Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (19 page)

The idea behind
The Dawn Patrol
concerned a small group of British fliers continually faced with near-suicidal bombing missions on German targets; the men bear up under the tension through an intense bonhomie and the constant intake of liquor. In later years, Hawks claimed to have come up with the story himself, telling Kevin Brownlow that he paid Saunders “$10,000 to put his name
on it because I knew they wouldn’t accept me as a writer of dialogue because I’d never been backstage. And Dick Barthelmess read it and I was assigned to make it with Barthelmess, and it was the biggest grossing picture of the year—
Dawn Patrol
. After that everything was easy.”

Hawks recalled things in more detail to Peter Bogdanovich: “I got the idea from a story—I think it was by Irvin Cobb—about
an evening with a British squadron that was being hit hard.… David Selznick went to John Monk Saunders to try to buy it. He wanted to give it to Billy Wellman [a former war pilot who had directed
Wings
], not me, and then when he couldn’t do that, he came to me to see if I’d do it, and I told him I didn’t think he was any kind of guy I’d want to work with because he’d gone behind my back. I said,
‘Didn’t you know I wrote that story?’ And he said, ‘No.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t do it with
you
if I never make the picture.’ So I made it with Barthelmess at Warners. Funny thing—I almost made it with Jack Gilbert. Gilbert hadn’t made a talking picture, but he was the biggest star we ever had in silent pictures and Louis B. Mayer got me to bring Gilbert in and talk to him. Well, Gilbert went
back and told Mayer he’d make the picture without any salary and that’s all Mayer wanted, because he told Gilbert he wouldn’t let him do it if he
paid
to make the picture. He wanted to humiliate him. I got Mayer by the front of the coat and bumped his head up against the wall and said, ‘Don’t ever make me part of your dirty little schemes again.’ I didn’t stand too well with Mayer for a while.”

As Fay Wray recalled it, Hawks turned up at their house on Selma just west of Fairfax one Sunday morning that summer with a story idea “that he wanted John to sell because John was most successful with scripts about aviation.” The two men, she felt, would properly share story credit, but Hawks “wanted no authorship credit for himself on the screen or in advertising; he instructed the studio of
that choice in writing.” Both Wray and the film’s costar, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., remembered Saunders working on the script at the studio and, subsequently, rewriting dialogue on the set, so Wray was always astonished decades later when she heard Hawks immodestly
assume total responsibility for both the story and script. When they ran into each other at the 1966 Montreal Film Festival, she asked
him about this, and she was even more amazed at his casual attitude toward giving Saunders screen credit—“I told him to go ahead and take it”—when it had cost him a share of an Academy Award.

Having accompanied her husband to the Oscar ceremonies in 1931, when
The Dawn Patrol
won the award for best original story, Wray noted that Saunders’s acceptance speech acknowledged a degree of ambiguity
concerning the extent to which he deserved exclusive credit for the film, as it questioned “which came first, the chicken or the egg.” As Wray remarked, “He might have said the chicken
hawk
or the chicken
hawk’s
egg. Howard Hawks had been involved with the story, as well as the direction of that film.”

Nonetheless, Saunders remembered it differently. In a sworn deposition given in August 1930,
in connection with Howard Hughes’s lawsuit over material allegedly stolen by the creator of
The Dawn Patrol
from his film
Hell’s Angels
, Saunders stated that he had dined with former war journalist Irvin S. Cobb at the latter’s Park Avenue apartment in 1919 and had that night heard the story of “young British pilots in a combat squadron in an airdrome at the front. [Cobb] was impressed by the
gallant manner in which each of these young inexperienced and untrained pilots flew out in the morning to face almost certain death in aerial combat with veteran German air fighters. Between themselves and death these young British fliers hung up an alcoholic curtain of laughter, song and card playing. Mr. Cobb said that he would never forget the magnificent courage and spirit which those young Englishmen
displayed.” Saunders added that while at Oxford, he had quizzed such pilots specifically about the situation Cobb had described.

