Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (103 page)

Although it was not directly related to making of the picture, tragedy struck on November 1. A Nairobi-based British animal trainer not in Paramount’s employ, Diana Hartley, had arrived at the de Beer compound with two cheetahs. When she learned that a lion she had known before, purchased for use in the film, was
now at the compound, she approached it. Her friends heard her speak to the lion, then scream for help. When Hartley’s body was pulled away, it became clear that the lion had bitten her on the neck, killing her. It later turned out that Hartley had mentioned to one of the other women at the compound that she was having her period; she was told in no uncertain terms not to go near the lion, but she
ignored the advice.

It was kept quiet, but Valentin de Vargas said that during the shooting “there was a mishap every week.” Three native Africans were accidentally killed during production, and while, miraculously, none of the actors or American crew members were ever seriously hurt, Willy de Beer was badly mauled when a baby leopard got loose and jumped on him from a tree. “He came back with
his arm covered in bandages and throat completely wrapped, but he just shrugged it off,” de Vargas recounted.

After de Vargas, Elsa Martinelli was the next cast member to turn up, at the beginning of November, arriving with her photographer boyfriend Willy Rizzo, who had the enviable double assignment of covering the shoot for
Paris Match
and working as the official Paramount stills man. A few
days later, Hawks came down with a serious virus that landed him in the hospital for a week. While there, he heard from Feldman, who was in discussions with Spyros Skouras in London about a long-term deal for Hawks at 20th Century–Fox, for six to eight pictures at $150,000 apiece, $75,000 in annual expenses, and 50 percent of the profits, with Paris as Hawks’s probable base of operations. Paramount
would probably match this deal, Feldman said, while Columbia might be willing to go as high as $200,000 per picture.

By the third week of November, the principal cast members began filtering in. Some of the best homes in the area were vacated in order to accommodate the stars in luxury; Gerard Blain, along with much of the
crew, stayed at the New Arusha Hotel. Hawks showed footage of some of
the good catches to the enthusiastic actors, and then gave them a pregame pep talk, telling them that they were privileged to be going on perhaps the most expensive safari in the world, costing millions. “He told us he expected strong nerves and a lion’s energy,” Martinelli recalled. “He was witty and very calm, and for half an hour before shooting started, he told the actors all the good and bad
things they’d have to face.” When Hawks left the room, all the other actors ran over to John Wayne to ask if he had a copy of the script. “He paused a moment, as though posing for a fashion plate by Avedon,” said Martinelli, “then he said, ‘Listen, kids. I’ve shot a hundred movies. Well, the greatest directors, including Hawks, never handed me a script. I’m an actor, and when they call me for a film
I know they need me, that’s all.… You just have to trust them. If you’re good, they’ll show you to your best advantage day by day.’”

Privately, Hawks told his leading lady, “This is a film I wanted to make for years and I wanted to make it like it was a vacation.” It became clear to Martinelli that the conditions under which they would be making the picture precisely paralleled those depicted
in the story, with Hawks as the boss figure and the uncertainty prompted by the lack of a script directly analogous to the unpredictability of the animal hunts. It was a thought picked up on by François Truffaut when he saw
Hatari!
, which he always considered to be Hawks’s disguised account of the process of filmmaking. In any case, for Hawks it was a realization of his lifelong urge to merge
his fictional ideals with his real life, a boy’s fantasy being played out every day. Even though the dreamer was now sixty-four years old, he couldn’t have been happier.

Like the actors, Paramount simply had to trust Howard Hawks. With Jacob M. Karp having taken charge of production only in 1959, there was no veteran big boss like Jack Warner or Darryl Zanuck who had a clue how to control Hawks.
All the studio could do was to pay the bills and hope for the best. There was no fixed budget per se and no absolute shooting schedule—what would it have been based on with no script?—although everyone, including Hawks, intended to finish in Africa by mid-February, before the rainy season arrived.

For the first part of principal photography, the company moved seventy-five miles west of Arusha
to the shores of Lake Manyara, set in the middle of plains that teemed with all manner of game. While Hawks, the cast, and some top first-unit crew members stayed at the Lake Manyara Lodge, a sort of British colonial outpost, the general company, much as on
Red River
, was put up in large canvas tents, in an area that was floodlit by portable generators all night to discourage animals from coming
in. Principal photography started on November 28 with scenes involving Wayne, Martinelli, and Buttons at Ngasumet Wells, in the middle of the arid Masai Steppe. Martinelli recalled that on that first morning, “Hawks was there waiting for us, shaved and dressed as though for a garden party.” She said that even after the longest of days, Hawks never tired. “He was the only one capable, after a day
of wild adventure, of returning to camp with his shoes shined.” He was a tough boss on his crew. He went through at least three first assistant directors on the picture, pushing the first one, Danny McCauley, to the breaking point and giving a hard time to the next, Bud Brill. “He was very hard on the people he worked with,” Brill testified. “He wanted his own people, and the studio wouldn’t let
him.”

