Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (84 page)

Hawks paid nine hundred dollars for the story, only to junk most of it for his screen treatment. Campbell’s fifty-seven-page tale involved a group of thirty-seven American soldiers
and scientists in Antarctica who discover an alien being that has been frozen in ice for twenty million years. The long first section is devoted to a debriefing on how the beast was detected and dislodged, followed by a debate over whether or not to thaw it out. The device on which the remainder of the story turns is that the alien, once revived, is able to transform itself into various guises,
including those of its victims, thereby making it exceedingly difficult to combat.

Needing a script quickly, Hawks called upon two of the fastest and cleverest minds he knew, Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht. Although Lederer had become one of Hawks’s closest friends, Hecht had passed out of Hawks’s orbit in the decade since
His Girl Friday
and had recently alienated many people both inside and
outside the industry with his extreme Zionism, particularly his fund-raising and propaganda writing on behalf of the militant—many said terrorist—Irgun Zvai Leumi. While continuing his screenwriting career, Hecht threw himself into raising money and arms for the Irgun, which was dedicated to forcibly removing the British from Palestine. Hecht had drawn harsh criticism from both American Jews and the
British for publishing a letter in fifteen major American newspapers in which he concluded with the following message to Jewish freedom fighters: “Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your bombs and guns at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a
little holiday in their hearts.” As a result, Hecht’s name was banned from British screens for two and a half years.

Even though Hawks privately scorned Hecht’s extracinematic activities—he even privately implied that denying the writer screen credit on this picture constituted his own form of punishment for Hecht’s political shenanigans—he knew the subject would never come up between them and
was therefore irrelevant to the matter at hand: developing a strongly dramatic approach to a story dominated by windy scientific speeches and debates. At first, Hecht wasn’t in the least enamored of the project. But the offer of a thousand dollars a day got him to the table; his interest increased when they decided to tell the story through the eyes of a newspaper reporter; and he soon realized
that this modern-day horror story could serve as an effective allegorical vehicle with which to poke fun at growing Cold War paranoia about communism. It is very probable that Hawks remained entirely
oblivious to this second level of meaning in the story, but then the mischievous Hecht often had his own private motives for what he wrote. For his part, however, Hawks managed to keep Hecht’s involvement
with the project such a secret in Hollywood that, decades later, Chris Nyby professed never to have known that the legendary writer had worked on his first picture.

To speed the work along, Hawks convened the writers daily at Hog Canyon. He later would greatly exaggerate by claiming that they finished the script in seven or eight days, but it actually took the better part of six weeks. Together,
Lederer and Hecht earned sixty thousand dollars for their work, or far more than anyone else on the picture but Hawks himself. Joining the three creators most days at the house was Hawks’s new partner, Edward Lasker. A wealthy young man from Chicago, Lasker worked on Los Angeles accounts for his father’s advertising agency, Lord & Thomas, before succumbing to the glamour of Hollywood social life.
In 1947, he married Jane Greer, which earned him the enduring enmity of Howard Hughes, and he gradually entered Hawks’s circle through their mutual interest in horses and the track. Lasker was often invited for croquet at Hog Canyon, and he and his wife socialized with Hawks and Marion Marshall before that romance broke up. Their main differences were religion and politics for, like Feldman, Lasker
was Jewish and a Democrat. But these things didn’t matter, simply because they never came up. Tall, imperious, taciturn, and always impeccably dressed, Lasker and Hawks were, in many ways, cut from the same cloth; by the early 1950s, Lasker maintained, “I was Howard’s best friend.”

With Feldman increasingly involved with the day-to-day demands of film production in addition to his enormous list
of clients, Hawks was in need of some help on the business side of his life. In Lasker’s view, “I don’t think he had any business sense. I never knew for sure, but I always sensed he was broke.” Chris Nyby suggested that there was an ulterior motive for Hawks’s friendship with Lasker: “Ed Lasker was rich, and he would help Howard guarantee loans when he needed the money, so Howard brought him into
pictures.” When Hawks formed Winchester, he invited Lasker to become his partner, to be credited as associate producer on each picture. For Lasker, a man with no motion picture experience whatsoever, this was beyond his wildest dreams.

