Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (104 page)

Blain recalled that, since Hawks had invited all the actors to feel free to contribute
ideas for scenes, he suggested a way to climax the sharpshooting scene between him and Hardy Kruger, whose character had previously decked Blain with a punch. “I proposed to Howard Hawks, … what do you think if I give my rifle to Wayne and, in the same movement, turn around and hit Kruger, knock him down, then help him up and shake hands? This was my contribution, and Hawks used it.” According
to Martinelli, however, there was an unpleasant stinger to it. After the first run-through, Wayne supposedly told the Frenchman that the only way for a shorter man to knock down a taller rival was with an uppercut. After the scene was over, Blain pointedly told Wayne not to offer any more advice. The whole set froze, but Wayne just shrugged him off.

But things deteriorated between the two, mainly
due to politics and Blain’s undiplomatic decision to speak his mind to the right-wing star about capital punishment, the Bay of Pigs, and so on. Wayne, who didn’t mind a legitimate argument, just got fed up. Blain should have known who would win this war, but he persisted, the result being that his part was diminished. The way Blain saw it, “At the beginning, my role was very important, more
like Montgomery Clift in
Red River
. Little by little, it got changed. Unfortunately for me, Hawks changed it during the shooting. He improvised a lot and, because Hardy Kruger knew English a lot better, I was at a great disadvantage.”

But considerably more annoying to Hawks was Michele Girardon. The director had taken a great personal interest in her from the beginning, bringing her to Hollywood
before the shoot and advising the inexperienced actress in his usual Pygmalionesque way. But there was much more to it than that. “Howard Hawks
loved
Michele Girardon,” said Gerard Blain, “but she refused all his advances.” This incensed Hawks, and he punished her as well by slicing her part to the minimum, although Blain felt that he “kept cutting and changing her role because he realized she
wasn’t much good. He really wasn’t much of an actor’s director. But if Michele had accepted the advances of Howard Hawks, it would have been a much different film.” Hawks’s frustration generated considerable tension on the set, which only increased when certain insiders realized that Girardon was carrying on the
most furtive of affairs with Russell Harlan. No one knows if Hawks ever found out
about that.

Instead, Hawks decided to forgive Chance for walking out on him in California and invited her to stay with him in Arusha. Chance arranged to cover the shoot for
Jours de France
, but this put her in direct conflict with Willy Rizzo, the representative of arch-competitor
Paris Match
. Chance and Rizzo hated each other on sight. “Since Rizzo was the lover of Elsa Martinelli, the lead,
and I was the mistress of the director-producer, there was a rivalry,” she said, and the Italian team won. “Martinelli would turn away from my camera whenever I tried to take her, and Rizzo was always running me down,” Chance complained, and there wasn’t much Hawks could do about it. Chance and Paul Helmick, who was sharing Hawks’s house, didn’t hit it off either, and then Chance and Red Buttons’s
wife were involved in a Jeep accident. It was all just too much for everybody, and Chance finally left to go on a real safari, returning periodically to pay brief visits to Hawks on location. According to Martinelli, Hawks also developed a serious interest in a beautiful woman who owned a ranch near Arusha.

Other visitors to the location included William Holden, who was co-owner of the Mount
Kenya Safari Club to the north and spent much of the rest of his life in Africa; Rosalind Russell and Frederick Brisson; Ed Lasker; and the Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who surprised his friend Martinelli one night while on his way through Africa with Alberto Moravia. The company was advised, for diplomatic reasons, to give a luncheon for Julius Nyerere, the nationalist leader
who would take control of Tanganyika when the British departed in December 1961; joined with the island of Zanzibar, the country would be renamed Tanzania. A fabulous spread of food was prepared at the compound, everyone was on his best behavior, and Nyerere even professed a familiarity with Hawks’s work. Hawks was solicitous and friendly in return, but the decorous occasion suddenly turned acutely
embarrassing when Hawks, who was seated at the table between Nyerere and Gregg, heard his son blurt out, “Dad, we never eat with black people at home. Why are we doing it now?” Hawks was at a total loss to recover from that one. After Nyerere left, Wayne privately disparaged him and everything he stood for, feeling that what Africa needed was a strong dose of capitalistic enterprise, not socialism
and nationalization. He even said, “I really think that if conditions had remained more to the white establishment that I would have gone back there and started a company, a safari deal, in which the men could rope the animals and tag them instead of killing them.” Blain recalled hearing Wayne say nasty things
about the local blacks, but he felt that Hawks, whom he realized was an archconservative,
“was neither one way nor the other” about them.

