Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (101 page)

For some time, especially after the disappointment on
Africa
, Hawks had been feeling that Feldman wasn’t doing a whole lot for him. Feldman
himself was spending the majority of his time on his own pictures, and Hawks began
to notice that the vast majority of projects his friend offered him were those he personally owned. Hawks, with some justification, felt that Famous Artists hadn’t done much for him lately, that he wasn’t being offered the best material, and that the deals he made, he basically made himself. But it wasn’t Feldman’s fault that
Land of the Pharaohs
flopped or that Hawks turned down
The Bridge on
the River Kwai
. Pointing out to his longtime client that he had “the best deal in the business,” Feldman nonetheless tried to placate Hawks by helping him with his continuing financial and tax problems by setting up a Swiss corporation in which he could stash some of his money.

Hawks and Feldman continued to socialize constantly. They spent New Year’s 1958–59 and much of the winter in Palm Springs,
where the season’s crowd included William Holden, Sam Goldwyn, Buddy Adler, Sam Briskin, and Mervyn LeRoy, and their wives. Feldman also had some private tête-à-têtes with Dee, no doubt partly about the Hawkses’ failing marriage. Hawks had bought land on Stevens Road in Palm Springs years before and had actually started construction on his own home there before leaving for Europe. Now he pushed
ahead to complete the job, giving him a place in the desert he so loved.

In the wake of
Rio Bravo
, Warners gave Hawks the green light on a second Western. Hawks found a novel by Steve Franzee,
Desert Guns
, that he thought could be combined with elements of two of the writer’s other stories, “Singing Sands” and “The Devil’s Grubstake,” to strong effect into one film. The director once again brought
Leigh Brackett out from Ohio, and Feldman negotiated a new two-picture deal at Warner Bros., under which Hawks would receive $150,000 for the new screenplay, $250,000 as producer-director of each film, and 10 percent of the net profits—a deal, in other words, that gave him considerably more up-front cash but a significantly reduced percentage.

Brackett turned out a good script, peppered with
lively dialogue, but Hawks dragged his feet in getting it moving; his real interest remained his great African adventure. In a meeting at the end of September 1959, Hawks and Feldman frankly told Jack Warner that they wanted to abandon
Gold of the Seven Saints
, as they were calling the Western, and proceed with something else, preferably
Africa
. Warner repeated his overwhelming lack of enthusiasm
for that project and countered with a couple of properties the studio already owned, William Inge’s hit play
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
and something called
The Saga of Pappy Gunn
.

Thereafter came several weeks of secret skirmishing, mutual suspicion, and growing bad blood, culminating in a blowup that severed Hawks’s forty-year relationship with Warner once and for all. Given Warner’s
lack of interest in
Africa
, Famous Artists started shopping it around town, with Paramount and Fox the first to bite. In early November, Warner got wind of this and fired off an angry letter to Feldman: “You are up to your old tricks again! Instead of working on the story both you and Howard promised would arrive here on October 30 you are selling Hawks to other studios.… [This] is uncalled for,
unwarranted, unnecessary and unbusinesslike, and also unethical.”

With Feldman out of town, one of his agents, Jack Gordean, responded, stating that Famous Artists had done nothing out of line, that Hawks’s deal with Warners was nonexclusive, and that it was perfectly normal to take
Africa
elsewhere after Warner turned it down. He continued, “I am sure you know that Howard has been in great demand
and that we have had many, many propositions offered to us for him. He is certainly one of the most sought-after directors in the business.”

Unlike Hawks, Warner was still enthusiastic about
Gold of the Seven Saints
so, after more unpleasant exchanges and recriminations, Warner settled with Hawks by agreeing to let him keep the eighty thousand dollars the studio had already paid him to prepare
the
Saints
screenplay. Warner quickly put the film into production, directed by Gordon Douglas; it is a film of no reputation, not even available on videotape. Initially, Warner had intended for Hawks’s fee to be applied to another film, but a few days later, fed up with what he viewed as Hawks’s and Feldman’s game-playing, he simply canceled the contract altogether. After having watched Hawks
walk out on him several times before, he no longer needed the aggravation.

