Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (3 page)

That Hawks shunned deep analysis yet employed extensively developed theories in his work, that he was an outdoorsman of action and at the same time a filmmaker most at home in highly stylized interiors, that he was an autocratic
elitist who nonetheless reveled in the classlessness of his characters’ group pursuits—these are just three of the paradoxes in Hawks’s character. Among the others: he was not an intellectual yet he was very intelligent (not so unusual); he possessed the wisdom of his years but remained an adolescent in his enthusiasms even in old age; he was innately conservative in his worldview yet daring and
inclined to risk; he was the very definition of a modern twentieth-century man but stuck to tried-and-true formulas; he was embraced by many feminists in the 1970s for liberating his women characters from the home and placing them on the same field with men, yet he held an utterly conventional view of women’s role in his own life; he was stoic but reckless, reserved but excessive; he was celebrated
but little known; he was a pragmatist but a poet; and he had the mind of an engineer but the subconscious of an artist.

He was, above all, a modern artist. Of all the classical Hollywood directors, he is the one whose work has dated the least, for whom no excuses or explanations need be made. His visual style was straightforward, unmannered, unrooted in a specific era except for that of the classical
Hollywood cinema in the most general sense. His lack of interest in topical matters, politics, social issues, and the like also serves to liberate him from the concerns of the times in which he worked, except, again, in the broadest
sense of dealing with existing conditions such as Prohibition and World War II. What decisively set Hawks apart from 98 percent of his contemporaneous filmmakers was
his complete lack of sentimentality. At every opportunity, he cut against conventional expectations in emotional moments and had acute antennae for anything that could be considered soft, schmaltzy, cloying, or indulgent.

Much of this difference stemmed from his female characters, who, in so many cases, talked back; were at least as smart as the men; refused to be condescended to; wore uniforms,
smartly tailored outfits, or pants more often than dresses; were not used as ornaments or mere objects of men’s desires; and didn’t simply want to get married and have kids. Putting aside for the moment the ongoing debate over how truly liberated Hawks’s women were, it remains indisputable that they represent a uniquely vibrant, free-spirited, and intelligent group, not only in Hollywood terms
but by any standard. The frankness with which male-female attraction was presented, the feeling of mutual respect and equality-as-ideal that is generated between the best of Hawks’s couples, represents the most moving thing in his work and would play as a model of contemporary sexual relations in any era. Although several of his best films conclude with a couple getting together after having hurdled
many obstacles, Hawks always avoided the climactic romantic clinch, the typical happy ending. The last moments of
Only Angels Have Wings
and
To Have and Have Not
, for example, show the central couples embarking on a “happy” future, giving the films upbeat endings that provide great audience satisfaction. When one deeply considers the circumstances, however, it is hard to imagine a prolonged, satisfying
future even for these beautiful couples, much less for many of the others in Hawks’s films; the other factors working upon their lives would seem to stack the cards against them for anything but the short term. And surely in the work of no other significant Hollywood director of the Production Code era have family and children played so marginal a role. In only one of his sound films,
Monkey Business
, are the central characters married throughout the picture. Edward G. Robinson and Zita Johann marry, unhappily, partway through
Tiger Shark;
Edward Arnold is encumbered in a passionless match in the second half of
Come and Get It;
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell were formerly wed in
His Girl Friday;
Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan’s wedding precipitates all the ensuing frustrations and complications
of
I Was a Male War Bride;
Dewey Martin unwittingly finds himself wed to Indian girl Elizabeth Threatt toward the end of
The Big Sky
, and Jack Hawkins’s Pharaoh seals his own fate when he takes Joan Collins for a second
wife in
Land of the Pharaohs
. In stark opposition to Hollywood convention, mothers appear with the utmost infrequency in Hawks’s work—briefly in
Scarface
,
Sergeant York
, and
Land
of the Pharaohs
, marginally in
Come and Get It
. The only remotely normal and appealing kids in Hawks’s films—and their screen time is momentary—are the young Matthew Garth in
Red River
and Pharaoh’s son; the others, the little boys in
The Ransom of Red Chief
,
Monkey Business
, and
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, are grotesques. Otherwise, all of Hawks’s main characters are basically unattached, single
men and women free to pursue their interests and goals in life, as well as each other. For his wily way with women, Hawks was tagged with the nickname “the godamned grey fox of Brentwood,” by his friend John Ford.

