Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (44 page)

Before
Bringing Up Baby
got under way, however, Hawks became more deeply immersed in Hollywood politics than he ever would again. Never a joiner of organizations and much closer in mentality to a boss than to a labor activist, Hawks became involved in the nascent Screen Directors Guild almost entirely out of self-interest. The industry-controlled Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had
always mediated in labor-management disputes, and the studios held virtually all the cards. However, when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of the Wagner Act in April 1937, it opened the door for Hollywood’s struggling guilds to achieve some true influence. With the Screen Actors Guild and the Screen Writers Guild already signing contracts by late spring, the Screen Directors
Guild, which had attracted only ninety members since its creation in February 1936, suddenly bulged to about 550 members with its decision to enlist assistant directors and unit production managers as Junior Guild members, making it a force to reckon with.

Hawks, a charter member of the guild, became chairman of the committee whose task it was to negotiate an SDG contract with the studios. The
big bosses, represented by three friends of Hawks’s, Darryl Zanuck, Eddie Mannix, and Jack Warner, already bruised by their losing battles with the other guilds, took the position that directors, by virtue of the fact that they “perform a service which is fundamentally creative,” were part of the Hollywood elite, closer to them, the producers and executives, than they were to the rabble-rousing,
socialist-minded leaders of SAG and the Screen Writers Guild. Even within the SDG, right-wing members such as Cecil B. De Mille objected to any alliance with SAG, due to its affiliation with the American Federation of Labor. Since the tycoons had welcomed directors as part of the exclusive Hollywood boys’ club, they felt, couldn’t everyone just be gentlemen about it and avoid all this unpleasant
haggling and saber-rattling? The studio heads simply couldn’t understand why the likes of Hawks, Eddie Sutherland, and John Ford, who composed the negotiating committee, would want lowly assistants and unit managers in their own guild, and at talks that began on August 4, they tried to persuade the directors to separate these underlings into a different organization in exchange for guild recognition.

At an SDG meeting on the evening of August 30, however, the SDG served notice that it had no intention of partitioning itself. The producers felt that they shouldn’t negotiate with the directors just as the National Labor Relations Board had refused to negotiate with design engineers at the Chrysler automobile company on the basis that they were well-compensated creative artists. To the contrary,
Hawks and guild attorney Barry Brannen pointed out at the meeting, directors had no contractual power to hire and fire and were therefore employees themselves, not management at all. “In practice,” Brannen acknowledged, “a director may exert substantial influence in selection of cast or designation of members of the production unit, but this influence is exerted vicariously by means of recommendation
and suggestion and not as a matter of right by any authority given him under his contract.”

Balking at this ultimatum, the producers stiffened their position, insisting that it would deal with the SDG only if it represented actual motion picture directors. The committee expressed its astonishment that the producers would “attempt to change the internal organization of the other and opposite party”
in labor negotiations, with Hawks protesting that this would amount to “nothing less than the dissolution of the guild!” On September 23 (the first day of shooting on
Bringing Up Baby
), spurred by the producers’ refusal to negotiate, Hawks, Ford, and Sutherland issued a statement to the trade press blaming the producers for the stalemate and announcing that the SDG would be filing for certification
with the NLRB. But from here on, Hawks played a significantly diminished role. In October, Frank Capra, Herbert Biberman, and Lewis Milestone took charge of the Inter-Talent Council, which coordinated dealings with the other guilds, and Capra assumed the chairmanship of the negotiating committee the following April, a month before he was elected SDG president. Still, a basic agreement and full
guild recognition from the producers wasn’t achieved until May 1939.

For Hawks, his own family history, fundamental instincts, and personal politics ran against the sort of FDR-style progressivism that the labor movement represented. (A cynical critic once suggested that if Hawks had ever made a film about American labor, it would have centered on the code of professionalism among strikebreakers
hired by management—an unfair hypothesis but one perhaps not inaccurate in its assessment of Hawks’s sympathies). Nor did Hawks ever lose much sleep worrying about the plight of the common man during the Depression. Hawks’s lack of compassion and
elite image of himself made him fundamentally ill-suited to active political engagement on behalf of any cause, and it was easy for him to see that Capra,
King Vidor, Rouben Mamoulian, and others would be more effective than he in keeping up the fight for the SDG. Hawks’s guild activity was always a matter of looking out for his own interests, which included increasing his salary, boosting his leverage with and independence from the studios, and gaining more artistic control.

