Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (116 page)

Hawks was greeted with a standing ovation to receive the award that was being presented to “a master American filmmaker whose creative efforts hold
a distinguished place in world cinema.” George Kirgo had written what he felt was a strong speech for Hawks to deliver, but the director decided he wanted to prepare his own. At first, he considered something “a little sarcastic,” to wit: “People usually come up here and thank everybody connected with their film, all the people they worked with, but I could stand up here all night, so I’ll just thank
a few little people—like Darryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Ernest Hemingway, and Bill Faulkner.” Instead, he decided to recount a story about visiting John Ford out in the desert shortly before the latter’s death. “We got to telling each other things that we’d stolen from each other.… One day he was laughing and he said, ‘There’s something I took from you that beats the whole thing.… I
made a picture that wasn’t so good and you made
Sergeant York
,’ he said, ‘I got the award.’ And he stopped in the middle of laughing … and he said, ‘Well, you’re going to get an award,’ and I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ He said, ‘Goddamn it, you’re going to get an award.’ So I would like to thank the Academy for making that prediction of his come true. Thanks very much.” When he
finished, Hawks
and Wayne engaged in a little Alphonse-and-Gaston routine of trying to lead the other offstage in opposite directions, then retreated to the pressroom, where Wayne was instantly accused by some journalist of being a racist. The star merely said, “You’re mistaken,” and Hawks backed the Duke up. When the belligerent reporter persisted in his tirade, he was escorted out of the building by security guards.

In Hawks’s mind, even then, little more than a year short of eighty, he was still going to make another film. He had a couple of fresh projects in mind, but still foremost in his plans was his globe-trotting oil-rigging yarn. He had always imagined that this was the project that Ted Wiener would back, although his financial involvement with his rich golf buddy had proved less than rewarding thus
far, since the one scheme of Wiener’s that Hawks had actually sunk money into resulted in Hawks losing a lot of money. (By contrast, Peter Bogdanovich, who got to know the Texan through Hawks, made some big profits on his investments with Wiener.)

Having received help from several writer friends at points along the way, Hawks finally sat down and, in July 1976, finished a full first-draft screenplay
for the picture by himself. Called “When It’s Hot Play It Cool,” it now focused on two international oilmen roaming the globe for untapped deposits, an incredibly blatant metaphor for their simultaneous sexual exploration. Hawks considered Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen for the leads but complained that both were too humorless for his type of film, that they wanted too much money, and that
McQueen had gotten too fat. He once half joked that he would prefer Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul of
Starsky and Hutch
, and he more seriously proposed that he was considering Alan Alda, an actor whose comedic gifts he much enjoyed on
M*A*S*H
, and perhaps Al Pacino. He also had no idea who to get for the Bacall-inspired female lead, a character he named Rabbit “because she runs around a lot.”

Having been shown studio facilities near Madrid at the time of his visit to San Sebastian, Hawks had the notion of basing the production in Spain, doing the interiors there, then sending Pierre Schoendorffer around the world to film the extensive locations. Reasonably enough considering the subject, he wanted scenes shot in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, but he cited red tape and very real
political inhospitability in these and other oil countries as reasons for the film’s delay. As it happened, though, Hawks never spoke, even in a preliminary way, with Schoendorffer about any of this, suggesting that he had never pursued the production realities with professional seriousness.

But just as Bertrand Tavernier felt it was a good thing that Hawks never made his Vietnam War film,
the same suspicion holds for “When It’s Hot Play It Cool.” In Hawks’s own draft, not only are many of the characters and conventions archaic and tired but the attitudes expressed are by turns infantile, racist, politically naive, and embarrassingly out of touch. It was one thing to have two Yanks hightailing it through the Middle East in the 1920s, but to portray Arab sheiks in the 1970s as evil,
lecherous buffoons with nothing but white slavery and throat-slitting on their minds—and to have the American ride roughshod over them to boot—would have been utterly unpalatable to contemporary audiences.

