Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (35 page)

From November 22nd to November 24th the Mexico City press gave considerable
publicity to the Tracy incident, as well as to the filming of the picture,
Viva Villa!
On November 23rd prominence was given to a telegram which Mr. Louis B. Mayer sent to President Rodríguez apologizing for the conduct of Lee Tracy and announcing his dismissal and the cancellation of his contract with the company.

Prior to the arrest of Lee Tracy, considerable newspaper publicity had been given
to alleged complaints against the filming of the picture
Viva Villa!
, which was said to picture the former revolutionary leader of Mexico, General Francisco Villa, in a manner defamatory to Mexico.

There was no mention of urination in the ambassador’s summary, nor was there in a more detailed account prepared by the embassy’s third secretary, John Aguirre. Frantic skirmishing was necessary on
the part of embassy officials and MGM representatives to prevent Tracy from being fined and deported, which is what the Mexican government wanted to do; in fact, officials held the train to Juárez for twenty minutes on the night of the 19th, with the intention of putting him on it. On the 20th, Hawks, who in his own memory of events had left before any of this started, arrived at the U.S. Embassy
for a meeting, at which he requested that the consulate general handle the case from here on, which was done. After much bowing and scraping by MGM; Wallace Beery, who offered to make a public apology; and Ramon Novarro’s well-placed brother, Tracy was allowed to leave, only to be fired from the picture and banished from MGM forever by a furious Louis B. Mayer. Tracy, whose star had risen so quickly
in Hollywood over the past four years, continued acting in films for several more years but increasingly turned back to the Broadway stage. He never worked for MGM again.

Tracy, of course, tried to put a good face on things, telling reporters back in Los Angeles, “After some strenuous weeks making
Viva Villa!
, I was just relaxing—feeling high. I had my pajamas and a bathrobe on. I was in my own
hotel room—not on a balcony. Somebody yelled—I yelled back,
in the customary Tracy manner. There didn’t seem to be anything vulgar nor offensive.”

He added that there were three other members of the
Viva Villa!
company with him at the window, and they all started cheering when the parade went by. “Somebody shouted back at us. Well, you know how those things are. We shouted back at ’em—’Go to______,
ha hah!’ or something like that. Anyway, it was all a big joke with us.”

When Hawks got back to Los Angeles on November 22, he was immediately called on the carpet by Mayer, who insisted that the director state publicly that Tracy had been impossible to control. What happened next depends on whom you want to believe. The most extreme, and unbelievable, version—Hawks’s, of course—is that the director
grabbed Mayer, pushed him up against a wall, told him “to go to hell” and quit. The always well-informed John Lee Mahin contrarily claimed that Mayer, upset that the film was going slowly and that retakes would push the budget well over one million dollars, fired Hawks to cut his losses. Whether he quit or was fired, the fact is that Hawks remained on the lot for some time after departing
Viva Villa!
, which would not have happened if he had manhandled Mayer. Having deduced some time ago that his future didn’t lie at MGM but tied down by a long contract, Hawks decided to transform this apparent setback into an opportunity to escape. Hawks informed studio vice president Eddie Mannix that Mayer “rubs me the wrong way” and that he wouldn’t work for him anymore. Then, Hawks said, he
stayed in his office for ten weeks, writing useless material he knew the studio would reject, until they finally agreed to let him go.

As for
Viva Villa!
, Hawks naturally said that when he departed, “they had everybody call me to go back and I wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘I don’t want any more of ’em.’” When his old friend Jack Conway was assigned to replace him, Hawks claimed, Conway “would call
me up and say, ‘What do I do about this?’ and I’d tell him the best I could on the telephone.” Conway received solo directorial credit. For his part, Beery piloted his own plane home, refused to answer questions about what had happened, and demanded a hefty bonus for having to replay his scenes with the new actor cast in Tracy’s role, Stuart Erwin. Mona Maris, who had been playing an aristocrat who
takes a fancy to Villa, only to be brutalized by him, was summarily dismissed and replaced by Fay Wray, and Selznick badgered Ben Hecht, now back in Nyack, into extensive rewriting of the film’s second half to cut the reporter’s importance way back. The remaining scenes were shot in the mountains outside of Los Angeles and on the Culver City lot. In the
finished film, what Hawks and Howe shot
in Mexico is pretty easy to spot: the clearly location-made opening scene of the child Pancho watching his father being whipped to death for speaking out against injustice, the enormous crowd scenes, the impassive but noble peasant faces, the many shots of riders moving against stunning backdrops all have a starkness and brute strength missing in the softer, sculpted images Charles G. Clarke created
for Conway. Some scenes, notably Villa’s farewell speech to his people midway through, intercut between Conway and Hawks, with the former’s interior close-ups of Beery appearing utterly isolated from the seeming thousands of cheering, rifle-toting men earlier captured by the latter. But there is less of Hawks and Howe than there might have been due to a highly suspicious accident at El Paso in
which a plane carrying twenty thousand feet of negatives crashed and burned after the pilot bailed out.

