Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (92 page)

Hawks always claimed that he and Kurnitz were waiting at Orly Airport on December 1 to greet Faulkner, but Noël Howard insisted that he alone was there to receive the news that due to bad weather, the writer’s TWA flight had been diverted to Zurich, where the passengers were put on a train for Paris. When Howard nervously went the next morning to tell his boss that Faulkner was missing, Hawks
had gone to play golf. Moments later, a couple of gendarmes delivered Faulkner to Hawks’s room, inebriated and bleeding from a head wound. After Faulkner slept for a while, Howard took him briefly to Harry’s Bar, then directly to his rooms at the Hotel Crillon because he didn’t want Hawks to see Faulkner in his ghastly condition. It seemed that Faulkner had drunk his way across the Atlantic, thought
he was in Paris when the plane landed in Zurich, and resisted getting on the train. Upon arriving in Paris, he headed straight for the all-night Bar Vert, where he was assaulted by some ruffians. Picked up by the police, he managed to get out the words, “Hawks—Plaza,” whereupon he was escorted to the hotel.

One of Hawks’s Egyptian acquaintances, a man named Raoul, had a villa in the Italian summer
resort town of Stresa, on Lake Maggiore, that he was happy to let Hawks use; with the town virtually shut down as winter closed in, there would be no distractions from the job of coming up with a script for
Land of the Pharaohs
. In a spasm of last-minute panic, Hawks decided to hire yet another writer, Harold Jack Bloom, a twenty-nine-year-old New Yorker who had just earned his first screen credit,
as cowriter of
The Naked Spur
, for which he would soon receive an Academy Award nomination. His agent, Alain Bernheim of Famous Artists, mentioned Hawks’s plight to him at Alexandre’s one night, and the next day, while Bernheim set up a meeting, Bloom hit the library to research pyramids. That night, Bloom met Hawks at the Ritz Hotel, and, he recounted, “I told him my premise, which became the
premise of the movie, about the Greek who is able to figure out a way to build a pyramid so it couldn’t be broken into.… He looked at me sideways, but said, ‘I like that.’ Then he asked, ‘Are you prepared to go to Italy?’ I said, ‘Of course.’”

Shortly thereafter, Hawks, Dee, and Faulkner began driving south, through the Alps, into Switzerland, and on to the Lake District. Bloom took a train from
Paris with Raoul, whose wife met them in Milan and drove them to Stresa. “When I got there,” Bloom recalled, “who should open the door but Faulkner. ‘Hello, you must be Bloom,’ he said. He always called me Bloom, and Kurnitz Kurnitz. I had no idea when I met Hawks that Faulkner was going to be on the picture. By the time I got to Italy I had it all figured out how to do the whole picture. But
Faulkner had talked to Hawks about doing it all as a pirate movie, with the treasure and the evil girl who tries to take it away from the pharaoh. It was a joke, because he didn’t see movies and didn’t like them. He thought they were for children.”

Kurnitz arrived in short order, and, surrounded by glorious pine forests where the writers could seek inspiration, the group began getting down to
work. Faulkner simplistically felt the film was “
Red River
all over again,” and both Kurnitz and Bloom quickly began to see that their celebrated colleague’s heart wasn’t in it. Hawks, whom Bloom sensed “was intimidated by the literary stature of Faulkner,” remained the picture of generosity and indulgence to his old friend, even offering him a profit share of the film. Feeling excluded from the
older men’s club of two, Bloom and Kurnitz formed a fast friendship of their own. Faulkner, Bloom said, “frustrated me. He didn’t like films and he wouldn’t read new books. I asked him what books he’d read recently and he said, ‘I don’t read new books. I only reread the classics.’” By contrast, “Harry Kurnitz was maybe the funniest man I’ve ever met in my life. To me he was salvation. If it wasn’t
for Harry, I think I would have been out of there in a week or two.”

As Hawks, Faulkner, Kurnitz, and Bloom toiled on the script, they realized that none of them knew a great deal about antiquity or had a distinct point of view on it. Hawks himself was especially interested in only two elements of the story: the idea of a megalomaniacal leader who spent his life on a mammoth building project,
and the physical mechanics involved
in sealing off the tomb chamber so that no one could ever break into it. The germ of the former idea actually lay in an earlier project of Hawks’s about the building of a Chinese airfield during World War II, which for political reasons was never produced. In Trauner’s view, “Hawks thought of the pharaoh like a tycoon in Hollywood.” For Bloom, the director’s
identification with the lead was total: “He was like a pharaoh himself, a Hollywood pharaoh.” At the very least, the pharaoh represented Hawks’s fanciful notion of himself, entranced with wealth and power, bewitched by a sexy young wife, and invaluably aided by his (perhaps not coincidentally Jewish) designer-architect. Given his lack of fleshed-out ideas for the story and his urgent need for them,
this influence should not be underestimated.