Although the way the cast and story were coming together was creating
considerable optimism about
Bringing Up Baby
, RKO still had cause for concern as the start date approached. The large salaries of Hawks, Grant, and Hepburn put the original budget at $767,676, and Briskin was advised more than a month before shooting that it was “suicidal” to make a Hepburn picture at that expense. “Hawks is determined in his own quiet, reserved, soft-spoken manner to have his
way about the making of this picture,” production executive Lou Lusty prophetically noted to the studio chief. “With the salary he’s been getting he’s almost indifferent to anything that might come to him on a percentage deal—that’s why he doesn’t give a damn about how much the picture will cost to make.… All the directors in Hollywood are developing producer-director complexes and Hawks is going
to be particularly difficult.”

Work on the film went slowly from the outset. The first problem was that Katharine Hepburn, who had never done “screwball” comedy, wasn’t getting the hang of her part; Hawks had imagined that she’d have no problem because the role was such a close fit to her own background as a clever, imaginative, outspoken New England heiress, but she was trying too hard, desperately
attempting to “act” funny, and constantly cracking up at her own antics and those of her costar. Although he was normally able to set uncertain actors straight with some simple, direct guidelines, Hawks couldn’t figure out what to do with Hepburn. “I tried to explain to her that the great clowns, Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, simply weren’t out there making funny faces, they were serious, sad, solemn,
and the humor sprang from what happened to them.… Cary understood this at once. Katie didn’t.”

In a measure of desperation rare for the director, Hawks turned to Walter Catlett, a veteran comic long associated with the Ziegfeld Follies. After watching some rushes, Catlett agreed that Hepburn was overdoing it but initially refused to work with her, until Hawks got Hepburn to ask him herself. “Walter
played a whole scene of hers out with Cary Grant, played it with every mannerism of hers,
very serious
, and she was entranced. She
said, ‘You have to create a part for him in the picture.’ And I did.” (Catlett was prominently featured as Constable Slocum.) “After that, she played perfectly—not trying to be funny, but being very, very natural and
herself
.” Hepburn also credited her costar with
keeping her on the right track: “Cary Grant taught me that the more depressed I looked when I went into a pratfall, the more the audience would laugh.”

Hepburn and Grant, who with their respective mates at the time, Howard Hughes and Phyllis Brooks, socialized a great deal off the set, were utterly full of beans on the shoot, overflowing with energy and thrilled to be working together. “We wanted
it to be as good as it could possibly be,” Hepburn said. “Nothing was ever too much trouble. And we were both very early on the set. Howard Hawks was always late, so Cary and I worked out an awful lot of stuff together. We’d make up things to do on the screen—how to work out those laughs in
Bringing Up Baby
.”

Among the scenes Grant came up with was the priceless one in which, after Hepburn tears
his formal suit in a swank supper club, he accidentally steps on her dress and rips off its rear, revealing her lingeried backside. To prevent everyone from glimpsing this, Grant first covers it with his top hat; then, once she has felt the breeze, they walk in step with him pressed as firmly up against her back as possible. Something similar had happened to the actor not long before at the Roxy
Theatre in New York City, where he had been seated in the front row of the balcony with the head of the Metropolitan Museum and his wife. When Grant stood to allow the wife to cross in front of him to go to the bathroom, he found that he’d neglected to zip up his fly and began to do so, only to catch the woman’s frock in it. The two then had to lockstep to the manager’s office in order to find
a pair of pliers to disconnect Grant’s fly from the lady’s garment. Hawks loved the story and fully caught its comically embarrassing spirit.

