Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (82 page)

Although they only had about three weeks of filming left, Hawks and Fox decided to close down the production in England and return to California, where they would await their star’s recovery; the $200,000 that the studio had already paid the British labor unions would have to be recouped on its next production. Thorough photographs were taken of all the sets so they could be reproduced on Fox’s stages
in Los Angeles, and some of the cast, including Marion Marshall, left as early as February 10. Hawks concluded his business and was glad to leave England behind when the
Queen Mary
sailed from Southampton on February 19. Arriving in New York six days later, Hawks stayed there only briefly, not bothering to visit David at nearby Princeton, before heading for home and warmth. Despite his up-bringing
in the frigid north, Hawks had entirely lost his taste for Eastern winters.

Feeling better, Ann Sheridan visited Paris and Rome before returning to California, while Cary Grant remained bedridden for weeks. Fleeing the hospital at the earliest opportunity, he sent Betsy Drake home and spent the rest of his time convalescing at Pamela Churchill’s Mayfair flat. It was the worst illness Grant had
ever suffered through, and he later confessed that he nearly died from the hepatitis. Having lost what has been variously reported as anywhere from twenty and forty pounds, Grant knew he needn’t rush home, since time was required to build up his strength and weight, and took a slow boat, the
Volendam
, which sailed to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal. He regained his health as the weeks passed
and finally arrived home on April 7. At the end of April, after a three-month break, he made some tests to ensure that he’d gained enough weight to match what had been shot before and shortly picked up where he left off, now with Norbert Brodine as cinematographer. As Hawks puts it, “Cary ran into a haystack on a motorcycle and came out weighing twenty pounds less.” Scenes of the couple trying to
make their way onto a Navy boat back to the States were shot at the San Pedro docks, and production finally wrapped on May 27, 1949, exactly eight months after it started. The budget was in the neighborhood of $2 million, although it is difficult to state precisely because of the $200,000 left behind in Britain and the layoff, which saw the cast kept on at full salary but at Lloyds of London’s expense.

During the hiatus, it had fallen to a young second assistant at Fox named Paul Helmick to try to make sense out of the footage shot thus far and help determine exactly what was still needed. Hawks didn’t forget the outstanding job he did at this, and an association began that would last the rest of Hawks’s life. Subsequently, the film editor, James B. Clark, had one of the most difficult jobs
on the picture, linking up all the disparate pieces shot in three different countries at different times.

An even greater problem, however, were all the changes demanded by the Breen Office. Because of the ongoing rewriting and the company being far away in Germany, Lederer’s script was not even received by the MPAA until the end of October, a month after shooting had begun. To the filmmakers’
dismay, Breen found the entire project unacceptable “because of the great amount of sex-suggestive lines and situations. This is particularly true of the element of sex frustration on the part of the leads after they have been married.” Since several weeks of film was in the can by the time the MPAA expressed its objections, there wasn’t much Hawks could do but hope for the best when he finally
presented it with the finished picture. An example of a line that Hawks was later ordered to cut was Catherine’s early warning to Henri, “If you lay a finger on me this trip, you’re going back to France minus a couple of parts you probably value.” There were also references to the French as “frogs,” innuendoes about the sexual urges of dogs and bulls, and a shirtless backrub that all eventually had
to go. However, it was the entire premise of the story’s second half that turned Breen red. In his notes, the chief censor stated that “playing around with the deferment of the marital act could not be approved.” He also pointed out that “comedy derived from the fact that a married couple are unable to consumate their marriage would be unacceptable.”

Hawks and his editor did have to cut a great
many of the more overt sexual innuendoes from the final print, but, his confidence bolstered by his past ability to slip some surprising things past the censor, the director took a big chance in the second half that Breen and his cronies would approve on the screen what they had objected to on paper. While they forced him to cut a joke in which a bystander was startled to see two women—actually
Catherine and Henri in drag—eagerly kissing, Breen and company were won over by Hawks’s treatment of his risqué subject and approved the picture more or less as filmed.

Fox rushed the picture through final postproduction to have it ready for release by August, and most critics were similarly disarmed by Hawks’s sly treatment of what seemed like a potentially silly story. Even Cary Grant
was delightfully
surprised by the result. Grant attended the premiere in New York the final week of August despite his apprehension that a good film could never have resulted from such a problem-plagued shoot. The next day he told the
New York Times
,“I just saw the picture and the audience laughed themselves sick. I’ve been in many comedies but I’ve never heard an audience react like this one. I honestly feel
it’s the best comedy I’ve ever done.”

