Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (50 page)

The Hays Office had no overriding problems with the screenplay it received before production but vehemently objected to repeated references to newspapermen as “the scum of creation” and “the scum of Western civilization,” as well as to
such untoward behavior as Hildy’s bribe of the jailer, Louie’s kidnapping of Mrs. Baldwin, and the idea of smuggling Earl Williams out of the court building. But censorship requirements impinged not at all upon anything significant in
His Girl Friday
.

While the procession of rewrites was under way, Hawks spent the summer realigning his family life. With Athole now under care in La Jolla, Hawks
brought Slim more fully into his household, encouraging her to spend as much time as possible with his kids. They responded enthusiastically to this vital young woman, especially David, who found Slim an incredibly exciting partner in fun. Peter and David continued to live at the Benedict Canyon house, but Barbara, who was only three during the summer
of 1939 and without a mother to care for her,
was more often than not sent to stay with Hawks’s parents in Pasadena. For a private getaway just for Slim and himself, Hawks proposed a car trip to Mexico, but the fun was diminished by Hawks’s getting so lost that Slim feared that they’d never find their way back. There were the usual expeditions to June Lake near Yosemite, and Hawks was gratified by the way he could see a new family unit forming
around him, with Slim as its spark plug.

Through August and September, as the storm clouds of war broke over Europe, Howard Hawks’s main professional concern was finding the right actress to fulfil his idea of a man-woman
Front Page
. Although Cohn had announced Jean Arthur for the picture back in March, she and Hawks remained cool toward each other. So the offers went out to actresses at other
studios: to Ginger Rogers, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, and, most seriously, to Irene Dunne. Amazingly, all refused. Finally, with the start date looming less than two weeks away, Cohn arranged to borrow Rosalind Russell from MGM, where she had just finished work for George Cukor on the picture that would shortly establish her once and for all as an important star,
The Women
.

The announcement
of Russell’s casting proved particularly humiliating to the smart, good-humored actress, who had never met Hawks. Russell had read a
New York Times
story revealing how the director had approached every important actress in Hollywood “before Harry Cohn had stuck him with me.” None too excited about the prospect of her first meeting with Hawks, Russell took a swim first and didn’t bother to dry
her hair, so that when she turned up at his office on the lot, he “did a triple take” before asking her in.

Taking the offensive with a director she was predisposed not to like, the plain-speaking actress bluntly confronted him with her knowledge that he hadn’t really wanted her for the part. Hawks blandly told her that everything would be all right and quickly ended the meeting by instructing
her to go to wardrobe and order a sharp-looking striped suit.

After four days of photographic, wardrobe, and makeup tests, production began on September 27 with the scene that would mark the beginning of the picture: Hildy Johnson arriving in the newsroom on her way to tell her ex that she’s to be married the next day. The sequence includes one of the rare extended moving-camera shots in Hawks’s
work, albeit a highly effective one, in that it definitively establishes Hildy’s relationship with, and dominance in, her workplace as she strides through a sea of well-wishing coworkers. The next day, Cary Grant reported to work for his initial scene
with Roz Russell, one that involved, as did all their interchanges, a great deal of complex timed dialogue and business. Having enjoyed two very
spirited collaborations with Hawks already, Grant was accustomed to, and in fact had earned, the loose reins the director gave him, but Russell was highly disconcerted because Hawks said nothing and just sat there watching her with eyes that she felt looked “like two blue cubes of ice.” Unable to take it anymore, she went to her costar to express her dismay and ask if he thought Hawks approved of
what she was doing. “Oh, sure, Roz,” she said Grant told her. “If he didn’t like it, he’d tell you.”

This gave her enough confidence to confront Hawks directly and demand his thoughts. “Unwinding himself like a snake, he rose from his chair. ‘You just keep pushin’ him around the way you’re doing,’ he said. I could hardly hear him but I could see those cubes of eyes beginning to twinkle.

“He’d
been watching Cary and me for two days, and I’d thrown a handbag at Cary, which was my idea, and missed hitting him, and Cary had said, ‘You used to be better than that,’ and Hawks left it all in. It’s a good director who sees what an actor can do, studies his cast, learns about them personally, knows how to get the best out of them,” she observed.

