Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (32 page)

Literary lore is rife with stories—some true, some no doubt apocryphal
or greatly exaggerated—of Faulkner’s initial misadventures in Hollywood: how his long, reserved silences and—when he did talk—often indecipherable Southern drawl put people off; his abrupt disappearance to wander around Death Valley; his legendary boozing; his suggestion that he would be best writing cartoons or newsreels; his disdain for most Hollywood films; and, most famously of all, his
proposal that he be allowed to write at home, with the agreeable studio not realizing that what he meant by home was Mississippi, not his Los Angeles residence. Faulkner was hired at a time when the studios, still settling into the sound era, were eagerly looking for anyone who could write good, pungent dialogue, and while Faulkner’s loquacious tendencies and rural subjects ran basically counter
to the sort of fast talk and urban material favored in films at the time, his reputation, however marginal and vaguely lurid, made him a plausible bet for a short-term tryout.

On his initial tour of duty at MGM, Faulkner wrote four short treatments, none of which came to anything. After six weeks, the studio decided not to renew his option, then hesitated and offered an extension at $250 per
week, half of what he had been getting. It was an offer the writer could refuse, since Paramount had just given Leland Hayward $750 for a four-month option on
Sanctuary
, at the end of which it paid almost seven thousand dollars to buy it (it was subsequently filmed as
The Story of Temple Drake
). On top of that, MGM had paid three thousand dollars for the rights to Faulkner’s short story “Turn
About,” published in the
Saturday Evening Post
on March 5 of that year. By Faulkner’s standards, he was flush, with no need for a workaday job at a time when he was about to read galleys on his latest novel,
Light in August
. But he got a call from Howard Hawks, at whose request the studio had bought his story (Bill Hawks handled the transaction), and agreed to meet with him.

Physically, the men
were a study in contrasts, Hawks long and lean, his prematurely gray-white hair clipped almost to the skull, Faulkner a full foot shorter, compact, his dark hair a bit unruly, with an odd way of walking while seeming to lean backward. But people couldn’t help but note the far greater number of similarities. Just a year apart in age, with Hawks the senior, both were reserved to the point of noncommunicativeness;
Nunnally Johnson was astonished by the sight of the two of them just sitting together not saying a word. When they did talk, they did so slowly, in a drawling manner. While very much of their respective regions, they were both Anglophiles, favored comfortable tweeds, and smoked pipes as well as cigarettes.
The two had both served in World War I but had not gotten overseas, although this didn’t
stop them from basing much of their work on the conflict, particularly the air war. Each was the oldest of three brothers, had stepchildren, and was in a marriage that already showed signs of fissure. They hunted and fished, and both liked to drink, although one rather more than the other.

In Hawks’s account of their first meeting, when he introduced himself upon the writer’s arrival in his office,
Faulkner replied, “I’ve seen your name on a check.” “I remember that very well,” Hawks said, “because I wanted to kill him. And he didn’t say anything else. He just sat there, and the more he sat there, the madder I got and the more I talked.” Hawks basically told Faulkner that he wanted him to write the screen adaptation of “Turn About,” and that he wished him to follow the original story
as closely as possible. “‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s all.’ ‘O.K.,’ he said, ‘I’ll go.’ I said, ‘Well, wait a minute. What are you going to do? When am I going to see you again?’ He said, ‘Four or five days.’ I said, ‘Oh, Mr. Faulkner, it shouldn’t take four or five days to digest what I’ve just told you.’ He said, ‘No, to write it.’ I said, ‘Are you serious?’ and he said, ‘Yes. You made it very clear
what you wanted. I can remember it all. It won’t take me more than five days.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was looking forward to meeting you. Would you like a drink?’ He said, ‘I’d love one.’”

In one account of what happened next, the two men went on a giant drinking tear that ended the following morning in a Culver City motel room with “Faulkner groping for cigarette stubs in a mint julep glass.” Hawks
merely said, “By the time we’d killed a couple of quarts of whiskey, I took a real drunk man home and he got up the next morning and started to work, and in five or six days he had a script.” Hawks gave the novice screenwriter some basic guidelines, the most important being, “The first thing I want is a story; the next thing I want is character.” Stunned at the high quality of his new friend’s
work, Hawks took the scenario to Thalberg and insisted that he read it at once. Thalberg concurred with Hawks’s assessment and directed, “Shoot it as it is. I feel as if I’d make tracks all over it if I touched it.”