Some viewers find
I Was a Male War Bride
virtually unbearable for the excruciating humiliation and sexual torture Cary Grant’s character is forced to endure; young men, in particular, often find nothing funny in it.
War Bride
is very much a middle-aged man’s film, the work of a man in his early fifties who, however much he had always enjoyed putting his male
comic figures through the wringer, was now disposed to take a more dispassionate view of the urgency of sexual consummation. The most prolonged and overt of the numerous examples of cross-dressing and sex-role flip-flopping in Hawks’s films, it also runs bracingly counter to the perception of Hawks as a conservative upholder of the status quo, for very few non-noir films of the late 1940s ridicule
bureaucracy, the establishment, and conventional mores as disrespectfully as does
I Was a Male War Bride
.

The film certainly did the trick with audiences. After first opening in Los Angeles in mid-August to excellent returns, the picture grossed a sensational $376,000 in its four-week run at New York’s Roxy Theater and rang up comparable returns nearly everywhere else. It was the number-one film
in the nation for two weeks running in late September, was the third biggest money picture for October, and ended up as the number-three attraction for the entire year with $4.1 million in rentals, tied with
The Snake Pit
behind
Jolson Sings Again
and Fox’s
Pinky
. This made
War Bride
Hawks’s third most popular film ever, after
Sergeant York
and
Red River
. The budget overages meant that Fox’s profit
was not as great as Zanuck would have liked, but the mogul was still more than happy with the first fruits of his new collaboration with Hawks.

As soon as Hawks returned to the United States, he began trying to find a picture he could slip in between Fox assignments.
The Sun Also Rises
, which Burgess Meredith, Paulette Goddard, and Franchot Tone desperately tried to buy from Hawks that year for
themselves to star in, remained the project Hawks most frequently mentioned, and he maintained that he intended to do it independently, with Montgomery Clift and Margaret Sheridan starring, then sell it to a distributor. Feldman even took the step of registering the title with the MPAA. All the same, little work was being
devoted to solving the script problems, and it remains a mystery why Hawks
didn’t hire one of his usual crack writers, such as Lederer, Hecht, or Furthman, to get the upper hand on the celebrated story that attracted him, and many others, so much.

At the same time, Hawks wanted to pursue his idea of an ongoing partnership with Cary Grant. The project Hawks most fancied was a comic version of
Don Quixote
starring Grant in the title role and the Mexican comedian Cantinflas
as Sancho Panza. Hawks always pointed to the example of Chaplin when people objected to his intention to turn this tragedy into a comedy, even speculating, “I think that Don Quixote’s the basis really for the Chaplin character.” There is no evidence that Hawks ever even engaged a writer to begin an adaptation, but certainly
Don Quixote
would have provided a supreme opportunity for Hawks to cross
the lines between tragic adventure and comic misadventure as often as he pleased. It also represented the only time Hawks thought about tackling such a revered literary classic, which may be one reason he never pursued it more seriously. Nonetheless, it was an idea that never went away, for as late as the early 1970s, Hawks was still talking about doing it, “Before Cary gets too old or I get too
old.”

Meanwhile, Hawks and Zanuck jousted and parried as to what film the director might next do at Fox. Zanuck tried to sell Hawks on
Fourteen Hours
, a drama about a man threatening to jump off a building which Hawks said he’d be willing to do only if he could turn it into a Cary Grant comedy. Zanuck also pushed a Philip and Julius Epstein script called “Mable and Me” and proposed “Angel Face,”
a curious Charles Schnee political melodrama that featured such in-joke character names as Eva Lang, Governor Fuller, candidate Joe Huston, Molly Keyes, George Kirkwood, and a drunk named Mickey Nolan and that bore no relation to the 1953 Otto Preminger film. But while his clout was at its peak in the wake of
War Bride
, Hawks was still unable to push through either of the projects that seemed
most immediately feasible.
Dreadful Hollow
remained unexceptional to Zanuck, but the alternative at least seemed to have possibilities.

