Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (11 page)

After living in Pasadena for some time after the war, in the early 1920s, Howard and Kenneth rented a house at 7125 Hillside Avenue, a tiny street just off upper La Brea north of Franklin. Hawks said that Victor Fleming once asked if he could put up at his place for a short time and ended up staying five years; while the length of time seems unlikely,
it was definitely during this period. In early 1924, the two Hawkses moved to a house at 6626 Franklin Avenue, just two blocks up from Musso & Frank’s restaurant, on the spot where the celebrated show-business apartment building the Château des Fleurs would be built in 1927. Living with them for a good deal of this time was Jack Conway.

A man who came into Hawks’s world in the early 1920s and
had a profound effect on both his personal and professional life was Irving Thalberg. It is unknown who might have brought Thalberg (who shared Hawks’s May 30 birthday but was three years younger) into the group, but occasionally Hawks would find this “little red-cheeked Jewish boy, very bright guy,” at his home or at one of his friend’s. Although Hawks admitted that he wasn’t initially sure of the
identity of this fellow, whose frailness and retiring nature contrasted markedly with the exuberant, macho personalities of most of the others, he endlessly told stories about him. Thalberg, of course, was Hollywood’s boy wonder, the fellow who had commandeered production at Universal at age twenty, wrestled Erich von Stroheim to the mat over the director’s prodigious excesses, and, in early 1923,
left Universal to join Louis B. Mayer in a partnership that bloomed at MGM the following year. A very protected mama’s boy who was forced to leave Universal when he decided he didn’t want to marry boss Carl Laemmle’s daughter, Thalberg was earnestly trying to be one of the boys by hanging out with the likes of Fleming, Conway, Sutherland, and the Hawkses, all of whom Mother Thalberg considered
wayward young men whose wild ways could only have a pernicious influence on her sensitive child.

In fact, the influence worked much more in the opposite direction. Fleming and Conway became two of the most important directors at MGM under Thalberg, while Hawks entered a significant new phase of his career
thanks to the young executive. Early in 1923, Hawks got a call out of the blue from Jesse
Lasky, vice president in charge of production at Paramount Famous Lasky. Of course, Hawks had worked at the studio some years before, but he was a lowly prop boy then and scarcely had a nodding acquaintance with the boss. The way Hawks magnified it in later years, Lasky started by flattering him, saying that, “Thalberg says you know more about stories than anybody else that he knows, so I’d like
to have you.” Offering him, according to Hawks, unlimited funds and direct access to his office, Lasky asked him to take charge of the production of a slate of forty pictures, to be responsible for literary purchases; choosing directors, writers, and cast; and cutting and titling the films. Hawks added that he didn’t have an official title at the company by his own request and boasted, finally, that
his office was “really doing all the producing.”

The truth, not surprisingly, was rather more prosaic. Hawks was hired, at a cushy salary of about five hundred dollars a month, as one of the scenario department’s four production editors. (The other three were Lucien Hubbard, Hector Turnbull and Walter Woods.) The production slate under way when Hawks came onboard was publicized in the trade as
Paramount’s
Super Thirty-Nine
, the second half of its lineup for the current year. Hawks later claimed that he bought about thirty stories for the studio—two Joseph Conrads, two Rex Beaches, two Jack Londons, two Zane Greys—as if no one had ever adapted these writers’ works for the screen before. Tossing it off as if it were nothing, he said that, “In two weeks’ time, I had forty pictures and
had ’em cast. Then all I had to do was to get people to write ’em. That was the most successful year Paramount ever had.”