Throughout his career, Hawks was well known as a star maker, a shrewd spotter of new talent, male and female. He can fairly be said to have discovered, or used effectively for the first
time on the screen, Paul Muni, George Raft, Carole Lombard, Frances Farmer, Rita Hayworth, Jane Russell, Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Malone, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, Angie Dickinson, James Caan, and Jennifer O’Neill. He worked repeatedly with five of the greatest male stars in the business—James Cagney, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne; used Edward G. Robinson, Richard
Barthelmess, and Joel McCrea twice; and relied upon such regular supporting players as Walter Brennan, Vince Barnett, Charles Coburn, and Arthur Hunnicutt. On only two occasions, however, did he use a leading lady a second time, with Ann Dvorak and Lauren Bacall; unlike Sternberg, his Svengali instinct was generally used up after one go-round with a given actress.

Hawks left a legacy not only
directly through his own work and the people he brought into the business but through his influence on a surprising number of contemporary filmmakers. Hawks’s modernity can be read in large measure through the extent to which his work remains a keystone and an inspiration for directors around the world; aside from Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, both of whom had styles that were much bolder and
immediately impressive and imitable, it is arguable that no director has been more widely cited as a positive and instructive influence than Hawks. Jean-Luc Godard and Bernardo Bertolucci each referred explicitly to Hawks in early features. Martin Scorsese had the leading characters in his first film go see
Rio Bravo
, which they then discussed at length, and he may have based Sharon Stone’s character
in
Casino
on Joan Collins’s in
Land of the Pharaohs
. Peter Bogdanovich excerpted
The Criminal Code
in his first film and
Red River
in his second, and lifted bodily from
Bringing Up Baby
for
his third. John Carpenter twice remade Hawks films, the first time unofficially, the second time with credit. Brian De Palma, in between Hitchcock homages, remade
Scarface
. Walter Hill, John Milius, and, less
obviously, Robert Benton owe a great deal to Hawks. François Truffaut considered
Hatari!
to be a disguised film about the filmmaking process and a model for his own
Day for Night
. Quentin Tarantino attended an entire Hawks retrospective while writing
Pulp Fiction
. There are, and no doubt will be, more, for the reason that Hawks’s films live in the present more vitally than those of most filmmakers
from any country or any era.

In a related way, Hawks has also inspired some of the most lucid and impressive writing from the relatively large number of critics who have written about him; just as Hawks collaborated with the best writers, he has brought out the best in those who respond to his work. Hawks’s films have been assessed, analyzed, defended, and canonized in unusually eloquent and
expressive fashion, first by the
Cahiers du Cinéma
critics and Manny Farber, then by Peter Bogdanovich and Andrew Sarris, and more recently by Robin Wood, Gerald Mast, Joseph McBride, Molly Haskell, Peter Wollen, John Belton, Gerald Peary, Richard Thompson, Jean-Pierre Coursodon, William Paul, Bruce Kawin, Gilbert Adair, and David Thomson, who went so far as to state that if he had the usual ten
films to take to a deserted island, they would all be by Hawks. Wood’s book stands as a model of insightful, persuasively argued critical analysis, while only a handful of directors ever produced a body of work that could inspire and actually support the sort of exhaustive explication Mast conducted in his scrupulously scholarly study of Hawks. Very few negative assessments of the director have
appeared in the past twenty years, the only notable one having been Raymond Durgnat’s conspicuously unconvincing article
Hawks Isn’t Good Enough
. Hawks’s career even inspired one of the most astonishingly esoteric critical books ever published, Clark Branson’s
Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study
. What remains impressive is how Hawks’s body of work provokes and sustains such a considerable volume and
diversity of study and analysis, generally at a very high level of appreciation and intelligence, and how the work easily accommodates this multitude of interpretations. This, one can only insist, further attests to the great life and relevance Hawks’s films still possess.

