Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (112 page)

Hawks originally considered John Wayne for one of the two leads, despite his advancing years and paunch, and it can hardly have been a complete coincidence that Wayne played a Red Adair figure named Chance Buckman in Andrew V. McLaglen’s 1968 firefighting
adventure,
Hell-fighters
. This didn’t deter Hawks, who frequently told George Kirgo he might hire him to write the script, received input from Peter Bogdanovich, and talked about it with any number of other creative friends. But it would be a few years before he had anything substantial on paper for his project.

Nor was it entirely coincidental that one of the men he spent the most time with
from the mid-1960s onward was a Texas oilman named Ted Wiener. A millionaire many times over, Wiener had a home in Palm Springs and quickly became enthralled by Hawks’s tales of Hollywood, the stars, and his own great accomplishments. The two played golf together regularly, and, in due time, Hawks persuaded his friend that putting money behind a slate of films that he would direct and produce would
be just about the best thing he could possibly do with it. Hawks and Wiener spent a great deal of time cooking up schemes by which they could beat Hollywood at its own game, arrangements by which Hawks could make his choice of pictures and both men could rake in a small fortune.

That the old days were quickly coming to a close was signaled by any number of events. In 1967, Jack Warner, one of
Hawks’s oldest associates in Hollywood, sold controlling interest in Warner Bros. to Seven Arts. In May 1968, Hawks was devastated by the death of Charles Feldman, at sixty-three. Except for Victor Fleming, Hawks had probably been closer to Feldman than to anyone else at the peak of their friendship, and much of what Hawks had accomplished in his career could not have happened without him. Despite
warnings at the time of his operation for prostate cancer, Feldman had, if anything, accelerated his career in its wake, producing a string of films through the 1960s that included
The Group
, the smash hit comedy
What’s New, Pussycat?
and the extravaganza
Casino Royale
. Feldman had also brought Woody Allen into motion pictures with the latter two films and was preparing to produce Allen’s directorial
debut,
Take
the Money and Run
, before his death. The month before he died, Feldman married a French socialite, Clotilde Barot, a move controversial among his friends since it entitled her to at least 50 percent of his vast estate. Hawks and Feldman’s lives had not been as intimately entwined in recent years as they had been before, but his friend’s death clearly marked the end of something for
the director, and coincidentally gave him something less of a foothold in Hollywood. Eight months later, on January 10, 1969, Hawks’s brother William died after enduring a three-month respiratory illness.

By now, Hawks was spending more time in Palm Springs and less in Los Angeles. In late 1967, he gave up his rented house at 502 North Hillcrest Drive in Beverly Hills, but he was charged by the
owner for damage to the premises in a suit that was settled out of court. Hawks then moved to a penthouse apartment at the fabled Sunset Towers, a bit past its heyday but still a classy address, with its share of models and young actresses, whom Hawks liked to invite to his balcony to have a drink and watch the sunset. One of the resident girls he struck up a close friendship with was Sondra Currie,
a petite redhead barely out of her teens who took to Hawks in a big way. “He was a gas,” she enthused. “A tremendous sense of humor, a real old-fashioned man’s man. I really didn’t know that he was as important as he was. My mother did—she used to say, ‘Sandy, don’t you realize who he is?’

“We really hit it off.… I think I was more of a mild amusement to him, but we did have a close friendship
for quite awhile.” Currie often accompanied Hawks and Gregg on off-road racing trips to Baja California and had quasiromantic feelings about the old man. “I used to get very angry at him that there was such a big age difference,” she admitted. “I felt very deprived, because we really, genuinely had such a good time together.”

As Gregg entered his teens, Hawks spent an increasing amount of time
with him, spoiling him with an array of dirt and racing bikes and riding with him and his friends in the desert around Palm Springs. If Hawks ever doted on anyone and loved someone completely, it was Gregg, who was far from the easiest kid to be around much of the time. But he became an excellent rider; he began entering races as soon as he could, winning quite a few of them.

In 1969, in the
wake of the success of
Bonnie and Clyde
, Hawks briefly flirted with a story about the Kate (Ma) Barker–Alvin Karpis gang, which was written by William Faulkner’s young brother, Murry Faulkner. Though the project was dropped, Murry Faulkner wrote to Hawks, saying that the director was “one of the two men in Hollywood of whom I heard my brother speak in frank and voluntary admiration.”

