Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (58 page)

As Robin Wood observed, the film charts a favorite Hawks theme of conflicting characters’ “mutual improvement through interaction,” but the dynamic of the plot is directly opposed to those of his comedies of “irresponsibility.” Unlike
Bringing Up Baby
, where Cary Grant’s academic life is thoroughly
disrupted by Katharine Hepburn, or
His Girl Friday
, where Grant’s unethical high-handedness rides roughshod over any notion of propriety, the world of civilized values is respected and reaffirmed here. The tough-guy gangster stuff feels off-putting as well as annoyingly artificial in
this context, underlining the fairy-tale conceit of the entire story, and Hawks sides with respectability and rectitude
in
Ball of Fire
for the only time in any of his comedies. This said, he also recognizes the need of his leading man to be loosened up by a spirited woman of the world, a theme that never varied in his work or personal life.

As soon as filming concluded, the Hollywood contingent left for Idaho, where Hemingway and his three sons had arrived in September for antelope hunting. As he had in the two
previous autumns, Hemingway, who had married the writer Martha Gellhorn the previous fall, was staying gratis at the plush, twelve-unit Sun Valley Lodge, a year-round resort that desperately needed the kind of publicity Hemingway’s presence could bring it. Gary and Rocky Cooper had visited the season before, and this year Hemingway, now at the peak of his success and fame, broadened the invitation
to include Hawks and Slim, whom he hadn’t seen since their Key West visit nearly two years before, as well as Barbara Stanwyck and her husband, Robert Taylor. Because Hemingway’s two younger sons, Patrick, thirteen, and Gregory, almost ten, were so close in age to David, Hawks’s twelve-year-old son also got to go, skipping school for a couple of the best-spent weeks of his childhood. Also on hand
was Hemingway’s buddy Robert Capa, the great Hungarian war photographer, who became friendly with Hawks and Slim and took pictures of the group hunting and partying that beautifully document the time. Coincidentally staying at Sun Valley, although not explicitly as part of Hemingway’s group, were Leland Hayward—perhaps the only Hollywood agent with more class and sophistication than Charles Feldman—with
his actress wife, Margaret Sullavan, and the producer William Goetz and his wife, Edie, Louis B. Mayer’s daughter.

Following Hemingway’s lead in mostly glorious Indian summer weather, the group hunted partridge and pheasant, swam, played roulette, and drank at night. Hemingway wasn’t particularly taken with Robert Taylor, but he enjoyed the spunky Stanwyck and liked Cooper as much as ever; the
year before, Coop had shown Hemingway up with his expert riflry, so the writer was pleased when Sergeant York asked for pointers to improve his skill with a shotgun.

As for Hawks, when the director talked in general terms about his notions for making a film about trotting horses, Hemingway urged him to hire his old friend Evan Shipman, a poet and horse expert, as technical adviser. He also challenged
Hawks to slug him in the belly as hard as he could causing Hawks to break his hand. Hemingway later wrote that he found Hawks “a very intelligent and sensitive man with a lovely girl,” and
there was no doubt that it was this “girl” who most occupied his thoughts. The strong, disturbing, unmistakable connection between Hemingway and Slim instantly reasserted itself here, although, at least on Slim’s
part, there was no way they were going to start something physical. But Hemingway persisted in sticking close to Slim while hunting and hovering solicitously after hours.

In her memoirs, Slim recounted two notably revealing stories about Hemingway’s feelings for her. The writer told her that his two young sons “asked him what falling in love is. ‘Well,’ Ernest said, ‘do you remember when you
first met Slim?’ Gregory piped up, ‘Boy, I sure do.’ And then Ernest said, ‘Well, what did it feel like?’ ‘Like being kicked in the stomach by a horse,’ Gregory said. Papa laughed. ‘That’s just what falling in love is like.’”

On another occasion that fall, Slim remembered, she had just taken a shower and went to dry her hair in front of the fireplace, where she found Hemingway and Capa. Hemingway
asked if he could brush her hair and, receiving permission, brushed it for a very long time. “When he was finished, he dropped the brush on the floor in front of me and said, ‘You don’t know what that was like. It was very, very difficult. Both for Capa and me. You’re a very provocative woman. I can’t be around you too much.’” Slim made light of this, diffusing the tension and allowing the good
times to continue.

