Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (70 page)

Epstein wrote twelve pages of new material, almost entirely with an eye to upping the sexual stakes between Marlowe and Vivian. Given that this sort of thing was Furthman’s specialty, that he had been the last writer on the film before, and that he had played a decisive
role in shaping Bacall’s screen image in the first place, it is not clear why he was not brought back to write these scenes. The best guess is that Jack Warner had more than a bit to do with the decision. Epstein’s major contributions were two double entendre–loaded scenes between Marlowe and Vivian. In the first, Marlowe and Vivian talk about love, with Vivian saying, “Carmen’s easy—men know
that—You have to work harder and longer on me,” to which Marlowe responds, “If an extra half-hour makes you feel more respectable.…” “Good night, Mr. Marlowe,” Vivian says. The other was the famous horse racing–as–sex café scene, which could not possibly be spiked with more innuendo. Marlowe admits to Vivian, “You’ve got a touch of class, but I don’t know how far you can go,” to which Vivian replies,
“That depends on who’s in the saddle.” This prompts Marlowe to speculate as to whether Vivian is a front-runner or likes to “come from behind.”

Other additions written by Epstein were the scene in the parking lot of Marlowe telling off Eddie Mars; Marlowe’s short speech about the chauffeur, Carmen, Geiger, and the compromising photographs; a revision of a scene of Marlowe entering the Sternwood
mansion in which some of the butler’s lines were given to Vivian, further beefing up her part; and redrafts of the scene in the hideout with Marlowe, Vivian, and Mona Mars (played by the harsh Pat Clark initially, but recast with the more conventional Peggy Knudsen for the reshoot); the one between Carmen and Marlowe in his apartment; and, crucially, Marlowe’s face-off with the D.A. This last scene,
in which Bernie Ohls tells Marlowe to lay off the Sternwood case, was a streamlined substitute for the original one, in which, among other things, the killer of the chauffeur Owen Taylor was identified and the entire plot to that point was summarized. Jack Warner personally ordered the replacement shot to speed the story along, and Hawks complied, but of all the new scenes added in 1946, this
one does not seem like an improvement, as the new version not only removed considerable information but erased much of the ambiguity and suggestion about why Marlowe wanted to continue his investigation, just as it further flattened out Ohls’s character.

In the year since the film had wrapped, relations between Bogart and Bacall and Hawks had become strained. Hawks had long since sold his interest
in Bacall to Warner Bros., and when it became clear that the couple intended to stay together and get married and that Hawks had been dead wrong about Bogart’s intentions, he washed his hands of them. Even Bacall’s close friendship with Slim had suffered. So when the group reassembled for six days of reshoots on January 21, 1946, the attitude was strictly business. Nonetheless, with the help
of the great dialogue and bold confrontations Epstein had created, they were easily able to reenter the provocative, sizzling groove they had been working in, on and off, for two years. On January 28,
The Big Sleep
finished shooting for good, and on February 8, the new and final version was previewed for the first time. The feeling that the
extra work had been worth it was shared by everyone,
prompting Warner to wire his East Coast executives with the news: “in my opinion we have [a] one hundred percent better picture.”

Whether or not Warner was right can now be judged by contemporary audiences, since the 1945 version, hitherto seen only in exceedingly rare 16mm prints, was restored by Bob Gitt of the UCLA Film & Television Archives and presented to the public in 35mm for the first
time in Los Angeles in July 1996. It is impossible to claim that the original cut is better, since the added material produces such intense sparks and provokes such thoroughgoing pleasure. All the same, the earlier version possesses a richness of narrative satisfaction, a thrill of dramatic discovery, that was sacrificed in the reshooting and cutting. The two cuts are very different in effect, with
the original 116-minute film having been trimmed of twenty minutes to make way for eighteen minutes of new footage, creating a final running time of 114 minutes. A comparison of the two versions reveals
The Big Sleep
as the indisputable turning point in its director’s career. The first cut represents the culmination of Hawks’s dedication to narrative, to classical storytelling principles, to the
kind of logic that depends upon the intricate interweaving of dramatic threads. The revised, less linear cut sees him abandoning these long-held virtues for the sake of “scenes,” scenes of often electrifying individual effect, but scenes that were weighted heavily in favor of character over plot and dramatic complexity. When Hawks saw that he could get away with this, it emboldened him to proceed
further down this path through the remainder of his career, with results that were variable in terms of the intent and quality of his work.

