Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (20 page)

The crash and the aftermath were also seen by thousands of motorists along the Pacific Coast
Highway, by fishermen and sailors in boats, and by passengers on the cruise liner
Ruth Alexander
, which was steaming off Point Vicente at the time. Speedboats and launches rushed out to join the camera boats, but the planes sank immediately, leaving in their wake gasoline and minor debris that blazed for two or three minutes on the surface of the water.

Three bodies were recovered quickly, those
of assistant director Max Gold, cameraman Conrad Wells and assistant cameraman Ben Frankel, all of whom had gone out the open door of their plane on the way down and hit the water apart from the aircraft. Gold was still alive when picked up, but he died on the speedboat heading back to shore, his bones, like those of the other two, badly broken in many places. O’Connell recalled that “the bodies
had burned in the explosion before hitting the water. The assistant director’s body came up first because he had zipped his jacket all the way up.”

Back at Clover Field, pilot Roscoe Turner told reporters, “I don’t know how it could have happened unless the sun got in the eyes of the other two pilots. They were probably jockeying to get in position and one swung into the glare of the sun, hitting
the other head on before he knew it.” Turner was so devastated by the tragedy that he broke down and went into seclusion at home. Other pilots at the airport agreed that blinding sunlight could be the only explanation for what had happened. After darkness settled in, a
Coast Guard cutter flashing its searchlights cruised the area all night in the hopes of finding more bodies.

The accident was
big news both in Hollywood and around the nation. Nothing like this had ever occurred in connection with the shooting of a motion picture. Three pilots had died filming aerial stunts for Howard Hughes’
Hell’s Angels
, but this was something altogether different, ten men lost while flying on what should have been a routine, straightforward job. Gold, Wells, Frankel, and property man Henry Johannes
were piloted by Ross Cooke, while Hallock Rouse flew the plane in which Kenneth Hawks, cameraman George Eastman, assistant cameraman Otto Jordan, and property man Thomas Harris died. Seven of the ten men were married, and six children were left fatherless. Captain Ross Cooke had flown in aviation camps in Texas during the war and had flown for movies, including
Wings
and
Hell’s Angels
, for more
than ten years, while the other pilot, Hallock Rouse, was a former flight instructor who had also done a great deal of film work; it is unclear which one Howard did not trust, as he undoubtedly knew both of them.

As soon as he heard, Howard went out to the search site, but there was nothing he could do as night had arrived. While being driven from the theater, Mary Astor was subjected to the
agony of having to listen, at intersections, to newsboys yelling, “Ten die in film accident. Mary Astor’s husband killed.” Edward Everett Horton went onstage before the evening performance of
Among the Married
to explain his costar’s absence to a subdued crowd, and Fredric March and Florence Eldridge cared for her at their home for more than a week. William Hawks and Bessie Love returned early
from their honeymoon to be with the family in Pasadena.

The morning after the accident, with two minesweepers, eighteen Navy planes, five commercial aircraft, two speedboats, and three Coast Guard cutters participating in the search, the wreckage was found by the Navy minesweepers at fifty-three fathoms, or three hundred and eighteen feet down. Because of a winter storm, it was not until January
6 that a diver, Charles E. Smale, was able to get into one of the planes, where he recovered the bodies of Kenneth Hawks and Thomas Harris, which had been rammed against the instrument panel.

The bodies were taken to the Nolan Undertaking Company in Venice, California, where Howard identified the remains of his brother. Technically, the inquest concerning the case was conducted over the body
of Kenneth Hawks, but it was extended to cover all the other victims. The
coroner’s jury found no specific person or company responsible for the accident but criticized the way the job was approached. “We find that the collision was caused by the airplanes flying in too close formation, one of the planes turning at too short radius and possibility of sun glare. We believe that flying of such a
nature is too hazardous and it in no way encourages commercial aviation and in too many instances seems unnecessary.” Sol Wurtzel made all the appropriate remarks of remorse and condolence on the part of Fox, which was completely insured for such a mishap, although it is unknown to what extent the victims’ survivors were compensated.