But Hawks shared these duties with three others and was worked fiercely by Lasky, one of the more benevolent bosses as Hollywood executives went and a man who appreciated Hawks’s intuitive smarts and mainstream literary tastes. Hawks claimed that Lasky agreed to give him Wednesday
afternoons off to play golf, and that he was sometimes able to persuade his boss to go with him so they could talk about work while enjoying themselves; if true, it was a clever ploy on Hawks’s part, not only for selfish reasons but as a way to get Lasky’s ear for a prolonged period, apart from everyday distractions. With only two title writers on staff, Hawks was able to persuade Lasky to
hire two more, Malcolm Stuart Boylan and sportswriter Beanie Walker, both of whom became top names in the field. Hawks even insisted that he saved Cecil B. De Mille’s contrived 1925 melodrama
The Road to Yesterday
by rewriting its titles. The picture, according to Hawks, had turned out badly, with the director having approached the story “very,
very heavily,” so Hawks told De Mille he could improve
it. “I made, not a comedy out of it, but at least in a lighter vein,” he bragged to Kevin Brownlow. “I changed the whole tenor of the story. So it didn’t take itself seriously, it took itself in a semi-humorous way. He took it out and previewed it and he was very pleased with himself that he’d gotten laughs and he decided he was going to make comedies.” Hawks also admitted, “I started the evil
of the ‘associate producer’ because I had so much to do I had to hire a couple of fellows to help me.”

Because of Hawks’s shared responsibilities on the
Super Thirty-Nine
slate, it is difficult to say with certainty which properties he bought and which projects he supervised. He himself took credit for several. Among the ones to come out in 1924 were George Melford’s adaptation of a Frances Hodgson
Burnett play, the crime drama
The Dawn of a Tomorrow
, featuring Hawks’s friend Raymond Griffith; two Westerns by Irvin Willat, a Zane Grey story called
The Heritage of the Desert
and
North of 36;
and
Open All Night
, also with Griffith, a sophisticated romantic comedy that was writer Paul Bern’s second film as a solo director. That first year Hawks himself received a writing credit on a George
Melford film,
Tiger Love
. Based on an opera called
El Gato Montes
, it was a Robin Hood–like tale of romantic intrigue and derring-do in Old Spain. It starred Antonio Moreno and Estelle Taylor and was judged good, if formulaic, fun.

Then there were the films directed by Victor Fleming. Hawks actually claimed that he was responsible for Fleming’s directing career, telling Peter Bogdanovich, “Then
he became a cameraman, which he was until I became a producer at Paramount and made him a director.” This is one of Hawks’s most blatant pieces of one-upsmanship on his more experienced friend, simply because it is so outrageously false, a weak attempt at building himself up when, in fact, his friend was way out in front of him, doing what Hawks really wanted to be doing. After spending the war
in the Army Signal Corps, Fleming had sailed with President Wilson in December 1918 to attend the Versailles Peace Conference, where, as chief cameraman for the American delegation, he had filmed the assembled world leaders. He had shortly thereafter become the first American to shoot movie film inside the Vatican, when Wilson visited St. Peter’s. Upon his discharge in 1919, he had begun his directorial
career at once at the behest of Douglas Fairbanks, his roistering buddy. He’d arrived at Paramount in 1922, and had already directed five films there when Hawks joined the studio.

The first picture on which Hawks and Fleming were jointly associated was
Empty Hands
, the story of a scandalous flapper who is swept down some rapids in a canoe while visiting the Canadian Rockies and survives in
the wilderness thanks to her father’s brawny engineer. Jack Holt portrayed the man, while the flighty girl was played by Norma Shearer, a Canadian actress whose career had slowly been taking shape for several years. A former advertising model in New York, Shearer left her married sister, Athole, behind and traveled with her mother, Edith, to Hollywood. Shearer was charming and pretty, if slightly
wall-eyed and horsey, and also very proper; and she was now, after a period of struggle, seemingly on her way up the ladder to stardom.

The mountain portions of the film were shot at Lake Arrowhead, a couple of hours east of Los Angeles, and Shearer immediately fell hard for her director, to the distinct disapproval of her ever-hovering mother, Edie. In her unpublished autobiography, which tends
to put a polite finish on the events of her life, Shearer as much as admits that Fleming was her first lover. “His few silver hairs and kind gentle ways attracted me enormously,” she wrote. “I suppose psychiatrists would have said my love for my father, whom I was missing so much, expressed itself in my romantic yearning for this mature man—this undoubtedly was the basis for my tender affection
which must have overwhelmed me one moonlit night as we sat in a hammock on the terrace of the hotel overlooking the beautiful lake. I found myself saying, for no reason at all, ‘Mr. Fleming, would you kiss me?’ And to my surprise he did and I loved it.’” Enthusing about “his amazing hands” and his talent for little endearments, Shearer revealed that, “I had a lovely time courting this mature man—the
first I had known.” She added that, “Sport cars were his passion and he drove a beautiful dark grey Dusenberg too fast—except when Edie was in the backseat—because she would scream ‘Victor’ and hit him on the back and he would pretend she had knocked him off the seat onto the floor.”

