Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (52 page)

On July 24, 1940,
Athole—or, properly speaking, her sister, Norma on her behalf—filed for divorce. During this final period, Athole “was very in and out,” as David put it. Misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and therefore incorrectly treated, Athole was in such a deteriorated mental state that she was easily “convinced by the doctors, her mother and sister to file for divorce, since they argued that she and my father didn’t
really belong together,” observed Barbara. At the court proceedings, which Athole did not attend, Norma acknowledged that Athole was “mentally afflicted,” but blamed this on Hawks’s “cruel and inhuman treatment.” The details and eventual settlement
took nearly another year and a half to work out, but Hawks in the end agreed to pay a thousand dollars a month to support Athole (she also received
additional money from Norma) while gaining full custody of the children, including Athole’s son Peter, who turned sixteen in 1940; Hawks was also required to set up trust funds for the children. There is no question that breaking from her husband represented a terrible ordeal for Athole, but David said, “She coped. A lot of people would have committed suicide. She was very warm, very loving. When
she was well, she was such a lovely person, really fun.” Still, her troubles were real and unavoidable, and her son admitted, “I was shielded from it a lot. Maybe they just put her away at the first sign of any problems. We’d go visit her in these locations where she was put, but it was never explained to us. We just sort of gradually became aware of a mental illness problem.”

That summer, Hawks
worked to bring Slim and his children even closer together, and the best way he knew was through sports and shared outings. Hawks arranged for Peter, David, and Slim to learn skeet shooting under the instruction of Tommy Thompson at a range just south of the Santa Monica Airport, and he subsequently took them dove hunting in the Imperial Valley. Later, Hawks put in a shooting range at Hog Canyon
that everyone agreed was one of the best in Los Angeles. They also went on a fishing trip to June Lake with Faulkner, whom David found to be “just a friendly, Southern good ol’ boy who liked fishing.” While Hawks was just a recreational Western rider, Slim was highly trained at dressage and jumping. However, her riding days came to an end late that summer when she fell and broke her leg, landing
her in traction at the hospital for an extended period. After that, she refused to as much as mount a horse, even, she joked, one of her husband’s Tennessee Walkers.

By August, Hawks had to turn serious attention to the Billy the Kid project, now known as
The Outlaw
. With Furthman’s script coming along, Hawks concentrated on the casting, which promised to be fun since the two leads, Billy and
the girl, Rio, would be played by unknowns. Working out of Hughes’s offices at 7000 Romaine in Hollywood, Hawks looked at dozens of young hopefuls, including Gene Fowler’s son Will and Wallace Reid Jr. for the Kid and, among the women, Beverly Holden, who had been up for Rita Hayworth’s role in
Only Angels Have Wings
. Facing a final round of screen tests without being sold on anyone, Hughes found
a prospect for the Kid in a dark-haired, physically compact twenty-three-year-old insurance clerk, Jack Beutel (soon changed to Buetel), while Hawks was taken with photographs of a nineteen-year-old aspiring model named Jane Russell
that he’d received from an agent who had noticed them at a photographer’s studio. Working in an improvised studio in the vast basement of the Romaine building with
Lucien Ballard behind the camera, Hawks paired off his five male and five female finalists at random to enact “the beginning of the big rape scene, where Billy and Rio come eye-to-eye, she has a pitchfork laying in wait and he throws her in the hay. It was all close-ups,” recalled Russell.

A few days later, Hawks called Buetel and Russell in to see him and separately showed them all the screen
tests. For her part, Russell said, “I was astounded at how I looked. I had a very mediocre image of myself, so I was amazed and very pleased!” Without a word, Hawks escorted first Buetel, then Russell to his small office, sat down at his desk, and calmly said, “Well, you two kids have the parts.” Russell never forgot how, when he announced this, Hawks “was so calm and quiet, but his eyes were twinkling,
bright blue.” But after she rolled back on her little cot and threw her hands over her head and Buetel similarly erupted, Hawks said, “Now that’s what I want you to do, be totally spontaneous and natural.” In fact, Russell had noticed Buetel from the first time she saw him at the tests and “had picked Jack out as the cutest boy there.” On their way out of Hawks’s office, they noticed a tall,
thin man leaning against the hallway wall looking at them. It didn’t take them long to figure out that this was Howard Hughes. It was clear, however, that “he didn’t want to meet us, just to see us in the flesh,” said Russell. “Howard Hawks and Howard Hughes had agreed on the tests, they had to agree on the discovery of Jack and myself.” After a quick look, Hughes disappeared into Hawks’s office.
Russell wasn’t actually to meet her longtime boss and benefactor until months later, after returning from location work in Arizona.

