Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (117 page)

Hawks, who was dazed with a head gash and had broken a bone in his back, struggled to lift himself up or pull himself along the floor so he could get to a phone, but he couldn’t do it.
He knew that no one would be coming by or checking in on him until at least the next day. All the while, Raven kept nudging her master. As it got later, Hawks became “cold and tired.” He recounted, “I finally went to sleep, and the dog had her leg around my neck and curled up on my chest.”

The next morning, two friends from town passed by and, alerted by Raven’s barking, came in and found Hawks
on the floor. He was immediately taken to nearby Desert Hospital, where he was treated for his head and back wounds and a serious concussion. Chance arrived in Los Angeles that afternoon and, informed by Gregg, who had been away motorcycling, as to what had happened, proceeded immediately to the hospital. According to what Hawks told Chance, his fall may have been abetted by other factors. “Hawks
had taken a whiskey or two earlier in the evening, then forgot about them and took some medicine,” she said, adding that doctors suspected he may have suffered a slight stroke or heart seizure either before or after he fell. Hawks credited his dog with saving his life by staying next to him for hours and sharing her body warmth through the long night.

Hawks’s children visited him in the hospital,
where he remained for two weeks. Had he been taken in and treated immediately, he would no doubt have been fine, as the injuries he had sustained were not themselves very serious. But he had suffered considerable dehydration that had affected
his entire system, and he had other ailments that had not been detected before, the most important of which was arteriosclerosis. With Hawks confined to
his bed and a wheelchair, Chance came by everyday to see him, give him a massage, and talk. She was there when Hawks had a farewell telephone conversation with John Wayne, who himself would die of cancer within less than two years. Photographs taken at the hospital reveal Hawks, for the first time, looking like a genuinely old man, something like the elderly William Randolph Hearst with his jowls
and long robe. All the same, he flirted shamelessly with the nurses, obtaining their phone numbers for future reference, and Chance was impressed that he “kept his extraordinary look” (“
son regard extraordinaire
”) until the end. “He didn’t know that he was going,” she insisted. “Which of us ever does? We always hold out hope till the very end. It was sad that such a man was departing. He was so
passionate about life.” Barbara remarked, “He kept his spirits and his sense of humor right to the end, but he just hated being hospitalized and hated being treated like an elderly gentleman the way the nurses treated him. He kept saying, ‘What a horrible place this is—what am I doing here?’”

On December 17, after thirteen days, Hawks demanded to be taken home. That, however, was the end of his
time with Chance, who said she was viewed with suspicion by some members of the family as a possible inheritance seeker, in the vein of Charles Feldman’s last-minute French wife, and was declared persona non grata in the household. Hawks did indeed invite one of the nurses over for a “date”; after arriving home, having a martini, and watching a football game on TV, Hawks warned his daughter, “By
the way, there may be a girl coming over for a swim.”

Over the course of his last ten days, Hawks was lucid most of the time, a bit confused at others. He joked about the circumstances of his accident, and he finally told Barbara that he loved her. “It was the first time I can ever remember him saying it,” she confessed. The last thing he said to her was, “Hi, Squirt,” using his pet nickname
for her, before he fell into unconsciousness on Christmas Day. With Barbara and Gregg at his side, he slipped away at 6:50 P.M. the following evening.

Officially, his death was attributed directly to “arteriosclerotic vascular disease with stroke,” a consequence of arteriosclerotic heart disease and acute heart fibrillation. According to his wishes, Hawks’s remains were taken to Desert Lawn Memorial
Park in Calimesa and cremated, the ashes then scattered over the desert from the air. Obituaries and write-ups of his life and career were appreciative of his contributions, much more so than they probably would have been a decade earlier, but Hawks’s death was still vastly
overshadowed by that of Charles Chaplin, who had passed away the day before and who naturally dominated news coverage for
some time thereafter.

