Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (66 page)

Unlike his relationships with Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and, later, John Wayne, Hawks was not a close friend of Bogart’s. They scarcely knew each other
before starting work together, they were at opposing ends politically,
and Bogart didn’t hunt, ride motorcycles, or indulge in Hawks’s other would-be manly pursuits. As if to show that he could boss around even the toughest actor in Hollywood, Hawks self-servingly told a story about how he noticed that Bogart returned from lunch on the first day having had several drinks. He immediately upbraided
the actor, saying, “Either I get a new leading man or you get a new director. I don’t want anybody who’s gonna drink during the day. I don’t think anybody’s that good. I have to get the best out of ’em, and if I don’t get it, I don’t want to make the picture.” Thus chastened, according to Hawks, Bogart said he wouldn’t drink, paving the way for a strong working relationship in which Hawks actively
sought the star’s suggestions, as he always did with anyone he felt was “any good.”

Bogart’s domestic situation was founded upon drinking and fighting. Not a philanderer in the Cooper-Fleming-Hecht-Hawks mold, Bogart had twice been married to and divorced from actresses before wedding Mayo Methot, another actress, who then let herself go physically, could land only minor film roles, and could
keep up with her hard-drinking husband shot for shot. By this time, six years into their marriage, a customary evening chez Bogart consisted of Methot’s becoming so loaded that she hurled both insults and objects such as ashtrays at her husband, often driving him out of the house. Once she actually stabbed him, and another time she attempted suicide by cutting her wrists. They were known around town
as the Battling Bogarts, but despite the chaos and unhappiness, Bogart felt a strong responsibility toward his wife and had not really come close to leaving her, much as he might have thought about it. According to the biographer Joe Hyams, Hawks once asked Bogart if he could get an erection without first having a fight with Mayo. At first taken aback by Hawks’s bluntness, he then replied, “You
know, I guess you’re right. I probably couldn’t.”

Nearly all the scenes shot during the first two weeks involved both Bogart and Bacall, and no one in their vicinity was oblivious to the heat lightning that blazed between them almost from the outset. Meta Carpenter, who was there every second, said, “That Humphrey Bogart and Betty Bacall were in love was evident after the first days of shooting.”
The publicist Mickey Seltzer observed, “The electricity between them was not to be believed. It was so tangible you could feel it in the air. I knew something was going to come of it.” There were telltale signs, such as the flowers that appeared daily in Bacall’s dressing room, the way each of them would hang around the set to watch the other work, the daily lunches. For her part, Bacall testified,
“I don’t know how it happened—it was almost imperceptible.” She said that around the third week of shooting, Bogart, who was done for the
day, came into her dressing room to say good night, impulsively kissed her, and asked her for her phone number, which she gave him and which he called later that night. (From the start, they carried over their screen names, Steve and Slim, into their private
life.) Bacall is also sure that the sharp-eyed Hawks picked up on their involvement “fairly early on” and decided to use it to the film’s advantage, even if he was boiling about it inside.

And boiling he was. As Bacall became increasingly more attentive to Bogart than to her mentor, a disturbing combination of resentment, jealousy, insulted ego, and wounded pride grew in Hawks, fostered by the
knowledge that there was nothing he could do about it. Bacall knew that Hawks “had quite a crush on me, but of course he was tangling with the wrong people because there was no way he was going to get anywhere, with Bogie and me involved. He wanted to be my Svengali. He told Bogie to get a room at the Ambassador, he threatened to send me to Monogram. He was really burned up. Bogie always said he’d
never send me to Monogram, he’d never do the things he threatened to do. He finally forgave me, but he couldn’t handle it.”

Part of Hawks’s fantasy about discovering a nobody and molding her into the ultimate movie star was that she would naturally fall in love with him, but in Bacall’s case he was thwarted on every front. After all, his wife had spotted her first and had become fast friends
with the youngster, perhaps partly a preemptive move at first but obviously a genuine one as well, given that the two women remained very close until Slim’s death nearly fifty years later. Slim turned up on the set of
To Have and Have Not
with unaccustomed frequency; Dan Seymour said, to coin a phrase, “Slim watched Hawks like a hawk.” And, unbeknownst to him, Bacall simply didn’t find him appealing
“that way.” Bacall admitted, “He was an attractive man because he was so talented and smart and successful, and some women would naturally be attracted to that, although I wasn’t. He was remote.” It was against Hawks’s nature to make the first move with a woman, but so infatuated was he with Bacall that early on he persuaded an intermediary to urge her to come see him. One thing Bacall didn’t
include in her autobiography was her belief that one of the reasons Hawks always kept Furthman around was that the writer acted as a pimp for his boss. “Furthman suggested to me that I give Howard a call,” Bacall said. “He said Howard would like it. But I said no way.”