The Big Sleep
finally opened in New York City on August 23, where it broke the opening week record at the Strand Theater with a tremendous gross of $84,000; public interest was so great that the house ran almost around the clock, closing its doors only between
3
A.M
. and 9
A.M
. The six-week run there generated a total gross of $378,000, making for one of the theater’s best engagements ever. Spurred by reviews affirming that the old Bogie-Bacall magic was back, the film soon spread across the country, and through September and October it remained steady as the number-two film in the nation, just behind Hitchcock’s
Notorious
. By the end of the year, it
had done more than $3 million in box-office rentals, making it Warner Bros.’ third-biggest film of 1946.

The qualities of
The Big Sleep
are self-evident. It is, as Hawks intended it to be, massively entertaining on a moment-to-moment basis, with Bogart
etching the definitive Philip Marlowe, every woman in the film fairly oozing sexuality, a mood of sinister uncertainty draping the action, and
a mystery being unraveled whose dubious clarity is at least matched by its scandalous fascination. The sense of intangible threats lurking in the darkness of the world at large, the Conradian danger present in so many Hawks films, is especially helpful to this deeply mysterious puzzle in which everyone is suspicious and most are guilty of something. It is not the personal film that
To Have and
Have Not
was, but it does reflect the steel-eyed, unsentimental, sly, sexually excitable, and ruthless sides of its director, all of which serve this material extremely well. As Cecelia Ager wrote in
PM
in the most perceptive contemporaneous review, the film “evokes the fond indulgence that a blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, good little boy meets when earnestly relating the very naughtiest daydream the
dear little fellow is able to think up.” She also put the dazzling skill evident in individual sequences in perspective by comparing it to “cutting and polishing rhinestones to simulate diamonds, instead of just cutting and polishing diamonds. They are marvelous fakes.”

With
The Big Sleep
, Hawks had now scored seven major hits in a row, a record all but unmatched in Hollywood. His commercial
success had earned him a virtually free hand at Warner Bros., where his position was condusive to his doing just about any project he wanted. And yet he chafed at being under contract, at not truly controlling his own destiny. He still looked back at the unfettered manner in which he and Hughes had made
Scarface
as an ideal he had been unable to recapture since. More than anything, Hawks wanted
his independence, to not have to deal with Jack Warner or Sam Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer, to own and profit by his own work. Due to his tremendous success as a director, Hawks was able to get what he wanted. But knowing how to handle it when he got it was another matter altogether.

As the war years began drawing to a close, Howard Hawks, who was approaching his fiftieth birthday, acquired some curious new pastimes. Long gone were his days of flying, sailing, and tennis, and even his taste for hunting began to subside as he got older. But his passion for all manner of engines and vehicles, preferably fast and unusual ones, persisted.
During the making of
To Have and Have Not
, he distracted himself by building an automobile from the ground up on the Warner lot, joined occasionally by David, who as a teenager was beginning to share his father’s interest in hot cars. But the most unusual, and almost comical, manifestation of this mania was the middle-aged men’s motorcycle gang that gathered every Sunday morning at Hog Canyon.
Sporting the curiously proper and British name of the Moraga Spit and Polish Club, this informal group “didn’t care too damn much about the usual social life that centered around how big you were,” according to Hawks, but nonetheless consisted largely of prominent Hollywood names: Hawks, Vic Fleming, Clark Gable, Ward Bond, Keenan Wynn, Andy Devine, Van Johnson, William Wellman, and, as the only
woman with a chopper, Wellman’s wife, Dotty, who, according to Slim, had the biggest bike of all and was the best rider. Other regulars included the stuntman Cary Loften, the test pilot and certified wild man Vance Breeze, the aviation innovator Bill Lear, later of Learjet fame, and Al Menasco, whose Menasco Aircraft Company made airplane engines in Burbank.

Sometimes numbering as many as twenty
cyclists, the gang would gather at Hawks’s house at 10:30
A.M
. in full leather gear and special jackets. The men then spent at least an hour polishing their machines to showroom conditions while discussing their machines’ performance and fine points, whereupon they would peel off for a couple of hours of noisy cruising through the hills off and around Mulholland Drive or into the San Fernando
Valley. Afterward, they either returned to Hog Canyon, where
Slim dutifully served up a big lunch she’d spent the morning preparing, or adjourned to Andy Devine’s ranch, where the jovial Western character actor “had this long ‘Liar’s Bench’ made for our house. All the riders would sit and drink beer and tell lies about what they’d been doing on their motorcycles.” The only biker who tried to outdo
the others in terms of speed and fancy maneuvers was Fleming. Otherwise, the main competition, such as it was, stemmed from having the spiffiest, most polished machine. Most of the bikes at that time were Harleys, although Hawks and Gable each had a four-cylinder Ariel Square Four. In addition to his own Harley, Hawks along the way acquired a Triumph, a Zundapp, and, just to one-up the others,
a rare German BMW, which he bought from a policeman.

