Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (36 page)

Hawks spent full days working with the writers, staying on top of them to ensure that the work got done and loving every minute of it. Often in the presence of
the young theatrical producer Billy Rose, who was trying to initiate his own collaboration with Hecht and MacArthur, the three men batted around dialogue ideas and completely rewrote the woman’s character, who became Lily Garland, née Mildred Plotka. At Hawks’s insistence, they also significantly altered the structure. In the play, from the outset Oscar and Lily are seen going head-to-head in the
train. For the film, Hawks requested a prologue that would reveal the essentials of the pair’s relationship, showing their initial Svengali-Trilby phase as Oscar transforms her into a star, the nature of their love affair, and her eventual flight to Hollywood to escape Jaffe’s ragings and possessive control. This prologue ended up lasting a half hour, boiling the substance of the original play to
a mere hour on film, resulting in a thoroughly overhauled work that Hawks felt “had a whole lot more to it than the play.”

The director kept pushing the writers beyond the point where they might have gone on their own. “I remember when we’d finished the script, they figured we were all done,” said Hawks. “I said, ‘Now we start on new, different ways of saying the same thing.’ We had more fun
for three days just twisting things around. I asked them, ‘How do you say this—“Oh, you’re just in love”?’ Ben came up with ‘You’ve broken out in monkey bites,’” (not realizing he had already used the line in
A Girl in Every Port
). The general pattern was for the men to sit around swapping lines, with Billy Rose, a former world champion in a shorthand competition, scribbling them down and a secretary
typing them up at night. When they got a good idea locked in, Hecht would disappear to write it while Hawks and MacArthur played backgammon. “They taught me how to play. We would work for two hours and play backgammon for an hour. I started winning from them so they got together and decided that when I was their partner they’d lose so that I would always be on the losing end of it. They were
so gleeful about this, but I saw what they were doing. If I threw a six and a three and I wanted a six and a four, I’d move it six and four. They never noticed. I won about $40,000 in IOUs from them and they never knew why the hell they were losing.”

Before he left Nyack, Hawks helped his friends get their project with Billy Rose off the ground. Rose was determined to stand Broadway on its ear
by producing a giant spectacle the likes of which had never been seen. Supposedly, it was Hawks who suggested that the most impressive backdrop
for such a show would be a circus, while MacArthur offered that the world’s most dramatic plot was
Romeo and Juliet
. Voilà, Rose’s extravaganza would pit two rival circus families against one another, and
Jumbo
, which would finally open at the old Hippodrome
in 1935, was born.

With a solid first draft in hand, Hawks returned home, where his critical challenge was convincing John Barrymore to play the part. The matinee idol of the 1920s and the most famous Hamlet of his generation, Barrymore had already begun his descent into broad self-caricature and erratic, alcoholic behavior. He wasn’t a major box-office name but he was still a star, the key to
Harry Cohn’s desire to make the picture. Barrymore had had a tempestuous affair with Mary Astor shortly before she married Howard’s brother Kenneth, but Hawks had never met the actor before heading up to his imposing mansion to tell him about the story and the role. As Hawks related it, when the actor asked why Hawks wanted him for the part, Hawks said, “It’s the story of the biggest ham on earth
and you’re the biggest ham I know.” Barrymore accepted at once and considered it “a role that comes once in a lifetime,” deeming the film his favorite of the sixty-odd pictures in which he appeared.

Carole Lombard, who was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, not far from Goshen, was Howard Hawks’s second cousin. But even though she had moved to California at age six and worked for Allan Dwan in 1921,
when he and Hawks were close, Hawks had never seen much of her, and he suspected, on the basis of her lackluster screen credits to date, that she was probably a bad actress. However, much as had happened with Ann Dvorak, Hawks saw Lombard “at a party with a couple of drinks in her and she was hilarious and uninhibited and just what the part needed.” It is with Lombard that Hawks truly began “discovering”
young actresses, shaping their screen personalities and fashioning what became known as “the Hawksian woman,” an independent type with a mind of her own who would stand up to men and was not content “to sit around and wash dishes.” Appropriately enough, Hawks’s career as a Svengali commenced on a picture depicting the very same sort of relationship between a dominant man and a woman he remakes
into a star. Just as significantly, it was the first time Hawks dared to pit a virtual beginner against an accomplished veteran in two equal leading roles; just as it would in later years, with Bogart and Bacall, and Wayne and Clift, Hawks’s gamble paid off. It is a tribute to his directorial control and brilliance with actors that he could simultaneously handle the chore of keeping John Barrymore
in line, which many directors were unable to do, and help Carole Lombard find the key to liberate her own personality on the screen, clinching her career from then on.

