The Books: “Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood” (Todd McCarthy)

Next book on my “entertainment biography” shelf:

Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, by Todd McCarthy

Howard Hawks is my favorite director (one of my big posts on him here), and this book is fantastic. It’s enormous, only true obsessives need apply … but it’s one of those towering biographical accomplishments that sets the bar. If you want to write about “the grey fox” now, you had better come up with some other angle, because McCarthy here has covered it all – and in a light confident prose that I found totally readable. Wonderful book. The thing about Howard Hawks is: the guy told tall tales, man. You read his interviews and he’s a raconteur – a great anecdotalist … but sometimes you think, “Oh come on, dude, you’re putting it on a little thick …” Kind of like catching a fish that becomes bigger with every telling of the tale. I find that endearing about him. It’s what storytelling is all about. But a biographer needs to look at the tall tales and sort out the truth from the elaboration. Howard Hawks, in interviews, comes off as a know-it-all (and not entirely in a bad way … again: think of the fisherman who caught the biggest fish ever) – and he is responsible for all of these great things happening. “I was the one to suggest this … and I made history …” “I was the first one to see the potential in so-and-so …” “That famous line in the movie was suggested by me …” Everything works out for the best in Howard Hawks’ world, and it’s because HE made the suggestion. I’ve seen clips of him being interviewed, and a more charming man you cannot imagine. Kind of crusty, crotchety, macho – never wanting to make a big deal out of his art, he probably wouldn’t even call it art … but at the same time, you get how proud he is of the work he has done. He’s a mixed bag. He seems baffled by being taken too seriously – and at the same time, he wants everyone to know how influential he was. I saw a clip of him and he was talking about how much the French, in particular, love and revere him – even more than his own countrymen. This was true for decades, when his star kind of faded … in the 60s and 70s … and the whole “auteur theory” of filmmaking came into vogue, and the old studio guys were kind of dissed by the up-and-coming directors. I mean, not really … but there was a definite feeling in those years of breaking free of the shackles of the studio system (which were all assumed to be bad) and re-making cinema in a more independent vein. That is all well and good, but to throw the baby out with the bathwater … In recent years, there’s been a reversal … I wonder how much of that has to do with the burgeoning movie-watching technology, every house with a VCR (well, I’m showing my age there) … and many many movies available to be watched – from the silents to the Michael Bay malarkey. In the 60s and 70s, probably many people had not even seen many of Hawks’ movies … unless they were on TV, or there was a special revival night at a local theatre … They just weren’t available to be seen. Now they are. So we, a movie-going public, can revel in what those studio guys did … and I’m sorry, but to assume that because Howard Hawks or George Cukor or John Ford worked under the studio system their work is somehow lesser, or that they were just “doing a job” as opposed to expressing their precious auteur point of view … That’s retarded. I would call Howard Hawks an auteur. I would call John Ford an auteur. You can’t look at their films and NOT see their point of view all over it. Hawks had different concerns than Cukor. Cukor had a different style than Ford. These guys were highly individualistic … and in a way the studio system helped them to do that. You have a woman’s picture? You call Cukor. You have a Western? Get Ford on it. You have a romantic comedy or an action picture? Get Hawks.

But back to the French and Hawks:

Hawks, in a way, for many years, was the bastard child of film-making … forgotten, ignored … certainly not given the props he deserved. Hard to imagine, now that his star has risen so defiantly to take its place among the all-time greats. Hawks was so good that he was not taken seriously (one of the many ironies of Hollywood). Perhaps it looked too easy. He was versatile – and sometimes THAT can be held against you, too. Hawks did screwball comedies, adventure movies, Westerns … did this guy have a point of view or was he just really workmanlike, and able to pull it off? It was the French, in the 50s, who discovered his work – and took it seriously, catapulting him into the realm of high-end playahs. Men whose work was really about something, a reference point for the newcomers. References to Hawks abound in French films of that period, in Godard’s work in particular. In Contempt (1964) a scene occurs in front of an enormous poster for Hawks’ film Hatari.

In Breathless, Jean Seberg quotes Faulkner – who, of course, wrote The Big Sleep (the screenplay) – and Jean Paul Belmondo dreams of being Humphrey Bogart. Godard was obsessed with American gangster movies – Hawks’ Scarface being one of the first classics in that genre.

The French films, at that time, while fully reveling in the new freedom of the cinema, kept their eye on the past as well … and Hawks was their guy.