The overriding reason for writing a biography of Howard Hawks, of course, lies in the extraordinary films he made. In all
the books, interviews, and articles about him, what has never been explained is how he succeeded in controlling his career to the remarkable extent he did, why the films
turned out the way they did, and how he was able to use the Hollywood system to his own end for four decades. Any lingering notions that just because he didn’t impose his name on the screenplays to his films he was not the “author”
of them will be eliminated in short order. But it is also very much to the point that he could never have done it alone. Without his collaborators, Howard Hawks probably would have designed planes or automobiles for a living. The way he selected, and then used, those he worked with was an intrinsic part of Hawks’s artistic process. For this reason, a considerable emphasis has been placed on
the characters and talents of his important writers and actors, as well as on his process of working with them. In terms of his working method, Hawks stood with such contemporaries as Leo McCarey and Gregory La Cava, two directors he greatly admired, and in the opposite camp from Hitchcock, whom he also liked. When he was working in the manner he preferred, any Hawks picture was the result of a continual
process of experimentation, adjustment, and discovery based on the personalities and talents of those involved, all channeled through the rigorous prism of Hawks’s taste and selectivity. A film director is best compared not to a solitary artist such as a novelist, poet, painter, or sculptor but to an orchestra conductor or a chef, someone who puts an indelible personal stamp on a work by organizing,
choosing, interpreting, and synthesizing a certain set of materials.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Hawks’s most important collaborators, especially the writers, died years ago, making direct questioning impossible. Jules Furthman, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Seton Miller, Dudley Nichols, Charles Lederer, Nunnally Johnson, Harry Kurnitz—it would be difficult
to offer a more impressive list of literary collaborators, but they are all long gone, having left behind little or, in most cases, nothing in the way of detailed notations on their work with Hawks. Also departed without ever having been questioned extensively or at all about Hawks, or having written about him in memoirs, were such important actors as Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Paul Muni,
Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Fredric March, Walter Brennan, Montgomery Clift, Danny Kaye, Ann Sheridan, Marilyn Monroe, and Rock Hudson; all the studio heads, from Warner, Mayer, and Zanuck to Cohn, Goldwyn, and Hughes; most of his producers and cameramen; his closest friends through much of his life, Victor Fleming and Charles K. Feldman; and all of his brothers and sisters. For reasons of their
own, his three wives all declined to share their memories: the first, Athole, due to mental fragility that would have been unduly disturbed, her daughter
said, by resurrecting troubling events from decades before; the second, Slim, because she was working on her own memoirs, which were published posthumously; and the third, Dee, who said that she is saving everything for a book she plans to write,
revealing things only she knows about Hawks and her late brother-in-law, Groucho Marx. We shall see.

Even if Hawks had lived a hundred years, he would never have sat down to write his memoirs. For him, the interview format represented the ideal means to relate his anecdotes and embellish his own stature. He was a great storyteller, both in films and in person, and regaling admiring interrogators
was easy. The impediments he placed in the way of a biographer stemmed more from negligence than intention: by casually leaving his collection of papers, scripts, and photographs in his garage, he put them at the mercy of the elements, which got to them, initially and massively in the early 1950s, then again in the 1970s, destroying much of whatever he had put aside. The remainder, which has been
lovingly inventoried and stored at Brigham Young University, simply because the archivist there, James D’Arc, was the first person to ask for it, represents a tantalizing but highly fragmentary glimpse into the entirety of Hawks’s life and career.

Fortunately, there have been other ways to go—often on very long roads but ending up, one trusts, at basically the same destination. Many circumstances
work against this biography being a view of Hawks from the inside, a full reading of his mind and emotions: he was not a man of letters or diaries; he was temperamentally opposed to revealing his inner thoughts and feelings, even to his wives and others closest to him; and he was never questioned extensively by his interviewers about his early and personal life and was not challenged on the incongruities,
distortions, and outright fabrications of his oft-told tales—who knew better at that time, or cared to confront the great man? An interior study of Hawks could only be wildly speculative, given his personality and assiduous disinclination from shared introspection. By necessity, much of the early life remains much sketchier than one would like; by terrible coincidence, his early Wisconsin
academic records burned along with the school that housed them, some of his high school documents got lost in various transfers, Cornell University disposed of student transcripts dating back that far, and his army records were destroyed, along with so many others, in St. Louis. There is no way to corroborate Hawks’s accounts of his amateur auto-racing career, his alleged athletic exploits,
his early flying days, or even some of his initial filmmaking ventures. Inevitably, the life comes into sharper focus a bit later on, when the adult Hawks embarks upon his serious career, but some areas, such as
his private dealings with bookies and the full extent of his gambling, remain beyond research, just as they were unknowable even to his family and inner circle.