Not only had Red Buttons not tested for the role, but he had never even met Hawks before he showed up to work. “Luckily for me, he dug me immediately. He found me amusing, and he and I paired off, he became my gin partner. He was the Gary Cooper of directors. He was a ‘Yup,’ ‘Nope’ guy. He was like a ventriloquist, he barely opened his mouth. I never heard him laugh, but I saw him smile
a lot.” Professionally, Buttons said, “He gave me a sense of freedom. From the first day he let me make up my own dialogue and we started to build from there.… There was something to be picked up from him that you don’t get from many other people. Even though he was taciturn, he had a special quality about him.… He was different, somehow or other. He was like a counter-puncher, he’d see the openings
and fill them in with his own cement. He had a great instinctive sense.… It would be a very tall order to second-guess him or argue with him.” Unlike many people, Buttons called him Howard from the outset, and there was never a problem.

Work soon began on the action that made everyone the most nervous—the catching of rhinos. Although stunt doubles, notably Hawks’s old friend Cary Lofton, were
on hand, all the actors, at their director’s encouragement, intended not to use them, particularly Wayne. Veteran hunter Willy de Beer’s truck was rigged so that the animal catcher did his work from inside the cab, but that wasn’t very photogenic, in Hawks’s opinion, so a seat was affixed to the left front fender. This made the actors as visible as a large hood ornament but also very vulnerable.
As soon as Wayne arrived, he grandly announced, “That de Vargas isn’t going to ride in the bucket seat anymore.
I’m
going to ride in it!,” and with very little practice, he proceeded to show everyone how it should be done. Buttons was cast in
the role of a former New York taxi driver now at the wheel of the catcher’s truck. “I’m the worst driver in the world, which is ironic, but they taught me,”
Buttons confessed. “They doubled me only for the long shots of really tough driving.”

John Wayne always said, “The most fun I ever had on any picture was on
Hatari!
” But Hawks later revealed that Wayne, who admitted to being scared during much of the hunting action, “had the feeling with every swerve that the car was going to overturn as he hung on for dear life, out in the open with only a seat
belt for support, motor roaring, body jarring every-which-way, animals kicking dirt and rocks and the thunder of hundreds of hooves increasing the din in his ears.

“Adding to the catcher’s problems—and ‘excitement,’ as Duke preferred to call it—was the game’s total unpredictability. They would, on a whim, suddenly switch from smooth plain to long grass, the whole territory being full of hidden
holes or obstacles which could spell disaster in a second. Duke remarked that the zebras were the smartest at eluding the car as they headed for the rocky edges of the forest as though completely aware that no speeding vehicle could move through the boulders.”

Throughout December, depending upon the animals, they shot sequences with rhinos, buffalos, giraffes, hartebeests and wildebeests, elephants,
and zebras. “We were always on the alert, like a military alert,” Red Buttons said, “for when the spotters would spot some animals, and then we’d all have to move out on the double.” Enthusiasm ran strong, even though the drivers were getting lost all the time and it seemed to take forever to get the animals to do what was needed. As far as the performances were concerned, Hawks said very
little to anybody. “At first, I thought, ‘I am an
actor
,’ you know, and I wanted to know what I should be doing,” de Vargas recalled. “But we learned a lot just from being around the men who did this, and eventually I saw that Hawks had us mesmerized, because we actually became part of it. We
were
animal catchers.”

Gregg arrived to spend Christmas with his father and ended up staying much longer
than planned. Shortly after the first of the year, Hawks and the editor, Stuart Gilmore, put together some cut footage to send back to Hollywood to placate Paramount executives. Once they were caught, quite a few animals were shipped to Los Angeles, both for future use in the picture and for distribution, by agreement, to various zoos; Hawks was particularly concerned, probably as much for publicity
reasons as emotional ones, that they be well cared for.