Still, there was a problem: the twenty-five-year-old former Mack Sennett bathing beauty was petrified at the prospect of acting opposite the screen’s aging Lothario, not to mention carrying a picture with him. Fortunately, the
problem was confronted head on and solved on the first day of rehearsals. Hawks often asserted that his famous private bit of direction to Lombard regarding how she should handle Barrymore took place on the first day of shooting, but the celebrating “kicking” scene in the train was not actually
filmed
until the third week of production, by which time Lombard was very much in the groove of her
performance. In rehearsal, however, in a precise reflection of the predicament of her character, Lombard was initially very stiff, “emoting all over the place. She was trying very hard and it was just dreadful,” explained Hawks. Barrymore was patient with her but at one point “began to hold his nose.” Becoming concerned, Hawks asked the actress to take a walk with him. “I asked her how much money
she was getting for the picture. She told me and I said, ‘What would you say if I told you you’d earned your whole salary this morning and didn’t have to act anymore?’ And she was stunned. So I said, ‘Now forget about the scene. What would you do if someone said such and such to you?’ And she said, ‘I’d kick him in the balls.’ And I said, ‘Well, he said something like that to you—why don’t you kick
him?’ She said, ‘Are you kidding?’ And I said, ‘No.’” Hawks’s parting remark was, “Now we’re going back in and make this scene and you kick, and you do any damn thing that comes into your mind that’s natural, and quit acting. If you don’t quit, I’m going to fire you this afternoon.” The direction worked, and Lombard’s natural spirited quality came through unchecked in her performance. Hawks claimed,
“She never began a picture after that without sending me a telegram that said, ‘I’m gonna start kicking him.’”

With Barrymore reporting two hours late on the first day, filming began on February 22, 1934, with the scene of the telephone conversation between Oscar Jaffe and the detective, played by Edgar Kennedy. Lombard began work the next day with scenes in Lily Garland’s dressing room, and
sound man Edward Bernds confirmed that the actress was entirely on top of her role from the moment she started shooting. “She was great from the first day,” he recalled. Given a tight twenty-one-day schedule, the film was made virtually in sequence, except for the theater scenes, which were bunched together early in the shoot. Hawks had selected Joseph August, the cinema-tographer of his first two
pictures,
The Road to Glory
and
Fig Leaves
, to man the camera, and production rolled along just slightly behind until the third week, when the interplay of the rapid-fire drawing-room scenes between
the two leads required so much rehearsal and refinement that filming fell five and a half days behind. But Hawks was trying something new, and everything depended upon the precise timing of the dialogue
delivery, which made it “a completely high-pressure picture,” in Hawks’s view. “It isn’t done with cutting or anything. It’s done by deliberately writing dialogue like real conversation:
you’re
liable to interrupt me and I’m liable to interrupt you—so you write in such a way that you can overlap the dialogue but not lose anything. It’s just a trick. It’s also a trick getting people to do it—it
takes about two or three days to get them accustomed to it and then they’re off. But you must allow for it in your dialogue with just the addition of a few little words in front. ‘Well, I think—’ is all you need, and then say what you have to say. You have to hear just the essential things. But if you don’t hear those in a scene, you’re lost. You have to tell the sound man what lines he must hear
and he must let you know if he does. This also allows you to do throwaways—it keeps an actor from hitting a line too hard and it sounds much funnier.” Hawks eventually found that his actors sometimes spat out their dialogue so fast that even he didn’t understand it.