As originally written, “Turn About” stood a good chance of becoming a formidable companion piece to
The Dawn Patrol
, a terse, compelling look at young soldiers daily risking their
lives on highly perilous missions during World War I, complete with a suicidal ending. Faulkner’s tale centered on an American pilot, Captain Bogard, who becomes involved with two British best friends, Claude Hope and Ronnie Boyce Smith, who run a
small torpedo boat. To show them some real combat thrills, Bogard takes the boys up on a bombing mission, whereupon they take him out on one of their
torpedo runs, which are highly dangerous as the torpedoes are released from the rear, requiring the speedboat to turn quickly to get out of the way. In the one significant change requested by Hawks, Claude is blinded by head injuries sustained in the attack (yet another instance of mutilation or blindness in his films). In a subsequent attack on a German cruiser, the torpedo-release mechanism jams,
so Ronnie, with the sightless Claude on-board, decides to ram the vessel. When he hears of his friends’ deaths, Bogard, in a rerun of the
Dawn Patrol
finale, undertakes a solo raid on an ammunition depot, then furiously continues on to bomb enemy headquarters, exclaiming, “God! God! If they were all there—all the generals, the admirals, the presidents and the kings—theirs, ours—all of them.”

Fatalistic and enshrouded in a doom lightened only by booze and the camaraderie of beautiful young men, “Turn About” might well have become a noteworthy addition to the Lost Generation cycle of film and literature, and its streamlined structure and clipped dialogue are strong enough to make very clear what Hawks would have done with it. However, what happened to “Turn About” stands as an almost grotesque
illustration of the studio system at its worst. It is also an exceedingly rare example of the fiercely independent Hawks accepting without complaint a demand that he had to know would ruin his film. He complied because he knew he had no choice, and because he was working for Thalberg now and wasn’t about to treat his brother-in-law in the high-handed manner he treated Jack Warner or Hal Wallis.

Scarcely a week after Thalberg had told Hawks to shoot the script as it was, studio vice president Eddie Mannix, a tough Irishman with whom Hawks got along famously, informed the director that his all-male picture was now to be a vehicle for Joan Crawford. It was common practice at the studio to quickly revamp projects to tailor them for stars who suddenly became available, and Hawks knew that
he had nothing to say about the matter. Hawks, who liked Crawford a good deal personally and, as he enigmatically put it, “used to go around with her,” went to talk to the actress and said he found her “sitting there with tears dribbling into her coffee cup.” She said, “‘Are they kidding, Howard?’ and I said, ‘No.’ Oh, she started to cry, and I said, ‘Now, look—you have to do it and I have to do
it. If you’re gonna make drama out of it, it’ll all be hell. If we decide to have fun and do it, we’ll have a nice time. What do you want to do?’ She said, ‘We’ll have fun.’ I said, ‘O.K.’”

Hawks broke the news to Faulkner by saying, “That’s the picture business, Bill,” and Faulkner quickly determined that the best way to shoehorn Crawford into the story was to make her an ambulance nurse.
On August 6, however, Faulkner’s father, Murry, died, at the age of sixty-two. Returning to Oxford, the writer promised Hawks he’d finish the rewrite at home, which he did, delivering it within a week. Crawford would play Ann, Ronnie’s sister. Upper-class children, they had grown up like siblings to Claude, their closest friend, who always thought he would marry Ann. Ronnie and Ann also seem so close
as to recall the incestuous feelings of
Scarface
, so the arrival of the dominant American, Bogard, into this mix takes on the dimension of a major disruption of apparent destiny among these altruistic English kids. At Crawford’s request, Faulkner gave Ann the same sort of exaggeratedly clipped, low-on-pronouns style of speech that the two English male characters had, hoping to reduce the sentimentality
MGM would invariably want to emphasize. To build up the special friendship of Ann, Ronnie, and Claude, he also wrote a childhood prologue, and later a section showing how Bogard and Ronnie had been classmates at Oxford.

In a very short time, and under the terribly adverse conditions of family tragedy, Faulkner did a remarkable job in reconfiguring “Turn About” to the studio’s specifications.
Still, it was felt that the script needed more work, and there were unresolved casting questions. MGM wanted to use Phillips Holmes as Claude, a choice Hawks, after
The Criminal Code
, was not crazy about. But the main concern was who would play Bogard. Currently shooting
Red Dust
with Vic Fleming, Clark Gable was on the verge of becoming MGM’s biggest male star, and the studio had any number of
properties waiting for him. First up, as it happened, was a goofy little story Hawks had had a hand in writing,
The Prizefighter and the Lady
, which was designed as a follow-up pairing of Gable and Jean Harlow after
Red Dust
. However, the suicide of Harlow’s new husband—and Hawks’s friend—Paul Bern in early September put an end to that idea. At one point, MGM even considered “doubling” Gable,
working out his schedule so that he could act in two films at once. But Hawks, although friendly with Gable, had his eye on Gary Cooper, whom he had found so effective in Sternberg’s
Morocco
. Cooper, who was currently starring in
A Farewell to Arms
, was under contract at Paramount but might be available at the right price. Waiting for Cooper would mean waiting until December, however, and in the
meantime, MGM had some other ideas about how they might employ Howard Hawks.

