Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (33 page)

With nearly three months to go before “Turn About” would be ready for the cameras, Mayer saw no reason why Hawks shouldn’t direct a film in the interim, so he was assigned to take over
The Prizefighter and the Lady
. When he was at the studio briefly in 1925, Hawks had written a story called “The Roughneck and the Lady,” which was earmarked
for Norma Shearer but never used. Although the credits of
Prizefighter
attribute the “original story” to Frances Marion, the film bears a strong resemblance to Hawks’s earlier yarn, which concerned a lowlife woman who transforms herself into a “lady,” only to take up with a boxer while hiding from the police after her gambling establishment has been raided.

Hawks claimed that he developed the
story with Josef von Sternberg as a kind of lark. As it emerged years later, it was a silly but workable story
about a boxer who becomes involved with a big gangster’s lady, and it might have amounted to something with the original Gable-Harlow pairing. But then the studio had the idea of casting real boxers, starting with Max Baer in the Gable role and supported by Primo Carnera and Jack Dempsey.
As the moll, the irrepressibly classy Myrna Loy was as implausible a choice as Norma Shearer would have been. This was definitely not the sort of film Hawks came to MGM to make, and he tried to refuse. But Hawks couldn’t play games with Mayer the way he had with Warner and Wallis, so, for the second time in three months, he had no choice.

Recasting the experience in retrospect to his own advantage,
Hawks claimed that he began directing the film only as a favor, to “do a couple of weeks’ work” with Baer to “teach him a little about acting.” Hawks said he “made two or three good opening scenes and then [W. S. (Woody)] Van Dyke stepped in and shot the rest.” John Lee Mahin, who wrote the film with John Meehan and Frances Marion, remembered things a bit differently, stating that Hawks “was
two days on that, and he was six days behind schedule. He probably thought he could get away with it at Metro. But Mayer just put his foot down and said, ‘This has got to stop.’” In Mahin’s view Hawks didn’t fit in at MGM because “he wouldn’t take the regimen. He wasn’t used to it. You know, he wouldn’t allow Hughes on the set.… Even at Warners, I think he got away with it. And that’s pretty tough
to do when you’re talking about Jack Warner. But he couldn’t get away with it at MGM.” Of course, it is entirely possible that Hawks deliberately slowed down to the point where he knew he would be replaced, all the better to go hunting with Faulkner, who was now back in town, and return their attention to “Turn About.”

A hunting trip that fall gave birth to one of Hawks’s favorite stories. It
is impossible to verify, of course, but definitely belongs to the “print the legend” category. Hawks: “Faulkner and I were going dove hunting down in Imperial Valley. Gable called up and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I told him. He said, ‘Can I go?’ I said, ‘Sure, if you get over here in a hurry.’ So we hired a station wagon, and we started down with a couple of bottles of bourbon. We were coming through
Palm Springs, and the talk was about writing. Gable asked Faulkner who the good writers were. And Faulkner said, ‘Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself.’ Gable looked at him and said, ‘Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?’ And Faulkner said, ‘Yeah. What do
you
do, Mr. Gable?’ I don’t think Gable ever read a book, and I don’t think Faulkner ever went to see a movie.
So they might have been on the level.”

Still working for $250 per week, Faulkner completed writing several new scenes for “Turn About” in October, notably the stilted opening interludes in which Bogard comes to rent Ann’s opulent home and stays for an awkward tea. Toward the end, Faulkner was joined by the young screen-writer Dwight Taylor in making revisions. Although both Howard and Bill
Hawks urged the writer to stay in Hollywood, Faulkner had done all he could on “Turn About.” Beyond that, his wife was pregnant, his mother wanted to go home, and Paramount had just picked up its option on
Sanctuary
and was about to move into production of the film. This meant more than six thousand dollars for Faulkner, more than he had ever had in his life. Although he was typically dubious
about its prospects,
Light in August
was published to ecstatic reviews. Sam Marx asked the writer about the book’s motion picture possibilities, but Faulkner doubted its potential. “I told him I didn’t think they could use it. It would make a good Mickey Mouse picture, though Popeye is the part for Mickey Mouse. The frog could play Clarence Snopes.” Instead, he worked out an arrangement with MGM
to continue working from Oxford, which he did until the following August.