Hawks always did what he wanted to do; loyalty, a mutually beneficial friendship, and professional understanding counted for nothing. He was bent on making the African film and would go where he could get the best deal he could. But within six weeks in October and November 1959, his third wife left him and he willingly
concluded his relationship with the studio where he had entered the sound era, directed ten pictures, fought many battles that he usually won, and consistently got his pick of material and been allowed to shape and cast it his way. In short, Warner Bros., Hal Wallis notwithstanding, had been the studio most agreeable to letting Hawks be Hawks, and the result was much of his most successful work,
both artistically and commercially. Now he closed the door on it, and there would be no going back.

At Christmas 1959, Hawks wrote Chance de Widstedt a letter. For more than a year he had been thinking about her, he’d written and talked to her occasionally—and how many women had ever had a John Wayne character named after them? Since Hawks had last seen her in Paris, Chance had quit modeling to become a reportorial photographer, initially free-lance for the
Herald
Tribune
and then, principally, for the photodominated magazine
Jours de France
. In his letter, Hawks informed her that he was now divorced from Dee and proposed to Chance that she come to Los Angeles and marry him. Although quite surprised, since she and Hawks didn’t know each other that well and had never slept together, Chance did feel that there was something special between them. “I decided
to go and have a look,” she said, telling Hawks that she would like to come stay with him for a while.

When she arrived, early in 1960, she moved right into Hawks’s house but stayed in a separate bedroom, as his wives always had. “This shocked me,” she confessed, “because I thought it was more important to be tender. After all,
la nuit n’est pas seulement pour dormir
. But he had trouble sleeping
sometimes because he had so much in his head. For his creativity he wanted to be alone, to read, to make notes, to dream, to wake up and write things down. He didn’t need daily tenderness and affection. He liked to be solitary.” Chance implied that they did become physically intimate during this period, but ambiguously explained that their relationship was one of “
sensualité, pas sexualité
. I
admired him. I had no father. I was his friend, and he was my father and friend. And I wasn’t with him because he was Howard Hawks.”

Already busy working on his African project, Hawks would get up early every morning and go to work, while Chance would stay around the house, sometimes with six-year-old Gregg. “I’d have a dip in the pool, then go and get my hair done so that I would look impeccable
when Howard came home
from the studio,” Chance said. “I was living in luxury, after coming from a two-bedroom apartment that I shared with my grandmother.” All the same, Chance had tasted the good life in Paris, so she wasn’t particularly overwhelmed by her newly adopted lifestyle. Hawks gave her a white Chevrolet Impala convertible to use around town, and when he came home from work, usually
late, they would go out to dinner, most often at Dino’s Place, Dean Martin’s popular restaurant and club on the Sunset Strip, where Martin often performed casual impromptu sets. They also went to dinner with celebrities—once at Alfred Hitchcock’s home and another time with Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “But these things only happened maybe once every week,” complained Chance.
“In L.A. then there was not much I could do. I supposed it will have changed by now. But back then it was deadly. You couldn’t even go have a coffee. You have no idea. I was used to Paris, where it was a wonderful time.”

Finally, the boredom of so many hours alone and the aridity of life in Los Angeles became too much to bear. After three months, she told Hawks she’d had enough and was going
back to Paris. “If Hawks had lived in Paris, then I suppose we would have married.… Maybe if I’d had some friends to pass the time of day, then I might have stayed. Maybe it was a stupid mistake not to have married him, but
c’est la vie
.” Hawks was initially furious at her rejection, but he quickly came to understand the reasons for her discontent and her desire to pursue a career of her own.
He also realized that they might be able to spend a good deal of time together very soon.

His bargaining power at its peak in the wake of
Rio Bravo
and with Warner Bros. definitively out of the picture, Hawks began setting up his African adventure in earnest. Jack Gordean, the Famous Artists agent handling most of Hawks’s business now that Feldman was busy with so many producing projects, was
in advanced discussions with Paramount about the project in early December 1959, when both Fox and Columbia stepped up with virtually identical offers. Paramount did finally land the production, with Hawks receiving $150,000 for the story, $150,000 for directing, and 50 percent of the profits after breakeven. At the same time, Feldman’s client John Wayne agreed to star for $750,000 and 10 percent
of the gross after the picture had pulled in $7.5 million.