In fact, through her entire life, Bacall “was always terrified” of Howard Hawks: “I always was nervous around him. He was always
very intimidating.” Although there was no way Hawks could remain oblivious to what was
going on between Bacall and Bogart, Bacall, not sure what he knew, desperately tried to keep the relationship a secret, just as Bogart needed to keep his wife in the dark about things if he had any hope of getting her to agree to a divorce. Bitterly aware that his protégée was slipping away from him just as
he was brilliantly fashioning her image for worldwide adoration, Hawks nonetheless kept his anger on a low boil through most of the shooting, professionally capitalizing on the sparks flying between his costars on the set and, by extension, on-screen. Shortly before the wrap Hawks ordered Bacall to his house one night and, in Slim’s presence, dressed her down for her irresponsible and ungrateful behavior,
threatened to sell her contract to Monogram, the lowest of the lowly Poverty Row companies, and predicted that Bogart would forget about her as soon as shooting was completed. “He had this very tight-lipped way of talking when he was mad,” Bacall vividly remembered. “He didn’t raise his voice, but he could be rough.”

In interviews decades later, Hawks painted over all the melodrama and never
let on to his own hurt feelings; he even pretended that he had helped engineer the romance and urged it along for the sake of the picture: “Without Bogie’s help I couldn’t have done what I did with Bacall. Not many actors would sit around and wait while a girl steals a scene. But he fell in love with the girl and the girl with him, and that made it easy.” One of Hawks’s more astounding claims, given
Bacall’s perceptions of his anti-Semitism, was his later insistence that he warned Bogart to curb his own slurs against Jews if he wanted to have a chance with Bacall; according to this story, Bogart had no idea Bacall was Jewish at the onset of their romance and only learned when Hawks told him. Ironically, Bacall was doing everything she could to prevent Hawks from finding out, lest he lose interest
in her professionally. Knowing details of Bogart’s life with Mayo Methot, Hawks also boasted that he instructed Bacall never, but never, to fight with Bogart if she wanted to keep him.

If things didn’t go Hawks’s way with Bacall, nor was his life with Slim altogether to his liking at this point. Bacall felt that Hawks was not so much in love with Slim as he was “very proud of her. He loved the
way she looked, she was so beautiful and classy.” But Bacall “never felt a sense of fun or sex between them,” and she learned that Slim knew all about her husband’s affair with Dolores Moran, whom Slim derisively referred to as “Dollarass Moron.” It is possible that Hawks launched into this casual relationship partly out of spite when he realized he would be getting nowhere with Bacall. During the
shoot, he also had a fling with a tall, brown-haired extra named Dorothy Davenport, whom Dan Seymour remembered as “a Slim type.”

Despite the deceit and ill-feeling revolving around Hawks, the contagious thrill sparked by Bogart and Bacall’s romance defined the prevailing mood of the shoot. Despite the pressures they were under, the two stars joked around constantly at work and met surreptitiously
at the end of the day and sometimes at night. William Faulkner, who would receive his first screen credit in eight years on
To Have and Have Not
, achieved new regard in Hollywood thanks to the picture, and he and Meta Carpenter found a measure of the happiness they had once shared, until he abruptly announced to her that his wife and daughter would be coming out for the summer. Walter Brennan
was a joy as always, Dan Seymour and Marcel Dalio were delighted to be playing prominent parts in a major picture, and Hoagy Carmichael could hardly believe that he was actually acting in a film; as Bacall said, the songwriter “looked up to Howard so much, and Howard made an image for him that he’d never had before.”