As it happened, Howard Hawks was also quite taken with Norma Shearer, but not in a romantic way. Hawks first noticed
her in a picture Jack Conway made at Warner Bros. in 1923 called
Lucretia Lombard
, which he claimed to have improved by retitling it to favor Shearer, who played the second female part, over the leading lady, Irene Rich. Hawks took credit for signing her for
Empty Hands
over the objections of Jesse Lasky, who found her unattractive. After he saw the finished picture, Lasky realized his mistake
and wanted to sign her for further films, but she was already under
contract to MGM. Thalberg had had his eye on her for three years and, by 1925 Shearer was a star at MGM. In 1927, she married Thalberg.

But the romance with Thalberg was slow to catch fire, and for some time Shearer continued to see Victor Fleming while he made three more pictures that Hawks supervised:
The Devil’s Cargo
, a dubious
story of sinners and redeemers during California Gold Rush days;
Adventure
, an action-and-romance-packed adaptation of a Jack London novel set in the Solomon Islands; and
Lord Jim
, a superficial but impressively physical telling of the Joseph Conrad tale.

Among Hawks’s other projects were two more Zane Grey Westerns,
The Code of the West
and
The Light of Western Stars
, both directed by William
K. Howard, as well as a picture on which Hawks shared a story credit with Adelaide Heilbron,
The Dressmaker from Paris
. The picture, directed by Hawks’s friend Paul Bern, tells of an American soldier, played by Allan Forrest, and a French maiden, portrayed by Leatrice Joy, in a comeback role after time off for motherhood, whose romance is thwarted when the Yanks go home. Some years later, the
young man, stuck managing an old-fashioned clothing store in a sleepy Midwestern town, decides to shake things up by inviting a famous Parisian designer to put on a fashion show at the store. It turns out, of course, that the couturiere is none other than his long-ago love, and the two surmount the shocked protests of local prudes by putting on a successful show and heading for the altar. Although
the predictability of the story was criticized, the fashion show sequence was incredibly lavish, loaded with beautiful models and an endless succession of gowns, furs, and revealing outfits. Despite his credit, Hawks absolved any real creative input on this film, telling Joseph McBride, “I just thought of the title and gave a writer the idea for a story, and she wrote it.” Hawks liked Leatrice Joy,
however, and through her met her husband, John Gilbert, whom Hawks also liked a great deal. The actor’s contract with Fox was up, and Hawks pushed both Lasky and Cecil B. De Mille to sign him up at Paramount. But Lasky missed the boat, and Gilbert shortly became Hollywood’s most romantic leading man at MGM.

As it turned out, Hawks’s stint at Paramount was also near an end. On September 1, 1924,
he signed a contract to work for one more year as a production editor at the studio, at $650 per month for the first six months and $750 per month for the remainder. Within a matter of weeks, however, he abruptly quit and took a similar position with Thalberg at MGM. Although he felt he was overworked, Hawks’s ostensible reason for leaving was that Lasky offered him no prospect of moving out of
the scenario department
and into directing. Thalberg, on the other hand, promised that if Hawks spent a year as a story executive, he would then let him direct. It was a promise not kept, however, and a year wasted as far as Hawks was concerned. Granted, Hawks admired Thalberg and learned a great deal watching him analyze scripts and first cuts of films, figure out what was wrong with them, and
then create new scenes that would sometimes dramatically improve the pictures. Hawks worked with dozens of writers, met many of the stars, and had an affair with at least one of them, the newly arrived Joan Crawford. But by late 1925, he could tell nothing was about to change for him at the thriving studio. When Hawks complained to Thalberg about it, he remembered the executive saying, “‘Howard,
Christ, we can get all the directors we need. I can’t get anybody to do your work.’ I said, ‘I just quit this morning.’ He and I were very good friends, and he said, ‘Nothing could change your mind?’ I said, ‘Nothing can change it.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I could let you direct.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want you to do that. You can let me direct some time after I show you what I can do.’ And I went off to
play golf.”