Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (96 page)

Hawks and his family spent an extended Christmas
holiday in the Alps, mainly at Klosters but occasionally venturing to St. Moritz, where more of the international crowd gathered. “Dee and the baby are fine and if I could find a story everything would be perfect,” Hawks confided in a rare note to Feldman. “It’s about time,” he admitted, “to think of something else.” New financial pressures also weighed on him, as in February, Hawks was commanded
by the court in California to once and for all pay Athole $52,382 in back alimony, which he finally did in May. Installed back in Paris at the Royal Monceau Hotel the following month, he was joined by Feldman, who spent nearly two months there largely occupied with attempts to set something up for Hawks. In response to Warner’s letter about the optional second picture, for which Hawks had already
been advanced $35,000, Hawks proposed two ideas to start as early as the summer. The first was a romantic drama,
The Daughter of Bugle Ann
, which he felt he could shoot in Ireland on a relatively low budget with Richard Burton and a yet-to-be-discovered actress. The other was an American female pioneer story,
Rugged Land of Gold
, which was meant to star Audrey Hepburn, one of the rare established
actresses with whom Hawks was ever keen to work. The feeling was evidently
mutual, but Hepburn’s heavy schedule and the lack of a script conspired to thwart it. There was also talk of Hawks collaborating with Irwin Shaw, a prominent American in Paris, on a story for Cubby Broccoli, who had just launched his producing career in London. Most intriguing in terms of its atypicality was a project called
“I’m Going to Have a Baby.” Derived from Martha Martin’s “I Will Live and Have My Baby,” which was published in the
Ladies Home Journal
, the story dealt with a young woman who becomes stranded in the wilderness shortly before she is to give birth. In its theme and potential for transcendent meaning, it somewhat recalled Hawks’s lost first film,
The Road to Glory
, and was unusual for him in that
it focused exclusively on one person cut off from group interaction. None of these ideas made it to the script stage.

Consuming the lion’s share of Hawks’s and Feldman’s attention was a story much more obviously in the director’s line. All Hawks had was the basic idea, a loose account of one season in the lives of hunters who capture animals in Africa for zoos. Without being developed in the
least, it contained all the basic Hawksian elements: a risky, adventurous profession being carried out in a remote location, endless opportunities for group interplay and interdependence, the possibility of introducing one or more women into a basically male environment, and a commercially appealing subject with plenty of room for major stars. Other pluses for Hawks included the opportunities for
a prolonged stay overseas and an exciting shoot, although a studio head might look at the same circumstances rather more skeptically.

To play the leading role of the chief hunter, Hawks thought of no one but Gary Cooper. The two men hadn’t worked together since
Ball of Fire
in 1941, and their relationship cooled somewhat after the actor unwisely turned down
Red River
. Nonetheless, Cooper always
maintained that there was no one he loved working with more than Hawks, provided the project was right. Back on top again after his Oscar for
High Noon
, Cooper was currently greatly in demand among top directors, having just signed to do
Friendly Persuasion
for Wyler and
Love in the Afternoon
for Wilder. During a stay in Paris in April, Cooper met numerous times with Hawks and Feldman. Despite
a certain hesitancy about the story, the actor trusted Hawks enough to agree to appear in
Africa
—pending his approval of the script. This was enough for Hawks to announce the news to the press in May, a month before
Land of the Pharaohs
was due to open. With that, he repaired for the summer to Cannes, where he, Dee, and Gregg took an apartment at the Villa Capri while Harry Kurnitz tried to develop
a first draft of the script.

Over the next year, a desultory and degenerating scenario unfolded, typical of the film business, perhaps, but unusual among Hawks, Cooper, and Warner, three men who had known each other for so long. In September, Cooper made it clear that, despite his handshake with Hawks, he was in no way committed to
Africa
until he saw a finished script. Hawks prodded Kurnitz
to at least get through a first draft, whereupon he immediately commenced a second, with many changes planned to beef up Cooper’s part and increase the quotient of comedy. In early October, Cooper flatly told Feldman that he wasn’t interested in the project, which prompted a quick withdrawal by Warner, who was in no mood to embark upon another African adventure with Howard Hawks. Still, Feldman
and Hawks persisted, submitting a second draft to Cooper while privately approaching John Wayne and William Holden to gauge their interest. Having already spent some forty thousand dollars on the script and research, Hawks threatened to sue Warner Bros. for breach of contract. Through the winter, Feldman badgered Cooper persistently while awaiting a new draft from Hawks, which was not forthcoming,
until Cooper finally and definitely told him, “You know I am crazy about Howard. You know I want to do a picture with him, but I don’t want to do this story.” At this, Hawks decided he had no choice but to sue Warners for reneging on its deal, which sent Jack Warner into a fury since it was his contention that his agreement to produce
Africa
was entirely dependent upon Cooper’s involvement.

