Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (12 page)

It took balls for Howard Hawks to walk out on Irving Thalberg, but it wasn’t the first and it was far from the last time Hawks would tell a boss what he could do with his job; it got to be one of his most endearing habits. Every day he spent at MGM represented an additional day of frustration and treading water, to the point where he was beginning to get depressed. Still, the way
he told it, Hawks left MGM one morning and was all set to direct a picture at Fox the same afternoon. According to him, when he went to play golf after kissing off Thalberg, he ran into Fox’s general studio superintendent, Sol Wurtzel, who, when apprised of Hawks’s availability, invited him to write and direct a picture on the spot. There is no way to confirm or refute the story, of course, but it
is true that Hawks was launched on his directorial career with incredible speed; he was signed by Fox at the end of October 1925, and his first film was finished by February.

Hawks joined Fox at a time when the studio, under the stewardship of its vice president, Winfield Sheehan, a longtime associate of William Fox’s, was gearing the company up to unprecedented levels of production in a determined
effort to become a dominant force in the industry; its enormous 1926–27 program called for spending $10 million on at least forty-nine features and fifty-two comedy shorts. Part of this surge involved beefing up the studio’s directorial roster, and Hawks signed his contract on October 28, 1925, at the same time as Harry Beaumont and Irving Cummings. Among the other top directors on the lot
at the time were John Ford, Frank Borzage, Raoul Walsh, Allan Dwan, Alfred E. Green, Roy William Neill, and John G. Blystone. Hawks’s deal called for him to receive $5,000 for his original story, $7,500 to direct, and an option on his services for three more pictures to be produced within nine months, the first of which would pay him $10,000, the next two $12,500. Fox included a further option for
four more films to be made during a one-year period. Hawks celebrated the attainment of his long-elusive goal by taking an ad in the year-end issue of
Variety
that stated, “Happy New Year—Howard Hawks—Now Directing for William Fox.” Early in the new year, his brother Kenneth, who had been working steadily as an assistant director for Clarence Badger at Paramount, followed him to Fox, where he
quickly became one of the studio’s top production supervisors.

Fox needed product immediately, which put Hawks on the spot to come up with a story that could be written, cast, and put before the cameras within a matter of weeks. The inspiration for his proposed picture, drawn from real life, was exceedingly poignant. As he told Joseph McBride, “It was taken from a little incident that happened
once where a beautiful girl went blind from drinking bootleg liquor at my house. While we were waiting for the doctor, she said, ‘Just because I’m blind it doesn’t mean I can’t perform pretty good in bed.’” Hawks said he “loved the attitude she had,” as most men would.

Unfortunately, the story Hawks wrote had nothing to do with this episode except for the blindness.
The Road to Glory
, which was
also tentatively titled
The Chariot of the Gods
during production, is one of two films Hawks directed that are not known to exist. As his first film, and one basically written by him as well, it is worth delving into the story and its development in some detail, since its inspirational, religious theme and gravely serious treatment stand at such odds with the majority of his later work.

Hawks
did very few extended pieces of writing of any kind during his life, and one of the longest is the thirty-five-page treatment he wrote for
The Road to Glory
. Although it doesn’t solve the question of what motivated him to create a story so squarely founded upon the importance of a devout belief in God, just as it doesn’t provide any sort of cogent summation of his philosophy or attitudes, it is
pure Hawks at age twenty-nine, unfiltered by anyone else’s input or even, so it would seem, by commercial considerations, until the staggeringly unrealistic and unbelievable happy ending.

The treatment’s first paragraph is the closest the work comes to expressing an outlook on life: “Chance brings a man and woman together. By chance they fall in love. A new element enters and thrusts them apart.
Then comes coincidence to reunite them. Without coincidence, life would move in a preordained groove destroying genius and blasting ambition. The greatest coincidence is life itself.”

The opening scenes shows two Jazz Age hedonists, Judith, “a speed-mad nymph,” and David Hale, of “muscular body and steady nerves,” racing at more than seventy miles per hour down a country road. When they suddenly
come upon a wagon, David runs the car into a ditch and through
a rail fence, throwing them both clear, although Judith suffers a bruise over her right eye.