The writer mentioned that Hawks had approached him a year before, saying that “he would like to obtain an air story with a war atmosphere as a starring vehicle for the well-known actor Ronald Colman. He stated that Samuel Goldwyn would buy such a story for the purpose
of starring Mr. Colman and would employ Howard Hawks to direct it.… I then told Hawks the idea Mr. Cobb had given me … that I had in mind a story involving that tragic atmosphere of which Mr. Cobb had spoken, that to my knowledge the subject of a British airdrome at the front and the comradeship and attitude of mind of the British pilots had never been shown on the screen and that we had therefore
a story which was in background and atmosphere altogether original.… I then gave Mr. Hawks a synopsis of the story which I had in mind [“The Flight Commander”] and which was later produced on the screen under the title of
The Dawn Patrol
.

Saunders claimed that his original story outline went largely unchanged, save for “minor suggestions, revisions and pieces of business,” and that the climactic
episode of a pilot on a solo mission to blow up a German munitions dump under heavy artillery fire [which is what Hughes felt was plagiarized] “was original with me.”

Goldwyn eventually passed on the package, however. Instead, First National, a company owned and controlled by Warner Bros., agreed in October to produce
The Dawn Patrol
, with Hawks directing for a flat salary of eighteen thousand
dollars. In Saunders’s original eighteen-page treatment, there was a prominent plot element that might easily have represented a Hawks contribution, since it turns up in films from
A Girl in Every Port
all the way through
El Dorado
and beyond. A veteran ace newly arrived at Camel Squadron 31 during the winter of 1916, Captain Guy Courtney is a wild loner who has been jilted by a beautiful peeress
before the war and quickly moves in on Célèste, “the spirited little French godmother of the squadron.” After Courtney and the green Lieutenant Warwick Scott become close, they carouse together with Célèste, until Courtney learns that Lieutenant Scott is the man for whom Lady Mary Cambridge left him. When Courtney then loses Célèste to him as well, the men become estranged and Courtney heartily
approves of sending Scott out on an almost certainly fatal mission. All women were eliminated from the final script, one factor that made the film so unusual at the time and so questionable to many executives. Hawks purchased the rights to Saunders’s “Flight Commander” story for ten thousand dollars, then promptly sold it to First National for the same amount while waiving all rights and credit
for himself (thus cheating himself out of not only an Oscar but a substantial sum nine years hence when Warner Bros. remade the picture).

Saunders piled up quite a few more credits over the next few years, but by the mid-1930s his career was essentially finished. He and Fay Wray had a daughter scarcely a year before they were divorced, in 1938, and two years later Saunders was found dead, a suicide
by hanging, in his beach cottage in Fort Myers, Florida. He was forty-two. No notes were found, although he had recently been under care at Johns Hopkins for a nervous disorder.

The fall of 1929 was an extremely eventful time for all three Hawks boys. On the domestic front, Howard and Athole’s first child, David Winchester Hawks, was born on October 9 at 10:30
P.M.
at Good Samaritan Hospital;
Howard was thirty-three, his wife twenty-eight. Athole delighted in her second son at the new house on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills while Howard
worked six days a week at the studio. The entire family also busily anticipated William’s wedding to the actress Bessie Love, planned for December 27. At the time, William was working in a Pasadena stockbroker’s office, and it is impossible not to notice
that all three Hawks boys, whether by design or coincidence, had married actresses—or, in Howard’s case, Hollywood royalty—better known than they were, women whose status could only improve the men’s standing in the industry.

A petite, very attractive Texas girl, Bessie Love, then thirty-one and never before married, had debuted in
Intolerance
in 1916 and had made some seventy silent pictures,
including films directed by such Hawks family pals as Marshall Neilan, Victor Fleming, John Ford, and Frank Capra. By 1929, after several ups and downs, her career was in transition again, as she had just emerged as a potential musical star at MGM in
Broadway Melody, The Girl in the Show, Hollywood Revue
, and
Chasing Rainbows
.

The wedding was an elaborate High Episcopal affair. Marshall Neilan’s
wife, Blanche Sweet, was the matron of honor, and the bridesmaids were Athole and Norma, Irene and Edith Mayer, and Bebe Daniels and Carmel Myers. A grand party followed that evening at the Biltmore Hotel.