Although it was not widely known at the time, Charles Feldman’s life was in considerable danger during this entire period. In the fall of 1959, Feldman was diagnosed with prostate cancer. On April 26, Dr. Edward C. Parkhurst performed a suprapubic prostatectomy on him in Boston, and after two weeks in the hospital, Feldman departed with
Capucine to convalesce
in the South of France. The majority of Hawks’s business, therefore, was handled with only the most cursory of attention from his agent.

Paramount announced
Hatari!
at the end of March, with shooting slated to begin within six months. Hawks had no more idea at this point what his story was going to be than he had more than four years before when Harry Kurnitz was trying
to patch something together in Paris. (An advance from Paramount enabled Hawks to finally pay Kurnitz $29,750 for his earlier work.) In fact, he wasn’t particularly interested in a story at all. “That was the year that Howard was not buying any story,” moaned Leigh Brackett. “He didn’t want plot, he just wanted scenes.” All Hawks knew was that he wanted to make a picture about people who catch animals
in Africa for zoos. It was a subject that had all the requisites: a dangerous profession, a colorful milieu, a group undertaking controlled by a boss to be played by a big star, and plenty of opportunity for exciting scenes, the likes of which had never been seen on-screen before. With its mix of people and animals against grand landscapes, it would even have the feel of a Western, albeit a
modern and quite exotic one. Defending its decidedly loose-knit construction, Hawks said that “the form of the picture is a hunting season, from beginning to end. It’s what happens when a bunch of fellows get together to hunt.” He also rationalized that “you can’t sit in an office and write what a rhino is going to do.”

In fact, within a five-month period, the dramatic incidents and even the
characters of
Hatari!
changed innumerable times. Based on various outlines and character notes, the tone of the piece was originally fairly dark and melodramatic, quite reminiscent of
Only Angels Have Wings
both in setting and attitude. As it evolved over the months, Hawks and his writers helped themselves to motifs from many of Hawks’s other previous successes. Initially, Wayne and Clark Gable
were meant to costar as two veteran hunters who, à la
A Girl in Every Port
, still competed for the same women. An overlay from
Rio Bravo
was added to this in that one of the men, an alcoholic, would have to be looked after by the other. Others may come and go but, as Leigh Brackett put it in one of her jottings, “Clint and Robbie are constants. There is a grim joke between them, a sardonic rivalry—which
of them will last the longest. There is a special bottle of brandy on the top shelf, waiting to be drunk by the survivor. Though they quarrel over methods, they love each other.” From
The Dawn Patrol
and
The Road to Glory
were drawn the ideas that casualties along the way would simply be replaced by others and that the man who used to receive the orders to place himself in harm’s way would one
day become the man who had to order others to do the same. From
Red River
came a marksmanship duel to prove which
young man was better, from
Ceiling Zero
the character of an invalid who used to be a great hunter but is now, due to an accident, reduced to menial chores around the camp. From many films, notably
Only Angels Have Wings
and
To Have and Have Not
, was derived the stray beautiful woman
who arrives, penniless, and is instantly resented by the tough hero, who has been burned by a woman before and has to be convinced to let her stay. In one draft, less than three months before photography began, there was a central
Moby Dick
theme of a wild rogue elephant, “old one-tusk,” who kills a man in the opening sequence and must be hunted down by Clint by the close.

In mid-June, Hawks
brought Leigh Brackett out to begin work, at $750 a week, but also hired the brothers Waldman, for a flat $35,000, to work separately from her, much as Brackett had worked apart from Faulkner on
The Big Sleep
. The sons of a Wall Street banker, Frank and Tom Waldman had been writing separately for television during the 1950s until teaming up to work for Blake Edwards on the
Peter Gunn
series and
their first feature, the lightweight Bing Crosby comedy
High Time
. Aside from advising them about key incidents and ideas they might take from his previous pictures, Hawks gave them little guidance, and they hammered away in many directions that had no bearing on the finished film.