With “Turn About” now on track to start by mid-December, the script still needed some improvement in the writing of Ann’s character, so the studio assigned Anne Cunningham to write a treatment charting the drama from the woman’s point of view. Her sentimental suggestions were rejected out of hand, and the veteran writer
Edith Fitzgerald was brought in to strengthen Ann’s character, which she did in part by creating more scenes of her working as a nurse. She also did some emergency surgery when the youthful actors engaged to play the leading roles in the childhood scenes couldn’t master British accents, making Hawks decide to eliminate the sequences entirely and work references to their childhood into the dialogue.

Retitled
Today We Live
, the film went into production in December without a leading man. Gable wouldn’t take on two films at once. MGM offered Gary Cooper a thirteen-thousand-dollar bonus but with
A Farewell to Arms
about to open and promising to further boost the actor’s standing, he held out for twenty thousand and got it.

Shooting through the new year until February, Hawks tried to make the
best of a bad situation, but by now the film was hopelessly removed from what he and Faulkner had started out with six months before. Faulkner made a valiant effort to position Ann (now renamed Diana) at the center of a story of which she originally was not a part. But this resulted in opening sequences so laboriously expositional that after twenty minutes the film was in a hole so deep it had no
hope of climbing out. Hawks and his actors seem so ill at
ease in the early drawing-room and church scenes that these emerge as among the worst scenes he ever directed, and though the child actors were let go because they couldn’t get the hang of British accents, the professionals do no better. Hawks pushes the stylized, repressed line readings of
The Dawn Patrol
into the realm of parody, with
Franchot Tone, cast as Crawford’s brother, Ronnie, almost never uttering a first-person pronoun and delivering stiff-upper-lip dialogue such as, “Glad. Been waiting,” and, to his sister, “Stout fella” and “Can’t help feelings.” This seems to rub off on almost everyone else, and rather hilariously led some observers to label Faulkner’s dialogue “Hemingwayesque.” Then there are the outrageous Crawford
gowns by Adrian, one of which had an enormous pointed collar that Hawks said “stuck in everybody’s eye.” Perhaps topping all was the heavy irony that one of the best scenes in the picture, Bogard’s initial bombing raid, used a liberal amount of background airplane dogfight footage from Howard Hughes’s
Hell’s Angels
, the very film Hughes had accused Hawks of stealing from just two years earlier.
As
Variety
sarcastically noted, on this film Hawks was only “in the air again by proxy.”

The picture admittedly improves in its second half, which is where, not at all coincidentally, it converges most snugly with Faulkner’s original. But it must also be noted that, aside from the air battle, the only memorable scenes in the film, the two torpedo boat attacks, were actually shot by Hawks’s ever-reliable
codirector, Richard Rosson. Despite the thematic familiarity of the final suicidal run, these scenes offered something visually new and were quite convincingly done, furthering Hawks’s reputation as an action director when, in fact, he never stepped off the Culver City lot during the shooting of this picture.

Metro previewed
Today We Live
in Pasadena on March 16, 1933, at the then unheard-of
length of 135 minutes. Although
Variety
gave it an upbeat advance review at the time, it was obvious that considerable footage had to come out. The film was cut to 110 minutes, still rather long, and William Faulkner traveled up to Memphis for the local premiere of the film on April 12 and saw his name on the screen for the first time. He never recorded what he thought, but his old interest in
flying had been spurred by Hawks.
Today We Live
opened in New York on April 14 at the Capitol, and its big opening followed by a quick decline in business became the pattern around the country. The critical reception overall was lukewarm, with special ridicule reserved for Crawford and her costumes. The big winner on all counts was Franchot Tone, a stage actor in his first film. Tone was rightly
singled out as the one actor in the cast who delivered the oddly
clipped dialogue with authority. In real life, Tone also won the affections of Joan Crawford, who was married to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. at the time, and public interest in their romance was viewed as a possible boon to the film’s commercial chances. In the end, the film did just average business for an attraction with such big stars.
Years later, Hawks acknowledged, “I thought some of it wasn’t bad,” but admitted that Crawford “had her limitations. She was a personality more than an actress, and there were things she just couldn’t do. How are you going to explain to these people that the addition of the biggest star in pictures is going to
spoil
your movie?”