Hawks often got up very early in the mornings for brief hunting expeditions, although he never got the leopard he wanted to bag. For publicity reasons, it was felt that great white hunter John Wayne could not leave Africa without shooting an elephant, so it was arranged. As Red Buttons remembered it, it was a disgusting affair. “There was a lot
of silent controversy about that.… They really let him take a pot shot. There was a queasy feeling about it.” A still photograph shows the rifle-toting star standing uncomfortably in front of the slain beast, with Hawks looking on impassively. While he later admitted that “there’s no particular thrill in killing an animal,” Wayne added, “When you get over there and you wake up in the morning and you
hear the savage sounds of these animals and everything, your hair curls and you grab that gun and you take a different attitude than you did when you were at home saying, ‘Well, I’d never shoot a little deer.’” Wayne occasionally had to exercise his macho in other ways. One night, he decided to challenge Willy Rizzo, who was not much taller than Gerard Blain, to a cognac drinking match. After Rizzo
matched him through twelve glasses of the stuff, Wayne finally said, “You’re okay, a real man.”

The rainy season arrived a month early in 1961, making it virtually impossible to shoot anything but the monkey-tree rocket launch during the first ten days of February. With mostly some chase scenes involving the baby elephants in downtown Arusha left to film, Hawks, Wayne, Martinelli, and Buttons
all became ill for a few days, delaying completion of first-unit work until March 5. When the second unit wrapped things up the following day, the exodus out of Africa and back to Hollywood was on. By then, Red Buttons said, “We were ready to go home.”

After a couple of weeks’ layoff for travel and recuperation, production started up again on the soundstages of the Paramount lot in Hollywood.
Ironically, it was the only major studio in town where Hawks had never made at least one film before, and he hadn’t been employed there since working for Jesse Lasky nearly forty years earlier. Many of the animals that had been brought over were temporarily housed on the stages at Paramount. “They were in cages,” Bud Brill remembered, “and they were so dejected.” After the adventure of Africa, coming
back to finish the picture on the faux-lodge sets was quite an anticlimax, even if working in Hollywood represented something of a dream come true for all the foreigners. Martinelli was flattered when John Wayne complimented her by inviting her and her four-year-old daughter to stay at his home for the duration of the shoot. “I realized
that his way of showing his esteem for me was to insert me
in his private sphere,” she said. For moral support and a degree of protection from Hawks, Michele Girardon brought her mother over to stay with her.

Once the company was back home, the main challenge fell to Leigh Brackett: laying out all the action scenes and looking for ways to connect them. Brackett and Hawks approached it like a puzzle, and for Brackett, the chief satisfaction came from
“doing a good job of putting all the pieces together, taking the disparate parts and making it look as though it grew that way.” During the subsequent shooting, she acknowledged, “I was on the set every day, working till ten o’clock at night writing the scene they were going to shoot at nine o’clock the next morning.” Although Bogart remained her favorite, Brackett was impressed with Wayne’s professionalism:
“I remember his working with the baby elephant in the scene at the end of
Hatari
, when the critter gets on the bed and it crashes down. They tried about eighteen takes, and he said, ‘He’s doing it right. I’m not.’ The elephant had his cues down perfectly, but it was Duke who was blowing it. He’s a much more complex person than people give him credit for being.” Wayne was also personally ill at
ease, at fifty-three, about playing the romantic scenes with twenty-eight-year-old Martinelli. Hawks took advantage of this by poking fun at his discomfort in the hilarious scene in which Martinelli’s Dallas, forced to be forward if she wants anything to happen with Wayne’s Sean Mercer, corners him and asks, “How do you like to kiss?” He’s so adolescent about it that she’s driven to inquire whether
he’s ever been kissed, whereupon he blusters, “Of course I’ve been kissed!”

