City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  It was perhaps his encounters with people like Hal Wallis that inspired the legend that Faulkner asked permission to work at home and then took that as permission to work in Mississippi. Darryl Zanuck claimed that Faulkner had pulled this trick on him while writing The Road to Glory for Howard Hawks in 1936. “I thought home meant where he was living in Beverly Hills!” said Zanuck, who seems not to have realized that Faulkner lived in cheap hotels or roomed with friends far from Beverly Hills. Jack Warner claimed that he was the victim of exactly the same ruse nearly a decade later. “Mr. Faulkner, how could you do this to me?” Warner recalled protesting on the long-distance phone. “How could you leave town without letting me know? You said you’d be working at home.” And Faulkner patiently answered, “This is my home. I live in Mississippi.” It is theoretically possible that both these events occurred just as the two studio chiefs said they did, but it seems hardly likely.* Faulkner himself told several versions of the legend, including a claim that it was all “a pure lie by some press agent fella.”

  The one important man in Hollywood who understood and appreciated Faulkner was Howard Hawks. One year older than the novelist, Hawks had spent the previous two decades as a director, and his movies were not only skillful but successful—The Dawn Patrol, Scarface, Twentieth Century. His success gave him considerable independence, so his films generally bore a Hawks touch, direct, unpretentious, based on a strong and fast-moving story, usually about men in action. Hawks himself was like that. He loved hunting, flying, auto racing, prowling the wilderness. He rode a motorcycle until he was nearly eighty. He also took a large part in the writing of all his films, and he produced most of them too.

  Hawks had discovered Faulkner early. He read his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, shortly after it appeared in 1926. He bought the film rights to one of Faulkner’s war stories, “Turn About,” and at a time when, as he put it, “nobody’d ever heard of Faulkner,” he began trying to hire him. Faulkner only reluctantly joined in the filming of “Turn About” at M-G-M and got only a partial script credit for the picture that became Today We Live (1933), starring Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford. But Hawks and Faulkner became lifelong friends, and Hawks repeatedly found work for him. Faulkner never actually wrote a single finished script for Hawks, so film scholars have tried in vain to determine exactly what he contributed to the director’s projects. Hawks liked to improvise on the set; he liked to have Faulkner there as a kind of carpenter, or perhaps he just liked to have him around. “If I wanted a scene or a story, I’d call up Bill and get it,” Hawks once said. “He could write almost anything. . . . We seemed to talk the same language. He knew what I wanted. Bill drank too much, but when he wasn’t drinking he was awful good.”

  Hawks liked to take Faulkner on hunting expeditions, and when Clark Gable heard one day that the director was setting off for the Imperial Valley early the next morning, he asked to go along. Hawks agreed. The three of them were driving through Palm Springs, as Hawks later recalled, when the talk turned to writing. Gable, whose ignorance was almost classic, idly asked Hawks’s gray-haired friend who he thought were good writers. “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself,” Faulkner said. Gable seemed mildly surprised.

  “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Faulkner admitted. “What do you do, Mr. Gable?”

  Perhaps that was intended as a sarcastic retort, but Hawks wondered. “I don’t think Gable ever read a book, and I don’t think Faulkner ever went to see a movie,” he said. “So they might have been on the level.”

  If Hawks felt an echoing admiration for the chronicler of Yoknapatawpha County, he felt even more for Ernest Hemingway, who had both the creative talent of Faulkner and the money to live like Hawks. The director repeatedly tried to hire him, but Hemingway kept shrugging off all his efforts.

  “I don’t want to go out to Hollywood,” Hemingway said to Hawks as they were fishing together off Key West early in 1943. “I don’t like it. And I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “You wouldn’t have to come to Hollywood,” Hawks said, according to his account of the scene. “We can go fishing or hunting. We can meet here, Sun Valley, Africa, any place you want, and write a story.”

  Hemingway still balked, so Hawks began taunting him, telling him that he could make a good movie out of anything.

  “I can make a movie out of the worst thing you ever wrote,” Hawks said.

  “What’s the worst thing I ever wrote?” Hemingway immediately demanded.

