Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (79 page)

All this did Hawks little good financially, since he had long since spent himself out of a meaningful share of the profits. Because he had worked on a deferral, Hawks didn’t receive any of his $125,000 salary until the picture officially went into profit after the 1952 reissue, and even then his share was only $56,405, the rest going to Athole, Slim, and Feldman;
subtract taxes, and Hawks cleared less than $30,000 for all his work, which makes it
more apparent why he felt forced to accept
A Song Is Born
and his subsequent contract at Fox. For its part,
A Song Is Born
ultimately took in $2.4 million at the box office, very good but not good enough compared to the unnecessary amount Goldwyn spent on it.

But the book was far from closed on
Red River
and
Monterey’s problems. From the time the company departed Arizona to years after the film had come and gone from theaters, the filmmakers were beseiged with lawsuits from creditors whom Hawks, in line with his usual treatment of everyone from bookies to the corner grocer, had left in the lurch. Among the twenty-eight claimants were an assistant director, Southern Pacific rail, thirty-one actors, and
the rancher who had rented them the steers. The most egregious grievance was that of John Wayne, whom one would have thought no one in Hollywood would want to alienate. Despite UA’s agreement to compensate the star first, full payment of his guaranteed profit was not forthcoming until 1952, although Famous Artists placated him with loans in the interim. As of 1952, creditors were still owed approximately
$175,000 by Monterey.

Most incredible of all was the company’s failure to reimburse Pathé Laboratories for its processing and printing of the film. In order to not hold up the film’s release any further, the lab generously turned out the full order of more than four hundred prints in 1948 without immediate compensation. Unfortunately, no one—not Monterey, MPI, or UA—took responsibility for the
bill (it was actually MPI’s obligation), and it got to the point where, at 10
A.M
. on July 20, 1951, the lab held an auction to get what it could for the film’s negative and soundtrack. The catch was that the buyer would not own the rights to the picture, but the true owner, for lack of the elements, would be effectively prevented from making 16mm or TV prints. Even though Pathé was owed less
than five thousand dollars, up to the day of the auction, the interested parties were all acting like cagey poker players, bluffing one another by not stepping up and paying off the small debt. In fact, the ploy worked for MPI, which managed to buy the thirteen cans of negative and sound at auction for fifteen hundred dollars. But Pathé then immediately announced plans for another auction, on August
21, at which an enormous amount of other
Red River
material would be sold to the highest bidder. Hawks’s business associate Ed Lasker won with a bid of $2,777, the price of the lien plus costs. Hawks had Lasker buy the material because, since it was not copyrighted, he and Feldman were afraid that another buyer would use it in another film or television show. In any event, it remains
astonishing
that the makers of so great and valuable a film could treat their creation, and those who helped them achieve it, in such a cavalier fashion, with so little regard for its condition and eventual fate.

In 1953, in the wake of the reissue, some profits began trickling in, with 69 percent going to MPI, 25 percent to Monterey, and 6 percent to John Wayne. The following year, Monterey actually received
$15,602 in profit participation, of which 18½ percent went to Hawks and 10 percent was given to Slim. Despite periodic offers for the television rights, Monterey finally sold
Red River
outright to UA in 1957 for $225,000. MPI had been dissolved the year before after making its partners a great deal of money, while Monterey, whose shareholders did considerably less well, followed suit two years
later, but not before having to pay off the $18,000 still due some creditors. Thus ended, with a whimper, Hawks’s long-abandoned dream of being a true independent producer in total control of his own destiny.

Critically,
Red River
was as well received as any straightforward Western was permitted to be in the 1940s or 1950s. During those two decades, when Westerns were at their greatest and most
abundant and therefore taken entirely too much for granted, the only Westerns nominated for the best-picture Oscar were
The Ox-Bow Incident, High Noon
, and
Shane
, the first two among the most socially conscious Westerns ever made. Essentially, if your aspirations did not include political and symbolic commentary beyond the normal scope of the genre, you could forget serious consideration from
the critics and tastemakers. The same went for John Wayne, who got very good reviews for
Red River
—
Variety
spoke for many when it said that he “has his best assignment to date and he makes the most of it”—but the lion’s share of the attention went to Montgomery Clift, who became the raging heartthrob of millions of teenage girls.

