Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (90 page)

As the original early November start date was pushed back
once, and then again, the press began to predict a giant feud between the two stars or, as columnist Earl Wilson inevitably dubbed it, “The Battle of the Bulges.” In fact, Russell, a down-home gal with no pretenses or complexes despite her status, welcomed Monroe at once and gained her confidence professionally and personally. She stuck with her endlessly through rehearsals and privately confided
to her about life as the wife of a professional athlete, as Russell’s husband, Bob Waterfield, was the Los Angeles Rams’ quarterback, while Monroe was trying to cope with Joe DiMaggio’s habits and circle of friends. The tight relationship carried over to their performances; as Norman Mailer much later observed, “Never have two women gotten along together so well in a musical.”

Russell was also
of invaluable help to Hawks on the picture, literally his lifesaver. Unable to communicate with Monroe, and with her increasingly resistant to anything the director said, Hawks acknowledged, “It wasn’t easy, that film, but it wasn’t difficult because I had Jane there.… I’d hear them talking, Marilyn would whisper, ‘What did he tell me?’ Jane wouldn’t say, ‘He’s told you six times already,’ she’d
just tell her again.” When not taking her cues from Russell, Monroe relied on her drama coach, Natasha Lytess, who Hawks silently abided for a while. Before long, however, he had to put his foot down. In one scene involving Monroe, Hawks was satisfied with the first take. But instead of looking at her director, Monroe checked with Lytess, who thought they should do it again. Hawks grudgingly obliged,
but after nine or ten more takes, none of them as good as the first, Hawks had had enough and told his star, “When I say ‘cut,’ I want you to look at me, not at Natasha.” Lytess also sat in for the musical numbers, irritating Jack Cole as well. The producer, Sol Siegel, tried to position himself as a diplomat between the warring parties, but things only got worse. At one point, when Zanuck asked
him how filming could be sped up, Hawks replied that he had “three wonderful ideas: replace Marilyn, rewrite the script to make it shorter, and get a new director.” Hawks had Lytess kicked off the set, but Monroe responded by staying in her dressing room and turning up later and later for work. Lytess was back within a week, although she was required to sit further away from the camera. On nearly
all of her scenes, Monroe asked Hawks if she could do it “just one more time.” Hawks would say, “Okay, but you were good,” and then turn around and quietly mutter, “There’s no film in the camera, is there?” before letting her continue. Jane
Russell said, “I liked Marilyn Monroe very much, but she wasn’t playing it straight with Hawks and that annoyed the hell out of him.” Hawks was simply the
first of several distinguished directors driven to distraction by Monroe’s lateness, insecurity, and reliance upon drama coaches.

Other than that, Hawks had some fun with
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. Shooting finally started on November 17, and Hawks was amused at what he had gotten himself into. For starters, his taste for subdued colors was useless in the face of the garish, eye-popping Technicolor
that this brassy, $2 million musical called for. “You got color that really came out and hit you,” Hawks said. “There was no sense in trying to dodge it.” He had no trouble accepting this because, for him, “the girls were unreal; the story was unreal; the sets, the whole premise of the thing was unreal. We were working with complete fantasy.” For him, Monroe and Russell were walking caricatures
of sex, and he confessed, “I never thought of either of them as having any sex,” adding that their obvious, showy “kind of sex isn’t my line at all.” Monroe, in particular, he found not only colossally dumb but profoundly vulgar. Appreciative, however, of the effect she had on others, he played with it and helped make her into a great star in the process. Zanuck was won over by Monroe in the first
week’s dailies, and studio-wide enthusiasm made it a bit easier to tolerate her contrary behavior and the maddening delays. So high was Hawks on the picture that he confidently predicted to a reporter who visited him on the enormous luxury liner set on stage three of the Western Avenue lot that it would bring in $10 million.