Judith shortly goes home, to a large suburban estate she shares with her father, Jim, a “big, youngish looking man” whom she loves “with a fierce passion” and calls “boy-friend,” as in “You’re late, boy-friend!” and “Not mad at me, are you—boy-friend?”
Despite Judith’s blurred feelings for her father, Jim and David get along pretty well, although, on a walk with her, David admits, “Sometimes I’m almost jealous of him. I wonder if you’ll ever love anyone as much as you love ‘the boy-friend’?” “It depends,” Judith responds. “On what?” David asks. “On whether or not this other person loves me as much as ‘the boy-friend’ does.”

Also living at the
house is a fanatically religious Negro cook named Aunt Salina, a role written in thick black dialect. Judith feels increasingly severe head pains, and when Jim is abruptly killed by a falling brick on his way to his office, Salina laments that, “De good Lawd sho’ done sent perversity to dis house. Fust He took Mistuh Jim an’ den Miss Judy gits a complaint wid her haid.” But the news is worse still:
a doctor who would rather be out playing golf informs Judith that her injury is going to make her gradually go blind.

Deciding at once not to inflict this “pitiful curse” upon David, she rejects David’s marriage proposal, cuts off their relationship, becomes totally bitter, and comes to hate God. David decides to bury his grief in manual labor in a mine, while Judith, her sight ebbing away, cares
about nothing anymore and accepts a invitation from her father’s old business partner, the fat, lecherous Del Cole, to a mountain lodge that happens to be near the mine.

In a breathlessly melodramatic final section, David is seriously injured in a mine explosion and is brought, of course, to the lodge as a train is arranged to take him to a hospital. Judith forces her way onboard, but the trains
loses its brakes and careens out of control down the mountain. Everyone jumps off except for the immobile David and an ecstatic Judith, who, knowing they are about to crash, at last tells David about her blindness and exults, “Soon it will all be over.”

After the crash, Judith is seen, “miraculously unhurt,” in a hospital. Informing her that David’s condition is grave, the doctor urges Judith
to “ask the Only One who can help.” Attempting to overcome her resentment of God and trying to remember how to pray, Judith recalls what a kindly old man told her once in a park: “God is Love.” Suddenly, David makes a
remarkable recovery and, to top it off, Judith’s sight is fully restored, whereupon the medic says, “A doctor can only help a little. It is God who cures,” before heading off to
play golf.

A final scene repeats the circumstances of the opening sequence, with Judith and David zooming in their car along the same road. This time, however, they miss the wagon and continue uneventfully on. “Gee, that was a close call,” says David. “What was it?” asks Judith.

To quickly flesh the story out into a full screenplay, Hawks suggested L. G. Rigby, the cowriter of Fleming’s Jack
London adaptation
Adventure
at Paramount. The script went through three drafts in November, with shooting beginning in December and extending into the new year. The first change was to remove Aunt Salina and replace her with Graves, “a fat and amiable butler” whose main function is to comically hide and provide Judith’s bottle of Scotch. Diary entries from Judith were introduced to convey some
of her inner thoughts. To emphasize the competitiveness between David and Jim, there was a scene at home in which the two youngsters dance the Charleston and Jim, unable to keep up, is forced to realize that he will soon be losing his daughter; later, at his office, Jim practices the dance so the kids won’t be able to make fun of him again. After she is informed of her oncoming blindness, Judith
is overcome with horror as she passes a sightless soldier stumbling through a park, led by a small dog on a leash. Finding a pamphlet entitled
God Is Love
, she throws it in the fireplace; subsequently, she goes to a bookstore and furtively requests a book in Braille. When she discovers the shopkeeper has given her a copy of the Bible, she violently throws it across the room.

Now feeling desperate
and reckless, Judith accepts Del Cole’s invitation to a wild party at a club, where she runs into David. Judith’s vision is virtually gone, but neither man knows what the problem is, and David takes her erratic behavior as proof that she isn’t the angel he thought she was. Cole takes her home and puts the make on her but backs off upon discovering she’s blind. She responds by mocking him for
no longer wanting her, and, expressing in a banal way the fears implicit in the remark of the real-life girl who inspired Hawks’s story, she says, “Nobody would want me!”