Although it was nominated for best picture and best screenplay Oscars in 1934,
Viva Villa!
ultimately emerged as something closer to a cartoon biography than a subversively funny look at early-twentieth-century mythmaking, as Hawks and Hecht had intended. “It really could have been one hell
of a picture,” Hawks believed. “I tried to make a strange man, humorous but vicious, out of Villa, as he was in real life, but Conway’s version had Wallace Beery playing Santa Claus.” Although the film proved to be a reasonably popular attraction, it just barely broke even because of its bloated budget.

“I knew it never was going to work out,” Hawks said of his stint at MGM. As should have been
obvious from the start, the MGM way of making movies—of preparing stories and scenarios and casts before assigning directors, then shuffling them around and reshooting extensively, often using other directors, and all of this orchestrated from above by Mayer, Thalberg, and now Selznick—was utterly antithetical to Hawks’s methods; Hawks later said, “I was glad to get out of that goddam place.”

After his exasperating year and a half at MGM, Hawks knew he needed a fresh start, and
Twentieth Century
marked the beginning of several things for Hawks, all of them very significant for his career. Since sound came in, he had directed six dramas—some heavier than others, all more brutal and harsh than the norm, with gangsters, prisoners, heavy drinkers, doomed
soldiers, reckless racers, and desperate fishermen as their subjects. With the exception of a grafted-on Joan Crawford, women had not been central to these films, and while Ann Dvorak and Zita Johann had offered characterizations that were not without interest, it couldn’t be said that Hawks showed any particular touch with actresses or female characters up to this time.

Nor had he done an outright
dialogue comedy. All of Hawks’s experience had taught him the value of injecting humor where it might least be expected, but only in
Fig Leaves
in 1926 had he played a picture strictly for laughs. But with
Twentieth Century
, Hawks would help introduce what became known as a new genre to the screen—the screwball comedy, in which attractive players, one of them a major star, horsed around and bounced
off one another in a manner normally expected only of comedians or supporting types. Before this, as Hawks explained it, “they didn’t have leading men and leading women make damn fools of themselves like they did in that picture.” What’s more, the film set a new standard in pacing comedy with its freewheeling approach and overlapping dialogue. The film version of
The Front Page
may have featured
equally quick pronunciation of words, but Hawks always claimed that Milestone’s direction created a “false” sense of speed through its cutting rather than the exchange of dialogue. Many of the early 1930s Warner Bros. pictures also featured some pretty fast talking, but much of that derived from the individual, wise-guy styles of specific actors, notably James Cagney and Lee Tracy.

By leaving
MGM for lowly Columbia, Hawks also reasserted the importance of his independence. Although it is not true, as he later claimed,
that he never signed long-term contracts with any studios, it is significant that at a time when most of his friends were forging important studio affiliations that guaranteed work and steady money, Hawks deliberately chose the nonaligned route so that he could keep his
options open regarding material, actors, and control of his movements. After what had happened at MGM and, to a lesser extent, Warner Bros. and Fox, Hawks was determined to take charge of his career himself, to be beholden to the studio bosses as little as possible. After 1933, Hawks did not again make two films in a row for the same company until 1939–40, when he was able to call his own shots
at Columbia on
Only Angels Have Wings
and
His Girl Friday
. Despite the fact that the mid-1930s did not result in Hawks’s very best work, they were of vast importance in carving out his reputation, and bolstering his self-image, as an independent operator who would work on his own terms or not at all.