The two leads, called Bill and Spike, just as they are in
A Girl in Every Port
, first meet in Malaysia, where they are representing competing American oil companies. They fight immediately,
but “at the bottom these two are the same man; tough, resourceful, cheerfully ruthless but always within limits, deeply loyal to a friend but never sentimental, equally needing women, adventure, and a spice of danger to make life worth living.” The gag from the original film, in which Bill pulls Spike’s dislocated finger, remains intact, and Hawks even inserted an in-joke about John Wayne: when Bill
claims that the other man doesn’t look like he should be named Spike, Spike replies, “If you were a red-blooded American boy with a name like Marion, what would you do?”

After adventures and misadventures in Kuwait, Beirut, Jakarta, and Central America, Spike and Bill are saved from a firing squad by a local strongman who has come under the influence of an all-American con-woman named Flo, Spike’s
ex-wife and Bill’s current lover.

Soused beyond belief, the two Yanks end up in a small cottage somewhere in the wilderness, and the film’s final sequence deserves to be recounted in full, not only because it would, if filmed, have been the final scene in the entire Hawksian oeuvre but because it undoubtedly represents the most outrageous and explicit manifestation of the naive, instinctive homoerotic
undercurrent running through a good deal of the director’s entire career.

They start for bed; unwittingly, both head for the same one and get into it on opposite sides. BILL and SPIKE. In the same bed. For a moment there are contented grunting as they settle themselves for sleep. Then we see their faces as each one becomes aware of something wrong; they’re back to back
.

SPIKE
(in a stage whisper)

Bill … there’s somebody in my bed.

BILL

There’s somebody in mine, too. What will we do?

SPIKE

You throw yours out, and I’ll throw mine.

BILL

Right.

SPIKE

I’ll count to five. One … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5.

Bill and Spike grapple with each other. They tumble out of bed
.

They fight and Bill ends up in a corner on the floor
.

SPIKE

How did you do with yours, Bill?

BILL

Mine threw me out.

SPIKE

That’s too bad. Never mind, you can sleep with me.

They go peacefully to sleep as we
fade out.

With his advancing years, Hawks was pried open emotionally, if ever so slightly, by his daughter Barbara, who knew that “Dad wasn’t the type of man with whom you could sit around for hours talking about intimate details of things.” However, her husband Don McCampbell, came from a very close-knit Nebraska
family that hugged and kissed a lot, and he had never met anyone as uncommunicative and emotionally closed off as his father-in-law. In these later years, Barbara and Don came to Palm Springs from Los Angeles to visit at least once a month. “I told Don, ‘He’s never told me he loves me, and he doesn’t hug me,’” Barbara recounted. “Don
got him to try it, and the first time I tried it, I felt his
whole body tense up. But I didn’t let go, and after a month, it was amazing, he loosened up. But my mother said he was always that way.”

In the mid-1970s, Hawks began slowing down just a bit, and friends noticed certain telltale signs of aging. His hands shook somewhat, which doctors later confirmed was a sign of the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, and this, combined with an injury to his
right thumb, made him shun typing and writing in favor of dictating into a tape recorder. In addition, his injury on the flatcar during
Rio Lobo
had never healed properly. When the ankle of the same leg was ripped up when he hit a cactus bush with his off-road motorcycle in late fall of 1975 (when Hawks was seventy-nine, no less), he contracted blood poisoning, and the leg was never the same again.
Gregg continued to mostly live with his father, although he stayed in Los Angeles after Peter Bogdanovich hired him as an assistant on
At Long Last Love
, a film Hawks tried to talk his young friend out of, although he visited the set a few times. In the wake of this film and his subsequent flop,
Nickelodeon
, Bogdanovich and Hawks had something of a falling out. After about a year, Hawks gave Richard
Schickel a message to pass along to Bogdanovich: “Tell him to come out for some more lessons.” Hawks continued work on “When It’s Hot Play It Cool,” asking Paul Helmick to figure out a budget. In Helmick’s opinion, “he wanted to make films, he really did,” although it was obvious it wasn’t going to happen.

Hawks kept reading popular fiction, mostly pulp detective stories and Western novels by
Louis L’Amour, and in early 1977 had one more idea for a film. It was the story of three men diving for gold buried in a sunken Nazi submarine. He insisted that the men should all hate one another, although that stuck him with a question he couldn’t answer: Why, if the three couldn’t stand each other, were they together on the same mission? Just as he had turned to his daughter and her husband to
find the dynamite ending of
Rio Bravo
, so now did he ask them to solve his dilemma on the new idea. This time, however, no one had any brainstorms.

