Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (86 page)

At least one woman fainted from fright at the film’s sneak preview in Pasadena, but the only significant change made after this first public showing was the elimination of the love scenes between Tobey and Sheridan, which were felt to slow down the action. No doubt because it was so prominently
touted as a “Howard Hawks Production,” in the manner of most of his other films,
The Thing
received the sort of serious attention from the press that was customarily denied to examples of culturally despised genres. Most critics found it scary, entertaining, not unintelligent, and well made, almost as if Hawks had directed it himself.

Even with Hawks’s name looming above the title, theater
owners were skeptical that a black-and-white science-fiction film with a no-star cast could do strong business in class first-run situations. RKO, concerned that the public might associate the picture with Phil Harris’s hit 1950 comic novelty song of the same name, lengthened the title to
The Thing from Another World
. But all fears quickly proved groundless, as an effective campaign and intense
local ballyhoo in particular cities kept the film between second and fourth place at the box-office nationally for five weeks running between mid-April and mid-May. It was the number-two film for the entire month of May, behind
The Great Caruso
, and enjoyed particularly outstanding runs at such prestigious theaters as the Criterion in New York and the Pantages in Los Angeles. In London, it shocked
the trade by breaking the twenty-one-year-old box-office mark in its first week at the London Pavilion. Its eventual earnings were less than sensational but, with rentals of $1.95 million, it ranked as RKO’s sixth-biggest earner of 1951 and forty-seventh overall, moderately ahead of the other alien-invader classic of the year,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, which arrived in September.

In late
1950, Hawks was squiring around a young Powers Agency model and hopeful actress, Elizabeth Threatt, with whom he often went dancing, and was also dating Jane Wyman, Ronald Reagan’s ex. But at a New Year’s Eve party, Hawks met a young woman seemingly made to order for him: very attractive and stylish, slim, vivacious, and forthright, twenty-two-year-old, Donna Hartford, who went by the name of Dee,
was a model with ambitions to make it big in pictures, the sort of striking, perfectly groomed woman who turned heads wherever she went.

Dee and her younger sister Eden were originally the Higgins sisters from Salt Lake City, but they left a difficult home life for New York, where they launched careers as teenage models and girls-about-town and adopted their new surname. Ironically, they wound
up in Hollywood thanks to Howard Hughes. Walter Kane, a Hughes aide whose most important duty was recruiting new girls for his boss, brought a photograph of a model with a knockout figure to Hughes’s attention. Hughes predictably responded by having Kane track her down and sign her up, but more than a year later, when she appeared in an RKO comedy ironically called
A Girl in Every Port
, Hughes
realized he had the wrong girl. It had been Eden that Hughes was interested in.

Dee soon realized that RKO had signed her up by mistake, but by then it was too late. Fate played its hand heavily in 1950–51 in determining the lives of the Hartford sisters, for when Eden came to the set to visit, she met the film’s star, Groucho Marx. Although she was twenty-four to his sixty,
they began dating;
and though Groucho, like many in town, suspected that the Hartford sisters might be gold diggers, Eden eventually landed her man.

Thirty-two years separated Hawks and Dee, and there was little question about what appealed to one about the other. The relationship heated up so quickly that by June Hawks had to deny widespread rumors that they were engaged. With his own financial condition quite
the opposite of Groucho’s, Hawks similarly felt there was no reason to rush into a third marriage. In late 1950, Hawks was still in trouble with the IRS, and RKO and Winchester were instructed to advance him no further money until $19,353 in back taxes were paid up. So urgently did Hawks then need cash that for a while in early 1951, unable to wait for a lump-sum payment, he asked the studio to put
him on a straight salary basis so he would get weekly paychecks. Hawks’s financial strain even induced him to embarrass himself by asking his respected friend and colleague John Ford for five thousand dollars while driving him somewhere. Ford just listened as Hawks explained his predicament, and the older man procrastinated about giving an answer until they arrived at his destination. Ford then
said, “Howard, I appreciate your plight. But I’ve just managed to save one million dollars, and if I gave you that money, I wouldn’t be able to put away the million,” whereupon he got out and walked away.