Although Hawks said he lost one day of shooting because Barrymore was drunk, the star was generally a model of dedication and cooperation,
offering to work two days for free to make up for his delinquency, knowing his lines, and helping the director plan the onstage sequences. Barrymore devised his own Kentucky Colonel disguise for the scene in which he sneaks onto the
Twentieth Century
and improvised the very funny bit in which, once safely inside his compartment, he elongates his nose putty and concludes by picking his nose. After
the rocky beginning, Barrymore became Lombard’s biggest fan and supporter, giving her tips and rehearsing with her at length until Hawks was satisfied. After this high point, however, Barrymore’s Hollywood career went into a steep decline. On his next picture,
Hat, Coat and Glove
, RKO was forced to suspend production when the actor couldn’t remember his lines, and the deliberate self-caricature
of
Twentieth Century
sadly degenerated into a general run of helpless self-parodies through the last seven years of his career. Hawks’s own comportment was reserved, as usual. “The word that comes to mind is
austere
,” said sound man Edward Bernds, who later became a director himself. “He didn’t go in for camaraderie with the crew. He didn’t even seem to be directing, he never seemed to have conferences
with the actors. Hawks seemed to take a well-played scene for granted. He took it in stride. He expected it. For Hawks, every scene had to be perfect, he wanted it to be perfect from beginning to end.”

Filming wrapped up with scenes in Lily’s apartment on Saturday, March 24, after twenty-seven days of shooting, six days over schedule. Two added scenes were shot in mid-April, and on May 3,
Twentieth Century
opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York. The critics were generally appreciative of the film’s sophistication, expert playing, and direction. But
Variety
’s prediction that the film was “probably too smart for general consumption” was born out by business so lackluster that the film lasted only one week at Radio City. As Hawks noted, “The public wasn’t ready for seeing two
stars act like comedians the way those two did.”

But resistance to the film then and now, regardless of its many sterling qualities, could also be due to several other factors that point to ways that Hawks’s overt comedies differ from his other films, in which humor and drama are deftly combined in a manner that is so much like life. One can easily imagine audiences at Radio City in 1934 being
put off by the patented Hecht-MacArthur sexual cynicism, in which all exchanges of desire and love between men and women are charades and power plays. Of course, set within the broader context of the theater, the leading characters are constantly “performing” in order to get what they want, and much of the comedy derives from this very role-playing. But the insincerity of the characters can simultaneously
prove offputting, since the story’s sympathy is clearly weighted entirely in favor of the brilliant thespians at the expense of the straight outsiders, who exist only to be buffaloed, bamboozled, and ridiculed, as is Lily’s boringly normal boyfriend (a dull Ralph Forbes).

Hawks’s direction in
Twentieth Century
was often praised in the same breath in which it was called “frantic,” and the same
could be said of his subsequent three outright comedies—
Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday
, and
Ball of Fire
. In the first three, particularly, Hawks pushed the pace to the breaking point, sometimes so far that it becomes more exhausting than funny.
Twentieth Century
and
His Girl Friday
, the two Hecht-MacArthur comedies, are also the only Hawks comedies not to feature shy, put-upon, often humiliated
men; both of these have a powerful male figure who is officially the woman’s boss, but to whom the woman manages to successfully stand up. Without Hecht and MacArthur, the women have their way entirely with the hapless men in Hawks’s comedies.

Hawks preferred making comedies to dramas, but he also felt that it was “suicide’ to announce to the audience that you are trying to be funny. Nor was
Hawks interested in joke-derived humor, saying, “I can’t remember ever using a funny line in a picture.” For him, humor had to flow out of the characters and their attitude to what was going on around them.

But probably the point where Hawks’s overt comedies and the rest of his work part ways most noticeably is in the style. Hawks’s films, dramatic or comedic, are always very stylized, hermetic,
and self-contained. In his best films, all seriocomic, the fantasy world that existed in the director’s head was played out with a recognizable human and emotional balance that seems both natural and intensely poetic. But you don’t feel the filmmaker’s hand. The breathless comedies, even at their greatest, still fundamentally seem artificially engineered, utterly unnatural. Hawks was as clever,
smart, and inventive as anyone else working in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, but of all the most expert comedy directors of that period—Lubitsch, Wilder, Sturges, McCarey, La Cava—Hawks was the only one whose fundamental instincts and personality were not comic. At the same time, Hawks made some comedies that can be ranked with the best made by anyone, whereas it’s impossible to imagine
Lubitsch making
The Big Sleep
, Wilder directing
Red River
, Sturges tackling
Sergeant York
, McCarey or La Cava mastering the challenge of
Scarface
or
Air Force
. Without sending them up, of course.