Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (15 page)

For her part, Athole was happy to return to New York so she could see what might develop between her and a young man named John Ward. The son of a prosperous New Jersey textile manufacturer, Ward had left the security of the family business behind to pursue a career writing
for radio but picked up money wherever he could. He and the Shearers had met the year before, when they were all extras in
The Restless Sex
. Eventually, John and Athole began seeing each other, and he abruptly proposed marriage. Edith was against the match, correctly sensing that Ward was a questionable prospect since, as Norma snootily put it, he “chose not to share in his father’s fortune.”
Evidently, the Ward family’s feelings about the Shearers and their show-business orientation was mutual, for the two families met for the only time at the civil ceremony in New York City in early April 1923. The couple honeymooned in the Adirondacks and moved into a modest Greenwich Village apartment with, in Norma’s view, “not much money and a rather uncertain future.”

During this time, Norma,
with Eddie Small as her agent, had begun appearing regularly in films made on the East Coast, and shortly after her sister’s wedding she signed an MGM contract and moved with her mother to Hollywood, where she made eight films within a year. The following year she was loaned to Paramount and began her serious romance with Victor
Fleming, just as she was being admired from afar by Irving Thalberg.
On July 31, 1924, in New York City, Athole gave birth to a son, Peter John Ward, but this by no means indicated a happy marriage. According to Norma, her sister’s “life seemed somewhat dismal at this moment,” and about eighteen months later, feeling Athole needed both emotional and financial help, Norma and Edith brought Athole and little Peter out to Los Angeles, where she moved into the Shearer
bungalow on Franklin at Whitley Heights, just a block from where Howard and Kenneth Hawks lived.

Norma echoed Barbara Hawks’s sentiments about the romance between Howard and Athole, at least as far as Athole was concerned. Hawks was “more fascinating than any man she had ever met,” Norma claimed. “My sister, to make the story simple, fell in love with him so deeply that it was to last a lifetime,
although not their marriage.” Athole had her son to take care of and was with her mother and sister, but she was still quite lonely in Los Angeles when Hawks entered her life, and there can be little doubt that Howard, in addition to seeming like a terribly dashing and accomplished figure, benefited from reminding Athole of the father who had been so absent from her life. Like Hawks, Andy Shearer
had gray hair and blue eyes. Very athletic, he loved horses and was a member of the Montreal Hunt Club. Raised in a very sporting environment, Athole was a fine horseback rider, swimmer, ice skater, skier, and sailor, better than Hawks in just about all these areas. She and Howard saw each other constantly through 1927, playing golf and making the fashionable social rounds, and Hawks didn’t take
long to push the idea of marriage. But the acutely sensitive Athole was increasingly distraught over the prospect of telling Johnny Ward that she wanted to leave him, and it took months for her to work up the nerve to ask for a divorce.

During precisely the same period, