Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (17 page)

Hawks had recently taken a house at 705 Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills in anticipation of getting married, and he certainly did not
want to lose the $120,000 he expected to make in 1928. Fox was not about to indulge Hawks by making
Budapest
, which promised to be expensive, and Hawks inadvertently dug himself deeper into a hole with management thanks to a prominent story element in
A Girl in Every Port
. Unbeknownst to Hawks, studio head Winfield Sheehan had been, in the early 1910s, the secretary to the police commissioner
of New York City, and he counted many cops among his close friends. Spike and Salami’s hatred for cops is one of the most prominent running themes of
A Girl in Every Port
, and Sheehan blew his top when he saw the finished picture. “We went to the preview and I’ve never seen a more responsive audience,” Hawks recalled. “But when we came out, he said, ‘This is the worst picture Fox has made in years.’
I said, ‘You’re just a damned fool.’ Well, from that time on, he didn’t like me very well.” One hitch that came up just before release was that the name Salami simply proved too much for the New York censor board, which insisted that it be changed. On American prints, at least, the character’s name was changed to Bill in the intertitles, although British reviews that appeared in March 1928,
shortly after the film’s American debut, still refer to the character under his original nickname. The picture performed well in its native land but was ecstatically received in Europe, particularly in France, where, during the ascendancy of surrealism and the waning days of expressionism, its straightforward functionalism was seen as the height of modernity and Louise Brooks was considered a revelation.
Henri Langlois
crowned Hawks as the Gropius of the cinema and reported that novelist Blaise Cendrars thought that the film “definitely marked the first appearance of contemporary cinema.”

Acting quickly, Hawks got out of making “Part Time Marriage” (Fox must not have thought much of the property, since they didn’t force anyone else to make it either) by coming up with a story of his own that
seemed commercially promising to the studio. Hawks proposed a modest little contemporary story that almost seemed like a milder offshoot of
A Girl in Every Port
, an account of how two young men learn to become pilots at flight school while competing for the same girl. Flying as a subject could not have been hotter: since Lindbergh had made his successful New York-to-Paris solo flight in May 1927,
seemingly every kid in the country had caught the flying bug, and after the release of William Wellman’s
Wings
three months later, the demand for places in flight schools had skyrocketed.
The Air Circus
, Hawks’s proposed film, would feed off of all this, and it seemed like a natural, since the director himself had been flying for ten years. Anxious to get Hawks moving on a project, Fox approved
it in early March for an almost immediate start.

The writing credits on the finished film are at variance with the way the names appear on the assorted successive script documents. While the film’s official credits cite Graham Baker and Andrew Bennison as the authors of the original story and Seton Miller and Norman Z. McLeod as the scenario writers, the first-draft screenplay names Hawks and
Bennison as the story men, and Miller and Baker as the screenwriters. McLeod, an American who had flown in Europe with the Royal Canadian Air Force and was Wellman’s assistant director on
Wings
, came on afterward to beef up the flying material; later in 1928, he would launch a successful directing career of his own.

Miller’s first synopsis, written with Hawks’s supervision, was composed quickly,
with the actors already set for their parts. David Rollins, a new Fox contract player who had appeared in just one previous film, would star as Buddy, an overly sensitive mama’s boy who is motivated to overcome his fear of flying by the memory of his brother Bill, a World War I flying ace who was killed in action. He heads off for flight school with his boisterous chum Speed, to be played by Arthur
Lake, the former vaudevillian who had worked for Hawks in
The Cradle Snatchers
. Arriving at the Pacific School of Aviation in Santa Monica, the two pals meet the school’s operator, who was to have been played by Robert Armstrong and was Buddy’s brother Bill’s
close friend during the war; they are instantly taken with the boss’s sister Sue, a role destined for Sue Carol.