To make any serious headway on the script, Hawks and the writers had to be clear on how they were going to show the pyramid was built, since this was the point of the story, and their savior here was Trauner. Although the pyramids have been the focus of endless fascination and study over the centuries, no one has entirely figured out how they were
constructed, how the five-thousand-pound stones were transported and then lifted into place on what were, for centuries, the tallest structures in the world. Having “called all the Egyptologues around,” Trauner consulted Jean Philippe Lauer, considered the world’s leading Egyptologist, who laid out all the leading theories about pyramid construction, then proposed his own notion, which involved a
series of ever-narrowing ramps running alongside the pyramid, upon which man-drawn sleds carried the stones. Trauner was convinced that this approach “was correct in an archeological sense.” Trauner also had long sessions with Hawks during which he sketched out his plans for the pyramid at various stages of construction; although he said Hawks, the former engineering major, never drew anything himself,
some photographs do reveal the director hovering over architectural plans, pencil in hand.

As for the crucial matter of the ending, in which the dead pharaoh’s burial chamber is forever sealed with his entourage of loyal servants as well as his treacherous wife inside, Lauer presented an assortment of ideas, given the fact that each actual pyramid was sealed with a different system. Later, in
Egypt, Lauer showed Trauner and Howard one small and quite recent tomb that had been sealed in a clever way: at the appointed time, sand-filled pottery encasements were smashed, allowing sand to spill out and the stones above to lower, enclosing the sarcophagus. Presented with this technique, Hawks expanded it to apply to the entire interior of his pyramid, turning it into an ingenious hydraulic
device that would lower the giant stones into a closed position, from which they could never be lifted. Trauner found that
Hawks became uncommonly involved in these matters, noting, “Once a propman, always a propman.”

Hawks had a particular disdain for the Cecil B. De Mille school of filmmaking and was never partial to spectacle per se. All the same, according to Bloom, “He wanted to do a Cecil
B. De Mille epic all of a sudden.… and he wasn’t really suited to that. It became a drawing room story.” Scholars have often chuckled at the director’s explanation for the artistic failure of
Land of the Pharaohs
—“I don’t know how a pharaoh talks”—but this problem really does lie at the heart of the picture’s difficulties. Hawks’s art was based on dialogue, gesture, and behavioral exchanges, and
his not knowing how a given character would react in a specific context deprived the film of the kind of spontaneity and nuance that can be found in his best work. When Hawks posed the question to his collaborators, Faulkner supposedly suggested that perhaps he should speak like a Kentucky colonel, while Kurnitz proposed that King Lear might serve as a better model. Hawks told them to go ahead
and do whatever they liked, because he would rewrite it anyway. Hawks, of course, tended toward modern colloquialisms, and successive script drafts reveal a clear progression from somewhat arch, occasionally pompous writing to material that was sparer, swifter, and sometimes jarringly contemporary.

Bloom and Kurnitz worked out a suspense element to the climactic sequence of the sealing of the
pyramid, with Dewey Martin and a young girl successfully escaping and Joan Collins trapped behind. Dramatic as it might have been, Hawks did not use it, probably, Bloom noted, because it would have been difficult to stage.