For once, Hawks was not making changes on the set. Lederer was not even
around, because, according to Jane Russell, “Everything was so well prepared.” Russell said Hawks was “a perfect gentleman, just like always,” who basically “let me do my own thing.” Unlike many people, Russell “found him a very warm man,” partly because he was quite like her own father, who was also outwardly stern and reserved. “In both cases, I learned to read them, to know when they liked
or disliked something.” Because of their close friendship, Zanuck was the only studio boss Hawks ever allowed on one of his sets, but Zanuck knew where the line was drawn. Lorrie Sherwood recalled, “When it was time to shoot, he’d say, ‘Well, see you later, Howard.’” Sherwood agreed that Hawks had everything “exceptionally well planned” on this picture. “But he just didn’t like to be rushed.” Hawks
got a huge kick out of Russell’s hand-picked cinematographer, Harry Wild, whose regular explosions of rage became a pressure-releasing running gag for the director. “Harry Wild would jump up and down on his felt hat, he’d get so mad,” the assistant director, Paul Helmick, remembered.
“Howard got more laughs out of him than anyone.” Fortunately, Hawks liked his work as well, as did Monroe, who
was pleased that Wild didn’t favor Russell.

Still, most of the women’s attention went into their preparation for the musical numbers, which didn’t involve Hawks. “Howard Hawks had nothing to do with the musical numbers,” Jane Russell said. “He was not even there.” Gwen Verdon, who was Jack Cole’s assistant on the picture, said, “I never saw Howard Hawks except for the scene of the boat leaving
the dock. I was with Jack all the time, … and we never had a meeting with Howard Hawks.” Cole drove Russell and Monroe, who had no dance technique or professional training, devilishly hard, and they were willing accomplices. Often, when Russell would knock off after hours of grueling rehearsal, Monroe would want to stay another couple of hours to work with Cole and Verdon. “Marilyn, strangely enough,
could do almost anything you would ask her to do if you could show it to her,” Verdon said. Unlike Hawks, Cole was able to say, “I never had any trouble with her. Once she came late, and I said, ‘Marilyn, don’t ever come late for me.’” She never did again. Cole worked out imaginative moves for his stars that made them look like much better dancers than they really were. However, as Verdon pointed
out, “the ladies basically walked everyplace or they were carried everyplace, so they didn’t really have to do dance steps.”

Two production numbers in particular stood out: “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” toned down from Cole’s sexy original rendition, with a glamorously decked out Monroe surrounded by a host of tuxedoed admirers, and the outrageous Carmichael-Adamson special “Ain’t There
Anyone Here for Love?,” in which Russell’s inquiries fall on the deaf ears of a bunch of bodybuilders narcissistically consumed by their exercises. The number ends with Russell being knocked into a swimming pool by one of the athletes, which was, in fact, an accident that Fox decided to go with. The gay aspect of this knockout number is so overwhelming that one can’t even properly refer to it as
subtext, which may be the reason it has often been cut for television airings. But it is impossible to include the song in the list of Hawks scenes bearing homoerotic innuendo for the simple reason that he didn’t have a hand in its creation, aside from having suggested that Carmichael compose additional songs for the film.

The question naturally comes up as to who directed, from a camera point-of-view,
the musical numbers if Hawks did not. According to Gwen Verdon, “Jack decided where the camera would be in consultation with the director of photography.” However, what concerned Cole much more
than the camera angles was how the different shots would cut together, so “if he had the slightest doubt about anything fitting together, he’d go to the editor [Hugh S. Fowler] to ask if it would work.
Hawks just stood by and let Jack do what he wanted to do.”

Charles Coburn, who had enjoyed himself on
Monkey Business
, was having the time of his life at seventy-five playing opposite the two bomb-shells. “Work? This is work?” he queried a visitor. “This is sheer, unadulterated joy.” Coburn indeed seemed to be having a high old time as the mining king all too ready to bestow his rocks upon Lorelei.
But the film has a serious problem with the male characters in general. With the bland Elliott Reid playing the detective to whom Dorothy takes a liking and the cringing Tommy Noonan appearing as Lorelei’s rich lover boy (with spectacles, as always, signifying eggheaded ineffectuality for Hawks), the range of manhood on display is simply too limited and unimposing, either elderly or wimpy.
All of Hawks’s recent films—
A Song Is Born, I Was a Male War Bride, Monkey Business
, and even
The Big Sky
—had dealt to some extent with the frustration and emasculation of the male lead, but here they are like toy popguns opposite the double-barreled dames.

Principal photography wrapped on January 22, 1953, with Hawks dispatching his portion of the film in an efficient nine weeks despite Monroe’s
recalcitrance. Only a month away from a wedding and his departure from California for what he intended to be a long sojourn abroad, Hawks left the editing and other postproduction details on
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
to others, under Zanuck’s supervision. Many people misremember the film as having been shot in CinemaScope. In fact,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
was one of the last major Fox pictures
shot “flat,” before the widescreen technique was introduced;
The Robe
, the first CinemaScope film, started shooting February 24, just a month after Hawks’s musical was completed.