That July, two film magazines on different sides of the Atlantic published significant, and significantly opposing, issues pertaining to Hawks.
Positif
, long the competitor of
Cahiers du Cinéma
in France, came out with a special Hawks number with
an interview and new critical commentaries. By contrast,
Film Comment
in New York carried a long piece by the veteran critic Raymond Durgnat called “Hawks Isn’t Good Enough,” which was the first major negative assessment of the director’s career to appear since Hawks had essentially been installed in the pantheon some ten years before.
Durgnat complained about many things: Hawks was partial to
“skimming over pain”; he compared unfavorably to such other directors as Wyler, Huston, Milestone, and even Wellman and Hathaway on similar subjects; he kept “so great a distance from the nitty-gritty of the lives that he describes … that he’s condemned to be an entertainer.” The writer proclaimed, “As an entertainer Hawks is a real artist; but as an artist he’s a very minor master.” Durgnat scored
a number of points in shotgun fashion, but his argument was so discursive, filled with factual errors, and simply wrongheaded at times that it finally proved unpersuasive. In a way, the piece’s title was the most lastingly memorable thing about it, and this wasn’t even the author’s but rather the invention of the magazine’s editors. The article did, however, provoke what
Film Comment
called the
Great Hawks Debate, between Durgnat and Hawks champion William Paul, which lasted beyond Hawks’s own death.

In 1977, Hawks led one more documentary filmmaker into the desert. This time it was a German, the former critic Hans C. Blumenberg, who interviewed Hawks for what became a very good documentary on the director’s career,
Ein Verdammt Gutes Leben
(
A Hell of a Good Life
). Unavoidably, Hawks
told many of his most familiar stories, but he told them well and by no means looked like a man about to depart this world.

Howard Hawks’s last major public appearance was a memorable one for everyone present. On October 21–23, 1977, the Directors Guild of America’s Special Projects division, under the guidance of David Shepard, and a small organization called the Los Angeles Cinémathèque cohosted
a Weekend with Howard Hawks. About fifty DGA members and film buffs spent the weekend at the oceanfront Surf and Sand Hotel in Laguna Beach. Hawks drove in alone from the desert in his Volkswagen Scirocco, and the entire weekend, from Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, consisted of a total immersion in Hawks, the man and his films. Fourteen of his films were shown, and Joseph McBride,
who by now had interviewed Hawks numerous times, knowledgeably hosted Hawks’s public appearances, at which visitors asked the master dozens of questions. Hawks seemed to positively beam, reveling in the limelight, outlasting many of the guests at night and beating them to breakfast in the mornings. As his daughter Barbara told McBride, “The timing was perfect. And of all the things like that he’d
done, I think that was the one he appreciated the most.” The event also provided an opportunity for his son Gregg, Barbara, and Barbara’s daughter Carrie, who liked her grandfather a great deal, to see a number of Hawks’s films for the first time. For a man with a reputation for coldness, it was a remarkably
warm and intimate occasion. To one observing him for the first time, Hawks came across
as very happy and vigorous, and it was inspiring to sense that here was a rare resolved man who had, indeed, lived a hell of a good life. The man and his films, it seemed, were one.

Hawks cut such a trim, vigorous figure at the Laguna Beach weekend that no one could possibly have imagined that he would be dead within two months. As Barbara later said, “We thought he would live forever—it was
as if he had beaten the system.” Hawks was looking forward to a holiday season with Chance de Widstedt, who was flying in from Paris on December 4 and was due to stay with him at the house through the month. The night before, Saturday, December 3, Hawks had dinner alone at home. Shortly thereafter, he tripped over his one-hundred-pound black Belgian shepherd, Raven, and hit his head on the stone floor.
According to what Hawks later told a reporter from the
Desert Sun
, the local Palm Springs newspaper, Raven “came over to me and whined a little bit. I patted her and told her it was okay. She tried to get me up.”