  “That piece of junk called To Have and Have Not,” Hawks claimed he said. He also claimed that Hemingway only answered, “I needed money.”

  To Have and Have Not was by no means junk. Harry Morgan was one of Hemingway’s more realistic heroes, about the only one who lived with a wife and worked for a living, and the climactic gun battle aboard Morgan’s fishing boat made a very powerful conclusion. But Hawks bought the movie rights to the novel for a modest ten thousand dollars and then proceeded to tear it to pieces. “There wasn’t anything in the picture that was in the book,” he later gloated. To help him at his task, Hawks hired a veteran screenwriter named Jules Furthman plus his old friend Faulkner, but the transformation of To Have and Have Not was very much the director’s own work. He seemed to think he could make it a kind of sequel to Casablanca, and so he moved the story from Key West in the Depression-ridden 1930’s to Martinique in the wartime 1940’s, thus ringing in once again the background conflict between Vichyites and the Free French. And who could be a more inevitable Harry Morgan than the original Rick, Humphrey Bogart?

  Hawks had apparently long dreamed of discovering a beautiful girl whom he could mold like a Galatea into a star of his own creation. He had already discovered one such creature, a model named Nancy Roe Gross, but instead of making her a star, he married her, just a year after getting his divorce from Norma Shearer’s sister. The new Mrs. Hawks was twenty-four, her husband forty-five; she called him, for some reason, Steve; he called her Slim. On the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, she saw a girl who she thought might serve Hawks as the toy he was looking for. A beautiful face, but hard, slightly Slavic, with a wide mouth and wide-set eyes. Hawks was interested. He was then working in partnership with Charlie Feldman, that former agent who had married the girl of Louis B. Mayer’s dreams, and though Selznick and Columbia were also interested in the Harper’s Bazaar cover girl, Feldman persuaded her to come to Hollywood to be tested and signed by Hawks.

  Born Betty Perske, she had taken her mother’s name of Bacall when she went into modeling. She was now eighteen and ready to conquer the world. Feldman took her to meet Hawks for lunch at the Brown Derby, and she was impressed by the “very tall man with close-cropped gray hair and broad shoulders.” Feldman said her teeth would have to be fixed; Hawks said that wouldn’t be necessary. He tested her, and she looked good, but he had nothing for her to do. In Miss Bacall’s retrospective view, Hawks was a rather frightening figure of authority, who talked grandly about his own triumphs and occasionally unnerved her by making anti-Semitic remarks (“Do you notice how noisy it is in here suddenly? That’s because Lee Forbstein just walked in—Jews always make more noise”), at which she paled but discreetly said nothing. Hawks’s recollection, on the other hand, was that this attractive girl’s voice was so bad, so high and nasal, that he wanted to get rid of her. “I had to tell her that we made pictures about a fairly sophisticated girl, that the kind of girls I like in a movie didn’t have little high nasal voices. I said, ‘You just can’t possibly read any of the lines we write.’ Didn’t bother her, she said, ‘What do I do to change my voice?’ ”

  Hawks told her to go somewhere and practice keeping her voice low, husky. Miss Bacall began driving out Mulholland Drive in her nine-hundred-dollar used Plymouth until she found a quiet spot where she could read aloud, in a low-pitched voice, from a current best-seller about Jesus Christ, Lloyd Douglas’s The Robe. “If anyone had passed by, they would have found me a c
andidate for an asylum,” she recalled. “Who sat on mountaintops in cars reading books aloud to the canyons? Who did? I did!” Hawks also taught Miss Bacall something more important: how to behave in the way he thought “sophisticated” women should behave. In Hawks’s slightly peculiar view, women became more attractive when they played the aggressor, the pursuer. Miss Bacall had those possibilities, but she was young and nervous. When Hawks once asked her why she couldn’t get herself a ride home from a party at his house, she said, “I don’t do too well with men,” and when he suggested that she try insulting one, she did, and thus got a ride home with Clark Gable.

