Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (72 page)

Predictably, then, when Kitty Stephen Hawks was born
on February 11, 1946, at 9:49
P.M
., her father was not around. He eventually turned up, but he didn’t even drive his wife and daughter home from the hospital, arranging for an ambulance to do so instead. If Hawks was to have another child at all in his fiftieth year, he definitely wanted a son—as might be gleaned from his daughter’s middle name, an inside joke on
To Have and Have Not
. As for her
first name, the incredulous have always wondered if Howard Hawks could actually have named his child after the birthplace of aviation. Of course he could, and he did. But that was the first and just about the last thing he did for her, as Hawks couldn’t be bothered to pay any attention to her.

Not that he was terribly involved in the lives of any of his kids. Peter, who turned twenty-one in 1945,
had developed a passion for airplanes that far exceeded that of his stepfather, especially after his wartime stint with the Army Air Corps. Shifted out of El Rodeo School in the Beverly Hills school district and away from all his buddies by the moves to Bellagio Road and then Moraga Drive, David spent the eighth grade at Emerson Junior High in West Los Angeles, where he began getting into trouble.
With this, Hawks enrolled him in the Black Fox Military Institute, where the student body featured quite a few spoiled and unruly rich Hollywood boys; future director George Englund was the cadet major at the time. Even though Black Fox was only a half-hour drive from Hog Canyon, at Melrose and Wilcox in Hollywood, David was forced to board there for two years. After that, David said, “I had
a plan of how to get out of going to Black Fox for another year, by telling my father it was full of delinquents.” Without taking the time to investigate David’s claim, Hawks freed his son to go to the public University High School (Uni) nearby in West L.A., but there David
fell in with the hot-rod crowd; by giving him a 1938 Ford coupe for his sixteenth birthday in October 1945, Hawks could not
have better played into his son’s hands. “It wasn’t a bad group of people I was hanging out with,” David recalled, “it’s just that we went out racing on Friday nights, and it was illegal.” Giving birth to L.A.’s post-war drag-racing scene, David and his pals would roar down Pico Boulevard well into the night until some of them got arrested and the rest took off for home. “It was far from being
a gang kind of thing, but the police cracked down on it. I remember my dad saying one night after I came home late that if I ever got picked up, he wasn’t going to come down and get me out, to wait to call him in the morning. It was the same way with everything else. I didn’t smoke or drink, and he didn’t tell me that I couldn’t. He just lent me his pipe and watched me turn green.… He never said I
couldn’t do anything, he just wanted me to know that I would have to take responsibility for whatever I did.”

Barely lasting the year at Uni, David was then sent to board at Webb School in Claremont, about two hours to the east. Despite the fact that he should properly have been entering his senior year, he was forced to join the junior class and therefore graduated a year late. One point in
Webb’s favor was that students weren’t allowed to have cars, but one celebrity sprig well known to the Hawks family, Irving Thalberg Jr., was expelled during David’s time there for keeping a car hidden in a nearby orange grove. Whereas he had gotten Cs at Uni, David made better grades at Webb since “there was not much else to do.” Thanks to his improved academic record and the fact that the school’s
founder was a Princeton man, David was accepted at the New Jersey Ivy League university for the fall term of 1948.

Although David always remained very fond of his father, he did have one complaint: “He was never very open with praise. Once I came upon a letter describing how he came for the only time to a high school football game. In it, he praised how well I’d done in the game and it did me
good to read him praising me. He never said anything to me at the time. I think it was very hard for him to open up.” The letter in question is one Hawks wrote in November 1947 to Shipwreck Kelly, who had tossed the football around with David some ten years before. In it, he wrote that David, who was by then six feet, two inches tall and weighed 160 pounds, “caught everything that came his way and
ended up by making two touchdowns and setting up a third, and to my great delight not missing a ball that he could get anywhere near.”

For her part, Barbara, who turned nine in 1945, was quietly being raised by her grandparents and going to school in Pasadena. She generally saw her father on holidays and on arranged vacations during the summer. Very occasionally, the kids saw their mother,
who during this time lived mostly in an apartment not far from Hog Canyon, on Hilgard in Westwood near UCLA. Athole was allowed to drive and so was able to get around, although she had very few friends and nothing in particular to do. Every so often, her attacks would recur, sending her back into the hospital at UCLA.