In a later scene, Hepburn accidentally broke the heel off her shoe. Immediately, Grant whispered to her the line “I was born on the side of a hill,” whereupon she repeated the ad-lib as she continued to limp along. It was this sort of dazzling quickness
Grant was to exhibit even more abundantly for Hawks two years later in
His Girl Friday
. Grant also provided his costar with some invaluable coaching for the final scene, in which she climbs toward him by ladder, then across his giant reconstruction on a brontosaurus, only to be saved by his outstretched hand when it collapses in a heap under her. “I told her when and how to let go,” Grant remembered.
“I told her to aim for my wrists, an old circus trick. You can’t let go of that kind of grip, whereas if you go for the hands, you’ll slip. She went right for my wrists,
and I pulled her up. Kate was marvelously trusting if she thought you knew what you were doing.” In general, Hepburn recalled, “Everyone contributed anything and everything they could think of to that script.”

Working with the
leopard, which was trained by a Madame Olga Celeste, provided an adventure all its own. Contrary to what RKO imagined, Hawks had the cat slinking through a great many scenes unleashed. Grant was terrified of it and played as few scenes with it as possible. (The avoidance of the actor’s face in some close-ups, including those in which the beast rubs up against his legs, suggests the use of a double.)
The star was not terribly amused when, as a practical joke, Hepburn dropped a fake leopard through the top of his dressing room. For her part, Hepburn suggested, “I didn’t have brains enough to be scared, so I did a lot of scenes with the leopard just roaming around.” Madame Celeste was always just outside camera range with a large whip, and Hepburn wore a heavy perfume that had the effect of
turning the jungle dweller into a pussycat. But the actress had a very close call in one scene in which she wore a dress with a hem lined with little weights. When Hepburn swirled around and made the dress swing abruptly, it startled the leopard into making a lunge for her back, and only a swift crack over the head from Madame Celeste kept the cat from clawing Hepburn. From then on, the cat was not
permitted to walk freely among the actors.

Hawks rarely complained about practical problems that held pictures up, but he had good cause here. “Now, if you don’t think that was a hard one to make! Oh, that goddamned leopard—and then, the dog, running around with the bone.… Katie and Cary had a scene in which he said, ‘What happened to the bone?’ And she said, ‘It’s in the box,’ or
something
like
that. Well, they started to laugh—it was ten o’clock in the morning—and at four o’clock in the afternoon we were still trying to make this scene and I didn’t think we were ever going to get it. I tried changing the line. It didn’t do any good.… They were just putting dirty connotations on it and then they’d go off into peals of laughter.”

But problems with the animals, as well as with actors
just having too good a time, were scarcely the only reasons the shooting proceeded so slowly. As the studio had feared, Hawks himself set a very relaxed pace. Fritz Feld, who played a psychiatrist who advises Hepburn in the supper club, recalled nostalgically, “Often in the morning Howard Hawks would come in and say, ‘It’s a nice day today. Let’s go to the races.’ And we’d pack up and
go
to the
races. Kate continued her custom of serving tea on the set. We all laughed and laughed, and were very happy.” At the end of the scene Feld
and Hepburn shared, Hawks sent in two cases of champagne. As Feld wistfully said, “Those were the good old days!”

The one story Hawks typically never failed to tell about
Bringing Up Baby
was an example of one-upsmanship over Hepburn. This is the version of
it he related to Peter Bogdanovich: “I remember another time we were making a scene and Katie was talking so much she didn’t hear me. We called, ‘Quiet!’ She didn’t hear that. Called ‘Quiet!’ again, and she didn’t hear it, so I just stopped everybody, and all of a sudden, in the middle of talking, she stopped and said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘I just wondered how long you were gonna keep up
this imitation of a parrot.’ She said, ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ and she led me around to the back. She said, ‘You mustn’t say things like that to me. Somebody’ll drop a lamp on you. These are my friends around here.’ I looked up at the man on the lamps. When I was a prop man, this fellow had been an electrician—I’d known him for God knows how many years. I said, ‘Pete, if you had your choice of
dropping a lamp on Miss Hepburn or me, who would you drop it on?’ He said, ‘Get out of the way, will you, Mr. Hawks?’ And Katie looked up at him and looked at me and said, ‘I guess I was wrong.’ And I said, ‘Katie,
he
doesn’t make it wrong, but you are. And I can tell you one thing, I’m gonna come up and kick you right in the behind if it happens again.’ She said, ‘You won’t have to kick me.’
And from that time on, she was just marvelous.”