Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (14 page)

Hawks completed
Paid to Love
in mid-September. Normally, it would have been expected to come out before the end of the year. For unknown
reasons, however, Fox sat on the film for nearly a year, by which time Hawks had directed two more features. Hawks said that the studio held it back “because they thought it was so
interesting” but also maintained that by the time it came out, in late July 1927, “everybody had done everything we had done in the picture,” resulting in a flop. This makes little sense as an explanation, but there is really no reason that can account for such a protracted delay, except, perhaps, an overabundance of George O’Brien titles on the release schedule. The reviews were on the mixed-to-positive
side, with special kudos reserved for Valli and the visual qualities, but the director’s perennial derision of the film was no doubt prodded by its relative commercial failure.

Hawks’s protests years later that sophisticated, European-style sex dramas were not his cup of tea perhaps should not be taken too seriously, for there is further evidence that he was enormously influenced by the likes
of Murnau, Lubitsch, Dupont, and the entire Continental wave then washing over Hollywood. As soon as he finished making
Paid to Love
, Hawks undertook one of the most surprising and overtly emotional projects of his career,
Budapest
. Written by Hawks, the story was fleshed out by Seton Miller into a very detailed, scene-by-scene, forty-six-page adaptation dated January 12, 1927, that bears the
intriguing alternate title
The Satyr
. It is, in fact, the commanding story of a big man brought low, a tale of war and sacrifice, a study of how the toughest and most egotistical of men is transformed by love. It contains several prominent motifs that would surface in later Hawks films: the leading character literally becomes crippled, the central female character is a beautiful entertainer who
inspires a rivalry among three men, and one man willingly sacrifices his life to save another man, a gesture that recurs in Hawks’s early work. But it also possesses an emotionally sincere, deeply felt quality that is unusual for him, as well as a vivid illustration of how a man can possess both an exceedingly hard outward personality and a heart capable of infinite tenderness and generosity.

Set in pre-war Budapest, the story contains such startling elements as the sadistic hero’s seduction of a beautiful dancer while she is strapped into his prize possession, a torture chair from the Spanish Inquisition.

But after a very strong start, Hawks’s and Miller’s treatment becomes overly melodramatic and contrived, lacking the irony, the intellectual distance on human behavior that made
the dramatization of similar stories by Stroheim, Sternberg, and others so distinctive. Fox didn’t bite on the project in 1927, nor did it when Hawks and Miller resubmitted it for consideration in May 1928. Later that year, however, the studio assigned eight different
writers to take a stab at it, asking them to keep the title but jettison Hawks’s and Miller’s characters and story line; none of
the subsequent outlines or treatments, including one in late 1929 that was intended as a musical, bore any relation to the original idea.

Hawks often claimed that he had everything to do with one of the most famous pictures to come out of the late silent period, Josef von Sternberg’s
Underworld
, which was heralded as the first real gangster film. He told Joseph McBride, “Ben Hecht sold a story
to me. Ben and I worked on the story, and a friend [Art Rosson] was to be the director. He went up to San Francisco, as I remember, to go to the prison there, but unfortunately got tight, so they had to fire him. We had sketches made of every scene. We had sets built, and we had a cast. It was beautifully written. Then we got Joe von Sternberg to direct the picture, and out came this really good
picture.” When Kevin Brownlow asked Hawks about Sternberg, he said, “We needed another director and I’d seen a little quickie that he’d made and said let’s give this guy a chance. And they said, if you watch him. And I said, sure, I’ll watch him.” The only problem with these stories is that
Underworld
, a Paramount production, was prepared with Rosson in late 1926 and shot by Sternberg beginning
in late March 1927, when Hawks had already been directing pictures at Fox for a year and a half and hadn’t been employed at Paramount for three years. To be generous, it is entirely possible that Hawks might have consulted with his friend Art Rosson about the project, may have first met Ben Hecht through him, and could easily, once Rosson was fired, put in a good word with Jesse Lasky and others
at Paramount on behalf of Sternberg, whom he liked a great deal. But whatever he may have done, he did it privately, as a friend or adviser, not in any official capacity. And under no circumstances did Hawks “watch” Sternberg as anything other than a friendly spectator, since he was busy at Fox preparing
Fazil
at the time. This is not only a case of Hawks once again taking credit for making an
important filmmaker’s career, but an instance of inverted influence: there is no question that Sternberg, Hecht, and a couple of the other writers on
Underworld
, the credited Charles Furthman and the uncredited Jules Furthman, had more influence on Hawks than he did on them.