From then on, things went swimmingly between
cast and director, with Hawks not only giving the actors freedom but encouraging them to come up with their own bits, lines, and flights of fancy. As precise and adamant about adhering to the script as Hawks could be on a “serious” film such as
Only Angels Have Wings
, he was loose and casual about such matters on his comedies, rightly feeling that the actors could bring inspiration and life to
the material on the set that writers couldn’t possibly think of in an office.

At the same time, Hawks the engineer was still very much present. Everyone always said that the original film of
The Front Page
featured some of the fastest dialogue ever delivered on-screen. Hawks devised a way to set a new speed record on
His Girl Friday
by having the actors overlap each other’s dialogue. This technique
had been tried before, of course, by him and others, but Hawks and his writers worked out a careful plan by which “we wrote the dialogue in a way that made the beginnings and ends of the sentences unnecessary; they were there for overlapping.” He also cranked up the pace to where, by one count, the actors were speaking at up to 240 words per minute, compared to the average speaking rate of
100–150 (the drawling Hawks would have come in at something significantly slower than that). When some newsmen came to the set and remarked about the speed
of the original, Hawks arranged to screen comparable sequences from both films at the same time to put the question to the test. The visitors were amazed at how slow the original seemed by comparison, leaving Hawks to surmise, “I guess we’d
accomplished what we’d wanted, which was to make it fast.”

The zany, unpredictable behavior on the set was great for the actors, but it “was hell for the cameraman,” Joseph Walker recalled. “
His Girl Friday
was tough because you never knew where the actors were going to go.” Comedies normally call for brighter, plainer lighting than dramas, and the look and mood was certainly a world apart from
that on their last film together. Nonetheless, Walker had to pay special attention to his female star. “Rosalind Russell was very hard to photograph,” he recalled, “because she had sagging jowls along her chin.” His solution was to have the makeup man, Fred Phillips, “paint a sharp, very dark line along the edge of her jaw, blending it toward her neck. Then, hitting her with a high key light, that
dark line became a strong shadow below her cheek, giving it a firm, youthful appearance.”

At one point, Roz Russell became concerned that the unvarying torrent of dialogue would prove too much for audiences to take, but Hawks, with great insight, reassured her: “You’re forgetting the scene you’re gonna play with the criminal. It’s gonna be so quiet, so silent. You’ll just whisper to him, you’ll
whisper, ‘Did you kill that guy?’ and your whispering will change the rhythm. But when you’re with Grant, we don’t change it. You just rivet in on him all the time.”

Given the green light, Russell quickly came up to Grant’s speed and matched him, quip for ad-lib. She had a ball: “We went wild, overlapped our dialogue, waited for no man. And Hawks got a big kick out of it,” she said. By now completely
converted to Hawks’s methods, she decided that “Hawks was a terrific director; he encouraged us and let us go. Once he told Cary, ‘Next time give her a bigger shove onto the couch,’ and Cary said, ‘Well, I don’t want to kill the woman,’ and Hawks thought about that for a second. Then he said, ‘Try killin’ ’er.’”

On another occasion, Russell did something so unexpected that Grant broke character
and, with a grimace directed at Hawks and the camera, said, “Is she going to do that?” Hawks left it in the picture, just as he did other jokes in which Grant refers to Archie Leach (his real name) and describes Ralph Bellamy’s Bruce Baldwin character as looking like “that fellow in the pictures—you know, what’s his name—Ralph Bellamy.” Bellamy happened to be in watching dailies when Harry Cohn
heard this for the first time. The studio chief erupted in a fury at the impertinence, but he eventually let
Hawks leave it in, retaining what has always been one of the picture’s biggest laughs.

Despite her pleasure in the part, Russell began to feel that the combined efforts of Hecht, Lederer, Ryskind, and Hawks had pushed the piece somewhat in favor of the Walter Burns character, leaving him
with most of the best lines. Taking matters into her own hands, she mentioned this to her brother-in-law Chet La Roche, the head of the advertising firm Young and Rubicam, who recommended one of his top copywriters to her. Out of her own pocket and unbeknownst to Hawks or the studio, the actress paid the writer, whom she would never identify, two hundred dollars a week to sharpen her lines, as
well as, eventually, a few of Grant’s. Because of the anything-goes, ad-libbing atmosphere on the set, Russell didn’t have to clear her changes with Hawks, since she could just drop them spontaneously into her dialogue. All the same, Cary Grant began to suspect something was up; it got to the point where each morning he would greet his costar by inquiring, “What have you got today?”