Later
that year, Hawks received overtures from a new company in town, Cinema Center Films, which had a distribution agreement with another start-up firm, National General Pictures. Developing a slate of pictures under the auspices of the company chief, Gordon Stulberg, and a young executive named Jere Henshaw, Cinema Center was anxious to sign some big names in order to establish instant credibility. Along
with William Wyler, Hawks was one of the last of the great generation of directors who started in the silent era and could still, with the right project, deliver big stars and big grosses. As far as the company was concerned, Hawks’s name meant money in the bank as long as he stuck to Westerns, so they offered him a choice.

First was
Monte Walsh
, an adaptation of a Western novel by Jack Schaefer
about aging, obsolete cowboys that might conceivably have served as a vehicle for Wayne and another actor suitable to Hawks, such as Mitchum or Holden. But Lee Marvin was set to star, and the actor instantly dashed his hopes of working with Hawks by turning up for his meeting with the director roaring drunk. Jack Palance ended up costarring with Marvin under first-time director William Fraker,
with dull results.

Hawks was always ready to work with Wayne if he could find a good story, an increasingly difficult proposition given the great star’s age, girth, and health; in his one outstanding film after
El Dorado, True Grit
, Wayne virtually parodied his usual persona. Hawks found some potential in a story by Burton Wohl, who had written a handful of films through the 1960s, involving
a series of train robberies of Union gold shipments by the Confederates and the efforts of a U.S. captain to track down the informers on his own side. Although at sixty-three now rather old to be playing the vengeful officer, Wayne would still be accepted in such a part, and Hawks was hopeful of getting Mitchum to play opposite him again as his Rebel counterpart who, after the war, teams up with him
to find the culprits.

To write the script, Hawks tried straightaway to hire Leigh Brackett, but she was just about to leave on a trip around the world and could not accept. Instead, he went with Wohl, who, like numerous other writers who had never worked with Hawks, was unnerved by his lack of clear instructions and his long absences. As Brackett put it, “Howard drives writers right up the wall.
He will throw you a whole bunch of stuff and say: ‘This is what I want.’ And then he goes away and you don’t see him again for weeks.… He doesn’t go into all the ramifications of motivation—that’s what he’s paying you for.”

Motivation and background were particularly lacking in
Rio Lobo:
after two hours of the finished film, one knows absolutely nothing about John
Wayne’s character except that
he was in the army; he exists as a completely abstract creation, a functional figure only. It was Hawks’s desire to bend the story as much as possible back toward
Rio Bravo
and
El Dorado
, which is what the second half of the tale became in reworked form. When Brackett returned from her travels at the beginning of December 1969, Hawks got rid of Wohl and brought her onboard, where she remained
for nearly four months, working against her better instincts for avoiding repetition by providing just that, a reconfiguration of her, and her boss’s, previous hits. “Most of what I did on
Rio Lobo
was to try and patch over the holes.… I was unhappy that he went back to the same old ending of the trade, because it was done beautifully in
Rio Bravo
and done over again in
El Dorado
.”

In the form
the script finally took, Wayne’s Cord McNally, for strictly private reasons, becomes involved in yet another battle over land rights, trying to help the little guy fight off yet another big bully with a raft of gun-slingers in his employ. This time, the ragtag group consists of his former Confederate foe, now his friend, the dashing New Orleans-born Lieutenant Pierre Cordona; a crazy old coot, Phillips,
whose land is threatened; Phillips’s son, Tuscarora, who lands in jail; and a beautiful young woman, Shasta, who has reasons of her own for fighting the bad men who have taken over the town. Working his variations, Hawks had his writers make the sheriff one of the villains so that Wayne and his cohorts had to break
into
the jail in order to hold out there until the federal marshal arrives, and
he played with the exchange-of-hostages climax so as to have the outlaws attempt to throw the dynamite, with less successful results than in
Rio Bravo
.