When
Budapest
didn’t proceed, Hawks suddenly inherited one of the studio’s most promising commercial projects. Fox had
bought one of the most popular Broadway plays of the era, Russell G. Medcraft and Norma Mitchell’s
The Cradle Snatchers
, a farce about three wives who combat their husbands’ philandering by pursuing some college students. The play
was the big comedy hit of the 1925–26 season, running for fifty-nine weeks beginning September 7, 1925. The playwrights were engaged to write an initial treatment, but
the real screenwriting chore was turned over to thirty-year-old Sarah Y. Mason, whose husband, writer-director Victor Heerman, was an old collaborator of Mickey Neilan’s. At first, Allan Dwan was assigned the directing job, but abruptly, at the end of November, Dwan was off and Hawks, the older man’s money man just a few years before, replaced him.

Fox and Hawks felt considerable pressure to
make sure the film version lived up to the often hilarious play. It is very doubtful that Hawks ever saw the stage production, and even though the basic three-act structure was not toyed with, silent films often proved ill-equipped to deliver the virtues of dialogue-rich stage plays. It was an assignment unlike any Hawks had yet faced in his short career, in which comic timing and theatrical technique
would be critical. But Hawks was up to the challenge, turning out another audience-pleasing comedy that met the approval even of critics who held it directly up against the play.

Hawks shot the picture between January 17 and February 15, 1927, and it opened at the giant Roxy in New York City on May 28, nearly two months before
Paid to Love
debuted at the same theater. Joseph Striker’s Joe is
the campus “sheik,” and Nick Stuart’s Henry Winton is stuck on one girl, while Arthur Lake’s Oscar, the “Swede,” is another of Hawks’s comic leads who is desperately afraid of women. The fortyish women played by Louise Fazenda, Dorothy Phillips, and Ethel Wales are seen dealing with their errant husbands in different ways, and Hawks gets in a personal joke when an insert of a business card for an
establishment called The Club 400 reveals the name “Victor Flemen” scribbled on it.

Part of reel three and all of reel four of the seven-reel picture are missing from the print Peter Bogdanovich salvaged some years ago from Fox, this after years of the film having been thought lost. But it all builds to a climax in which the society women decide to punish their husbands by consorting with the
spiffy college boys, in the hopes of teaching them a lesson. It is a boisterous, energetic Jazz Age film, sprightly paced and fresh-feeling despite its obvious theatrical origins. Like Hawks’s other early work, it hardly stands as a major silent film, but it did just what it set out to do and certainly bolstered Hawks’s confidence in his ability to direct comedy and achieve desired effects. As Leland
A. Poague points out in his critical book on the director,
The Cradle Snatchers
can be seen “as a paradigm instance of role reversals and role playing in Hawks,” and while it may indeed forecast more of the same in his films over the years, the overtly theatrical origins
of the piece have more than a lot to do with this. At this point, Fox had every reason to believe that its new director, after
a year and a half on the job, had found his niche in comedy.

All through this time, Kenneth Hawks was quickly establishing a great deal of credit for himself at the studio as a supervisor, the equivalent of a contemporary line producer, or the studio’s administrator and organizer on a particular production. Kenneth’s intelligence and amiability stood him well in this job, which he performed on
Albert Ray’s
More Pay—Less Work
and John G. Blystone’s
Ankles Preferred
before dabbling in editing on Sydney and H. A. Snow’s Arctic documentary
The Great White North
, in story writing on Albert Ray’s
A Thief in the Dark
, and even, it seems, in cinematography on Richard Rosson’s bootlegging melodrama,
The Escape
, al-though his shared camera credit is somewhat questionable. In any event, Kenneth
received a very well-rounded education in the various aspects of filmmaking in a very short time, and soon went back to supervising.

From the second half of 1926 through 1927, romance bloomed for all three Hawks boys. The Mayfair Society was an elite social institution that held formal white-tie dinner dances once a month at the Ambassador Hotel. Several friends of the Hawkses, most notably Mary
Pickford, were among the frankly snobbish group’s prime movers, and it was at one of these elegant affairs that both Howard and Kenneth Hawks had their first dates with the women they would marry.

Victor Fleming was still seeing Norma Shearer sporadically in 1926, and when she agreed to accompany him to a Mayfair ball that summer, she asked if he knew anyone who might escort her younger sister,
Athole. Howard Hawks, always quite fond of Norma, readily agreed to fill out the foursome. According to their daughter Barbara, it was “romantic love at first sight” between Howard and Athole. Physically, there was no mistaking that Athole was Norma’s sister; both were pale-skinned brunettes with very English good looks, but most people considered Athole the greater beauty of the two. Even Norma
admitted as much in her unpublished autobiography: “I wasn’t nearly as popular with the boys as my sister—she was two years older and much prettier.” Norma, who had the bluest of eyes, added that Athole had “an unusual pair of brown eyes that caught all the beaux”; Norma, in her pre-Hollywood days, got only the hand-me-downs. Athole was not driven professionally the way her sister was, and she had
impeccable grace and manners that appealed greatly to Howard’s sense of propriety and good breeding.

Born on November 20, 1900, Athole Dane Shearer was at a curious stage in her life when she met Howard Hawks. Athole, Norma and their brother Douglas had enjoyed a spoiled upbringing in suburban Montreal, with Athole often tutoring her younger sister, who rarely attended school. But their pampered
lives began to be threatened when their father Andrew’s lumber company and investments went bad during World War I. In reduced circumstances, they had to sell their large house in fashionable Westmount and move into a modest apartment, and family life was strained further by the constant philandering of Andy, a “sport,” as Norma put it, who “was a gay blade and had sown plenty of wild oats.”

In the winter of 1917–18, Athole showed disturbing signs of some sort of emotional or psychological imbalance. As Norma described it, “my beautiful sister Athole became desperately ill—apparently the psychological effects of the war during our adolescence.” Athole had dated several young men who had gone off to war, and many schoolmates she knew more casually were in the trenches as well. Canadian
casualties were disproportionately high, and when the inevitable word came back that some of her friends had been killed, the news hit Athole hard. The sisters’ bedroom was plastered with patriotic posters, and Norma remembered that Athole “began to look at them strangely one day—then she said quietly with frightened eyes, ‘I can hear them—they’re coming—up in the sky!’ We thought she was out of
her mind!” Despite the fact that “screams from the upper window each morning turned my steps back from school,” no professional treatment was sought for Athole because of the embarrassing stigma attached to mental illness. “But she recovered one day, after three months, as suddenly as she became ill. We never knew how or why! Everyone was elated and breathed and ate and slept once more!”

That
was the way Norma remembered things. In fact, Athole withdrew gradually into her intense depression, becoming progressively worse whenever she learned of further deaths among her friends, until she finally stopped speaking. With this, the family physician ordered her confined to her bed, and she was sedated for a month, after which she suddenly returned to something resembling normal. The teenager
suffered another attack of acute melancholia some months later, but by then doctors, who had seen numerous cases of similar female misery, had decided that the condition was specifically war-related and would disappear as soon as the conflict ended. For the moment, then, Athole’s problems were conveniently swept under the carpet.

After the war, the family fell on hard times. Andy’s plant closed
entirely, young Douglas became a chauffeur, Norma stayed on a friend’s couch, and Athole, who knitted sweaters for four dollars apiece, and her mother, Edith, moved into La Corona Hotel, where they could stay for very little since it was owned by a family friend. Soon Edith sold everything and, with four hundred dollars, took the girls to New York City with the intention that they would conquer
Broadway. Living in a dump of a building, refused as showgirls by Ziegfeld but able to get representation with the Edward Small Agency, the two sisters found minor movie work with the Transatlantic Picture Corporation in Mount Vernon, in a two-reel comedy about a girls’ finishing school, and were extras in D. W. Griffith’s
Way Down East
and the Marion Davies film
The Restless Sex
, both released
in 1920. But after a year they ran out of money and retreated to Montreal, where the girls became models for the city’s leading portrait photographer, Jimmy Rice. With a bit of experience under their belts, they were able to return to New York City, where Norma found regular work as a model for illustrators and photographers and had a little romance with Ben Lyon, an aspiring actor who would go
on to star in Howard Hughes’s
Hell’s Angels
. Edith took a job in the blouse department of Franklin Simon’s on Fifth Avenue.