Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (41 page)

Hawks’s characteristic understatement pays off in certain scenes, notably the creepy one, adapted virtually unchanged from the French film, in which the French soldiers hear Germans digging underneath their quarters with the
intention of placing mines there and blowing them up. The quality of war as a never-ending night with no ultimate meaning is also strongly conveyed, although viewers who might see this as an antiwar tract along the lines of
All Quiet on the Western Front
are barking up the wrong tree, since none of the key creative personnel, including Zanuck, would have considered themselves pacifists. Hawks
stated, “I’ve never made a picture to be anti anything or pro anything. I flew. I knew what the Air Force was up against. I used that theme from
Dawn Patrol
in another picture about war [
The Road to Glory
], and the theme is very simple. It’s a man who’s in command and sends people out to die and then he’s killed himself and some other poor bastard has to send them out to die.” Hawks also dispensed
with the ghostly processional of war dead at the end, further emphasizing his cyclical, and defiantly nonpolitical, view of war. “I’ll come back. I always come back. I’m eternal,” Laroche tells his mistress at the outset, and he does, figuratively, as a different man, one who will be
compelled to give the same speech and the same miserable orders, and probably to suffer the same fate.

Given the
unrelievedly bleak mood of the film,
The Road to Glory
did fairly well at the box office, breaking a five-year-old house record in its opening at the Rivoli in New York and enjoying solid, if not spectacular, runs in major cities throughout the country. “Strictly a man’s picture,”
Variety
dubbed it, “but has done business on that score.” But when Hawks returned to World War I one last time, five
years later, he would take a very different, and more popular, tack.

With three pictures in release, a new baby on the way, and an income commensurate with that of any filmmaker in Hollywood, Howard Hawks should have had a great year in 1936. Instead, he spent it in the crucible both professionally and personally, enduring turmoil, frustration, and hurt brought on mostly by his own obstinacy, selfishness, and coldness. The year
provided vivid examples of Hawks’s will and stubbornness, his habit of just turning and walking away when things didn’t go his way, no matter the consequences for others. A positive reading of his behavior would praise his resolve and sense of principle; a negative one would see simple childish petulance.

The difficulty of Hawks’s home life led him to remove himself from it as much as possible
through nonstop work and obsessive gambling. A new baby wasn’t exactly what Hawks had had in mind when Athole got pregnant again; David was six now, Peter ten, and for some time Hawks had been unable to see how things between him and his wife would work out. Her breakdowns were just periodic but still always looming ahead. For her, even if her husband was scarcely around, having another baby made
her happier than she had been in a long time and gave her the hope that this would help keep her faltering marriage together. If she was lucky, she didn’t know about Hawks’s ongoing affair with the statuesque showgirl and dancer Mary Lou Holtz.

Professionally, Hawks should have known what getting involved with Sam Goldwyn again would mean, but his need for money—and Goldwyn would provide a $3,500
weekly paycheck—outweighed his hesitations. Even if Goldwyn sometimes seemed, or played, the fool, no director ever put anything past him. Hawks thought he could this time, and he tried, but to no avail in the end.

Goldwyn’s taste for big literary names and properties led him to inquire about Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Edna Ferber’s
Come and Get It
even before it was published in late 1934
and to eventually pay forty thousand
dollars for the screen rights. Set in the author’s native Wisconsin in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the sprawling novel centers on an unscrupulous lumber baron who rides roughshod over the land and his loved ones in pursuit of wealth and status. As far as Ferber was concerned, it was “a story of the rape of America,” and the book’s passionate ecological
theme was the overriding impetus behind its writing.

Goldwyn put his forces to work on the project at once. Edward Chodorov was the first screenwriter assigned to the adaptation, but when Ferber was critical of the changes he made, particularly with the lead female character of Lotta, he was taken off the job. Ferber persistently badgered Goldwyn to hire Howard Estabrook to write the script,
but as he was presently under contract to Fox and on loan to MGM, Goldwyn turned to Jane Murfin, who in November 1935 handed in a draft Ferber considered “excellent” through the first half but problematic thereafter.

The lead character was hard to cast. Barney Glasgow was written as a big, burly roughhouser who could take on any lumberjack on his crew, and the span of the story sees him age from
thirtyish to his fifties. It remains difficult to think of any actor at any studio at the time who would have been ideal for it. Goldwyn tried to persuade his greatest rival, Louis B. Mayer, to loan him Spencer Tracy. But Mayer, who was then grooming Tracy for major stardom by giving him more sympathetic roles, rejected Goldwyn’s overtures out of hand. Almost by default, the 1930s prototypical
tycoon, Edward Arnold, got the part.