As Hawks admitted, the
film was “full of anecdotes—very little story. It was just about how boys of that particular period would learn to fly. Some of them got frightened and some of them were kind of crazy.” Speed goes up with Sue to learn how to control a plane but pulls a bunch of pranks, which prompts her to parachute out as a rebuke. Speed rises to the challenge and executes a perfect landing on his own, prompting
everyone to admit that he’s a natural even if he’s also a reckless wildman. Buddy, on the other hand, feels his fear growing daily; after falling out of bed during a nightmare in which he crashes, he is grounded when he puts a plane on its nose while taxiing. At an exhibition called Field Day, Speed wins a race. But later, when the small airport is deserted, Speed unknowingly tears off his landing
gear while taking off. Only Buddy sees it and, screwing up his courage, he sets out in another plane to warn Speed that he has no wheels. Speed misinterprets his friend’s hand signals as instructions to land, which Buddy must then prevent him from doing by daringly diving under his plane. Finally, Speed parachutes down, and Buddy is knocked unconscious in his first attempt at a solo landing. But
in a cornball ending, Buddy is deemed the real hero, Sue declares that she loves him, and Buddy can now feel that he is worthy of his brother’s memory.

The first draft script added more hokey elements as well as more typically Hawksian incidents and attitudes. Among the former: the full script gave more weight to the misgivings of Buddy’s mother, to be played by theater veteran Louise Dresser,
about the aviation aspirations of her only remaining son. Also, the school’s owner was not only an old friend of Buddy’s late brother, but a rare Hawks flashback shows how Bill gave up his life by crashing his plane into a German one that was right on his friend’s tail. Among the improvements: Sue becomes something closer to a Hawksian woman, surprising both men upon meeting them by offering, “I’ll
take you both up”; a comic character is added, that of Jerry the mechanic, played by Heinie Conklin in the first Walter Brennan–like role in a Hawks film; and there is considerably more documentary-style detail about learning to fly.

Also added was a big dance sequence designed principally to exploit the comic predicament of the boys’ having only one tuxedo between them. By arrangement, Buddy takes Sue to the dance; then Speed sneaks through a window into a back room, where they are to swap clothes for a while, giving Speed some time with Sue at the dance. Naturally, things go awry, but the
entire scene seems distended and
silly. A more curious scene was a digression dropped into a lecture the instructor gives about the unlimited opportunities awaiting the students in aviation; visually backdropping this was intended to be a “Jules Verne” sequence showing future designs for planes, airports, air traffic systems, and so on.

The Air Circus
was shot in a spirit of fun from April through June 9, 1928. The director
was pleased with the result and noted that Arthur Lake, who played the daredevil Speed, in fact soloed for the first time during the filming. Ironically, three days later,
Fazil
finally had its Los Angeles premiere at the Carthay Circle. But now
The Air Circus
would be held up as well. Since the sensational debut of
The Jazz Singer
the previous October, the studios had begun gearing up for the
inevitable changeover to sound pictures. Part-talkies were now appearing with some regularity, and this strange transitional period is marked by quite a few pictures that were begun or, as in the case of
The Air Circus
, actually finished as silents but that had one or more dialogue sequences added.

It is not entirely clear if Fox asked Hawks to work on the dialogue passages with Lewis Seiler,
a director of comedies and Westerns with eight films to his credit at that time, or if the studio simply replaced him; even Hawks fudged the point somewhat. In any event, Hawks, who hated the dialogue prepared by Hugh Herbert because he felt that “nobody talks that way,” had nothing to do with them. Given that the film is lost, it is not even certain how many new scenes were added. Several sources
and Hawks himself referred generally to “talking sequences,” but the
Variety
review specifically timed the dialogue episode at fifteen minutes (out of eighty-eight total) and identified it as “a sentimental session” between a blubbering Buddy and his mother that “reduces the hero of the film to the status of a big baby”; Hawks called the result “mawkish” and said, “You have never
known
such bad
dialogue.”

It was a dangerous period for artists who had worked only in movies and never in the theater. The knee-jerk reaction of executives and producers was to find actors, directors, and writers with stage experience and throw them into films. No one who had been working in films was safe; everyone had to prove themselves. Hawks was in double jeopardy because he had alienated both Winnie
Sheehan and Sol Wurtzel, but his track record was just good enough to keep himself on the studio roster, at least, it seemed, until his contract was up the following March.