Hawks’s one previous foray into producing another director’s work,
Corvette K-225
, had not proved memorable on any level, but his financial
crunch had motivated
him to include just such a provision in his RKO contract; it would be an easy way to pick up an extra $125,000 or so. Studio executives, however, were taken aback when Hawks, instead of selecting a known quantity to direct, drafted one of his own cronies who had never exposed a frame of film before. Hawks had considered handing the job to Charles Lederer; he had directed one previous film, and he
obviously knew the material. But after the rescue job Nyby performed on
Red River
, Hawks had expressed his gratitude by assuring his cutter a shot at directing, and Hawks decided to throw the new project his way. In all candor, Nyby later speculated on the main reason he got the job: “Hawks knew he probably couldn’t have controlled Lederer as much as he did me.” Hawks selected the story and prepared
the script; hired some of his most trusted collaborators, notably the cinematographer Russell Harlan and the composer Dimitri Tiomkin, to ensure a professional result; planned to oversee it to make sure all went smoothly; and set a moderate budget of $860,240, which, with 25 percent studio overhead, came to $1,075,300. Hawks’s generosity to Nyby did not extend to the protegé’s salary; of the
$50,000 the RKO contract specified for a directing fee, Hawks parceled out just $5,460 to Nyby, keeping the remaining $44,040 for himself.

The part of the job Hawks enjoyed most, and that he largely reserved for himself, was the casting. At long last, he would be able to launch his discovery Margaret Sheridan in a starring role. There were no female characters in Campbell’s original story, but
Hawks created the role of Nikki especially for her. The story’s nominal hero, Captain Patrick Hendry, would be played by Kenneth Tobey, who had played a sailor skeptical of Cary Grant’s womanhood in
I Was a Male War Bride
. Again, Hawks surprisingly came through on his promise to make him a lead in a later picture. From
War Bride
, Hawks also brought back William Self, while for another role he
found a muscular, good-looking young Texan, Dewey Martin, whom he signed to a two-year contract.

But Nyby was responsible for finding the two actors who would become the most familiar faces to emerge from the production that was now called
The Thing
, albeit for their subsequent work on television. Nyby’s next-door neighbor was George Fenneman, who, after his making his screen debut in
The Thing
, became famous as Groucho Marx’s announcer on
You Bet Your Life
. And when Nyby met James Arness, an aspiring actor, at John Ford’s Memorial Day party, he was convinced that the towering young man would be perfect for the role of Streak in
The Big Sky
, which was then still
on the boards. Hawks agreed and cast him, but when the Western was postponed, he gave Arness the thankless title role in
The
Thing
. Arness, of course, recovered to make a career out of
Gunsmoke
.

Of the countless changes Hawks, Lederer, and Hecht made from story to script, among the most important were moving the setting to the North Pole in order to introduce the element of American surveillance of the Soviet nuclear threat; creating a female lead who fully participates in speculating about alien invasion and in devising
a way to kill the Thing; and making a film in which, for arguably the first time in a Hollywood production, science-fiction and horror were equally mixed, as well as one in which the struggle was just as much between the scientists and the military as between men and an alien. One element Hawks took credit for introducing was the critique of scientists and, by extension, intellectuals, in that
the biologist played by Robert Cornthwaite is the main culprit for the Thing’s escape. However, this view was present, if in more implicit form, in the original story. On the downside, the screenplay vastly reduced and simplified the powers of the monster, eliminating its ability to mutate, a decision no doubt inspired by the virtual impossibility of creating convincing special effects.

Howard
Hughes was dubious about the entire project from the outset; after all, he had signed Hawks to bring some class to RKO, not creaky monster movies. Even his cast and crew were a bit skeptical. The script boy Richard Keinen said, “We all thought this was the dumbest thing we’d ever heard of. We thought, ‘What is Howard Hawks doing making this stupid horror film?”’