The underlying reason for the trip was to work out a strategy for Hawks to get the directing job on
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. In the year since its publication, the novel had become the biggest best-seller since
Gone
w
ith the Wind
, putting Hemingway back on top of the heap among American writers. Paramount’s record purchase price of $115,000 for the motion picture rights was
rising to $150,000 because of the book’s enormous sales, but nothing concerning the film’s production had been locked down. The studio hadn’t begun to figure out how to handle the book’s touchy political and sexual elements, nor had a director been definitely selected. As a favor to Cooper, who would play the lead, Cecil B. De Mille had read the novel in galleys to help press Paramount into buying
it but passed on tackling the film himself. Sam Wood, a former assistant of De Mille’s, was announced by Paramount for the job in June 1941. But since Cooper had contractual director approval and hadn’t officially been signed himself, the door seemed just sufficiently ajar for Hawks to slip in if everyone played their cards right.

Hawks went along with all this out of a desire to work with Hemingway
and Cooper, as well as to take the helm of what could easily have been the most prestigious and commercially successful film of his career to date. By the second week of November, Paramount had secretly agreed to give the
picture to Hawks. At the crucial moment, however, Hawks’s uncertainty about the project asserted itself and he responded that he “might be interested if Cooper is definitely
the lead and Hemingway writes the script.” Since he knew perfectly well that Hemingway would never actually sit down to write the screenplay, Hawks had to realize that this requirement would dash his chances to direct the picture.

The irony in all this, and the reason for his ambivalence, was that Hawks privately loathed
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Up to then, he had loved nearly everything Hemingway
had written, and they shared a great deal in the way of aesthetic tastes and codes of behavior. But Hawks found the new novel pretentious, overblown, and too overtly—even distastefully—political. Hawks knew that because of the novel’s fame and prestige and the author’s undoubted surveillance of the project, he wouldn’t be able to change it very much, unlike the drastic overhaul he would give
To Have and Have Not
. More than most filmmakers of the time, Hawks steered clear of august literary properties that could not be tampered with; when he had dared fiddle with
Come and Get It
, he was booted off the picture, and he was able to turn
The Front Page
inside out only with the express blessing of the coauthor, a good friend. Whatever lie Hawks told Hemingway concerning his feelings for
For Whom the Bell Tolls
is lost to time, but it was not a film Hawks was particularly eager to make or was crestfallen over not having done, at least until he saw how much money it earned.

The film Sam Wood directed, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, was a success beyond anything anyone dared imagine upon its release in 1943 but so turgidly directed that one can’t help but fantasize about
what a Hawks version could have been like. It remains, in theory anyway, one of the great might have beens of his career, concerned as it was with a small group dedicated to a dangerous mission, the stoic denial and dedication of a capable American hero, and the enticing beginnings of a great romance with great star power. On the other hand, the novel was very much about political commitment and
self-sacrifice, the profound impulse toward democracy and humanism versus fascism and destructiveness. Wood was oblivious, even hostile to these elements, but there is little reason to believe that Hawks would have been more responsive to them. Hawks probably could have figured out a way to make a version of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
that would have been terrific on his own terms. But given the
novel’s stature, this would never have been countenanced at the time, so it’s a moot point, and Hawks was wise to recognize it. He was better off—artistically, if not financially—with
To Have and Have Not
.

Air Force is going to be the real stuff.

—Howard Hawks

Many weddings have been victimized by rain, storms, and all manner of bad weather. Some have been marred by unruly guests, embarrassing faux pas, and even no-show participants. But few had what Hawks’s and Slim’s had: Pearl Harbor.

It seemed to have taken forever but, finally, more than three years after Hawks and Slim met,
the final details of his divorce settlement with Athole were resolved and they were at last free to marry. Now that their future together was in no doubt, Slim threw herself into planning the Hog Canyon home, and Hawks put the Benedict Canyon house up for sale and rented a temporary residence for himself, Slim, and the kids in Bel Air, adjacent to the Bel-Air Country Club golf course.