Also to get more money rolling in, Hawks set in motion the third and final project under his RKO contract. One of the big best-sellers of 1950 was William E. Barrett’s timely and inspirational
novel,
The Left Hand of God
, about an American flier trying to escape the embattled China of 1947 disguised as a priest. The trappings of the story—the resourceful pilot hero, a gorgeous young nurse, the endangered outpost of humanity trying to stave off violent and unpredictable forces—had obvious outward appeal to Hawks, who certainly would have played up the adventure and romance angles.

Hawks managed to spring Faulkner from his lingering commitment to Warner Bros. to adapt the book, and even though the writer had, in December, reached the pinnacle of his career by receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Faulkner didn’t want to let his old friend down and accepted the assignment. Flying out to Los Angeles at the beginning of February, Faulkner installed himself at the comfortable
Beverly-Carlton Hotel in Beverly Hills, instantly resumed his affair with Meta Carpenter, and agreed to a deal with Hawks whereby he would receive two thousand dollars a week and a substantial bonus if he finished the job within four weeks. Very occasionally, he would meet Hawks at his offices at RKO, then venture across to Lucey’s for a few drinks. More often, he would meet Lorrie Sherwood for double
bourbons at Musso & Frank’s or at Hawks’s house, where he
would dictate to her “so slowly,” as she recalled. Faulkner turned in his 198-page first draft with one day to spare and about a week later returned to Mississippi, from where he did periodic revisions for additional pay. But the results, while craftsmanlike, were disappointing—rather dull and sincere, with an abundance of narration—and
the project was put on the back burner.

With
The Thing
finally finished and released in the spring, Hawks turned his full attention back to
The Big Sky
. As before, the main frustration lay in the casting. Despite his promise from the previous summer, Hughes now adamantly refused to make Robert Mitchum available. Hawks, Lasker, and Nyby all assumed it was because Hughes still harbored a grudge
over the
Outlaw
–
Red River
issue, but adding fuel to the fire may have been Hughes’s double frustration over Lasker’s marriage to Jane Greer and Hawks’s relationship with Dee Hartford; taking professional revenge on men over women he wanted was standard practice for Hughes.

John Wayne, Hawks’s other leading candidate, was booked solid and simply couldn’t fit in what promised to be a shoot no shorter
than that for
Red River
. So for the role of riverboat explorer Jim Deakins, Hawks settled on Kirk Douglas, one of the top new postwar stars. Douglas was scarcely his first choice, but Hawks figured his intense physicality and confidence would serve the film well; ironically, his $125,000 price was exactly what Marlon Brando had asked for the year before, only to have been rejected out of hand
by Hawks as too high.

Where the producer-director now intended to save money was with the role of Boone Caudill, the leading character in the book, a “White Savage” ultimately at home neither in white society nor among the Indians. The choice came down to two young actors from
The Thing
whom he had under personal contract, Ken Tobey and Dewey Martin. After watching them closely on
The Thing
,
Hawks decided to give the plum part to Martin, a perfect fit for the role physically but still callow and inexperienced as an actor. Hawks did save money, however, paying him just $6,325. For the key female role of Teal Eye, the Blackfoot princess who comes between the two men, Hawks cast his fashion-model discovery Elizabeth Threatt, who was said to be of Cherokee and English descent and had used
the middle name Coyotte, adapted from her actual middle name Coyote, during her New York modeling career, although she dropped it when she came to Hollywood.

With
The Big Sky
, Hawks believed that he could follow up on the achievement and reputation of
Red River
, not only with another story of early
Western trailblazing but as a deeper exploration of his perennial interest in “a love story between
two men” in which serious emotional sacrifice is required to maintain the friendship—one that has been placed in jeopardy, as usual, by a woman. The working out of the conflict between sustaining the male relationship and allowing one of them to go off with the woman they have both loved is accomplished here with a maturity and complexity new to Hawks.

Even if the picture is not fully realized,
the two men are forced to confront the dilemma head-on, transcend it, and embrace it to the benefit of all three people involved. As Arthur Hunnicutt’s Uncle Zeb deftly summarizes the situation that pertains to so many Hawks films, “Ain’t it funny. Two men is friends, then a girl comes along, and then pretty soon they ain’t friends no more. And now with one of ‘em walking out on what the other
one woulda give his right arm fer, I kept wonderin’ what they’d do to settle it.” Fortunately, in
The Big Sky
there is no forced confrontation or melodramatic showdown; each man simply acts wisely and maturely, accepting nature’s course.