Hawks was grateful for the attention of the French. They pretty much stood alone in their regard for Hawks for about 2 decades. Not that Hawks wasn’t respected and Bringing Up Baby wasn’t loved in America, it was … but when you hear the French directors talk about Hawks you realize that something else was going on with them. Hawks was NOT “just” a director of popular movies to them. He was a high-end storyteller, directing movies with deep cultural themes, each with his own personal stamp of style and mood … Hawks laughed about some of their theories … there was one French critic who write an entire thesis practically about Cary Grant scrambling around in the dirt after the dog in Bringing Up Baby and what it all meant on a cultural level. The critic saw so much more in that moment than Hawks did (Hawks just thought it was funny to put Grant in jodhpurs and have him crawl through the bushes) … and Hawks often wondered what the hell was going on in France that they would examine his work so closely – but we owe them a great debt, for keeping the flame alive until the rest of us could catch up.

The first time I saw Twentieth Century, Hawks’ first big screwball comedy with Carole Lombard and John Barrymore – from 1934 – I felt a little goosebumpy within the first 10 minutes – especially after the first appearance of Barrymore lying on the rug writing with a FEATHER PEN … because I realized, immediately, “Okay. This film is funny on a whole other level.” From the first scene in the big theatre where they’re rehearsing (“Now, listen. You’re in America now. And the people in the Old South do not yodel.”) – the mood is so madcap, so ludicrous … and it’s all played to perfection – that you pretty much start laughing instantly and you never stop until the end. The film is a miracle. A miracle of sustained chaos. You can’t believe they all get away with it. John Barrymore is OUT OF CONTROL. He was of course a big TRAGIC actor, that was his trademark – so to see him here, parodying himself, essentially – is just brilliant. He is so funny that “side-splitting” is kind of not an exaggeration. What a nincompoop that guy is. But so typical of Hawks: to create a male character all puffed up in his own ego, his own accomplishments … completely unselfconscious in how RIDICULOUS he is … and then to watch him become completely undone in his interactions with the pesky little lady critter who will not play by his rules. Hawks, of course, loved the war of the sexes … his sensibility was essentially kind … Women in his films are insane, headstrong, insolent … but without that one edge that makes them unlikeable. You love these girls. And the men do, too, but oh boy, do they try to make that little lady settle down and give him – the almighty man – his due. It’s hilarious. The men and women in his films are equal sparring partners. They need one another … but they fight against dominance by the other tooth and nail. The women always win. Because that’s the way it should be (in Hawks’ view). Look OUT, fellas, if a lady sets her sights on you. You might as well just lie down and take it … because there’s no way you could stop that locomotive. Even Jean Arthur wins in Only Angels Have Wings … because that toin-coss in the last moment shows that he doesn’t want to let her go, even after all of his cranky rejection of her. He can’t do without her. He won’t ASK her to stay, it’s not in his nature … but he lets her know she is wanted. Jean Arthur is put through her paces, man, in that movie – it’s one of the most brutal in Hawks’s repertoire of women learning to play by men’s rules … She MUST not be a wuss, or too girlie … that will not fly in that environment. It’s hard for her. She struggles. Unlike Susan Vance, the madcap heiress in Bringing Up Baby, who goes for her man like a circus trainer trying to cage a lion (or a leopard) … Jean Arthur realizes very quickly that that kind of behavior will not fly with the flyer Geoff Carter. God, I love that movie. I love the sexual tension, and I love the craziness that people expreience when they go through love in Hawks’s movies. All of this makes for hilarity. Hawks loved taking a so-called dignified man and watching him unravel as he fell in love against his will. Twentieth Century came out in 1934 – it’s early Hawks, at least early in terms of screwball – and in only a couple of years he would hone his craft and make Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Only Angels Have Wings, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not – masterpieces. ALL of them. Extraordinary.

Hawks was interested in being a Svengali. He knew the type of woman he wanted for his films – someone like his wife, a stylish no-nonsense woman named Slim … who drank like a man, swore like a man … but never lost her femininity. He thought Lombard had potential in this arena: a beautiful platinum blonde, who was quite coarse in her humor, really one of the boys (Hawks loved women who could hang out with the boys … really ladylike women do not fare well in his films) – Lombard had to ride a horse in one film. She was not comfortable on a horse, but she did what she had to do to get through the shoot. At the end of the day, she clambered down off the horse, announcing, “This entire day has been like a dry fuck.” Men, naturally, love women like that – especially if they look like Lombard … Nobody likes a priss. Hawks saw that in Lombard and leapt on it. It wouldn’t be until a couple of years later when he discovered Betty Bacall, and put her under his own personal contract, that he found the girl who could be molded exactly as he wanted her. How she moved, walked, smoked, smiled … He coached her through everything. Unfortunately for Hawks, his “creation” fell in love with her co-star in To Have and Have Not and he lost control of her almost immediately. How dare she??

A complex bag, Mr. Hawks, and someone whose work I completely treasure. I never get sick of his movies.