Aside from Wayne and Jack Elam, whose walleyed looniness made him an excellent successor to Brennan, the casting was Hawks’s biggest hobgoblin on the new picture. Like Paramount, Cinema Center was not disposed to paying another star salary in
addition to Wayne’s, and Mitchum’s price had gone up since
El Dorado
. As he had done on
Hatari!
, Hawks split the intended second lead into two parts for younger men. For the southern lieutenant, Hawks made the unlikely choice of Jorge Rivero, the handsome young star of some two dozen Mexican movies who was being promoted for a Hollywood career after his first American picture,
Soldier Blue;
the
director decided to go ahead with him after a screen test with Wayne. For Tuscarora, Hawks was determined to hire Chris Mitchum, Robert’s second son. Jere Henshaw was just as adamantly against him, and the stand-off was resolved only when Hawks fulfilled his threat to shut down production in Mexico, which he did for two days, until Mitchum arrived. “I just asked if they wanted to go on their record
or mine,” Hawks said. “Chris was on the next plane.”

For the female lead of Shasta, Hawks had no front-running candidates but was determined to follow his habit of finding a newcomer rather than casting an up-and-coming actress who might have demonstrated some acting talent. Pierre Rissient made tests of a dozen young European prospects for Hawks; one, a beautiful German named Katrine Schaake,
interested Hawks greatly. She had played a bit in
What’s New, Pussycat?
and, according to Rissient, Charles Feldman had been willing to give her a leading role if she would sleep with him, but she refused. Hawks was ready to cast Schaake as Shasta, but at a crucial moment, much as had happened with Françoise Dorléac on
Red Line 7000
, she couldn’t be found; then, with the start date looming, immigration
would not issue her a work permit.

With this, Hawks was forced into a hasty decision. Cinema Center had tested a beautiful twenty-three-year-old model named Jennifer O’Neill, who had already been under contract to Joseph E. Levine and Paramount but had acted in just one film,
Glass Houses
, directed by Alexander Singer, the director, coincidentally, of the Burton Wohl–written
A Cold Wind in August
. Hawks liked what he saw and hurriedly signed her. Married and the mother of a three-year-old daughter, the dark-haired, highly photogenic O’Neill was from a wealthy family; since she was seventeen, she’d been earning $100,000 a year as a model. But she had undergone little acting training, and Hawks had no time to groom her in his preferred fashion.

On a preproduction trip to Mexico City, Hawks
found a local actress, Susana Dosamantes, who had been in a number of films, to play Maria. For the other Mexican woman, Amelita, he tested a model and actress who had appeared in Irvin Kershner’s new film
Loving
, Sherry Lansing. “He had a very fixed image of what a woman should be,” Lansing observed. “Tall, long hair, long legs, big eyes—a very specific type. Basically, she had to be Lauren Bacall,
and I just fit right into the image.

“He made me go through the exercises. You’d strain your voice so you’d get a husky thing on your vocal cords, and there was a way to push it down to lower it,” Lansing said. Once he cast an actress, “He attempted to control every aspect of your life, how you dressed, what you did in your spare time. The attitude was, ‘If you do this movie, you are required
to come to dinner, to be available.’ In his world, you were required to be the image, not the person. It was all illusion.”

Unlike many of Hawks’s other would-be discoveries, Lansing was not easy to mold. College-educated and with a teaching degree, she was not certain she wanted to act at all and was in therapy at the time to try to resolve her dilemma. Her inclination to introspection and analysis
made her a particularly bad match with Hawks, and she was frustrated that “talk with
him never went beneath the surface. There was a lack of self-examination. It sounds cool when you read it, but it’s terrible in real life.” Allowing that she was “very conflicted and confused” through the entire experience, Lansing still confessed, “I liked him. I liked him a lot,” adding, “we never had a
personal
relationship. He never did anything improper.”

Along with script and casting difficulties, there were other annoyances. To save approximately $1 million in production costs, Hawks and Cinema Center agreed to base the production in Durango, Mexico. However, when the English director Michael Winner, who was preparing a Western called
Lawman
with Burt Lancaster, got wind of this, he immediately
flew to Durango to nail down a lease on the standing movie set there, preempting Hawks by a matter of hours. The title was another problem. The story’s original name was
San Timoteo
, which everyone knew needed to be changed. Sherry Lansing said, “I remember being in a liquor store with Hawks and he was looking at bottles to try to find a title for the film.” Finally, in the hopes of reminding
the public of past glories,
Rio Lobo
was settled upon.