Hawks’s growing children were not in a position to complain about their father’s
extreme distance from them, but Slim, once she was back on her feet after her daughter’s birth, resolved to take her life into her own hands. Without telling him, she decided “very early that Kitty was not to be Howard’s baby. I would have the sole responsibility for her forever, and so she was mine.” In early April, needing to get away from the oppressive atmosphere at home, Slim left her baby
of less than two months with a nanny to go to New York, where she built up her ego with a two-week round of partying with friends and some new gentlemen admirers. Wanting more, she hopped down to Nassau, which proved less exciting, so she called Hemingway in Cuba and procured an invitation to join him and his wife of six weeks, Mary Welsh, at Finca Vigia, his compound southeast of Havana.

Still
aroused by Slim’s presence, Hemingway greeted her at the airport with the provocative comment, “Miss Slimsky, why don’t we ever find each other
between
marriages?” Most evenings were spent with the crowd that gathered around Hemingway at the great El Floridita bar in Havana, and Slim endured an uncomfortable four-day fishing trip with the newlyweds. Despite Mary’s resentment, Slim was enormously
refreshed and buoyed by Hemingway’s constant attention and praise. Things also took an interesting turn when some unexpected show-business personalities turned up and more or less imposed themselves on Hemingway: David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones, the agent and producer Leland Hayward and his wife, Margaret Sullavan, and CBS’s founder and owner William Paley. They tried to induce Slim to join
them on their continuing cruise of the Caribbean, but she begged off, realizing she couldn’t ignore her obligations in Los Angeles forever.

Once back home in May, Slim reluctantly joined her husband for a short stay in Palm Springs without Kitty, to little effect on her marriage. She then, at last, eagerly embraced her role as mother, but with the knowledge
after her trip that there was a different
life out there for her; she didn’t know how or when she would find it, but she was now on the lookout for her chance. Hawks became suspicious that his wife might be having an affair with the photographer and compulsive ladies’ man Robert Capa, who took advantage of Hawks’s standing invitation to visit his house by spending an inordinate amount of time hanging around the pool and drinking his
booze. But for the most part, Capa was unhappily killing time between rare opportunities to see his true secret lover, Ingrid Bergman.

In the end, it was Hawks himself who created the circumstances that fostered Slim’s break from him. On Bastille Day, July 14, the Hawkses went to a Sunday night dinner party at David Selznick’s. As he sometimes did, Hawks bowed out early but insisted that Slim
stay on. Slim enormously impressed Leland Hayward, who was there without his wife, and he insisted upon taking her home. Hayward, an endlessly dynamic, appealing man of forty-four, had blue eyes much warmer than Hawks’s and a salt-and-pepper crewcut and was known as much for the quality of his female conquests—Garbo, Hepburn, Sullavan—as for their quantity. Dropping Slim off at home, he asked her
point-blank why she didn’t ditch Hawks, since there was so obviously nothing between them anymore, and tempted her with the thought that there was a lot out there waiting for her if she would only leave her husband. Contriving a way to see more of her, Hayward hired Slim as costume consultant for the national tour of
State of the Union
, one of his first outings as a producer. For the first and
last time in her life, Slim took a job, and it enabled their romance to begin without raising anyone’s suspicions. Slim’s involvement with Leland Hayward also inadvertently led her to help her husband make his second big discovery of the 1940s, this time of an actor who would become one of the idols and legends of his era.

Not having finished
Viva Villa!
or
The Outlaw
, Hawks was ready to tackle
a Western, this best-defined of film genres that had proven so successful for almost every important director of his generation. The pulp writer Borden Chase was an acquaintance of Hawks’s through horse circles and in January 1946, Hawks bought Chase’s story, “The Chisholm Trail,” about the nation’s first major cattle drive. Hawks paid fifty thousand dollars for all rights and hired Chase for $1,250
a week to write the screenplay. Early on, however, Hawks could see that he would have trouble with the belligerently right-wing Chase, who refused to collaborate with Hawks or anyone else and became incensed at the mere suggestion of any changes. With its grand theme of how the creation of a cattle empire helped build a nation, its epic movement, its contrast of an old authoritarian ethic with
a newer and more democratic
one, and its elemental conflict between an older man seeking revenge upon the foster son who took away his herd, Chase’s dramatic architecture was sound and full of tremendous potential. His straightforward, sometimes colorful dialogue was quite suitable for films, though as a prose stylist he was crude, bombastic, repetitive, and utterly lacking in nuance.