By the
beginning of December, everything seemed in order: the wedding date was set for December 11, Hawks had made what he thought were marvelous plans for the honeymoon, his current film was the biggest hit in the country,
Ball of Fire
was opening in a month, and Slim, after much debate, had decided not to invite her father to walk her down the aisle. Then, on Sunday, December 7, they awoke to the news
that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese. The United States was going to war. Slim, however, was not to be denied, and four days later, the wedding went ahead exactly as planned.

Howard Hawks and Nancy Gross were married in a small, formal ceremony at Hawks’s parents’ Pasadena home. Dr. Roderick Dhu Morrison of Altadena officiated, Bill Hawks was the best man, Slim’s schoolgirl friend
Dixie Cavalier-Carlisle was her bridesmaid, and Gary Cooper gave her away. The fashion-conscious
Los Angeles Times
reported, “The bride wore a wedding gown that had been in her family for four generations. It is an old-fashioned, ivory satin dress with a slight train and a deep, lace collar. She wore an old lace and tulle veil. She had carnations in her hair and her bouquet was all carnations.”
Slim admitted that at the last minute, as she
was standing at the top of the stairs, she developed cold feet and told Cooper she didn’t want to go through with it. Coop told her it was too late to back out, and down they went.

Hawks had arranged for them to travel by train to New Orleans, then on to Miami, where they were to share a house with the newlyweds Shipwreck Kelly and the 1930s’ most
famous debutante, Brenda Frazier. However, because army troop trains were already receiving priority on the tracks, the honeymooners’ train was endlessly delayed. Once in Miami, Hawks spent most of his time golfing or fishing with Shipwreck, abandoning Slim with Frazier, a spoiled rich girl whom she found utterly vapid and uninteresting. Hawks’s plans to continue on to the Bahamas and Cuba had to
be scuttled because of the war, but by this time Slim was too disillusioned about the honeymoon trip to care and just wanted to return to Los Angeles as quickly as possible.

By the time they got back, Hawks found that quite a few of his friends had already enlisted for military duty. Jimmy Stewart, Darryl Zanuck, and John Ford were already commissioned officers, while Frank Capra, William Wyler,
and John Huston would be entering the U.S. Army Signal Corps as soon as they disposed of their obligations on current pictures. Forty-five years old and a veteran of World War I, Hawks did not have to consider actual duty in the armed services. But rather than sign on to make government documentaries, as had Capra, Wyler, Huston, and any number of other filmmakers, Hawks opted to stay stateside,
where he spent the next year and a half working exclusively on major studio projects heralding the war effort.

Although there was no doubting his patriotism and dedication to the cause once the United States declared war, nor the slightest suggestion that he was an America First proponent or isolationist, there is reason to believe that Hawks was a latecomer in supporting U.S. involvement in
the war. His close friend Christian Nyby, a film editor in the 1940s, said that, ironically, the director of
Sergeant York
felt throughout 1941 that the United States was being railroaded into the war and afterward was “teed off” because of his suspicions that FDR had known about the Japanese plans for Pearl Harbor two days before the attack occurred. According to Nyby, Hawks never softened in
his view of Roosevelt as “a pompous ass.” With a beautiful young wife, a gorgeous new home, and an earning power matched by only a handful of other Americans at the time, Hawks made his choice: he stayed home and signed a contract that would guarantee him a minimum of $100,000 per year, with the opportunity to make much more.

In the wake of
Sergeant York
’s breakaway success, Hawks was inundated
with offers. Jean Gabin, the recently arrived French star, asked for Hawks to guide him through his first Hollywood picture, John O’Hara’s adaptation of Willard Robertson’s 1940 melodramatic best-seller
Moontide
, and Zanuck and producer Mark Hellinger, hoping that Hawks could help mold Gabin into another Gable or Tracy, pursued the director at length before giving up and settling for Archie Mayo.
Zanuck also tried to persuade Hawks to direct
Ten Gentlemen from West Point
, about the early history of the academy, which Henry Hathaway eventually took on. There was talk of a Gary Cooper–Barbara Stanwyck Western called
Cheyenne
that William Hawks would produce at RKO, and that studio also approached Hawks about reuniting with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell on a war-oriented project called
Bundles for Freedom
.