The ending in Rigby’s adaptation becomes, if anything, infinitely more melodramatic than Hawks’s original, although Hawks approved the changes. Judith installs herself at the lodge with Graves and his wife, while David, not
a mine worker in this version, races up the mountain through a storm to assert his love for her. The moment he does so, lightning strikes a huge
tree, which crushes the cabin and knocks David out. The next day, the grim attending doctor issues the same religious imperatives to Judith, who, overcoming her qualms, takes to her knees, clasps her hands together, and prays for David’s survival. Before
she’s even done, a ray of sun breaks through to fall upon her face, and not only does David instantly recover, but Judith can see again. The doctor tells her that even though the shock of the storm might have restored her sight, she should be thankful to God, whereupon she says, “Thank you, God—Thanks awfully.”

The coda this time has the couple driving along in their car cautiously, at just ten
to fifteen miles per hour, and the final shot shows the back of their car to reveal them as newlyweds.

Contemporaneous reviews indicate that the finished film hewed very closely to the storyline as described, and Hawks’s suggestion to Peter Bogdanovich that he and former Mack Sennett comic Ford Sterling, who played the father, improvised the idea of his character being killed by a falling brick
is completely contradicted by the incident’s full description in Hawks’s original treatment. Upon the film’s unveiling in April 1926, in both the United States and Britain, the critics’ comments were reasonably good, unanimous in praising May McAvoy’s performance as Judith as well as the film’s technical aspects. The London
Bioscope
found that “the story is a little bit morbid,” and
Variety
sarcastically
suggested that the film might as readily be booked by church organizations as movie theaters, “since a half dozen or more morals and lessons are neatly sugar-coated.”

The most extended commentary on the now unviewable results of Hawks’s first full-length piece of direction came from the British
Kinematograph Weekly
, which felt that Hawks “has achieved a notable picture very much ahead of its
prototypes. Emotional to a degree almost too poignant at times, the overpowering pathos avoids ‘mush’ and is treated with ingenuity that is never laboured; the early reels have a delightful light touch in well-devised contrast to the double tragedy that swoops like a cataclysm and will grip even those who hate having their withers rung. Concessions to hackneyed banality—the super-dog, the cabaret,
and the prayer—are mercifully restrained, and smooth treatment is very effective.”

Years later, Hawks assessed it by saying, “It didn’t have any fun in it. It was pretty bad. I don’t think anybody enjoyed it except a few critics.” He was, he said, under the delusion that “the thing to do was to be dramatic.” He was quickly disabused of this notion by Sol Wurtzel, whom Hawks greatly respected
and who issued him the following directive: “Look, you’ve shown you can make a picture, but for God’s sake, go out and make entertainment.”
It was advice Hawks took to heart and that he heeded, not only on his next picture, but for the rest of his career.

Directing three films in a year and writing the story to a fourth, as Hawks did in 1926, was nothing unusual during the silent era. Most pictures
ran little more than an hour, directors were often assigned to projects literally moments in advance of shooting, and postproduction time was minimal, given the absence of a soundtrack, meaning that pictures could be in theaters very soon after filming was completed. The way Hawks remembered it, he had no sooner finished shooting
The Road to Glory
than he went home and wrote something intended
to be entertaining and commercial. On January 28, he submitted a five-page outline for
Fig Leaves
which he divided into eight sequences. A sex comedy about the early tests and trials of a marriage, the story begins in the Garden of Eden, where the couple goes through their morning routine: they are awakened by a coconut-and-sand alarm clock; Adam breaks the morning newspaper, a stone tablet, into
two halves—whereupon Eve complains, “I have nothing to wear”; Adam leaves for work in a brontosaurus-drawn conveyance; and Eve is visited by a friendly snake.

As the film leaps ahead thousands of years to contemporary New York City, the serpent transforms into Eve’s next-door neighbor Alice, a flapper who insists, “It is every woman’s right to have pretty things to wear.” Hawks has his heroine
secretly become a model for fashion designer André, who, despite his effeminacy, tries to seduce Eve, who wants no part of him but likes wearing beautiful clothes. When Adam and his buddy Eddie coincidentally arrive at the shop to fix the plumbing during an elaborate fashion show and see Eve parading around in very skimpy garb, Adam says he doesn’t want to see her again. But when Eve gets back to
the apartment and finds Alice wearing her fur coat from the shop, the two women begin fighting, to Adam’s vast amusement, and Eve kicks her conniving neighbor out. Back in the Garden of Eden, Eve is seen shooing the serpent out with a broom; she and Adam make up, and “Adam suggests that Cain and Abel are holding a sale and Eve may find just what she wants.”