Emboldened by the success of his fast-and-loose attitude to narrative in
Red River
, Hawks took an even more casual approach with the structure here, figuring
that if the individual scenes were strong enough, the film would be too. The confidence behind such an attitude is evident in the film. By the start of shooting, Dudley Nichols had gotten the script down to 187 pages, and with Hawks operating autonomously at his own production company, no one at the studio was in a position to question it.

Hawks still, however, had to answer to the Breen Office,
which saw much to object to in Nichols’s script. The censors were concerned about such matters as the potential for great brutality in the fight scenes, the vulgarity of many of the French expressions, the prominent role of Boone’s dead brother’s scalp as a prop, Uncle Zeb’s many lewd expressions, and the characters’ heavy drinking. Although the censors objected to it, Hawks got away with the
line “She’s wild and pretty like a virgin woman”—surprising, given all the fuss over the word
virgin
in
The Moon Is Blue
two years later.

But the central problem, because it was so crucial to the resolution of the story, was Boone’s sleeping with Teal Eye, only to awake the next morning to discover that he has “married” her, an event signaled in the original screenplay by having Teal Eye finish
putting on her clothes and fastening her belt. It took a long meeting between Hawks and Lasker and the MPAA to work out an acceptable alternative: when she symbolically cuts the thong holding back the flap to her wigwam with Boone’s knife, she initiates an
unknowing Boone into marriage, Blackfoot style, and he has nothing to say about it.

On the first of June, Hawks chartered a DC-3 from Paul
Mantz to take the second-unit director, Arthur Rosson; the cinematographer, Russ Harlan; the unit manager, Art Siteman; and a few others up to Jackson Hole for another location hunt. Virtually all the exteriors would be shot in and around Grand Teton National Park, with the Snake River filling in for the Missouri, and Hawks later proudly claimed that
The Big Sky
was the first major outdoor picture
without a single process shot. The budget, including 25 percent overhead, was set at $1,712,174; the first unit would shoot for forty-seven days (revised upward to fifty-seven days by the start of production), with twenty-eight days allotted to the second unit. Despite its growing popularity, especially in big period films, color cinematography still did not appeal to Hawks. “Dirt looks more
like dirt in black-and-white,” he reasoned. “If you photograph a picture like mine in color you expect someone to suddenly come forth and sing ‘By the Waters of the Minnetonka.’” After final preparations were made in Hollywood, Hawks, along with his son David and most of the top crew members, left for Wyoming the second week of July and stayed at the luxurious Teton Lodge in Moran while a new Camp
Anderson was put up.

Art Rosson, who had now been doing this sort of thing for Hawks for twenty years, began shooting his second-unit coverage of river men working the keelboat in the second half of July. Hawks and the rest of the company arrived by the end of the month, and the director nearly had a calamitous mishap before he ever got to work. On the day that he was supposed to have his mandatory
physical, Hawks decided he’d rather go fishing and invited Lorrie Sherwood out on a small boat. When a dam on the Snake River was opened, the torrent of rushing water swept them swiftly downstream until Hawks managed to grab onto an overhanging tree. It was only when Russ Harlan and some of his camera crew happened to notice them that Hawks and Sherwood were rescued.

Nor did principal photography
begin auspiciously on August 3, as inclement weather nearly kept Hawks was from shooting his first scene. He couldn’t start up again until August 8, but even then filming proceeded at a slow pace because of the combination of highly changeable weather conditions and Hawks’s usual relaxed pace, which included extended visits from Dee, Jane Greer, and Famous Artists agent Ray Stark, who brought
up his son Peter as well as Douglas’s six-year-old son Michael. Hawks’s fifteen-year-old daughter Barbara spent the summer on location, was given a bit part as
an Indian girl, and developed a major crush on Kirk Douglas. “He said, ‘When you’re eighteen, call me,’” she remembered. Hawks, dapper in his custom-made cowboy gear, rewrote constantly on his omnipresent yellow legal pad, handing his revisions
daily to Lorrie Sherwood, who typed them up while working from the back of a truck. Coordinating the crew, the movements of the boat, and the ever-changing locations was an enormous, time-consuming task, but Hawks’s decision to hire mostly real river men to crew the
Mantan
paid off both in efficiency and authenticity.