Choosing an actress to play the double role of Lotta was equally daunting. As written, Lotta was a pathetic, lame little barkeep who is loved, then dumped by the callous Barney Glasgow, who decides to marry up socially in order to guarantee his career and fortune. In distress, she marries Barney’s best friend, the hulking Swede Swan Bostrom. They have a beautiful
daughter, also named Lotta, upon whom the besotted Barney lavishes money and gifts in a foolish, pathetic attempt to make her love him and thus make up for his having deserted her mother. Instead, the young Lotta is attracted to Barney’s son.

Just as she was beginning her role for Hawks as the mercenary saloon girl in
Barbary Coast
, Goldwyn announced that Miriam Hopkins would play Lotta in
Come
and Get It
. Hawks, who made two other pictures in the meantime, eventually persuaded the producer that Hopkins wasn’t the ideal choice. Abruptly, Goldwyn announced with considerable fanfare that Virginia Bruce had won the double role. Newcomer John Payne was also
mentioned for the role of Barney Glasgow’s good-looking son. Involved with
The Road to Glory
, Hawks bided his time.

While the director
was still shooting in the trenches on the Fox back lot, he dispatched his ever reliable right-hand man Richard Rosson to begin filming second-unit footage in Idaho in mid-March. The crew’s assignment was to capture dramatic footage of falling timber, camp work, logjams, huge trunks sliding down flumes, hundreds of cut trees freed from ice and snow by explosion and sent downriver, and other lumbermill
activities that would make up an exciting montage at the beginning of the picture. The crew was rugged and expert, but there were significant problems nonetheless. A lot of the action proved very difficult to photograph, particularly the flumes, and when the company arrived in Lewiston, they found themselves in the midst of a particularly bitter labor dispute. Eventually, it took four months
of intermittent shooting, in Wisconsin and Canada as well as in Idaho, to get everything they needed, but it was worth it, as Rosson topped even his work in
Tiger Shark
, delivering footage that most critics felt was the most exciting in the finished picture.

Hawks took on
Come and Get It
with considerable trepidation. Not only was he familiar firsthand with the sort of strangling effect Goldwyn
had on directors, but he had serious reservations about the story and its commercial potential. He liked the first half, with its emphasis on the logging life, Barney Glasgow’s ambition, and the great love he discards, but he thought the second half “pretty lousy.” He considered the problems formidable enough to turn the assignment down, but he gave in when Goldwyn’s wife, Frances, begged him to
do it. There were plenty of reasons why Hawks was regarded as the ideal director for the film. Not only was it a rambunctious piece peopled by strong, lusty characters, but the story literally took place in the Hawks and Howard families’ backyard. Edna Ferber had grown up about twenty-five miles north of Neenah, in Appleton, Wisconsin, where her father was rabbi to a small Jewish community. She
had left that life behind to become a reporter and, by the 1920s, one of the most successful and prolific American novelists. Hawks sometimes claimed that Barney Glasgow was based on his own grandfather, a boast with a pinch of truth to it. The character was, in fact, a composite but was inspired mostly by the dominant Wisconsin lumberman and politician of the time, F. J. Sensenbrenner. A trait or
two might have been taken from C. W. Howard, but the important thing was that Hawks knew this sort of man well; he had spent the first ten years of his life around such men, men like his neighbors Kimberly
and Clark. When Ferber learned that Hawks was Charlie Howard’s grandson, she concurred with the Goldwyns’ decision to entrust her book to him.

Hawks had known Jules Furthman since the mid-1920s,
when they were at Paramount together. Since then, the caustic writer’s irreverent, cynical, slyly insinuating style had greatly enhanced the careers of his friends Josef von Sternberg and Victor Fleming. But because of his ongoing alliances with Ben Hecht and William Faulkner, Hawks had never had the occasion to work with Furthman. As he was intent, however, upon changing the first Lotta from
a shrinking violet into “a big, luscious girl, full of bravado,” a sexy saloon singer in the Dietrich manner, who better to call upon than the writer of
Morocco
himself?