Meanwhile, numerous other possibilities were coming Hawks’s way. Out of the blue, Dino De Laurentiis, one of Italy’s hottest young producers, who at that moment was making
War and Peace
with King Vidor, approached Hawks with another Tolstoy adaptation,
Resurrection
. Hawks got into advanced talks with British investors to shoot a picture in England and made a serious attempt to acquire the rights
to two properties previously filmed by Warner Bros.,
The Mask of Dimitrios
and Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter,” in which he wanted to star Ingrid Bergman and Richard Widmark. When Bergman turned out to be booked for more than a year, he considered using Jennifer Jones.

Late in 1955, after the French release of
Land of the Pharaohs
, Hawks sat for the first of what were to be several long interviews
with the French film magazine
Cahiers du Cinéma
, which had “discovered” him two years before. Hawks was interviewed by three fanatical admirers: Jacques Becker, the distinguished director of the classic
Casque d’Or
, and two film critics in their twenties who had just begun directing shorts, Jacques Rivette, the author of the enshrinement of
Monkey Business
, and François Truffaut. The
discussion
mainly centered on
Land of the Pharaohs
, but then turned off into more theoretical areas, in which Hawks greatly impressed the eager French cinephiles with his thoughtfulness and well-articulated opinions.

Periodically through 1955 and 1956, Dee would return to Los Angeles with Gregg and stay with her sister and Groucho Marx, who were now married. As Groucho described the situation in a letter
to Arthur Sheekman,

When I casually invited Eden’s sister to spend a week or two, I had no idea it would lengthen into six. And the way she eats, one would think that the baby is still inside of her instead of fouling up my house with baby toilet seats, wet bed sheets and flying rattles. Her nurse is very eager to appear on my show as a contestant, and nails me every time I come out of my bedroom.
My bedroom exits are becoming more infrequent all the time. Beginning Monday, I am holing up in my boudoir until the taxi (with Mrs. Hawks) leaves for International Airport.

As a matter of fact, Dee is a charming girl—both pretty and bright—and if she were here alone, without the nurse, the baby and Eden, I’d have a hell of a time.”

One reason Groucho didn’t mention for Dee’s prolonged stay
was that she had an unspecified operation, from which she recuperated partly in Palm Springs. Not long after her return to Europe in November, the family was off again to Klosters, this time to the Haus Am-Taoback, for another winter of skiing and socializing. This season, however, proved to be much less enjoyable than the last. Slim sent Hawks a late Christmas present by way of a lawsuit. Having
gotten wind that Hawks was putting Hog Canyon on the market, Slim saw this as her chance to collect the $40,000 that her ex-husband owed her, as well as the $11,300 he had neglected to pay for Kitty’s child support. The following spring, Hawks, with his brother Bill handling the transaction, sold his beautiful home for an underpriced $58,000 to the Tower Oil executive Howard Keck, and later that summer
he was able to have Slim’s suit dismissed on the promise that he would meet all his existing obligations under their original property settlement. He then chose to ignore the matter entirely, forcing Slim to take legal action repeatedly in years to come in an attempt to get her ex-husband to live up to his legal responsibilities. Hawks’s behavior in relation to Slim and Kitty is hard to fathom,
although it certainly stemmed from some combination of arrogant stubbornness, a conviction that he needn’t pay since Leland Hayward
and Slim had far more money than he did, a lack of liquid cash, and a lingering resentment of Slim for having left him. Relations between the two were strained when they existed at all, and Hawks undoubtedly knew that Slim bad-mouthed him to her show-business and
society friends. Slim remained very close with such former mutual friends as Bacall, Bogart, and Hemingway, whereas Hawks did not. When Slim had an affair in the mid-1950s with the writer Peter Viertel, she described Hawks to him as “a great pillar of nothing.”