The ghostwriter
came up with the rude bit of nose-thumbing business for Russell in the restaurant scene in which Burns makes fun of his ex-wife’s forthcoming train trip to Albany with her husband-to-be and prospective mother-in-law. That scene, which has no equivalent in
The Front Page
, proved to be one of the most complicated in the entire picture to shoot, as it involved three actors delivering very quick overlapping
dialogue, perfect timing from the waiter and other bit players, and a great deal of precise innuendo and nuance in the line readings. (One will notice that food is served but virtually none is eaten during the scene; with the actors spitting the lines out so rapidly, there was no time for chewing.) With Hawks shooting in sequence and, as was always his custom, with just one camera, the
scene came up a week and a half into production and took four days to finish rather than the allotted two.

The arrival of the great character actors playing the reporters in the press room meant more delays, as they all literally had to get up to speed with Hawks’s requirements, and the intricate timing of these ensemble scenes meant continual adjustments and retakes. Hawks applied a lesson he
learned from
Bringing Up Baby
to make his new film more palatable, in his view. He felt that audiences had had a problem with the earlier picture because he had made “all the characters crazy.” This time, he was determined to play the supporting characters straight to offset the antic behavior of his leads. “Outside of one reporter and the funny man [Billy Gilbert] who came in with the pardon
and the overdone mayor [Clarance Kolb],
they were all pretty legitimate. I don’t mean the reporters weren’t funny, but they were legitimate. They had the cynical attitude of a bunch of criminal court reporters and were amusing mainly in the way they said things.”

With Arthur Rosson helping out for three days of second-unit footage with the phone operators and shots of the jail courtyard, constructed
at the Columbia Ranch, production was completed on November 21, seven days over the originally scheduled forty-two shooting days. Very uncharacteristically for the time, but consistent with his first speed comedy,
Twentieth Century
, Hawks used no music in the film except to build to the final fadeout.

Rushing the picture to completion just as he had done with
Only Angels Have Wings
, Cohn held
a sneak preview for a regular audience in Pomona the first week of December. Any concerns he and the filmmakers might have had about the dialogue being too fast for viewers to grasp evaporated at that highly successful first showing. Screened for the press on January 3 as the first picture of 1940,
His Girl Friday
received across-the-board outstanding reviews, with virtually all critics approving
the sex switch and therefore the legitimacy of remaking the beloved
Front Page
. Once again, a Hawks picture premiered at Radio City Music Hall, on January 11, where it grossed a good, if not sensational, $155,000 during its two-week engagement. As had
Only Angels Have Wings
, it performed better elsewhere, racking up terrific returns in Los Angeles, in the big eastern cities, and even in small
Midwestern towns.

His Girl Friday
has remained in high regard since then, a Hawks classic of its period whose reputation was further strengthened by the revaluation of the director’s career from the 1950s on. Although theater critics and historians have been curiously silent on the subject, the handful of film academics—Gerald Mast and Robin Wood in particular—who have bothered to closely analyze
the differences between
The Front Page
and
His Girl Friday
have come down decisively in favor of Hawks’s film.

Because of the central role of a smart working woman torn between her professional talent and her domestic inclinations, the film has also served as a convenient focal point for discussions of Hawks’s attitudes toward women. On the surface, of course, Hildy comes off as exceedingly modern,
a sharp-dressed feminist before her time who can out-think, out-write, and out-talk any of her male colleagues, an unusual woman even in Hawks’s world in that she long ago proved herself worthy of inclusion in the otherwise all-male group. Feminist critics, notably Molly Haskell, have praised Rosalind Russell’s Hildy as one of the most positive and uncompromised
female screen characters of the
era. By contrast, one of the director’s great champions, Robin Wood, attacked the final choice Hildy was offered between staying with Walter Burns or Bruce Baldwin as “much too narrow to be acceptable.” Wood argued that “the only morally acceptable ending would be to have Hildy walk out on
both
men; or to present her capitulation to Walter as tragic.” The point Wood misses, it would seem, is that
throughout the film Hawks is making the case for Walter and Hildy being two of a kind and, therefore, belonging together. Sure, Walter takes advantage of her and manipulates her, as he does everyone. But he also brings Hildy fully alive, both personally and professionally. Hildy is at her most vital and creative with Walter, as he is with her; who else could Wood imagine being suitable for her?
It almost seems as though Wood would rather she were alone than with a man who, for all his monstrousness, brings out the best in her.