  Hawks, in his turn, was impressed. He saw in her “that quality of insolence. That hadn’t been seen.” After nearly a year of keeping her idle, he decided to make her the heroine of his Hemingway picture. For that, he needed a new test that would win the approval of Jack Warner, so he wrote a bit of dialogue himself, wrote for his young protégée the world-weary lines that she was to make famous: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” Hawks showed the test to Warner, who loved it, and to Bogart, who told Miss Bacall, “We’ll have lots of fun together.” Everybody liked the test so much that Hawks wanted to insert the lines he had written somewhere in the wreckage of Hemingway’s novel. “Faulkner was the one who found a place to put it,” Hawks recalled. “He said, ‘If we put these people in a hotel corridor where nobody else is around, then I think we can make that scene work.’ So we did it. I wrote the line, but he wrote the stuff that led up to it.”

  The only other thing that Betty Bacall needed now was a new first name. Hawks wanted something resonant. He asked her what her grandmother’s name was. Sophie, she told him. That wasn’t quite what he had in mind. He saw her a few days later and told her that her name would be Lauren, and if anyone asked her about its origins, she was to answer that it was an old family name. And so he had created her, the sassy young Lauren Bacall, but before he could begin to savor the fruits of his invention, she fell in love with the forty-five-year-old Bogart, and he with her. Though Hawks was somewhat jealous at first and tried to break up the romance on his set, he eventually found it a “funny thing” that Bogart had been captivated by “the character she played, so that she had to keep playing it the rest of her life.”

  To Have and Have Not wasn’t a particularly good movie, and yet it became one of the triumphs of 1945. It was a typical Hawks creation, fast-moving, breezy—Hawks’s version of Harry Morgan and his wife even called each other, like the Hawkses at home, Steve and Slim—but Bogart and Miss Bacall were so obviously in love with each other that they cast their own romantic glow over the whole film. Jack Warner, who had originally regarded it as Hawks’s sequel to Casablanca (complete even to Hoagy Carmichael, replacing Dooley Wilson, at the nightclub piano), now wanted a new movie that would be a sequel to this. As early as the drive back from the preview, he said to Hawks, “We’d better do another picture with these two people. Do you know a story?” Hawks said he did. Warner asked what it was like, and Hawks, knowing how Warner’s mind worked, said, “Something like Maltese Falcon.” So Warner advanced Hawks $50,000 to buy Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and Hawks artfully bought the novel from Chandler for $5,000, artfully keeping the other $45,000 for himself. Chandler was not free to write the screenplay, since he was under contract to Paramount; Hawks once again hired Faulkner, together with two professionals, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett.

  Chandler liked the idea of Bogart as his private detective, Philip Marlowe. “Bogart can be tough without a gun,” he wrote to a friend in England. “Also he has a sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt. Bogart is the genuine article.” There was only one problem. Marlowe didn’t really like women and particularly didn’t like the two spoiled daughters of his client, old General Sternwood. When the younger one, who eventually turned out to be the murderer, came stealing into Marlowe’s bed, he threw her out. When the older one kissed him and invited herself to his apartment, he fended her off with probing questions. “You son of a bitch,” said Vivian Sternwood.

  That wouldn’t do at all for Lauren Bacall, or for Hawks’s general admiration for adventurous women. When Chandler’s Marlowe went into a bookstore, the woman in charge of the place offered him nothing but a few wisecracks. Hawks’s Marlowe suggested a drink, and she put a sign on the door saying CLOSED FOR THE DAY. When Chandler’s Marlowe hired a cab to tail someone, the driver was simply “a fresh-faced kid”; Hawks turned the cabbie into a pretty girl and had her ask Marlowe to call on her again, preferably at night, if he ever wanted another “tail job.” Chandler’s novel ended with Marlowe ordering Vivian Sternwood to have her homicidal younger sister locked up in a mental institution, and then departing to deal with some gangsters who were threatening the Sternwood family. Hawks’s film ended, of course, with Bogart and Bacall united. “What’s wrong with you?” he says. “Nothing that you can’t fix,” says she.