Setting Hawks further back in early 1956 was an accident on the slopes at Klosters. When Hawks took up skiing, Chris Nyby warned him
to start on short skis and gradually work up to long ones. The proudly self-confident Hawks would have none of this and gamely used full-length skis from the outset. He got by with this for a couple of seasons. Lorrie Sherwood, who by now had become both secretary and girlfriend to John Huston and was working for him in Europe, by chance met Hawks skiing at Klosters that winter and said, “He was doing
all right. He wasn’t what I’d call a good skier; he was a good learner.” His mishap had nothing to do with fast, reckless skiing down treacherous, steep runs. Rather, Hawks tripped up in slow, sloppy conditions near the bottom of the mountain, where people often don’t pay close attention to what they’re doing. Hawks broke his leg and was laid up at the Haus Am-Taoback for weeks, well into April.
Feldman wagged his finger at him in a letter, saying, “Always told you to lay off those goddamn skis [sic]. It is for the ‘young uns,’ believe me, Howard.” A month short of his sixtieth birthday, Hawks was forced to concur, and he willingly gave up his short-lived skiing career.

On his feet again, Hawks returned to the Hotel Raphael in Paris and, in May, filed suit against Warner Bros. for breach
of contract, fraud, and deceit over the
Africa
project. Hawks claimed he was out of pocket $43,742 in payments for the screenplay and further demanded $136,000 for his fee and $1 million in “lost profits.” The real bone of contention was the issue of Gary Cooper’s script approval: Hawks maintained that the studio had deliberately withheld the information that Cooper had such rights “in order to
induce and secure the plaintiff’s agreement to the terms” of the contract. The suit was to sit in limbo for some time to come.

Through the spring and early summer, Hawks lived a gentleman’s life of leisure. He socialized frequently with Charles Boyer and the recent Parisian transplant Preston Sturges and went to Longchamps racetrack with John Huston and Huston’s friend the former jockey Billy
Pierson. Huston, who didn’t find Hawks to be his kind of boon companion but didn’t mind
his company, observed that Hawks seemed to place only moderate bets. When Billy Wilder came to town and joined Hawks for drinks at Hawks’s hotel, Hawks boasted to Wilder about how he had just made $2 million on a lucky oil investment. Wilder knew from experience to take this with a grain of salt, and when Hawks
excused himself, a member of the hotel staff approached Wilder and asked if he knew his companion very well. Wilder said he did, whereupon the hotel man explained that he was concerned only because Hawks had been at the hotel for more than a month now and had not paid for anything. Beneath his casual countenance, however, Hawks was highly agitated about his lack of a new project and insisted
upon seeing Feldman every day and called him up to ten times a day. Feldman complained in a wire home, “I have been besieged daily by Hawks to extent I am going nuts!”

When it became evident that nothing was going to break soon, Hawks and his family again returned to the South of France for the summer, splitting their time between the exclusive Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo and the Villa Loi
et Moi in tony Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. It was the usual round of golf for Hawks, Dee tanning by the pool or at the beach, cocktails and long dinners with whoever happened to be around, plus a rather loud little boy approaching his second birthday. One visitor reported frequently “hearing words” between the husband and wife, while another said it was clear that “Dee wanted more excitement” than she
was getting sitting around the glamorous but languid pleasure capitals of Europe with a child in tow.

During one of Dee’s trips to Los Angeles, Hawks met a woman who would remain in his life until he died. Hawks was at the Longchamps racetrack with a small group when one of his party, the actress-model Lise Boudin, saw a friend and asked her to join them. She was Chance de Widstedt, generally
known just as Chance, a twenty-year-old Chanel model. Tall, slim, and with a natural look rather like Bacall’s, Chance made an immediate impression on Hawks, and the feeling was mutual. Chance had never heard of Howard Hawks and had no idea who he was but found him “tall, handsome, very elegant, très chic, athletic, attentive.” The fact that he was older was even a plus, “because I was attracted
to a father figure. I’d had no father.”