The son of a prominent Chicago judge, Furthman had contributed to newspapers and magazines before turning to the screen in the mid-1910s. Forced to use the pseudonym Stephen Fox during the war years because of his Germanic name
(while some people may have presumed that he was Jewish, he was not), he worked mostly at the Fox Studios through the mid-1920s, collaborating repeatedly with such directors as Maurice Tourneur, Henry King, John Ford, Clarence Brown, and Arthur Rosson and directing three films himself in 1920–21. He joined Paramount in 1925, just when Hawks was there, and soon rose to become one of Hollywood’s
top screenwriters. He came into his own in his work for Fleming and Sternberg, notably
Morocco
and
Shanghai Express
, which oozed with innuendo and understated, offbeat eroticism.

The problem with Furthman, however, was that he was one of the nastiest, most cantankerous characters to carve out a place for himself in Hollywood. As the years went on, fewer and fewer employers would tolerate him,
despite his undeniable talent. Hawks said that he, Sternberg, and Fleming “were about the only people who could put up with the son of a bitch.… He was such a mean guy that we thought he was just great. He was bright, and he was short. He’d say, ‘You stupid guy’ to somebody who wasn’t as smart as him. He needed help, but when he got help he was awful good.”

Furthman’s personal life was intensely
private. When the wailing of his retarded son annoyed his neighbors, Furthman, along with his wife and son, moved to a remote corner of unfashionable Culver City, where in his specially designed greenhouse, he became an obsessive cultivator of orchids. Unlike most of Hawks’s other illustrious writers, Furthman was the author of nothing outside of his screenplays, gave no interviews, left no papers,
and
thus remains one of the great enigmas of Hollywood. Pauline Kael once opined that Furthman wrote “about half of the most entertaining movies to come out of Hollywood.” (Hecht, she said, “wrote most of the other half.”) Hawks clearly demanded, and got, the best out of Furthman. But as the years and the films mount up, it becomes evident that Furthman’s decisive influence over Hawks, both in
the scripts he actually wrote and, indirectly, in further sharpening Hawks’s own methods and concerns, cannot be overrated.

Hawks so charmed Edna Ferber when they met that she didn’t mind when he mentioned how he wanted to alter a few things. He then hired Furthman, who, at Hawks’s instruction, began changing things quite a bit. As everyone but Ferber and Goldwyn, who had “a great fetish for
prominent writers,” agreed, the story needed work. Just as he thought he could slip through David Selznick’s net of total control on
Viva Villa!
because he’d be off on location, so Hawks was emboldened in his moves to change
Come and Get It
because of Goldwyn’s prolonged absence from the studio. Hawks reported to the lot on April 1, when the producer was supposed to be in Europe. However, Goldwyn
only got as far as New York, where gastrointestinal problems aborted the trip. Hawks went to New York briefly in late April to confer with Goldwyn at the Waldorf-Astoria, and shortly after the director returned to Los Angeles, Goldwyn was headed for the hospital to have several feet of rotting intestine removed.

It was during this time, with Rosson busy capturing spectacular logging footage and
Furthman rewriting Murfin’s script, that Hawks had to decide who would play Lotta. After ten years as a director, Hawks had launched Carole Lombard as a star, but he hadn’t yet truly discovered an essentially unknown actress and put her definitively on the map.
Come and Get It
gave him the opportunity to do so if he found someone whom both he and Goldwyn believed could both pull off the double
role and, in effect, carry the picture. Hawks ran endless reels of film—screen tests, upcoming pictures, private material—and was struck by one girl he saw in a student film, Antoinette Lees, who had the kind of fresh, spunky quality Hawks liked but was not quite ready for the lead. Nonetheless, Goldwyn put her under contract, changed her name to Andrea Leeds, and assigned her to play Barney Glasgow’s
daughter Evvie.

Then Hawks saw some rushes from a Bing Crosby musical currently in production called
Rhythm on the Range
, featuring a new Paramount contract player named Frances Farmer. Just twenty-two, Farmer had completed two pictures, but Paramount obviously hadn’t figured out what to
do with her, not having offered her anything remotely challenging or interesting. An instinctive contrarian
who had stirred up controversy as a University of Washington drama student when an essay she wrote won her a trip to the Soviet Union, she was already becoming fed up with Hollywood after less than a year there. But for Hawks, her high-strung temperament merely added to the appeal of her extraordinary beauty; she was, he enthused, “the cleanest physical thing you’ve ever seen. She always looked
as though she were shining.” Her natural blond looks and clear blue eyes instantly reminded people of Lombard, and her sturdy build would be another plus in the role of a Wisconsin North Woods girl.