Naturally, the studio publicity machine geared up to full steam in the months before the film’s release. Monroe and Russell were on the cover of
Life
magazine in May, and on June 26 they knelt down together, necklines
plunging, over the cement in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood to imprint themselves for posterity at the spot where the film would soon open. After an invitational preview the night before,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
had its world premiere at the Roxy Theater in New York City on July 15, 1953, and grossed a stupendous $128,500 in its opening week at the 5,886–seat house, which
was just 314 seats smaller than Radio City Music Hall. In its six-week exclusive run, the picture pulled in a sensational $625,000 at this Manhattan showcase alone. The film was number
one in the nation by the first week of August, dropped to second place for a week, then held the number-one slot for another two weeks. By the end of the year, the picture had generated $5.1 million in rentals for
Fox, good for ninth position on the year. It was the biggest box-office hit Hawks had ever had, with the exception of
Sergeant York
, which still stood at $6 million. Still,
Gentlemen
was far exceeded by Fox’s nonmusical CinemaScope follow-up later in the year, Jean Negulesco’s
How to Marry a Millionaire
, starring Monroe, Betty Grable, and Lauren Bacall, which pulled down $7.5 million in rentals.

Some of the East Coast reviews of
Blondes
were a bit sniffy about the vulgarization of the material and its having “gone Hollywood,” but even the starchiest observers had to admit that the gals had something going for them and that Monroe might actually have some talent. It has always been challenging for critics to fit the film into the context of Hawks’s career, other than as an example of his
extraordinary versatility and his abilities as an entertainer. One could begin a theory about Lorelei and Dorothy as female versions of the two sailors in
A Girl in Every Port
, but it can’t be extended very far. Ultimately, the film can be enjoyed for its very “unreality” and, of course, for its two lead performances, the musical numbers, and its sheer mythic and camp value. But, unlike the way
he attacked, reshaped, and transformed material not his own on so many occasions in the past, Hawks seems rather along for the ride on
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, passively accepting the story and character values created by others. The same could be said about
Monkey Business
and
The Ransom of Red Chief
, making his early 1950s Fox period one of the least interesting of his career from the point
of view of Hawks’s aspirations and accomplishments.

Like Lorelei Lee, Dee Hartford got her man. Having set her sights on one of Hollywood’s most successful, if not richest, producer-directors, she landed her catch. That she was beautiful and well groomed went without saying, and while she may not have had Slim’s refinement and infallible sense of style, her personality was even more gregarious. She revitalized and
provoked Hawks; she called him on his fabrications and pushed him where others were afraid to. More than anyone he had ever been with, Dee challenged him emotionally and psychologically; she didn’t take everything he said and did unquestioningly, didn’t tolerate his silences, didn’t let him off the hook. This kept him on his toes more than he was accustomed to, and he liked it.

Hawks’s friends
smiled to each other about the intended marriage; the grey fox wanted to show everyone that he could still score, that his elegant, gentlemanly, soft-spoken ways hadn’t lost their effect. Family members were privately disappointed, even disapproving, feeling that Hawks was just trying to show off but had actually succumbed to the young woman’s calculated wiles. Dee may or may not be a gold digger,
they thought, but there was something a little less classy about her than her predecessors. She wasn’t Slim, and she wasn’t a Shearer. As one friend said, “It was a marriage of ego and convenience.”

The ceremony took place at six in the evening on Friday, February 20, 1953. Fifty-six guests gathered at Hog Canyon to watch Howard Hawks get hitched for the third time. Dee was twenty-four, Hawks
fifty-six. Time would tell if such a marriage could last. Bishop B. J. Summerhays of the Brentwood Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints performed the ceremony, Dee’s sister Eden was the maid of honor, and William Hawks acted as his brother’s best man for the second time in less than twelve years. Hawks wore a black suit adorned with a white carnation, while Dee looked strikingly modern in
a small round hat with veil, a tight-fitting white dress featuring
narrow straps that exposed most of her shoulders, and long gloves up to her elbows. The evening soiree was as much a bon voyage party as a wedding celebration, for the couple was booked to fly to New York the following morning, then sail on the
Queen Mary
for Europe on Wednesday, February 25.