A memorial service for Howard Hawks was held on December 29 at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. John Wayne, who read a brief elegy, was the biggest name in attendance, and he repeated the lines he had read over the dead in
Red River:
“We brought nothing into this world, and it’s certain we can take nothing out.” No one else, not even any churchman, spoke, nor
was there any music or ritual. Frank Capra, James Stewart, Angie Dickinson, and Sherry Lansing were among the two hundred or so people on hand, but several friends and devoted crew members noted with dismay how many people who owed their careers to Hawks were not present, a result, no doubt, of the emotional distance Hawks maintained between himself and many of those in his orbit and of how little
he remained in touch even with people who had been very important to him at various times in his life. “It was kind of sad,” one of his confidants said, “after everything he had done for so many people and for the industry, how little he seemed to be appreciated.”

In his will, Hawks divided up his holdings among all his children but Kitty, whom he excluded on the basis that “her mother is well
able to make such provision.” Royalties rolled in on many of Hawks’s films, and do so to this day, which David, Barbara, and Gregg continue to collect. Gregg inherited the Palm Springs house and was the beneficiary of a considerable trust set up by Hawks and Dee upon their divorce.

In the months after Hawks died, Cary Grant would periodically telephone Peter Bogdanovich, a brilliant vocal mimic,
and say, “Peter, do Howard for me.” Bogdanovich said, “The last times I saw both Cary Grant and John Wayne, they both talked about Howard, about missing him.” Hawks was gone, but there was no forgetting him.

All of Howard Hawks’s wives outlived him. Athole spent the remainder of her years in a country club–like nursing home in the San Fernando Valley. Though she lived the quietest of lives and could not have been further from the limelight, she still managed to stir up some unwanted controversy before she died when a tabloid journalist visiting the home under false pretenses managed
to get her to say some scurrilous things about her famous sister Norma’s deteriorated condition toward the end. Athole passed away, at eighty-four, on March 17, 1985.

Slim, after her generally exciting and socially illustrious marriage to Leland Hayward came to an end in 1959, wed an even wealthier man, the British banker Kenneth Keith, in 1962; when he was knighted, she became Lady Nancy Keith.
However, this marriage was virtually stillborn from the outset, and it ended in 1972. Slim spent the remainder of her years as a doyenne of New York society, with a circle that included Babe Paley, Lauren Bacall, Irene Selznick, Jerome Robbins, Mike Nichols, and, most famously, Truman Capote; she was one of Capote’s closest confidants until she broke with him forever over what she saw as his betrayal
of her in his catty story “La Côte Basque.” She died on April 6, 1990, and her entertaining autobiography,
Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life
, was published posthumously later that year.

Married to the fabulously wealthy, CIA-connected businessman Stuart W. Cramer III, who was formerly wed to Jean Peters and Terry Moore, Dee was a fixture on the Bel-Air–Beverly Hills social circuit until
she and her husband moved to Palm Springs several years ago. Dee says she intends to write a book about both Hawks and Groucho Marx, claiming, “No one understands them the way I do. I know things nobody else knows.”

Peter John Ward Hawks, Athole’s son by John Ward adopted by Howard Hawks, worked in aviation in the San Francisco area all his life. His first wife, Shirley Godfrey, died in 1973,
and he subsequently married
and was divorced from Norma Baldwin, who piloted her own private chartered plane. Peter and Shirley had three daughters. The eldest, Jamin, is an attorney, while Kate, who has a son, and Celia, who has two sons, work in aviation as did their father, who died on July 22, 1989, at his home in Woodside, south of San Francisco.

David Hawks, married in 1975 to the film
costumer Virginia (Ginger) Hadfield after his divorce from Judy Webb, had a long career as an assistant director, working for many years on the
M*A*S*H
TV series before retiring in the early 1990s. He has two daughters by his first marriage, Darren and Jessica. In the early 1990s, producer-director Irwin Winkler asked David to appear as his father in
Guilty by Suspicion
, a film about the Hollywood
blacklist that included a scene of Darryl Zanuck watching dailies from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. When David turned the offer down, Winkler decided not to actually show “Hawks” on-screen in the picture.

Barbara Hawks McCampbell and her husband, Don, moved from the western San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles to Palm Springs in the early 1990s, as Barbara always wanted to do. She works in real
estate in the area and rides her horse regularly. Both of their daughters, Carrie and Tracey, are married, and Carrie has a daughter and a son.

Kitty Hawks worked for a number of years as a Hollywood agent with ICM. From 1976 to 1983 she was married to Ned Tanen, a high-powered executive and producer who, at the time of their marriage, was in charge of production at Universal Pictures. After
their divorce, Kitty returned to New York City, where she works in interior decoration.