Hawks made running off to film
Twentieth Century
sound like the easiest thing in the world, and
it was true that “everything that had to go right went right.” The trick Hawks had up his sleeve after he lost
Viva Villa!
was the idea of making
Twentieth Century
practically overnight. Making himself look smarter than anyone else, as usual, Hawks loved telling the story of how he finagled five thousand dollars and ten weeks of vacation pay out of his pal Eddie Mannix when he left MGM, and at
the end of that time invited Mannix to a preview. “He said, ‘Of what?’ and I said, ‘A picture I’ve made since I left you.’ And when he saw the picture, he said, ‘Do you mean to say that you made that in the ten weeks while we were paying you $5,000 for a
vacation?
!’ and I said, ‘Yes.’” If true, this would have helped Hawks justify taking such a low salary for
Twentieth Century
, as he agreed to
make it for just $25,000, or half of what he was making a few pictures back. It was one of the rare pictures on which the screenwriters made significantly more than the director; Hecht and MacArthur sold the play to Columbia for $25,000 and received another $14,525 for their adaptation.

As a friend of Hecht and MacArthur’s, Hawks had attended a performance of
Twentieth Century
during its monthlong
run at the El Capitan in Los Angeles in June and July 1933. By the time
Viva Villa!
was pulled out from under him, Harry Cohn had already unsuccessfully tried to recruit Rouben Mamoulian and, subsequently, William Wyler to direct a film version of the play. He then turned to the suddenly available Hawks, telling the director he had the job provided he could both make it cheaply and secure John
Barrymore for the leading role of the overbearing theatrical producer. The Christmas holidays were approaching, but Hawks, intent
upon showing up MGM and getting the film done in no time, made plans to leave for New York almost at once to work with Hecht and MacArthur.

Adapting the play wasn’t just a simple matter of opening it up and inventing some new locations for the action (almost the entire
play takes place during a sixteen-hour train trip). The work had its origins in a play called
The Napoleon of Broadway
written by a press agent named Charles Bruce Milholland and inspired by his former boss, the lordly theatrical producer Morris Gest. Milholland gave his manuscript to another Broadway titan, Jed Harris, who identified with the leading character but felt it wasn’t a professional
play. For a price, he convinced Milholland to let him give it to Hecht and MacArthur, from whom Harris wanted another play. Within three weeks, the speedy team delivered the first two acts to Harris, who could now see that the character of Oscar Jaffe was based on Gest, David Belasco, and, naturally enough, him.

Hecht and MacArthur had trouble getting around to the third act, however. After a
long gestation period, interrupted by numerous screenwriting assignments, including
Scarface, Twentieth Century
opened on Broadway on December 29, 1932, to strong notices and a respectable run.

When Hawks decided to undertake the film, he went to Gregory Ratoff, who had played Oscar Jaffe in the Los Angeles run, for advice concerning potential changes and improvements. He came away convinced
that the woman’s part should be changed from an imperious grande dame to “Sadie Glutz” from Third Avenue. Hawks admitted that having no theatrical background—indeed, never even having been backstage—he was not particularly the most knowledgeable director for such a piece. He conceded, “If it hadn’t been for Gregory Ratoff’s help, I wouldn’t have realized what things could be played around with or
worked on.”

Having received the playwrights’ approval for the character change over the phone, Hawks boarded a train for New York, carrying with him a special parcel. In Mexico City that fall, Hecht had ordered six custom-made miniature wax tableaux by special artisans, but they were just now ready. Hawks had brought them over the border, and a couple of months later he finally presented the
suitcase to Hecht in Nyack. “He opened it and there were six boxes of little wax statues that were the dirtiest things I’d ever seen in my life—a mother going down on her son, things like that,” said Hawks. “They were really horrible but they were fabulously done by this erotic, crazy family down there who were great artists. Well, I was going to kill him. I got cold perspiration thinking about what
could have happened if I’d got caught with those things.… Ben was always up to some crazy thing like
that.” Hecht had special shelves built in his library to show off his acquisitions, to the assorted delight and dismay of his visitors.