December 18, 1970.
Cast: John Wayne (Capt. Cord McNally), Jorge Rivero (Lt. Pierre Cordona), Jennifer O’Neill (Shasta), Jack Elam (Phillips), Chris Mitchum (Tuscarora), Victor French (Ketcham), Susana Dosamantes (Maria Carmen), Sherry Lansing (Amelita), David Huddleston (Dr. Jones), Mike Henry (Sheriff Hendricks), Bill Williams (Sheriff Cronin), Jim Davis (Riley), Dean Smith (Bitey), Robert Donner (Whitey), George Plimpton, Robert Rothwell, Chuck Courtney (Whitey’s henchmen), Edward Faulkner (Lt. Harris), Peter Jason (Lt. Forsythe).
Hawks appeared in the following documentary films devoted to his work:
1967
Howard Hawks: The Great Professional (BBC-TV)
Producer: Barrie Gavin. Director, writer, and narrator: Nicholas Garnham. Director (of Hawks interview) and interviewer: Peter Bogdanovich. Editor: Howard Billingham. Running time: 60 minutes. First broadcast: July 10. Segment of the BBC-TV series The Movies.
1970
Plimpton! Shoot-out at Rio Lobo (David L. Wolper Productions for ABC-TV)
Producer and director: William Kronick. Executive producer: David L. Wolper. Writers: George Plimpton, Kronick. Cinematographers: Michael Margulies, Jules Brenner. Editor: Robert K. Lambert. Music: Walter Scharf. Running time: 52 minutes. First broadcast: December 9.
1973
The Men Who Made the Movies: Howard Hawks (WNET/13, New York, for the Public Broadcasting Service)
Producer, director, writer, and interviewer: Richard Schickel. Cinematographers: John A. Morrill, Erik Daarstad. Editor: Geof Bartz. Narrator: Cliff Robertson. Running time: 58 minutes. First broadcast: November 18.
1978
Ein Verdammt Gutes Leben (A Hell of a Good Life) (Sunset Mark Productions, Munich, in association with Bayerischer Rudfunk, Munich)
Director, writer, and interviewer: Hans C. Blumenberg. Cinematographer: Bodo Kessler. Editor: Inge Gielow. TV Editor: Silvia Koller. Sound: Pat Shea. Production coordinator: Juergen Hellwig. Running time: 58 minutes. First shown: March 2, Berlin Film Festival.
1997
Howard Hawks, American Artist (British Film Institute)
Producer: Paula Jalfond. Director, writer, and interviewer: Kevin Macdonald. Running time: 58 minutes. First shown: January 27, National Film Theatre, London.
Acknowledgments
Even though it only began to take shape years later, this book was truly born at the Directors Guild of America’s Weekend with Howard Hawks in Laguna Beach, California in October 1977. This outstandingly in-depth tribute was organized by David Shepard, then head of special projects for the guild, and moderated by Joseph McBride. It was the intensity of seeing so many Hawks films in the presence of their maker, and then having the opportunity to talk to him immediately and at length, that ignited my excitement for the man and his work that endured throughout the long period of research and writing. Joe McBride, who had edited Focus on Howard Hawks and would eventually edit his numerous interviews with the director into Hawks on Hawks, put the challenge to me to write a biography, and I thank him for all his insight, enthusiasm, and assistance.
Hawks on Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich’s unpublished full-length career interview with the director, now published in condensed form in Who The Devil Made It, were the sources for the majority of Hawks quotes used in the text, and I thank Joe and Peter, who generously provided me with original, unedited copies of their manuscripts.
At the same time, many other Hawks interviews, most of which are listed in the bibliography, have been consulted. Among these, the most useful were the text stemming from the Directors Guild of America’s weekend with Hawks; Kevin Brownlow’s unpublished investigation into Hawks’s silent movie career, and John Kobal’s Q & A in his anthology of show-business interviews, People Will Talk.
The one centralized collection of Hawks-related material is the “stuff” Hawks himself gave to the Archives and Manuscripts Division of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Hawks maintained his personal papers in haphazard fashion, and only a fraction of what he once possessed was still in his garage when he donated his holdings to BYU shortly before his death. But archivist James V. D’Arc did an immaculate inventory job, and his register of the c
ollection, “The Papers of Howard W. Hawks,” itemizes every piece available for study, from a list of Hawks family doctors in the mid-1940s to William Faulkner’s personal script copy of Dreadful Hollow.
Almost equally valuable is the Charles K. Feldman Collection at the Louis B. Mayer Library at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Inventoried and maintained by Alan Braun, the collection represents a treasure trove of inside Hollywood history in general and of Feldman and Hawks’s activities in particular. The papers provide ample evidence that one of the great unwritten Hollywood biographies is that of Feldman.