For her part, Bacall couldn’t get over the irony of being a virginal, nineteen-year-old
“nice Jewish girl” cast as a sexually knowing woman of the world and thrown in among these tough, seasoned men. Like the persona that was being created for her, The Look, as it came to be known around the world, began as a false pose as well. Because she was so nervous at first, Bacall held her head down to minimize her shaking, then would look up with her eyes without lifting her chin.
When enhanced by Hickox’s lighting, this proved so provocatively sexy that Hawks would just instruct Bacall to give Bogart The Look and she would know what to do.

It took Bogart to wake Bacall up to the fact that much of what Hawks had been regaling her with for months was purest fiction. “Very early on, Bogie said, ‘You don’t believe the stories Howard tells, do you?’ I said, ‘Of course I do.
Why not?’ Bogie told me that he made things up as he went along. Bogie never believed any of the stories Howard told.” After this, Bacall was able to deduce that Hawks “had quite an active fantasy life. In his stories, he always won, he always came out on top. He got his release through his work and his inventions. His inventions in his work, I think, meant everything to him, and I guess he more
or less succeeded in making them his life.

“He was a great director, as long as I did the work,” Bacall reflected. “I thought he was the best real movie director I ever worked with. I think he was really way ahead of anyone else in terms of dealing with men and women. He had great wit in dealing with them. The films don’t date at all, they’re completely modern. He believed that women should behave
like men. He gave you a great sense of security that made you feel like you’d come out on top. And it was fun.” Pranks were the order of the day. Hoagy
Carmichael played the whole picture with a toothpick in his mouth, which added a memorable aspect to his character. “It was a gimmick, like George Raft and his nickel,” he observed. “I thought of it and Howard didn’t say he liked it, but didn’t
say he didn’t.”

As per Hawks’s policy, Jack Warner was not welcome on the set. Despite this, he called down one day to announce that he was bringing over the gossip columnist Louella Parsons. As Dan Seymour remembered it, the assistant director, Jack Sullivan, “told Hawks, who went out the door, got into his car and left the lot. Then Sullivan sent all of us home. By the time Jack Warner walked
on the stage with Louella, Howard Hawks, Bogie and Bacall were gone. Jack Sullivan said, ‘We’re through for the day.’ Michael Curtiz heard about this and tried to get away with it, but he couldn’t. Warner and the others were afraid of Howard Hawks because he was so cool.”

Bacall remained surprised that Hawks actually wanted her to sing in the picture. Her vocal training was coming along, but
no one knew if she would sound good enough for her singing voice to be used, so Hawks kept his options open. To find a singer whose voice would match up plausibly with Bacall’s husky tones was not easy, and quite a few were tried, including the deep-voiced black singer Lillian Randolph, Dolores Hope, and the teenaged Andy Williams. Williams finally prevailed, and it was his voice that emanated from
the playback machine on May 1 when Hawks at last came to filming “How Little We Know.” As was customary, Bacall sang along while Carmichael tinkered away on the silent keyboard, and as she did, Hawks liked what he heard and told her to keep going. When she was done, he decided to record her again singing the song, so, despite the legend that has come down over the years that Andy Williams’s voice
was dubbed over Bacall’s (a legend so generally accepted that it became a correct answer on
Jeopardy
), the truth is that Bacall sang her own numbers in
To Have and Have Not
.

As he preferred to do, Hawks shot as much in sequence as possible; with Faulkner rewriting as they went, it would have been difficult to do otherwise. Warner Bros. scheduled the production for forty-eight days, but with the
playful approach brought to this picture, as well as the care Hawks lavished upon his new star, shooting was already six days behind schedule after just fifteen days of work. Hawks filmed the key pair of scenes in Marie’s and Morgan’s rooms, ending with the “whistle” line, over three days, March 27–29, at the beginning of the fifth week, a week or two after Bogart and Bacall had started their relationship
for real. On some of the key shots featuring Bacall, Hawks made between nine and thirteen takes, an unusual number for him, but worthwhile to ensure that he got exactly what he wanted
from her. Quite apart from his romantic interest in her, Bogart got a charge out of acting opposite Bacall: “She gives you back what you send. It’s like a fast game of tennis. If you put over a good ball and somebody
muffs it, you can’t have a good game. But if somebody drives it back hard, you drive back hard, and pretty soon you have a good game.”