Kenneth’s funeral on January 8 at the Little Church of the
Flowers at Forest Lawn Cemetery was conducted by the same Episcopalian minister who had married him and Mary Astor two years earlier. But while the service was attended by many prominent members of the film industry, Mary was conspicuous by her absence. Ken’s ashes were scattered into the Pacific off Point Vicente, close to where he died. Only after the funeral did Mary learn that Ken was virtually
destitute: the sale price of their home would barely pay for back taxes; his $200,000 insurance policy had lapsed; Fox was declared, in a suit brought by some widows of the victims, not to have been negligent in the accident; and the stock-market crash had wiped out her husband’s cash assets. He even owed money on some gambling debts. Quickly deciding that it would be best for her to put her past
behind her, Mary had little contact with the Hawks family from then on.

Hardest hit, however, were Frank and Helen. Now three of their five children were gone, and they can only have worried about Howard, who was about to make a dangerous aviation picture himself.

Always closer to Kenneth than to anyone else, Howard was unquestionably as affected by his brother’s death as by any other event
in his life. Already prematurely graying at thirty-three, his hair turned entirely gray thereafter. Publicly, however, he kept his own counsel, never even speaking about Kenneth to his wives and children. In later years he was only known to comment about his brother unsentimentally, in the manner of a professional evaluation. “I thought he had a good deal of promise,” he told Kevin Brownlow. “He had
a great deal of warmth, much more than I have. I don’t think he knew as much about story as I do but he had his own little way, he had a very good sense of humor and he showed that in his first picture and they definitely thought he had talent.”
Such Men Are Dangerous
opened to tepid response at the Roxy in New York on March 7, 1930, with the
Variety
review carrying the credit “Directed by the
late Kenneth Hawks.”

The Dawn Patrol
provided vivid and daily reminders of Kenneth’s violent death, not only for Howard but for everyone on the production. Still, the temperament of the piece, with its projection of stoicism, bravado, and steel nerves under the constant threat of sudden extinction, as well as the breezy professionalism of the crew and many fliers employed on the show, created
an atmosphere that encouraged setting aside cautious, sentimental considerations. Howard himself put up a philosophically pragmatic front. Of his group of six best friends who had enlisted in the Air Corps together in 1917, two had been killed on the airfield at Issoudun in France, two had crashed into each other pursuing a balloon in Italy, and now his brother was dead—all killed in planes. “So
I was the only one left,” he realized. “I always thought of it as just the luck of things, you know. It never frightened me about flying.”

The Dawn Patrol
represented a late entry in a cycle of phenomenally popular World War I films, which began in the silent era with
The Big Parade
and continued through
Wings, What Price Glory?, All Quiet on the Western Front
, and
Hell’s Angels
, which Howard
Hughes had been making since 1927.

As
The Dawn Patrol
neared production, the main challenges were refining the script, casting, and securing sufficient airplanes to enact the aerial missions. Officially produced by the cultivated Robert North, the film was overseen by Hal Wallis, then just a year into his job as general manager of First National under the overall stewardship of Jack Warner. Wallis
and Hawks took an immediate dislike to each other, and the mutual antagonism grew into a barely manageable stormy relationship that nevertheless produced eight mostly outstanding films over a period of seventeen years. Just as Hawks had no tolerance for overbearing executives who meddled in his business, Wallis had little patience for egotistical directors who fiddled with the script on the
set and went over schedule. There was never any common ground between them except for the needs of the project at hand, and all their dealings over the years were marked by exasperation and mistrust on both sides.

As far as
The Dawn Patrol
was concerned, Wallis liked John Monk Saunders, whom he considered “a very interesting man … a fine writer in the Scott Fitzgerald mode. Saunders, like the
people he wrote about, was never completely at ease in civilian life.” With
The Dawn Patrol
, Wallis felt, Saunders had written “a beautiful screenplay, authentic in every detail. His only weakness was a tendency to overwrite. We worked together, trimming
and tightening, until we had a lean, workable script.” In this regard, Wallis ignored the contributions of two more writers. From Fox, Hawks
brought over Seton I. Miller, the blond, facile scenarist of four of the director’s silents, including
The Air Circus
. Hawks wanted Miller to help him flesh out the original into a detailed screenplay. Dan Totheroh, who had seen combat in France and had just finished working for Victor Fleming on
The Virginian
, was later brought in to work on dialogue through the shoot.