Meanwhile, Ken and Mary Astor’s relationship seemed improved, although Ken was keeping her in the dark about his financial difficulties. Despite making a thousand dollars per week at Fox, where
his star was quickly rising, Ken had lost all his money in the stock-market crash. He was also behind on his house payments and, without informing his wife, had been forced to discontinue his substantial life-insurance policy. On New Year’s Day, as usual, the younger Hawkses and their wives attended the Rose Bowl Game, followed by an early dinner at Frank and Helen’s home, within easy walking
distance of the stadium. Ken then drove his wife downtown to the Majestic Theater, where she was working onstage for the first time, co-starring with Florence Eldridge and Edward Everett Horton in Vincent Lawrence’s comedy-drama
Among the Married
.

Ken was then shooting
Such Men Are Dangerous
, a melodrama based on the life of the late Captain Alfred Loewenstein, who either fell or jumped to his
death from his private plane while crossing the English Channel on July 5, 1928. On January 2, Ken left the house early to drive across town to do some special shooting at Santa Monica’s Clover Field (named after a one-time roommate of Ken’s, Greer Clover, who had been killed flying). Ken asked Howard, a more experienced pilot, to come to the airport to help check things out and watch the parachute
jump they planned to film off the coast. Normally, Howard would have gone, but Athole, who felt her
husband saw little enough of her and their nearly three-month-old son as it was, prevailed upon him to stay home. The job at hand was pretty straightforward, but not without risk: in order to film a scene representing Warner Baxter’s Loewenstein character making a parachute jump into the sea near
the coast of England, two planes carrying camera crews would fly close together, one slightly above the other, and capture the action as a stunt man jumped from a third plane. One crew would film close-ups, the other long shots. Ken had told his concerned wife, “If it looks as though there’s going to be anything dangerous about it, I won’t do it.” Everyone felt that the only person to worry about
was the stuntman who would be making the jump into the ocean.

Howard, however, was not so sure. “Ken wasn’t much of a flyer, and I said, ‘You’d better look out, you’re liable to run into one another. Take care about it, and especially the man you’re flying with isn’t much good.’ When they called me and said there’d been an accident, I said, ‘Did they run into each other?” and they said, ‘Yes.’”

Howard was at home when he received the news, as were his parents. Mary Astor had just completed the matinee performance of
Among the Married
and was relaxing on a couch on the Majestic stage when Florence Eldridge sat down beside her and said she needed to speak with her. “There’s been an accident, Mary,” Eldridge told her. “The planes—we’ve only just heard—they’re not sure about anything yet—we’ve
just got to wait.”

Encouraged with false hope, Mary was advised by Horton to skip the evening performance no matter what happened, and understudy Doris Lloyd was quickly called in. Mary Astor was in her dressing room removing her makeup when a Fox producer arrived at her door. “He was fighting back tears,” she remembered, “and when he started to talk he couldn’t; he just choked up. But he didn’t
have to say anything. I looked at him, and I knew. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he,’ I said, and he could only nod.”

The two camera planes had collided in clear weather during a test run over Santa Monica Bay, killing all ten crew members. After Lieutenant Colonel Roscoe Turner, the pilot and a close friend of Kenneth’s, took off with the parachutist, Jacob Triebwasser, and crew members Fred Osborne and
Bert White, the two camera planes—large, closed cabin, single-engine Stinson-Detroiter high-winged monoplanes carrying five men apiece—followed in V-formation, heading out over the bay into the sun and rising to three thousand feet. At 4:30
P.M.
they were about three miles offshore and two miles south of Redondo Beach, above the spot where lead cinematographer L. William O’Connell and other crew
members were
waiting in several small boats to photograph the parachutist and then fish him out of the water. O’Connell was a flier himself, but his wife had asked him not to shoot any flying pictures, which is why he was not aloft. With the planes flying at virtually the same level, they were attempting to make quarter turns when one of the planes veered toward the other. The wings touched; then
one plane lurched around and smashed head-on into the other at a forty-five-degree angle. There was an explosion, and the planes went down together, nose-locked and burning. Flying a bit ahead and beneath, Turner, the lead plane’s pilot, did not actually witness the crash, but Osborne saw it and said, “Look, they have hit each other!” At that, Turner said, “I winged over and turned around to get
a look at them. They were tangled together, both afire, and plunging toward the ocean. Just as they were about to hit, two or three of the men either jumped or were thrown out of the burning planes. I saw the bodies splash into the ocean a little distance away from the point where the planes hit the sea.”