  Chandler could hardly complain about changes in the plot. His original novel was a tangle of loose ends, and when Hawks’s three screenwriters turned in their script, one of them said, “There are a lot of things that don’t make sense.” Hawks didn’t care. “Good,” he said. “Let’s try it and see whether the audience likes that.” So they just started in, and in due time they inevitably came to the question of who murdered Owen Taylor, the Sternwoods’ family chauffeur. He was not an important character, and it was not an important murder, but still—there he was, sitting in Vivian Sternwood’s black Buick sedan under ten feet of water off a Lido fishing pier. Hawks and the writers pored over Chandler’s novel, but Chandler himself, apparently by oversight, had never explained who killed the chauffeur. So Hawks sent him a telegram asking him who had committed the murder. Chandler went back through his book, reflected on the mystery, and then sent a return telegram: “I DON’T KNOW.”

  Hawks still didn’t care. He said later that this incomprehensible story was “the first time I made a picture and just decided I wasn’t going to explain things. I was just going to try and make good scenes.” The interviewer eliciting these reminiscences, Joseph McBride, seemed to think that Hawks had discovered some avant-garde method. “It’s a revolutionary thing you did,” said McBride, “because it became the method of modern films that people don’t care if the plot makes sense if it’s fun.” Hawks was happy to agree. “It’s just my way of telling a story,” he said.

  The only ones who argued that the narrative of The Big Sleep was supposed to make sense were the censors from the Johnston Office, and they disapproved of Chandler’s ending in the original script. They disapproved of the fact that nobody in the Sternwood family was punished, that even the gangsters finally went on about their business. Hawks turned on the censors and challenged them to provide an ending themselves. “I said, ‘OK, you write a scene for me,’ ” Hawks recalled. “And they did, and it was a lot more violent, it was everything I wanted. I made it and was very happy about it.”

  The basic idea of the new ending, whether or not anyone from the Johnston Office actually proposed it, was that Marlowe returned to the scene of the first murder and was trapped there by the gangsters. At this point, Chandler himself was consulted, and he suggested an interesting outcome. In Chandler’s version, Carmen Sternwood, the younger sister, was also trapped in the house with Marlowe. The detective knew that whoever first emerged from the house would probably be shot down, and he knew that Carmen was the murderer, and he knew that if she understood the situation, she would have no qualm about killing him. “He didn’t feel like playing God or saving his skin by letting Carmen leave,” Chandler later wrote. “Neither did he feel like playing Sir Philip Sidney to save a worthless life. So he put it up to God by tossing a coin. Before he tossed the coin, he prayed out loud, in a sort of way. The gist of his prayer was that he, Marlowe, had done the best he knew how and through no fault of his own was put in a position of making a decision God had no right to force him to make. H
e wanted that decision made by the authority who allowed all this mess to happen.” The coin came down heads, indicating that Marlowe should let the girl go her own way, even to her death. She started toward the door. He started to stop her. She pulled a gun on him and laughed. Then a burst from one of the gangsters’ machine guns, fired more or less at random, drilled through the door and killed her. But Hawks didn’t use Chandler’s ending. Too complicated, perhaps. In the final version, which had no Carmen Sternwood in it, the burst of machine gun fire accidentally cut down the chief gangster, enabling Bogart to walk out of the trap and into his new wife’s embrace.

  She was not quite his new wife yet. They had agreed to marry as soon as Bogart could get a divorce from the quarrelsome Mayo Methot, but the third Mrs. Bogart did not go quietly. All through the filming of The Big Sleep, there were fights and scenes. Bogart decided to leave home. Then friends told him that his wife would kill herself if he left. She promised to stop drinking if he would stay. She had to go to a hospital. He decided she deserved a last chance. Miss Bacall wept. And so on. At one point, when Bogart and Miss Bacall were enjoying themselves aboard his yacht, Mrs. Bogart came back early from a shopping trip. Miss Bacall had to hide in the ship’s head until Mrs. Bogart departed again. On another occasion, Miss Bacall picked up a telephone and heard an angry voice shouting, “Listen, you Jewish bitch—who’s going to wash his socks? Are you?” Early in May, Mrs. Bogart finally gave up and got her divorce. Less than two weeks later, Bogart took a weekend break from some reshooting on The Big Sleep and married Miss Bacall on the Ohio farm of the novelist Louis Bromfield.