With Hawks’s original
choice of Ronald Colman now out of the picture, there was no question but that Richard Barthelmess, the star of
Wings
and one of the biggest names of the silent era, would play the ace, Captain Courtney. The other important role was that of his younger charge, Lieutenant Scott. Barthelmess recalled that Hawks “wanted very much to have Doug [Fairbanks Jr.] in this part. I’d known him since he was
in short trousers and always thought of him as ‘Little Doug’ because his father was one of my great friends. I went to Doug and said, ‘Look, you must do this part, it’s going to be good for you.’ He said, ‘But Jack Barrymore wants me for a picture of his.’ I said, ‘Look, go to Jack and put it up to him, see if he won’t release you.’

“Well, Jack being the great fellow he was said, ‘Well, if the
part is better than the one in mine, certainly, for goodness sakes take it.’ Doug did, and he was such a howling success in it that it established him as a star.”

The experienced stage actor Neil Hamilton was selected for another principal role, Major Brand, whose command Courtney relieves. In search of a cameraman, Hawks talked to Harry F. Perry, who had done considerable shooting on
Wings,
Now We’re in the Air
, and
Hell’s Angels
, but Barthelmess insisted upon “his own personal cameraman,” Ernest Haller, a polished studio craftsman who was inarguably more experienced.

By February 28, 1930, when
The Dawn Patrol
started shooting, Howard Hughes was in the final stages of converting his air epic,
Hell’s Angels
, into a talking picture. The film had begun shooting in September 1927 under
the direction of Marshall Neilan. Luther Reed had later taken over before Hughes himself assumed the director’s chair in April 1928. When talkies hit, Hughes rightly judged that he couldn’t risk sending out his nearly three-million-dollar investment as a silent, so he began reshooting it with dialogue, with a partly new cast that included Jean Harlow, under the direction of James Whale; the film
finally wrapped in November 1929.

In a move that was both shrewd and shameless, Hawks began interviewing and hiring many of the experts who had just finished working on
Hell’s Angels
. Among them were Elmer Dyer, the chief aerial cameraman
on the Hughes film, who would become a good friend of Hawks’s and shoot the airborne footage in
Only Angels Have Wings
and
Air Force;
Harry Reynolds, a mechanical
engineer and aviation technician; and Ira Reed, a pilot-actor. There was nothing Hughes could do about this, but when he learned what the
Dawn Patrol
company was up to, he tried to buy up all the World War I fighter planes he didn’t already own, even though his picture was finished. In Wallis’s view, Hughes, “furious that we dared make a rival picture … raised competitiveness to the level of mania,”
sparking a run on the market for old Spads and Camels.

Having heard that
The Dawn Patrol
contained dramatic incidents that seemed suspiciously similar to some in his picture, Hughes tried various other ploys to thwart the production. According to Hawks, the first time he met Hughes was when the young tycoon turned up unannounced at Hawks’s house one Sunday morning. Hughes, he said, objected to
a scene from
The Dawn Patrol
that resembled one in his film, in which a fighter pilot is shot in the chest and coughs up blood before his plane explodes, and tried to talk the director out of using it. In one account, Hawks said that he replied, “Howard, I make pictures for a living, you make them for fun. I got a hangover. I’m not interested in talking about it.” In a legal deposition, Hawks
declared that he told Hughes, “‘Hell, anybody in a war, when they get shot in an airplane, the chest is the biggest target. That’s just the usual thing.’ … I think I used some harsh words about it. Anyway, I refused to do it.”

After this acrimonious initial meeting with Hawks, Hughes plotted to ground the First National project by legal means, but through an illegal maneuver. Hughes induced one
of his writers to bribe Hawks’s secretary into giving him a copy of the script of
The Dawn Patrol
. She informed Hawks, whereupon the studio had two detectives waiting, and they arrested Hughes’s man for theft.