Faulkner was not oblivious to Dee’s unhappiness. According to A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax, Faulkner confided, “Mizz Dee, I wouldn’t want to be a dawg, a hoss, or a woman around
Mr. Hawks.” Dee also recalled that Bogart admitted that he felt badly for her. “He was cute about it; he felt sorry for me. Everybody felt sorry for me—married to the monster.” Harold Bloom noted that Hawks and Dee didn’t give the impression of a normal husband-and-wife relationship: “He acted like he was her husband and she acted like she was his daughter, even his granddaughter.” It didn’t take
long for Dee to become restless and bored in Stresa; there was absolutely nothing to do, and all the restaurants were closed. According to Bloom’s Israeli girlfriend, who got to know Dee fairly well, Dee had another reason to be frustrated: there was no way she could see her French boyfriend, whom she had met in Paris. A ski resort setting, however, would attract less notice, so Dee persuaded
her husband to move on to St. Moritz for the holidays, which
they did on December 19. They were soon joined at the new, ultra-luxurious Suvretta House by Noël Howard, as well as Charles Feldman and Jean Howard, who were long since divorced but still close friends. Even King Farouk turned up. Although he was a beginning skier, Hawks lived up to his reputation as a sportsman, joining Dee for regular
outings on the slopes, while the writers managed to get considerable work done in the mornings. Things slowed down quite a bit however, after the substantial imbibing done at lunch. Faulkner habitually fortified himself with two martinis and a half bottle of Chassagne Montrachet ’49 at midday and became pleasantly distracted when Jean Stein, the nineteen-year-old daughter of MCA founder Jules
Stein, attached herself to him at Feldman’s Christmas Eve party and wouldn’t let go. Warmed by her attention, Faulkner was nonetheless depressed by the collection of wealthy international frolickers and flew off the day after Christmas to Stockholm, passing through London before returning to St. Moritz on January 6. Jean Stein was still there, waiting for him.

On January 5, the group had a big
party to celebrate Harry Kurnitz’s forty-fifth birthday, and the following day, when Faulkner got back, Hawks mailed a fourteen-page outline of the story to Jack Warner in Hollywood. “I really believe it is the best thing I’ve ever worked on,” Hawks enthused to Warner. He summarized the story as that of “a Pharaoh who accumulated the greatest treasure in the world, takes twenty years to build a
tomb where he can be buried with it. He makes the mistake of falling for a beautiful young bitch.” Hawks also cited the historical fact that pharaohs, even when they became old, were periodically required to run about a mile in public to prove they were in good physical condition and proposed a sequence, never shot, in which “the Queen gives him a hard night the night before the test and the poor
bastard barely makes it.”

As had happened previously with Hawks scripts on which Faulkner worked, each of the writers tackled different sequences separately. Bloom recalled, “I had difficulty with it because I would write twelve pages a day but then I wanted to edit it, but Howard wanted everything, the unedited pages. Faulkner was not writing anything at all, it was all verbal. Harry wrote twenty
pages a day, out of which Hawks would find one or two pages.”

Curiously, Hawks never considered a major star for the leading role. After toying with the idea of Sydney Chaplin as Pharaoh, Hawks settled on the English actor Jack Hawkins, who had been appearing in films for more than twenty years and was well-respected but not a box-office name. Hawks made the point to Warner that “almost every
one of our actors should be
fairly good figures because the costumes make a fat man look pretty bad.” As far as the females in the cast were concerned, he said, “The evil young queen should be the most beautiful, sexy girl we can find. I hope to find a new one and ran across one whom we will test. She is Swiss, speaks English, French, Italian and German. Saw a little test that is awful good but
will reserve an opinion until we make our own.” That girl turned out to be seventeen-year-old Ursula Andress. Thanks to the test Hawks saw, however, Paramount quickly signed her up, making her unavailable to Warners.

Ten days later, as promised, Hawks sent the ninety-one-page rough draft to Burbank, confessing, “Am very pleased with it as it represents only five actual weeks work,” and terming
it “the most adaptable yarn for Cinema-Scope that has yet been found.” Hawks bluntly stated that Pharaoh’s obsession is an effort to provide meaning for his life, while the evil young queen is trying “to make their work meaningless.” Nellifer, the Cypriot princess who becomes the pharaoh’s bride, was clearly being written on the highly insolent model of Slim in
To Have and Have Not
, and the big
initial sex scene in this draft was arresting. After Nellifer has been put in the dungeon for disrespect, the pharaoh goes to visit her there. With Nellifer bound by chains, they launch into passionate sex, and the next scene sees her happily installed in the pharaoh’s apartment. In the final film, the equivalent sequence takes place in the pharaoh’s quarters without any bondage accoutrements, his
passion provoked when she bites him.

Hawks warned Warner that because both MGM and Fox were having some trouble with pictures they were making in Egypt, some “trained help” there would be valuable. Approving the outline, the first draft, and Hawkins’s casting, Warner upped the budget to $1.75 million, although he was privately advised by Blattner that $2 million would be a more realistic figure,
given the various unpredictable elements involved.