The Hollywood motion picture studios have proved highly variable in their accessibility and their cooperation with scholarly inquiry into Hawks’s filming activities. Full information on the director’s abundant work at Warner Bros. is available at the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Leith Adams, who admirably oversaw the collection for years, is now at Warners, and the material is presently under the knowledgeable purview of Ned Comstock, as is some archival material from the old Fox Film Corporation and 20th Century– Fox, as well as Universal. The late Peter Knecht generously permitted further access to corporate and legal files at Warner Bros.
The late John Hall opened wide the RKO Pictures files before they were deposited with Special Collections at the University of California, Los Angeles. At UCLA, Brigitte Kueppers meticulously oversees the holdings donated by Fox, which were vital in connection with Hawks’s silent career. Samuel Goldwyn Jr. was exceedingly generous in arranging special access to his father’s massive collection, which provided a full account of Hawks’s work for Goldwyn.
Gaining access to Columbia Pictures files, now that the company is owned by Sony, is not a simple matter for scholars, but Su Lesser and longtime archivist Dennis Wilson proved extraordinarily helpful in permitting a look at the invaluable records pertaining to Hawks’s significant work at Columbia. Sherry Lansing, Howard W. Koch, and A. C. Lyles similarly were of great assistance in securing information regarding Hawks’s work at Paramount Pictures, but even they could not turn up records from the studio’s early years, which have apparently been destroyed.
With the exception of the limited amount of material on file at USC, Universal remains as impenetrable to the film scholar as the image of its famous Black Tower would suggest, and the records of MGM are now, for all intents and purposes, off-limits by policy of the owner of its library, Ted Turner.
The archives of United Artists, especially helpful in regard to Red River, are maintained at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison. The Howard Hughes Collection at the Texas State Archives in Austin provided unexpected insight into the long relationship between Hughes and Hawks, although the production, story, and legal files of Hughes’s motion picture operation, the Caddo Company, remain buried somewhere within the inaccessible Hughes empire. The reporting of Variety over the decades provides an unmatched source of information on the ebb and flow of the film business, as well as of increasingly precise information on the commercial fortunes of individual pictures. Wherever possible, however, budget and box-office figures have been drawn from internal studio records. Many other trade journals, especially more obscure ones from the industry’s early days, have been consulted as well, notably Motion Picture News, Kinematograph Weekly, and Bioscope.
Also important was the Archives Department of Los Angeles District Court, where microfilm copies can be found of all the many lawsuits in which Hawks played a part. Censorship-related correspondence from the Motion Picture Association of America is on file at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills.
I would like to greatly thank Hawks’s two eldest children, David Hawks and Barbara Hawks McCampell, who, with their respective spouses Ginger and Donald, opened their homes to me on numerous occasions and generously answered any and all questions I posed to them. Gregg Hawks and his wife, Penny, also had me to their home and guided me through several fascinating scrapbooks of old clippings and personal and professional photographs.
Many dozens of individuals who knew Hawks and/or worked with him were interviewed for this book. I conducted most of them myself, but several additional interviews were done by Ari Bass, Jonathan Benair, Joan Cohen, Philip Kemp, Kevin Macdonald, and Stephen O’Shea, and I thank them very much for their outstanding help.
By the late 1990s, those with firsthand knowledge of Hollywood’s silent era and the golden age of filmmaking are members of an increasingly rare breed. The same project begun today would be impossible to duplicate in its present form simply because so many of the participants have passed away. Among those no longer with us who were particularly helpful were Meta Carpenter Wilde, Hawks’s on-and-off secretary and scriptgirl and the epitome of Southern hospitality and graciousness, and Allan Dwan, whose early friendship and collaboration with Hawks provided unique insights into both Howard and Kenneth Hawks. Others now departed who gave interviews or were helpful in other ways were Max Bercutt, Pandro S. Berman, Rafe Blasi, Niven Busch, Stuart Byron, Frank Capra, Hoagy Carmichael, William Clothier, J. J. Cohen, Marcel Dalio, Carl Foreman, John Houseman, Noël Howard, John Huston, Don Hutter, Alfred S. Keller, John Kobal, Hans Koenekamp, Sheldon Leonard, May McAvoy, John Lee Mahin, Sam Marx, Gerald Mast, Earl Miller, Christian Nyby, L. W. O’Connell, Michael Powell, George Raft, Ella Raines, Wells Root, John Russell, Dan Seymour, Alexandre Trauner, Francois Truffaut, King Vidor, and Joseph Walker.