Hawks threw a party for his lucky couple at the Mocambo nightclub on the Strip, where they were thrilled to meet Gary Cooper, and the director gave the untrained new actress voice and posture lessons. “He wanted me to keep my voice low, and he said that girls should
walk from the hips, not from the knees. He said I should take long strides” Russell remembered. Hawks took Russell to Nudie’s, a famous cowboy outfitter, where he bought her some well-tailored Western clothes, and sent her to see Slim in the hospital, where she was still laid up in traction with her broken leg. Slim arranged an appointment with her favorite women’s-wear buyer so Russell could
be properly attired on location.

Even though MGM was proceeding with its own Billy the Kid picture, starring Robert Taylor, which looked as though it would beat theirs into theaters, Hughes and Hawks went ahead. Hawks cast two solid actors
he’d worked with before and knew he could count on, Walter Huston and Thomas Mitchell, to play Doc Holliday and Pat Garrett, respectively. Much as had been
done for
The Dawn Patrol
, an entire tent city was put up outside of Tuba City, Arizona, a small Indian town on the Navajo reservation about seventy-five miles north of Flagstaff. As locations went at that time, it was extremely remote, not easy to reach, and far from any luxurious amenities. With the still-mending Slim remaining behind, Hawks flew in with Lucien Ballard and was joined by Furthman,
who continued to amend the screenplay as shooting began in the last week of November, as well as by Cubby Broccoli, whom Hawks made an assistant director. Not needed for the initial scenes, the voluptuous Jane Russell was immediately taken to be photographed in a series of revealing outfits that prominently featured what the publicity campaign later trumpeted were “two good reasons for seeing
The Outlaw
.” After a few days of being pushed to pose in increasingly preposterous positions, Russell had had enough: “In tears, I went down to see Howard. He said, ‘Look, Jane. You’re a big girl. If you don’t want to do something, the answer is “no.” Cooperation is not always the best thing to do.’ It’s the best advice I ever got,” Russell averred.

While this mythmaking was going on, Hawks directed
the opening sequences: the introductions of Billy and Doc Holliday and the scene—the best in the entire picture—in which Thomas Mitchell’s Pat Garrett tries to hit Billy in a saloon but gets knocked down by him instead. Just as he had on
Scarface
, Hawks insisted that Hughes come nowhere near the set while he was working, and he was reassured that his “partner” was hundreds of miles away in Los
Angeles. This represented less protection than it seemed, however. As he began to see the rushes that were shipped back to him each day, Hughes started complaining by telegram and phone that Hawks wasn’t taking advantage of the locale’s scenic possibilities. He then took exception to Hawks’s direction of Buetel. Russell felt that “Hughes identified with Billy the Kid and wanted him to be the antihero.
Hawks wanted him to be smart-alecky. Hughes wouldn’t hear of this. Hughes didn’t want him cocky, but Hawks definitely did.”

Suddenly, without warning, the boom was lowered: after just two weeks, Hawks was off the picture, Hughes would replace him as director, and the company would return at once to Los Angeles. This is one of several instances in Hawks’s career where it remains debatable whether
the director quit or was fired; either way, the decision was mutually agreeable. Hawks could already see that Hughes’s personal interest in the story and
his young stars was such that he’d be constantly interfering in a way that he never had on
Scarface
. Hawks’s usual response to interviewers about his departure from the picture was, “We had different ideas about revealing women’s bosoms, and
things like that,” so that when the chance to direct
Sergeant York
presented itself, he told Hughes, “You always wanted to direct, why the devil don’t you direct this?”