Red Buttons was impressed with the atypical way Hawks handled the man-woman relationships. “He was completely unsentimental,” he felt. “The word
nostalgia
is not in his vocabulary. You’d call him cool, especially the way he treated romance. It was the battle of the sexes, unvarnished.” Gerard Blain found this approach
downright weird; he is one of the few people who knew Hawks and worked with him (as opposed to film theorists and critics) who dared to say, “I detected a submerged homosexual in Howard Hawks.”

Hawks stole from himself in sending Blain and Kruger off to Paris à la
A Girl in Every Port
, having Kruger say, “It turns out we both know a girl there.” He lifted the ending from
The Front Page
when he
had Wayne call the airport after Martinelli has left to tell authorities not to let her on a plane because “she stole something.” Some of the work was good, some less so, the atmosphere was relaxed, businesslike, and less intense than in Tanganyika. As filming was winding down, word came on May 13 of the death of Gary Cooper, for whom
Hatari!
had originally been intended. After
Bogart, who had
died in 1957, and Gable, here was another Hollywood giant gone.

Production finally came to a close on May 24. Including the break for travel,
Hatari!
was before the cameras for six months and cost $6,546,000 to make, an unusually high sum for the time, more than the contemporaneous
West Side Story
. Before the actors departed, Hawks thanked them and talked about doing a follow-up in India called
Bengal Tiger
with mostly the same cast. As assistant director Bud Brill remembered it, Hawks told a couple of Paramount executives that he had a great idea for a film that he’d like to sell to them. “So he started telling them the story of
Hatari!
and finally they said, ‘But that’s the story of the film you’re making.’ He said, ‘No, not at all. That’s the film we were
supposed
to make.’”

Dimitri
Tiomkin had scored most of Hawks’s films since
Red River
and assumed that he would be doing so on
Hatari!
Hawks, however, did not want a traditional, bombastic, swellingly exciting soundtrack for this picture, and he instructed the composer to use native instruments when possible and to absolutely avoid strings or woodwinds. Hawks recalled, “He said, ‘That’s a great idea, boss.’ Then he called
me the next day and said, ‘You were fooling, weren’t you?’ And I said, “You’re fired, Dimi.’” After a wrong turn with another composer, Hawks called the hottest up-and-coming music man in Hollywood. Henry Mancini had already written a few film scores, but he had recently stirred up excitement with his theme for Blake Edwards’ television series
Peter Gunn
and was a particular pet at Paramount for
his recently completed score for
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, due for release in the fall. Excited to work on such a big picture, Mancini was even more impressed when, at their first meeting, Hawks opened up a big box containing all sorts of exotic musical instruments he had brought back from Africa—thumb piano, shell gourds, and two-foot pea pods with seeds inside. “I was entranced and immediately
decided to use them in the score,” said Mancini, to whom Hawks also gave tapes of Masai chants.

Working more closely with Mancini than he normally did with a composer and making a point of sitting in on the recording sessions, Hawks came to him with the specific problem of what to do with a little vignette Stuart Gilmore had cut together of the three baby elephants following after Elsa Martinelli
and splashing around in a muddy pond. He shot the unplanned sequence only because the elephants were so crazy about Martinelli, but he was leaning towards cutting it out unless Mancini had any bright ideas. The movements of the elephants put Mancini in mind of boogie-woogie, so he wrote the eight-to-the-bar “Baby Elephant Walk” and thereby created one of the most fondly remembered interludes
in the picture.

For
Hatari!
, Mancini composed one of the genuinely great film soundtracks, full of lyricism, unusual rhythms, unfamiliar instrumentations, hints of jazz, and African motifs, music that quickened the pulse during the animal chases, deepened the mood created by the setting, accompanied the action perfectly, and also stood on its own. As Red Buttons put it, “The score
is
Africa.
If you’ve been there, you know.” The album was a bestseller, and Mancini remained a lifelong friend and fan of his director. “Howard was a great gentleman, and he never raised his voice,” Mancini enthused.

Within three weeks of the wrap, Stuart Gilmore had the film in sufficiently presentable form for Hawks to host a private screening at Paramount. At dinner beforehand and over drinks afterward,
Charles Feldman, who had recovered well from his prostate operation, predicted that
Hatari!
would be a smash, a cinch to gross $20 million or more, a sentiment echoed by Paramount executives, who boldly foresaw it becoming their second biggest hit of all time, behind only
The Ten Commandments
.