Hawks sent Hughes a string of
notes and memos assuring him that the picture would be extremely scary in a modern way and that the Thing would be unique, nothing like the usual Frankenstein creature. The beast in the original story was, indeed, out of the ordinary, with three red eyes and blue wormlike hair. The producer made the makeup artist Lee Greenway, who was also a well-regarded painter and sculptor, go through eighteen
versions of makeup designs for the Thing. None of them satisfied Hawks, who finally got fed up and dismissively told Greenway, “Make him look like Frankenstein.” A more playful contribution came from the prop department, which made the little “thinglets” growing in the laboratory out of condoms. No one noticed, however. In any event, the beast wouldn’t even be clearly shown in the final film, the
better to emphasize the threat of the unknown. Although grateful to be working at all, James Arness was so embarrassed by his appearance that he usually lunched alone during shooting and otherwise kept his distance from the others in the cast, except for Dewey
Martin; in subsequent years, he similarly refused all invitations to participate in reunions or sci-fi celebrations centering on
The Thing
.

Hawks claimed to have invited the heads of three major electronics companies to his home for dinner on the pretext of asking them to suggest the best way of killing the Thing. Less receptive were the army and air force, both of which refused to cooperate since the story was predicated on a belief in flying saucers, a phenomenon that the military was then strenuously trying to downplay. Official
sanction, however, was hardly crucial to the production.

Hawks sent Nyby and a few crew members to Alaska to scout potential locations, but any suitable spots were simply too inaccessible to accommodate a cast and crew of one hundred. Instead, the major exteriors would be filmed at Cut Bank, Montana, a town of twenty-eight hundred people fifty miles south of the Canadian border and forty miles
east of Glacier National Park. Cut Bank was chosen, largely on the advice of Hughes himself, because it was, statistically, nearly the snowiest place in the United States and it had a huge military airfield, recently abandoned, that had been used for reconnaissance flights by B-29s toward the Soviet Union.

In the second half of October 1950 the most memorable showdown in the history of the Screen
Directors Guild took place between factions of the right and the left. Cecil B. DeMille and his fellow archconsevatives unsuccessfully tried to oust guild president Joseph L. Mankiewicz over the issue of a loyalty oath. Tensions ran high, with John Ford publicly rebuking De Mille after the latter cast aspersions on such eminent directors as Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Fred Zinnemann because
of their foreign accents. No longer an SDG officer, Hawks was nowhere to be found during this crucial episode in the guild’s history. As Ed Lasker remarked, “He would never get involved in something like that.”

Shooting on
The Thing
started on October 25, but more in theory than in reality. With the actors remaining on call in Los Angeles, Hawks, Nyby, and the crew flew up to Montana in two TWA
Consellations provided by Hughes. The art department had done its job, building a small compound on which the eaves of the roof were only two feet above the ground, so that even the slightest amount of snow would make it look as though it was buried nearly up to the top. But the problem was that there was no snow at all. Due to stay in Cut Bank for just a few days, the company waited. And waited.
And it never snowed.

After a while, the men began to go stir crazy. One day, the script boy Richard Keinen and some other crew members were forlornly hanging
around the airport site, about ten miles outside town. A couple of little boys turned up to play and asked the men what they were doing there. When told that they were waiting for snow in order to shoot a movie, one boy said, “It doesn’t
snow here.” Keinen assured them that it snowed more here than just about anywhere else, but the boy corrected him: “It snows a lot in town, but it doesn’t snow here at the airport. That’s why they built it here, because the wind keeps the snow away and the runways clear.”

Not quite willing to decamp based on the word of a little kid, Hawks decided to stick it out, certain the snow was bound to
arrive as winter neared. A lot of poker was played and liquor drunk to sooth the frayed nerves. Lasker, who was new to it all, learned one lesson about working with Hawks the hard way. “After one week, I went to Howard and said, ‘Howard, we’ve been up here for a week and we’re already six days behind schedule.’ Howard just froze and said, ‘Don’t ever talk to me about that.’” In desperation, the
crew created artificial snow and the cast was flown up in the hopes of doing some general shots, but Lasker said that the company “finally got perhaps only one shot up there.” The seven weeks on location were a total waste, to no avail on-screen.