Despite the muddled results of their first collaboration, Hawks
enjoyed working with Faulkner so much that he was eager to continue their collaboration without interruption. Settled back in Oxford for the winter, Faulkner went to work on an adaptation of John McGavock Grider’s novel
Diary of an Unknown Aviator
. It developed into a highly personal effort intimately related to his fiction, possessing some of the same characters, concerns, themes, and complex
narrative devices of his major novels. “War Birds” deals with the tarnished, corrupted nobility of several World War I veterans now living in America’s South and, during its war flashbacks, focuses on the fatalistic recklessness of the youthful soldiers as well as the erosion of the Old World aristocracy. Despite the strong echoes of
The Dawn Patrol
and even
Today We Live
, the script, which he
delivered to Hawks in mid-January 1933, reads as the most thoroughly Faulknerian script the writer ever prepared, and it is probably his best. But the time-jumping narrative and complicated personal relationships were enough to make it uncongenial as material for the straightforward Hawks, so it is not surprising that he let it drop.

Part of what may have put Hawks off of “War Birds,” were the
“hillbilly” Southern characters Faulkner so often wrote about. With the prominent exception of
Sergeant York
, in his films set in the twentieth century, Hawks never gravitated to Southern or rural characters. “I got mad at him one day and told him I got so sick and tired of the goddamn inbred people he was writing about. I said, ‘Why don’t you write about some decent people, for goodness’ sake?’
‘Like who?’ I said, ‘Well, you fly around, don’t you know some pilots or something that you can write about?’”

As it happened, Faulkner had attended an air show and met some fliers and wing-walkers who intrigued him, and he’d centered his short story “Honor” around them. Early in 1933, Harry Behn wrote a treatment of it for MGM, and by March Faulkner had turned it into a screenplay, with dialogue
contributions from Behn and, later, Jules Furthman. A tart look
at a group of daredevil aerialists and their equally risky amorous flings, it is a wonderful script, permeated by the full-blown Hawksian code applied to professionals performing a dangerous job. The leading character, a wing-walker named Mildred Churchill, is exceedingly well drawn; her need for thrills, in her work as well as in
her men, is strongly etched.

There is more than a trace of Furthman in the script, particularly in the characters’ sexual gumption and the sense of compressed lifespans. One is left aching to see the film as directed by Hawks at his best (that is, not at MGM) with a terrific, sexy actress (Carole Lombard, perhaps Stanwyck) as the spunky Mildred. Regrettably, it was never made. Faulkner’s eventual
novel based on the material,
Pylon
, published in 1935, has never been considered one of his major achievements. For Hawks, its central character of an alcoholic newspaperman who becomes intrigued with these danger-loving flyers stemmed from a time when Faulkner “got drunk when he went down to an air show to see what it was like. He had kind of a hazy idea of it.” The result, he felt, “wasn’t an
awful good book” The film made of it twenty-five years later,
The Tarnished Angels
, is impressive in its own right but certainly lacks the juice and hopping hormones of the original script, no traces of which were used.

One more, even racier project Hawks was considering in the wake of
Today We Live
was a potentially wild comedy called “Moll.” Late in 1932, Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler sent Hawks a twenty-five-page treatment of this goofy gangster-themed comedy about a gun moll hiding out in Normandy who marries an ingenuous fellow expatriate. At the close of the story, he insists that she needn’t
have concealed her past. “You shouldn’t have worried about my being upset about a gun-moll,” he declares. “I don’t want to brag but I killed about a hundred people in the war!” The story is casually amoral at the very least and written complete with nude scenes on the beach.

Unsurprisingly, “Moll” was never made, but it did put Hawks back in touch with Hecht at a time when high drama was enveloping
MGM. In December, Thalberg suffered his first heart attack. At the same time, David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law, quit his top production job at RKO, after a string of successful pictures, because of disputes over his forthcoming production slate. Baldly taking advantage of Thalberg’s illness to reduce the younger man’s power and consolidate his own, Mayer offered Selznick his own
production unit at MGM, and Selznick installed himself at the studio on February 5, 1933, just after Thalberg had embarked on a long recuperative trip to Europe.