Both Ballard and Russell remembered it rather differently, however. The cinematographer stated that Hughes strategically waited until a day when the crew was idle and Hawks and Ballard were off scouting a new location. At that
moment, Hughes ordered the entire company home, save for the director and cameraman, who were left in the lurch. Ballard made no bones about it: “Howard and I were taken off the picture,” he said. “We were told that we were to pack up and leave—very suddenly.” Abruptly informed of the news by unit manager Cliff Broughton, Russell and Buetel were devastated that they were no longer to be guided through
their film debuts by one of the top directors in Hollywood. When Hawks finally turned up, he told the kids that since “no one tells me how to shoot a picture,” he had advised Hughes to take over in his place. He even invited them to fly back to Los Angeles with him, but Broughton warned them that Hughes would be furious if they accepted Hawks’s hospitality, so they returned, as they had arrived,
by bus. Later, when Russell finally met Hughes for the first time, she said that he told her, “Howard Hawks was spending too much money, so I’m going to shoot this in the studio.” Ironically, a completely opposite story was reported in the press, with
Variety
stating that “Hawks pulled out when Hughes insisted on a budget of $1,500,000, which, Hawks contended, would have reduced the chances of
realizing on a percentage basis.”

To Russell’s great disappointment, Hawks never directed her in any scenes. “I watched a little. I loved the way he directed Jack. I adored him, and got things from him I was able to use even though he was no longer there. He didn’t take any shit off people. He knew what he wanted, and if he didn’t get it, he removed himself.” As he was saying good-bye, Hawks
told both Russell and Buetel that he wanted to work with both of them again someday, and he meant it.

As for
The Outlaw
, the rest of the shoot was “painful,” in Russell’s view, in more ways than one. “Hughes wasn’t really sure what he wanted and did it over and over and over. It was the most insane thing I’ve ever seen. Walter Huston had the right idea, because he just took it like a big joke,”
said
Russell. By contrast, Thomas Mitchell was none too pleased with Hughes’s amateurism and made sarcastic and derogatory remarks about his new director’s abilities throughout the shoot.

Encouraging the ever-present Furthman to outrageous extremes and oblivious to prevailing censorship norms, Hughes laboriously guided his ripe young stars through ridiculously stilted and contorted sexual situations,
with Buetel striding around in tight leather outfits, Russell constantly posing for maximum mammary impact, and both of them enacting some kind of weird S&M ritual that would have been campy if it wasn’t so dull. The extent to which Hughes tried to emphasize Russell’s chest bordered on the demented, as he instructed his new cameraman, Gregg Toland, to devise shots that would allow viewers
to peer all the way down her blouse. In one scene, he directed Russell to carry a tray so as to make it appear that her big breasts were, in fact, on it. When he looked at the scene later, he kicked himself for covering this action in a medium shot and spent ten thousand dollars to pay a specialist in optical printing to create a zoom in on the tray and its contents. It was a difficult effect to
achieve but, as one Hughes aide vividly recalled, “When Hughes saw it, I never saw a kid so tickled in my life.” The shot went into the picture. Hughes was so fixated that he privately ran shots of Russell’s most overtly sexual posturings night after night in his screening room, and rumors have persisted over the years of special nude footage made for Hughes’s delectation alone.

Unsurprisingly,
the film was rejected outright by censor Joseph Breen, who was shaken to the core by its relentless obsession with Jane Russell’s physique. He was extremely concerned that the film, if shown publicly, might spark a trend to “undrape women’s breasts.” The appeals, legal haggling, and recutting went on for nearly two years until, in a barrage of publicity orchestrated by the endlessly resourceful
Russell Birdwell,
The Outlaw
finally premiered at the Geary Theater in San Francisco on February 5, 1943, accompanied by a special “stage epilogue” in which Russell and Buetel performed an embarrassing scene supposedly written for the film but never shot. By this time, Jane Russell had become an international sensation on the basis of her eye-popping cheesecake photographs. The film was briefly
seized by the San Francisco police, then cleared, but after the landslide of attention and promise of great business, Hughes, preoccupied with his Spruce Goose airplane project, suddenly withdrew the film. More legal battles ensued until the picture was once again offered to the public, in altered form, in 1946, then again in 1950. The film generated millions of dollars in grosses over the years
but, as Hughes confidant Noah Dietrich
pointed out, the problem with
The Outlaw
was that it was a $450,000 picture that Hughes spent $3 million to produce. Despite all the publicity, free and otherwise, “he lost money on it,” said Dietrich.