The last week of January, Hawks’s unit returned to the Arusha base, where all the scenes set around the fictional compound were filmed. The baby elephants really did seem to come to think of Elsa Martinelli as their mother, as it appears in the film, and the sequence in which Red Buttons captures hundreds of monkeys by sending up a rocket
to drop a giant net over a large tree was a particular nail-biter. The technique had been developed in England in the 1950s, but the special-effects man in charge was terribly nervous about proceeding with the scene. “He postponed it five days because he could feel a whisper of wind,” Hawks recalled. “He didn’t want any wind. We had to move people back a quarter of a mile behind barricades because
we didn’t know where the rocket was going to go. None of us thought it was going to work, really. But it worked beautifully the very first time.”

That was the work side of things. Just as in the film, however, there were deep personal tensions working beneath the surface of what appeared to be a highly engaged, sympathetic group of people. Any film shoot creates a world of its own for the weeks
or months it lasts, a feeling accentuated on a distant location that, in this case, was virtually out of touch with the rest of civilization. Red Buttons testified, “I found out for the first time that there was a world where nobody heard of Frank Sinatra.” Buttons also explained that after hours, “It was not one big group. Duke and Howard, they’d have their little drink together. Some of us lived
in private houses with lots of servants. There wasn’t much social life except for those that lived in the hotel in Arusha, and they’d drink at the bar.” Buttons did not know Wayne and didn’t agree with him politically, but he was happy to find that Wayne seemed to be very fair. “We all got to Africa right after JFK was elected. John Wayne said, ‘I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president and
I hope he does a good job.” For Wayne, who was initially accompanied on location by his wife, Pilar, and his young daughter, this was a vacation, a relief after the rigors of producing, directing, financing, and acting in his $12 million personal project,
The Alamo
, which had opened in October. Elsa Martinelli was initially apprehensive that Wayne would take his cue from the story and make life
difficult for her until she proved herself, but she found him a true gentleman; she became his chess partner throughout the shoot and often cooked pasta for him and Hawks at her house. According to Martinelli, later, after his wife left, Wayne started an affair with a blond woman who lived in Arusha, but he was so discreet that no one ever found out who it was.

At one point, there was a startling
showdown between Wayne and Hawks. Assistant director Bud Brill said, “Duke Wayne got mad when Gregg Hawks slapped his lovely little girl or did something physical like that, and he said, ‘If you do that one more time, I’ll break your goddamned neck.’ Then he looked up and saw Howard there with a big grin on his face.”

The filming was a great adventure for everyone, but for a few it was a moving,
life-altering experience. Hardy Kruger, accompanied by his wife, was so deeply affected by Africa that he arranged to purchase a portion of the compound after the shoot and has spent a good deal of his life there since. Although he didn’t take a home, Red Buttons, also there with his wife, reacted the same way. “Of any of my locations, this one had the most profound effect on me. I never thought
it would happen, but a tranquility came over me, gradually, and it really stayed with me. The reason it was so meaningful to me was that I was from cement, from the Lower East Side.… Looking at Mount Kilimanjaro, … on clear days, which they mostly were, … you’d see the snowcaps, and you could almost believe what the natives believed, that God resided up there.… Part of it has been in my soul ever
since.” Even Bud Brill, who was given such a hard time by Hawks, said, “I ended up falling in love with the country.”

Most of the difficulties centered on the French contingent. Early on, Hawks confided to Martinelli that he was having trouble figuring out how to use Gerard Blain, for the simple reason that he looked so short next to all the other actors, especially Wayne. Just as he had dressed
the slight Monty Clift in black to allow him to cut a stronger profile, Hawks realized he would have to do the same with Blain. “Unless I dress him up,” he confessed, “nobody will believe he’s a big game hunter in the heart of Africa capable of stealing his best buddy’s girlfriend.” His short stature also caused the director “to set him off from the others” visually and dramatically. “That’s how
Hawks worked,” observed Martinelli. Red Buttons elaborated on Hawks’s technique by saying, “It was improvisational, but then again it wasn’t, because Howard had this all mapped out in his head. He played his people, he saw what they were and what they could do, who he could pair up, who he couldn’t.” It was Bud Brill’s impression that with the possible exceptions of Wayne, Buttons, and Martinelli,
“The actors were all scared to death of him, but he had a great knack of developing things as they went along.” When Blain turned up all in black for his first scene—“he looked like he stepped out of a Fritz Lang movie,” said Martinelli—Wayne could barely contain himself. That evening, she noted that he told Hawks, “‘Dear Howard, only I know how much it took for you to make Montgomery Clift
believable
in
Red River
. … I hope you have the same success with this little French actor.’ They knew each other so well nothing could escape them. Hawks simply answered: ‘A great deal of Montgomery Clift’s success belongs to you, so I hope you’ll help me teach Blain at least two things, to fistfight and to hold a gun.’”