Still, time and perspectives change and, as good and unusual as
Clift was in the film, the film historian Jeanine Basinger more recently made the incisive point that “a nonmovie lover is the person who walks out of
Red River
talking about Montgomery Clift.” Hawks always liked to say how John Ford, who allegedly helped edit certain sequences in
Red River
, told him upon seeing Wayne’s performance as Dunson, “I never knew the sonofabitch could act.” Wayne backed
the story up, stating that, “Jack never respected me as an actor until I made
Red River
,” and it was immediately thereafter that Ford starred Wayne in a series of roles that were much more complex and demanding than any he had offered him previously. In any
event, nothing Wayne had done before quite prepared the viewer for the sheer force and turbulence of his performance as Dunson; there is no
question that it was his breakthrough role.

Like the similar independent ventures of Capra, Wyler, Stevens, Sturges, Hitchcock, Lang, and others, Hawks’s didn’t last long—just one film. Because of the tremendous autonomy Hawks had commandeered at the studios prior to this, he didn’t have appreciably more artistic freedom on
Red River
than he’d had on any of his earlier pictures, nor did he have
the slightest inclination to use his freedom to make “art” films, such as Ford’s
The Fugitive
, or message pictures even in the mainstream vein of Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life
. The secret of Hawks’s enduring success was that there was no difference between the manner of films he wanted to make and what the studios craved; he just wanted to make them on his own terms, without the interference of
meddlesome producers and executives, and at maximum profit to himself. Being left to his own devices, and exposing himself financially to his investors when he hadn’t nearly the expertise or self-discipline to beat them at their own game, proved fatal to his dreams of continued independence. But he made a classic film in the process, and
Red River
introduced him to the only place other than the
modern world he was ever to find accommodating to his imagination: the American West.

Although time would prove her wrong, Slim felt that Hawks was being very civilized about the divorce. And the feeling was mutual, for, although she could have tried to clean her husband out, she didn’t feel motivated to do so. In their property settlement, Slim agreed that she could be supported “in her customary manner” by just five thousand dollars
in alimony from Hawks per year, to terminate in the event of her remarriage, and six thousand dollars in annual child support for Kitty. She would also keep her two cars, the money in her personal checking account, her interest in Monterey and some other business ventures, selected furniture, silverware and bric-a-brac from the house, and her clothing and jewelry. The jewelry, much of it bought
by Hawks or, at least, with his money, consisted of more than fifty items and was worth in the tens of thousands of dollars. With Slim poised to marry Leland Hayward as soon as both divorces came through, perhaps it seemed pointless for her to press for too large a settlement, although something could have gone wrong with Hayward. As far as Hawks was concerned, once Slim moved out, he washed his
hands of her and Kitty; his view on his little daughter was that since she would never remember him anyway, she could be raised as Hayward’s own.

At that time, however, obtaining a divorce was a protracted matter. Hawks and Slim can truly be said to have broken up at summer’s end, 1946; she moved out in the spring of 1947, and the property settlement was agreed upon at the end of the year. Slim
and Kitty left Los Angeles and moved in with Hayward in New York City the following spring, but her divorce was not definitively granted until June 6, 1949; four days later, she and Hayward married at Bill and Babe Paley’s estate in Manhasset, Long Island, with David Hawks up from Princeton to give the bride away.

The groundwork for another 1949 wedding was also being laid during this time, as
Peter Hawks left Arizona State for the San Francisco Bay area, where he had spent the war years, took a job as a purser with South-west
Airlines, and soon became serious with a young woman named Shirley Godfrey. Barbara, now on the verge of puberty, was still living in Pasadena with her elderly grandparents and “Aunt” Katherine, who were beginning to slow down, and attending Westridge.

With essentially
no family responsibilities, other than the financial, Hawks had fewer ties than he’d had in twenty years. Through the winter, spring, and summer of 1948, he golfed frequently, was constantly at the track, did a little horse trading, and continued gambling heavily, resulting, as usual, in heavy losses. This year, he had a partner in bad luck, as Feldman rolled up losses well into five figures.
Hawks was habitually on the phone to one of his bookies the first thing every morning and would often place large bets based on hearsay and hot tips. When short for cash, he would insist that one of the junior agents at Famous Artists cover the bets, the sum to be deducted from his earnings later. While persisting in this recklessness, he blithely continued to stiff legitimate businesses to
which he owed money, even down to the little Bel-Air market at the foot of Moraga Drive, which regularly settled for ten or twenty cents on the dollar from Hawks after waiting many months for payment.