I also want to thank the following people for their important contributions to my work: Mark Adams of the British Film Institute, Norman Alden, Georg Alexander, Army Archerd, Lauren Bacall, Mary Lea Bandy at the Museum of Modern Art, Jeanine Basinger, Hercules Belville, Edward L. Bernds, Barbara Bione, Gerard Blain, Harold Jack Bloom, Peter Bogdanovich, Budd Boetticher, Ken Bowser, Bud Brill, Meredith Brody, Pat H. Broeske, Josh Bryant, Red Buttons, Paul Byrnes, Harry Carey Jr., Al Clark, Robert Cornthwaite, Johnny Crawford, Constance Cummings, Sondra Currie, Jon Davison, Edouard L. Desrochers at Phillips Exeter Academy, Bill Dewhurst, Angie Dickinson, Robert Donner, Clint Eastwood, David Ehrenstein, Bernard Eisenschitz, Ken Eisner, Derek Elley, Patricia Evans, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Rudi Fehr, Michael Fisher, Sally Fleming, Charles Flynn, William Friedkin, Sam and Christa Fuller, Jack Friend, Michael Friend at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Doug Galloway, Sam Gill at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Bob Gitt, Arnold Glassman, Celise Goldman at the Directors Guild of America, Gary Graver, Jane Greer, Lawrence Grobel, Curtis Harrington, Virginia Hawks, Paul Helmick, Mark Horowitz, Jean Howard, Keline Howard, Joe Hyams, Sam Jaffe, Paula Jalfond, Peter Jason, Martin Jurow, Greg Kachel, Richard Keinen, Bruce Kessler, Leonid Kinsky, George Kirgo, Leonard Klady, Erle Krasna, Bill Krohn, Miles Krueger, Edward Lasker, Larry Lasker, Emanuel Levy, Lorraine LoBianco, Serge Losique, Glenn Lovell, Tom Luddy, Don McGlynn, Leonard Maltin, Pat Marlowe, Andy Marx, Arthur Marx, Dick May, Virginia Mayo, Myron Meisel, Robin Mencken, Clive Miller, Robert Mitchum, Dick Moore, D’Arcy O’Brien, Jeannie Olander, Pierre Rissient, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jane Russell, Gary Salt, Andrew Sarris, Velvet Sheckler, Pierre Schoendorffer, Ben Schwartz, David Schwartz of the Museum of the Moving Image, William Self, David Shepard, Eric Sherman, Vincent Sherman, Lorrie Sherwood, George Sidney, Tony Slide, Dennis Sullivan, Jeffrey Sweet, Bertrand Tavernier, Elaine Thielstrom, David Thompson, Ken Tobey, Andre de Toth, Leonardo Garcia Tsao, Valentin de Vargas, Gwen Verdon, Catherine Verret, Juanita Walker, Cissy Wellman, Chance de Widstedt, Arthur Wilde, Billy Wilder, John Woodcock, Adrian Wootten of the British Film Institute, Fay Wray, Deborah Young, and the staff of the Polytechnic School in Pasadena.
Several people have provided a combination of long-term support and prodding, and I especially thank Florence Dauman, Charles Higham, David Thomson, Patrick McGilligan, and Luc Nemeth on this score. Michael Hamilberg was an early believer and was of great assistance in the early stages of the project.
Sustained encouragement and conf
idence also came from my parents, Daniel and Barbara McCarthy. My sister Kerry McCarthy Stilwell and her husband Richard Stilwell provided me with a place to work in their home in Virginia during a crucial period, and my wife’s parents, Burton and Barbara Alpert, generously made available their home in Santa Fe for a long period of sustained writing.
My editor at Variety, Peter Bart, was incredibly understanding, as perhaps only another author can be, of the demands of writing a book, and I thank him for giving me such tremendous latitude at the paper during my stretches of intensive work.
My agent Harvey Klinger applied the cattle prod with an acute sense of timing; Bonnie Thompson was an exacting and exemplary copy editor; and Grove Press’s Amy Hundley attended to countless details, large and small, with unfailing scrupulousness. I am deeply indebted to my editor, James Moser. How Jim forged his unique combination of patience, tact, enthusiasm, intelligence, and good humor I may never know, but they were all essential in seeing me through the job to completion.
I will never be able to properly thank my wife, Sasha Alpert, for being so exceedingly tolerant of the demanding rival for my attention that this book has represented, and I hope that our daughter, Madeleine, will excuse her father’s bringing up another baby during the first two years of her life.
Notes
Introduction: The Engineer as Poet
Robert Capa’s view of Hawks’s mythomania was related by Noël Howard.