Even if MGM was having an easier ride through the Depression than the other studios, there was still a sense of foreboding. The threats of strikes and the organizing of Hollywood labor were gaining force, and no one was more opposed to these left-wing notions than Mayer and Thalberg. Barring some miracle, it seemed
certain that Mayer’s friend Herbert Hoover would be out of the White House come January, replaced by the dreaded Franklin D. Roosevelt. Within the studio, Thalberg’s always-frail health had taken a turn for the worse; under doctor’s orders to rest and cut back his schedule, Thalberg had no option but to look for some people he could trust to help him do his job, and for him, Hawks was a natural choice.
In Thalberg’s view, just about anyone could direct, but it took a special talent to recognize stories that had real screen potential, as well as to the work with writers and directors to help realize that potential. Thalberg had always felt that Hawks possessed the talent to cut through to the most fertile dramatic essence of a story, and Hawks definitely knew both how to communicate with writers
and how to get them to produce. Toward the end of September, with “Turn About” on hold, Thalberg asked Hawks and another director, Sidney Franklin, to become his lieutenants. Franklin wound up going on to a very comfortable career at the studio for another twenty-five years, but for Hawks, the whole thing, a disagreeable reminder of his short stint at MGM eight years earlier, represented a
step in precisely the opposite direction from where his career had been building ever since. Nonetheless, Hawks felt obliged to accept, with the proviso that he still be allowed to direct, and the appointments were reported in
Variety
: “In realigning the production forces at Metro, and to relieve himself of considerable burden, Irving Thalberg is assigning Howard Hawks and Sidney Franklin, directors,
to supervisory powers. Both men will continue to direct pictures in addition to handling four productions a year. At the time Hawks, who is Thalberg’s brother-in-law, joined Metro it was figured that he would become the latter’s chief aid. His new duties may shortly bring him to that position.”

In short, Hawks had a golden opportunity for a career countless others in Hollywood might have killed
for: to become, if he wanted, the third most powerful executive at the world’s most eminent film studio. But he had backed away from such a position twice before, at MGM and Paramount, and he would back away from it again now. He knew a full-time office job wouldn’t suit him temperamentally: he liked the breaks between pictures to pursue his sporting interests, and he was loathe to give up a schedule
that, when he wasn’t shooting, left his Wednesdays free for golf. He certainly
didn’t want to have to report to Louis B. Mayer and deal with him daily. But most of all, even if he never said it in so many words, he was an artist; he needed to create, he needed the thrill that came from working with actors and writers on the set, of being out on a limb and cleverly working out how to get down.
Even if Hawks agreed to his brother-in-law’s plan, he would simply continue with his directing projects. Sooner, rather than later, the impracticability of his double role would certainly become apparent.

One of the reasons that coming to MGM had looked appealing to Hawks was that Vic Fleming was there. But such close proximity also made the competition between them very direct and apparent for
all to see. Therefore, Hawks’s own vicissitudes at the studio stood out in even greater relief against Fleming’s terrific career upswing. Fleming had just directed Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in
Red Dust
, and the chemistry was in place for one of the more scorching box-office blockbusters MGM had during that period. The first preview took place at the Alexandria Theater in Glendale, and John Lee
Mahin, who wrote
Red Dust
, vividly remembered how tremendously its reception bothered Hawks. “Howard was always very jealous of Victor. He went to the preview of
Red Dust
with us. I rode home with him to Vic’s house, and Vic drove with somebody else. It had gone over very well. Howard was silent for a long while; then he said, ‘I wonder where Vic got that story.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, where
did Vic get that story?’ Howard said, ‘Where’d he steal it?’ I said, ‘It came in a fifteen-page treatment of a story to MGM called
Red Dust
, and it was a very purple melodrama about a poor little slaving whore—she got whipped by the heavy, fell in love with Gable from afar, and that’s all that happened. So, we decided to turn it into a comedy-drama.’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I think I’ve
heard that story somewhere.’ He just couldn’t face the fact.”