As published
in the
Saturday Evening Post
in installments from December 1946 to January 1947,
The Chisholm Trail
told of Thomas Dunson, a “bull of a man … with eyes that looked out at you like the rounded gray ends of bullets in a pistol cylinder.” Splitting off from a wagon train with one bull and a wagon, he meets a boy, Matthew Garth, whom he takes under his protection. Plotting the beginnings of a giant
herd of cattle, he kills a Mexican who disputes his right to the land he is now claiming as his own.

Jumping twenty years ahead, Matthew is on his way back from fighting for the South in the Civil War when he stops at the River Palace and is attracted to saloon singer Tess Millay, the companion of a blustering gambler named the Donegal. Back in Texas and ready to move his thousands of cattle
to market in the North now that Matthew has returned, Dunson takes on Cherry Valance, a “charming and impudent” hired gun, to join his thirty other men in the drive. Cherry has also known Tess, giving him and Matthew a sort of
A Girl in Every Port
relationship. Demanding total obedience from his men, Dunson insists upon driving the herd the long way through to Missouri, despite the many reports
of trouble with outlaw gangs there and Cherry’s insistence that there is now a railway line closer by at Abilene, Kansas.

After a nocturnal stampede and the arrival of a nearly dead rider warning of a border gang, several men rebel against Dunson and Matthew, who kill five of them. Cherry Valance rounds up the remaining three, who are shot by Dunson. Despite an easier crossing to the west, Dunson
insists upon making a dangerous crossing of the Red River, which now marks the border between Texas and Oklahoma. The loss of three more men sparks a full-scale mutiny, which Matthew joins by stating that he will drive the cattle to Abilene himself. At this betrayal, the old man vows to kill Matthew, but as he goes for his gun, Cherry Valance shoots Dunson in the shoulder. Turned out by the man
he raised as his son, Dunson swears to come back for him and hang him.

As Matthew and the men drive through the Nations, they run across a wagon train headed by the Donegal. With him are a dozen sporting women, including Tess Millay. After a long evening campfire, Matthew deliberately stampedes the cattle under threat of an Indian attack, which
arrives the next morning. Tess flirts heavily with
Matthew and Cherry Valance, which enrages the Donegal, who draws on Cherry, with fatal consequences for himself. Tess, hardly crushed by the loss, continues to provoke Matthew, announcing that she will now change course and accompany him to Abilene even though he doesn’t want her to. All the while, Dunson and ten hired guns are rapidly advancing on Matthew and the herd.

After a nighttime lightning
storm, during which many steers are shot to prevent them from crushing a broken wagon in which a woman is having a baby, Cherry decides to quit the herd and stay with Tess’s wagon train, which trails about a mile behind Matthew. Cherry virtually proposes to Tess, but when she says she wants a man with real money, he slinks off to plot his takeover of the herd. He then tries to ambush Matthew
during another river crossing but botches the attempt. Dunson arrives in Tess’s camp and, after a long talk, offers her half his empire, once he claims what’s his, if she will bear him a son. When Cherry turns up, the two men shoot it out; Cherry hits Dunson in the shoulder again and would have killed him if Tess hadn’t brushed his elbow as he fired. This gives Dunson his chance, and he kills Cherry.

Having reached Abilene and the railroad, Matthew collects more than eighty thousand dollars for the cattle and puts it away for Dunson to collect, as promised. But as the men celebrate, Tess comes into town to inform Matthew that Dunson has shot Cherry, that she’s agreed to go off with Dunson, but that she’ll throw it all away if he’ll leave with her now. Of course, he can’t cheat destiny that
way, so at high noon the next day, the two men face off in town. They draw, and the younger one is faster, but Matthew finds himself unable to shoot the man who taught him everything he knows. Dunson, ailing from the wound Cherry gave him, fires away but can’t hit his target as he loses strength with every squeeze of the trigger, and finally crumbles to the dust. An epilogue has Matthew and Tess
returning to Texas with Dunson in the back of their wagon. After they cross the Red River, the old man gets out to stand on Texas soil one more time before he dies.