Hawks needed his job because his life was radically changing, his responsibilities growing. He and Athole had originally hoped to marry on
February 8, two weeks before Ken and Mary Astor. In early 1928, however, Athole sank
into another deep depression. The recurrence of her psychological problem, which had first manifested itself a decade before, came very soon after she returned from Reno to finalize her divorce from John Ward. Norma assumed that Athole had suffered a nervous breakdown and bizarrely attributed it to her sister’s severe disapproval of their mother’s new involvement with her very young, guitar-playing
chauffeur who, she hastened to add, “was no monk.” According to Norma, Athole’s behavior was as disturbing as ever, as “she sat up in bed and began to say strange things—that the clock was making too much noise and by her expression I knew it had happened again and I was very frightened but couldn’t let her know.” Doctors passed her condition off as “nervous exhaustion,” while Irving Thalberg
simplistically supposed that once Athole was married to Hawks, she would be fine. As before, the Shearer family covered up any and all hints of unsavory, negative information and merely waited until Athole started feeling better, which she finally did.

It is not known how much Hawks really knew of Athole’s problems; in his biography of Norma Shearer, Gavin Lambert suggests that the Shearers so
successfully kept Athole’s illness a secret that “Hawks heard only that she had suffered another bad attack of the flu.” Everything else about Hawks’s character would indicate that he was too sharp to be so completely hoodwinked. But what is indisputable is that Hawks exhibited the patience of a saint for months, waiting devotedly until Athole was improved and then resetting the wedding date for
May 28, two days before his thirty-second birthday. Norma was the matron of honor, and Athole looked beautiful and thoroughly happy.
The Air Circus
still had two weeks of shooting left, and it is possible that Hawks had nothing to do with the added dialogue footage for the simple reason that he was gone on his honeymoon when they were done. Once Hawks was finished with the picture, he and Athole
sailed for Hawaii; unlike Ken’s honeymoon, there are no reports of Howard’s performance during it. Rather, 16mm. color home movies of their trip show the couple appearing to enjoy a fun-filled, adventurous time, learning to surf with skilled young men on Waikiki Beach in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, where they stayed, traipsing through rocky, rugged terrain on a hunting expedition in a mountainous
region, where Athole shot a mountain goat, and being instructed by local guides on the fine points of killing an octopus, an act involving biting down on the brain sac and spitting it out. Athole looks spirited and happy in the footage, and Hawks appears in the peak of manhood, lean and trim in a bathing suit, not an ounce of fat on him.

Unfortunately, when Hawks returned to the Fox lot after
his honeymoon, not only did he find
The Air Circus
ruined, in his opinion, but the studio insisted that he get moving on another script he found worthless, a romantic comedy-drama called
Life’s a Gamble
. Hawks procrastinated on this for the rest of the year, driving Wurtzel crazy with protestations and excuses about why he didn’t think it was worth doing, drawing salary all the while but falling
way behind on his contractual obligation to deliver three pictures a year. Finally, at the end of the year, after spending nearly $45,000 going nowhere with
Life’s a Gamble
, Fox assigned Hawks “as a last resort” to direct an adaptation of the popular English mystery novel
Trent’s Last Case
. The way it turned out, it easily could have been Hawks’s last film—and was, for a while.

They thought my career was finished. They thought John Ford’s career was finished. They said, What do you know about dialogue?

—Howard Hawks

As it was for Hollywood and the nation, 1929 was a pivotal year for Howard Hawks; once he got through it, his career would never be in doubt again. The year would bring him his first child but would also lead his family to the brink
of its greatest tragedy.

The Air Circus
had been reasonably successful, with Hawks’s flying footage particularly praised, but his refusal to have anything to do with the hastily added talkie sequences did nothing to persuade Fox that he could handle dialogue. Nevertheless, Hawks was still one of the studio’s most reliable young directors, and he jumped at the chance to tackle the adaptation of
E. C Bentley’s 1913 British mystery,
Trent’s Last Case
, which had faithfully been filmed in England in 1921.