Gregg Hawks sold his father’s Palm Springs house, has continued racing motorcycles, and for some years now has run a motorcycle repair and customizing business called Sport Engineering in Van Nuys, California. He and his wife, Penny, live in Santa Monica.

With several of Hawks’s films more or less officially
installed as classics by the time he died, his work enjoyed renewed life on the revival, retrospective, university, and museum circuits in the years that followed. Five years after his death, three major books on his work were published: Joseph McBride’s career interview,
Hawks on Hawks
, assembled from the many discussions the author had with the director over the years; academic Leland A. Poague’s
learned critical study
Howard Hawks;
and the late Gerald Mast’s
Howard Hawks, Storyteller
. Dauntingly detailed, impressively erudite, and exhausting at times in its thorough reading of the films, Mast’s work stands, after Robin Wood’s book, as the most convincing and strongly argued full-length case on behalf of Hawks’s status as a major artist. Then, in 1987, came
the exceedingly bizarre labor
of love, Clark Branson’s
Howard Hawks; A Jungian Study
.

Any number of other spirited celebrations of Hawks’s achievements appeared over the years. Molly Haskell’s essay in Richard Roud’s
Cinema: A Critical Dictionary
is particularly outstanding, and in a 1993 selection of the thirty best American movies ever made, the
L.A. Weekly
, a very film-wise alternative newspaper, ranked
Rio Bravo
third
and
His Girl Friday
fifth; Chaplin and Welles were the only other directors to also claim two titles on the list.

In this light, it is surprising that James Bernardoni would assert, in his stimulating 1991 book
The New Hollywood
, that there was a “lack of solid, definitive criticism in support of Hawks’s growing reputation” within the literature on film. In evaluating the work of significant
directors since the late 1960s, the late Bernardoni persuasively writes that Hawks and Hitchcock have yielded by far the greatest influence on younger filmmakers, but that this influence has not been very much to the good, for complex reasons that he carefully elucidates. Bernardoni felt that it was the lack of strong criticism that “resulted in a rather misleading interpretation of his achievements
gaining currency in the New Hollywood, an interpretation that seemed to hold that the lesson to be learned from Hawks was that the most blatantly escapist entertainments would be transformed by the same mysterious alchemy at work in Hawks’s films into works of genuine art. The result was that a number of New Hollywood directors who apparently admired what Hawks had achieved … set out to work within
the same genres without fully understanding how Hawks had managed to transcend their inherent limitations.” Bernardoni pointed out
Jaws
as an example of “another indicator of the aesthetic decline that has befallen the American cinema during the New Hollywood era.”

Bernardoni concluded that the legacies of both Hawks and Hitchcock were ill-served by their imitators. “The Hawksian tradition in
film comedy has been all but ignored; the Hawksian adventure melodrama has been distorted into films that … [lack] Hawks’s subtle (and audience-involving) renderings of action as the expression of morality.”

The work of Howard Hawks has been called to mind by a great many films by young directors since the 1960s. These homages run from brief tips of the hat, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s prominent
placement of
Hatari!
posters in the background of shots in
Contempt
, to “stealing,” such as Peter Bogdanovich’s lift of
Bringing Up Baby
for
What’s Up, Doc?
and John Carpenter’s appropriation of the basic setup of
Rio Bravo
for
Assault on
Precinct 13
, to Carpenter’s outright remake of
The Thing
and Brian De Palma’s contemporary version of
Scarface
, written by Oliver Stone.

But the range of filmmakers
who have felt moved to acknowledge Hawks’s influence is exceptionally wide; the one consistent element is that most of them are, or have been at certain periods of their careers, very good directors. Other than the oblique, nonverbal one in
Contempt
, possibly the first explicit, self-conscious reference to a Hawks film in the work of another director came in Bernardo Bertolucci’s second picture,
Before the Revolution
, in 1964. In it, the leading character spends a good little while trying to convince his friend to join the Communist Party, then bids him goodbye and heads off into a house. As the friend departs, the hero comes back out and shouts to him, “Agostino, go and see
Red River
. Don’t miss it.”