Once again delving into the
Saturday Evening Post
for material, Hawks became interested in “Morning Star” through, of all people, Leland Hayward, who had bought the rights when Robert Spencer Carr’s science-fiction love story was first published in 1947. The
story centers upon a strong, brilliant scientist, Brian Dale (to have been played by Gary Cooper), who is working at the atomic bomb lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, testing a
new rocket designed to make the first flight to Venus. Among the other resident geniuses is Eva Morgenstern (Morning Star), an alleged Russian refugee who seems both overpoweringly bright and oddly disturbing to Brian (Margaret
Sheridan, again, was intended for this part). After a meteor shower, Brian induces Eva to acknowledge her true identity: she is an emissary from Venus. What’s more, her kind has been here before, but they were taken by earthlings to be angels or saints. It is clear that Brian and Eva were meant for each other in a cosmic sense, that it is through this couple’s love that alien worlds can come
together. Eva eventually returns to her mother planet on her own, whereupon Brian quickly volunteers for the first flight to Venus, from which he returns in triumph.

There are obvious Ayn Rand elements here, as well as an expression of the popular sci-fi theory that Venus is populated by beautiful women. The material had the potential to be dangerously corny, but it was written with great conviction
and warm appeal. It would certainly have provided Hawks with the challenge of creating his most sincere love story, and would appear to have contained great commercial potential. But while admitting that the story was “unique,” Zanuck put Hawks off by insisting that the treatment was not sufficiently developed and that the production would probably be exceedingly expensive. As late as 1952,
Ray Stark at Famous Artists, working on behalf of Hawks, tried to interest Dore Schary, Jack Warner, and Stanley Kramer in backing the picture, but to no avail.

What was slowly becoming clear was that Zanuck was happy to have Hawks aboard his ship but had no intention of letting him steer the course; Hawks would make films Zanuck wanted him to make, never the other way around; nor would Zanuck
play the sucker as Jack Warner so often had and pay advanced prices for material Hawks had bought for far less. Partly because Zanuck and Hawks were friendly and similar in some basic ways, Zanuck had Hawks’s number and wouldn’t let him get away with the sorts of things Hawks would pull repeatedly on Warner and even Goldwyn. From Hawks’s point of view, his deal at Fox was a one-way street in terms
of doing projects he really cared about. In this sense, he really had been better off at Warner Bros., and as soon as he realized this, his eye, quite understandably, began to wander.

Peter Hawks, now twenty-five, married Shirley Godfrey in the summer of 1949, but his stepfather did not bother making the trip north to San Mateo for the wedding. Although Hawks avoided formal occasions whenever
he plausibly could, one reason he may have steered clear of this one is
that he knew Athole would be there, and the two were on the outs to such an extent that she sued him later that summer. In her complaint, filed on August 31, Athole stated that Hawks owed her four thousand dollars in alimony, as well as the stipulated 10 percent of his net income, or an additional $39,112 for the relevant
period of November 1, 1943 through August 17, 1949. Hawks had been through this once before, in 1943, and this time he resisted by employing every legal stalling tactic he and his lawyers could think of, even though it meant halting work on the home Hawks was building in Palm Springs, which Athole attached to the suit. He paid her a small amount in 1952, but it wasn’t until 1955 that the matter was
finally settled by a judgment that forced Hawks to pay Athole $55,382, including accumulated interest.

As the decade drew to a close, with his next-door neighbors Vic Fleming and Gregg Toland dead and no one else living at Hog Canyon, Hawks revved up his outside social life, dining out and partying often at La Rue’s, Romanoff’s, Chasen’s, Ciro’s, and the Mocambo, often in the company of Feldman,
Gregory Ratoff, Cyril Gardner, George Raft, Clark Gable, and Otto Preminger. The social season reached its peak with an enormous party at Feldman’s on December 17, which Hawks attended with Marion Marshall and which boasted such other guests as Gable, the Goldwyns, Jane Wyman, Kirk Douglas, Gertrude Lawrence, the Arthur Kennedys, the Charles Boyers, the Tyrone Powers, the William Holdens, the
David Nivens, Anatole Litvak, Clifton Webb, Spyros Skouras, Arlene Dahl, Irving Rapper, and a young politician from Massachusetts making the rounds of Hollywood, John F. Kennedy.