Todd McCarthy leaves no stone unturned in this big respectful (yet even-handed) biography … and it is well worth reading. The panorama of 20th century moviemaking is in it.

Today, I chose an excerpt having to do with the development and filming of Twentieth Century. Notice Hawks’ anecdotal style in the quotes below. It’s not off-puttingly arrogant, but – he’s the smartest, he had the ideas, he “got” the others … I find it endearing, and if you hear him actually speak (there are many clips available), you find him compulsively likeable, and you just want him to keep talking and telling stories forever.

I love the story about the “kicking scene” in Twentieth Century, one of the funniest moments in the movie. And notice how McCarthy gently corrects Hawks’ version of events. He does that throughout the book – but unlike Peter Manso in his bitchy book about Brando (excerpt here) … McCarthy doesn’t come off as a snot. He comes off as a man who has done his homework. At the same time, we really get a glimpse of how amazing Hawks was with actors (an undeniable fact) – how he treated Barrymore differently from Lombard … how each had different challenges, and Hawks would adjust his approach. He was a master.

EXCERPT FROM Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, by Todd McCarthy

The director kept pushing the writers beyond the point where they might have gone on their own. “I remember when we’d finished the script, they figured we were all done,” said Hawks. “I said, ‘Now we start on new, different ways of saying the same thing.’ We had more fun for three days just twisting things around. I asked them, ‘How do you say this – “Oh, you’re just in love”?’ Ben [Hecht] came up with ‘You’ve broken out in monkey bits,'” (not realizing he had already used the line in A Girl in Every Port). The general pattern was for the men to sit around swapping lines, with Billy Rose, a former world champion in a shorthand competition, scribbling them down and a secretary typing them up at night. When they got a good idea locked in, Hecht would disappear to write it while Hawks and MacArthur played backgammon. “They taught me how to play. We would work for two hours and play backgammon for an hour. I started winning from them so they got together and decided that when I was their partner they’d lose so that I would always be on the losing end of it. They were so gleeful about this, but I saw what they were doing. If I threw a six and a three and I wanted a six and a four, I’d move it six and four. They never noticed. I won about $40,000 in IOUs from them and they never knew why the hell they were losing.”

Before he left Nyack, Hawks helped his friends get their project with Billy Rose off the ground. Rose was determined to stand Broadway on its ear by producing a giant spectacle the likes of which had never been seen. Supposedly, it was Hawks who suggested that the most impressive backdrop for such a show would be a circus, while MacArthur offered that the world’s most dramatic plot was Romeo and Juliet. Voila, Rose’s extravaganza would put two rival circus families against one another, and Jumbo, which would finally open at the old Hippodrome in 1935, was born.

With a solid first draft in hand, Hawks returned home, where his critical challenge was convincing John Barrymore to play the part. The matinee idol of the 1920s and the most famous Hamlet of his generation. Barrymore had already begun his descent into broad self-caricature and erratic, alcoholic behavior. He wasn’t a major box-office name but he was still a star, the key to Harry Cohn’s desire to make the picture. Barrymore had had a tempestuous affair with Mary Astor shortly before she married Howard’s brother Kenneth, but Hawks had never met the actor before heading up to his imposing mansion to tell him about the story and the role. As Hawks related it, when the actor asked why Hawks wanted him for the part, Hawks said, “It’s the story of the biggest ham on earth, and you’re the biggest ham I know.” Barrymore accepted at once and considered it “a role that comes once in a lifetime,” deeming the film his favorite of the sixty-odd pictures in which he appeared.

Carole Lombard, who was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, not far from Goshen,w as Howard Hawks’ second cousin. But even though she had moved to California at age six and worked for Allan Dwan in 1921, when he and Hawks were close, Hawks had never seen much of her, and he suspected, on the basis of her lackluster screen credits to date, that she was probably a bad actress. However, much as had happened with Ann Dvorak, Hawks saw Lombard “at a party with a couple of drinks in her and she was hilarious and uninhibited and just what the part needed.” It is with Lombard that Hawks truly began “discovering” young actresses, shaping their screen personalities and fashioning what became known as “the Hawksian woman,” an independent type with a mind of her own who would stand up to men and was not content “to sit around and wash dishes”. Appropriately enough, Hawks’s career as a Svengali commenced on a picture depicting the very same sort of relationship between a dominant man and a woman he remakes into a star. Just as significantly, it was the first time Hawks dared to pit a virtual beginner against an accomplished veteran in two equal leading roles; just as it would in later years, with Bogart and Bacall, and Wayne and Clift, Hawks’s gamble paid off. It is a tribute to his directorial control and brilliance with actors that he could simultaneously handle the chore of keeping John Barrymore in line, which many directors were unable to do, and help Carole Lombard find the key to liberate her own personality on the screen, clinching her career from then on.