Hawks’s active involvement in Directors Guild affairs had been minimal since the late 1930s, but under the new president, George Stevens, Hawks was corralled into joining the public relations committee,
along with Leo McCarey, George Sidney, Norman McLeod, and Norman Taurog. The group drew up a publicity agenda by which directors would be guaranteed credit in all advertising controlled by a film’s producer, embracing newspaper, magazine, and radio ads. This was something Hawks could wholeheartedly get behind, although the Guild faced a longer and tougher fight in pushing through their long-sought
demand that a director be able to present his cut of a film before studio executives could take scissors to it.

As far as broader politics were concerned, the ill winds of blacklisting, security clearance, and red-baiting were already swirling in Hollywood, but while most of those in Hawks’s circle—Wayne, Cooper, Furthman, Fleming, Nyby, Carmichael, Brennan—were ultraconservative, Hawks personally
had little more patience for the rhetoric and bullying of the right than he did for the left. As his son David said, “Dad didn’t like people who were in politics.” Because he basically agreed with them, Hawks could humor and not argue with his right-wing friends, but there was no way he was going to join them; When stuntman Cliff Lyons approached Hawks about joining the virulently anticommunist
Motion Picture Alliance for the
Preservation of American Ideals, Hawks pretended he didn’t even know what Lyons was talking about, even though two close friends, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, had been among the organization’s earliest members. Years later, Chris Nyby vaguely alluded to how Hawks worked “behind the scenes” for the conservative cause during the blacklist days, but when pressed, he
could point to nothing of substance to back his claim. Persistent questioning of many members of both the left and right in Hollywood yielded no one who had the slightest feeling that Hawks became politically involved in any direct way during the polarized Cold War years. Hawks had his sympathies, no doubt, but true to Harry Morgan, he believed in minding his own business.

And business was good,
better for Hawks than for many in the film industry. For all the directors who had thrived in the studio system from the early 1930s through the end of World War II, the immediate postwar period represented a turning point critical to defining the direction of the remainder of their careers. A number of the more hard-nosed old “pros,” including Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh, William Wellman, Henry
Hathaway, Henry King, Clarence Brown, Mervyn LeRoy, and even John Ford, continued much as they had before, making one or more films of variable quality a year and hanging on more or less as long as the aging moguls for whom they worked. A fortunate few, notably Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, and George Stevens, were able to transform enormous box-office success
and (except for Hitchcock) some well-timed Oscars into an extraordinary degree of producer-director autonomy. A much larger group of other directors of comparable prewar reputation—Frank Capra, Frank Borzage, Leo McCarey, Fritz Lang, Rouben Mamoulian, William Dieterle, Edmund Goulding, Mitchell Leisen,—were able to continue their careers for a while but had clearly lost sync with public tastes and,
arguably, even their own talent. As Hawks said privately about these men, “They’ve lost the wrinkle in their belly.” In other words, they got fat, something Hawks would never allow to happen to him.

For his part, Hawks represented an almost singular case. In theory, he should have been among the dominant producer-directors, but despite the prominence of Hawks’s name on some of the biggest commercial
attractions of the period leading to this decisive time, a combination of factors conspired to keep him out of this select group. Unlike DeMille and Hitchcock, he was not associated with a specific type of picture, nor did he
have a strong public image; unlike Stevens, Wyler, and sometimes Wilder, he rejected high-brow and “significant” think-piece material, thereby disqualifying himself from
serious consideration by the East Coast tastemakers and literary-oriented critics. Partly for this reason, he was never recognized at the Oscars, and he never made that single, career-defining blockbuster that would forever separate him from the crowd. For critics and anyone in the public who thought about it, Hawks was still more a solid all-rounder than a distinguished, selective artist, closer
to Milestone and Wellman than to Ford, Stevens, or such attention-getting newcomers as Huston, Mankiewicz, and Kazan.