It hardly escapes notice that several members of the group, notably Bond, Wynn, and Fleming, were extremely right-wing, and vague stories have circulated over the years about how Hollywood’s first motorcycle gang was actually a bunch of celebrity thugs prone to roaring through the streets of Hollywood on the lookout for liberals and lefties.
While Bond and a couple of his cronies apparently indulged this fantasy from time to time, it wasn’t on Sunday mornings with the rest of the bunch, who were in it for the social and mildly macho gratification. Any political views voiced were no doubt conservative, but the Moraga Spit and Polish Club was as innocuous, and somewhat silly, as its name.

Hawks’s chronic preoccupation with vehicles,
which Slim tolerated with no enthusiasm, assumed its most peculiar manifestation when he bought, at untold expense, an elaborate land yacht that he imagined would take Slim and him off on fabulous journeys to unknown destinations. The two-toned green contraption consisted of a special cab attached to an enormously long trailer that resembled the inside of a yacht. After Slim stocked it with the
requisite utensils, Hawks decided to take the unwieldy thing on its inaugural voyage. By the time they reached the end of Moraga Drive, Slim felt so ill that she insisted that they return home at once, so Hawks made an ungainly U-turn and, while attempting to park, did not clear the eave of the stable, which sliced like a can opener through the top of the trailer. Neither Hawks nor his wife ever took
it out for a second spin.

Shortly after the war ended, a new sport was taken up by the Hollywood elite: croquet. Commonly thought of in America as a children’s pastime, the game, when pursued seriously, is as vicious as polo and second only to cricket in the length of time required to play. In addition, the necessity of a large, perfectly flat, immaculately manicured, expertly measured grass
playing field, as well as costly English equipment, restricts access to
the privileged few, annointing it with further snob appeal in the film capital. The sport had long been popular in society and show-business circles in the East, with the critic Alexander Woollcott as its “high priest” and other enthusiasts including Averell Harriman, Richard Rodgers, Vincent Astor, Moss Hart, Herbert Bayard
Swope, and George S. Kaufman. It was Hart who was most responsible for bringing croquet west by introducing it to Darryl Zanuck. Soon Hawks became one of its prime adherents as well, followed by such others as his brother Bill, Tyrone Power, Cesar Romero, Samuel Goldwyn, Gregory Ratoff, Otto Preminger, André Hakim, Joseph Cotten, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Louis Jourdan, who was the best player.
William Powell, Slim’s friend from the mid-1930s, was the official cheerleader of the Palm Springs club.

Because of the vast acreage of Hog Canyon, Hawks’s compound was easily able to accommodate an impeccable regulation croquet lawn. Matches could easily last all day and sometimes continued well into the evening. While Hawks, Zanuck, and the other diehards feverishly pursued their new game,
nonparticipants, including Slim, Robert Capa, Lew Wasserman, and Constance Bennett, would play ruthless poker inside.

Naturally, the East Coast veterans looked down on the Hollywood neophytes, and Zanuck took Moss Hart’s joking put-downs as a slap in the face that demanded satisfaction. Thus was born the East-West croquet championship, which pitted Hart, Tyrone Power, and the agent Fefe Ferry
for the East against Zanuck and Hawks for the West. The three matches were played on July 6–7, 1946, before some three hundred spectators seated in a gallery set up at Hawks’s home. Special floodlights were installed to allow play to continue after dark, and the playoff was considered such an event that
Life
magazine covered it with a two-page spread highlighted by photographs taken by Jean Howard.
Zanuck and Hawks won the first game, but, as Hart observed, “they became drunk with success and lost control very early” in the night game, then lost again the next day, giving the tiny winner’s cup, presented by Slim, to the East. Among those in the crowd on the first day was Howard Hughes, who the next afternoon would nearly die when he crashed his experimental XF-11 plane into two homes in
Beverly Hills.