Still, there was a problem: the twenty-five-year-old former Mack Sennett bathing beauty was petrified at the prospect of acting opposite the screen’s aging Lothario, not to mention carrying a picture with him. Fortunately, the problem was confronted head on and solved on the first day of rehearsals. Hawks often asserted that his famous private bit of direction to Lombard regarding how she should handle Barrymore took place on the first day of shooting, but the celebrated “kicking” scene in the train was not actually filmed until the third week of production, by which time Lombard was very much in the groove of her performance. In rehearsal, however, in a precise reflection of the predicament of her character, Lombard was initially very stiff, “emoting all over the place. She was trying very hard and it was just dreadful,” explained Hawks. Barrymore was patient with her but at one point “began to hold his nose”. Becoming concerned, Hawks asked the actress to take a walk with him. “I asked her how much money she was getting for the picture. She told me and I said, ‘What would you say if I told you you’d earned your whole salary this morning and didn’t have to act anymore?’ And she was stunned. So I said, ‘Now forget about the scene. What would you do if someone said such and such to you?’ And she said, ‘I’d kick him in the balls.’ And I said, ‘Well, he said something like that to you – why don’t you kick him?’ She said, ‘Are you kidding?’ And I said, ‘No.'” Hawks’s parting remark was, “Now we’re going back in and make this scene and you kick, and you do any damn thing that comes into your mind that’s natural, and quit acting. If you don’t quit, I’m going to fire you this afternoon.” The direction worked, and Lombard’s natural spirited quality came through unchecked in her performance. Hawks claimed, “She never began a picture after that without sending me a telegram that said, ‘I’m gonna start kicking him.'”

With Barrymore reporting two hours late on the first day, filming began on February 22, 1934, with the scene of the telephone conversation between Oscar Jaffe and the detective, played by Edgar Kennedy. Lombard began work the next day with scenes in Lily Garland’s dressing room, and sound man Edward Bernds confirmed that the actress was entirely on top of her role from the moment she started shooting. “She was great from the first day,” he recalled. Given a tight twenty-one-day schedule, the film was made virtually in sequence, except for the theater scenes, which were bunched together early in the shoot. Hawks had selected Joseph August, the cinematographer of his first two pictures, The Road to Glory and Fig Leaves, to man the camera, and production rolled along slightly behind until the third week, when the interplay of the rapid-fire drawing-room scenes between the two leads required so much rehearsal and refinement that filming fell five and a half days behind. But Hawks was trying something new, and everything depended upon the precise timing of the dialogue delivery, which made it “a completely high-pressure picture,” in Hawks’s view. “It isn’t done with cutting or anything. It’s done by deliberately writing dialogue like real conversation: you’re liable to interrupt me and I’m liable to interrupt you – so you write in such a way that you can overlap the dialogue but not lose anything. It’s just a trick. It’s also a trick getting people to do it – it takes about two or three days to get them accustomed to it and then they’re off. But you must allow for it in your dialogue with just the addition of a few little words in front, ‘Well, I think -‘ is all you need, and then say what you have to say. You have to hear just the essential things. But if you don’t hear those in a scene, you’re lost. You have to tell the sound man what lines he must hear and he must let you know if he does. This also allows you to do throwaways – it keeps an actor from hitting a line too hard and it sounds funnier.” Hawks eventually found that his actors sometimes spat out their dialogue so fast that even he didn’t understand it.

Although Hawks said he lost one day of shooting because Barrymore was drunk, the star was generally a model of dedication and cooperation, offering to work two days for free to make up for his delinquency, knowing his lines, and helping the director plan the onstage sequences. Barrymore devised his own Kentucky Colonel disguise for the scene in which he sneaks into the Twentieth Century and improvised the very funny bit in which, once safely inside his compartment, he elongates his nose putty and concludes by picking his nose. After the rocky beginning, Barrymore became Lombard’s biggest fan and supporter, giving her tips and rehearsing with her at length until Hawks was satisfied. After this high point, however, Barrymore’s HOllywood career went into a steep decline. On his next picture, Hat, Coat, and Glove, RKO was forced to suspend production when the actor couldn’t remember his lines, and the deliberate self-caricature of Twentieth Century sadly degenerated into a general run of helpless self-parodies through the last seven years of his career. Hawks’s own comportment was reserved, as usual. “The word that comes to mind is austere,” said sound man Edward Bernds, who later became a director himself. “He didn’t go in for camaraderie with the crew. He didn’t even seem to be directing, he never seemed to have conferences with the actors. Hawks seemed to take a well-played scene for granted. He took it in stride. He expected it. For Hawks, every scene had to be perfect, he wanted it to be perfect from beginning to end.”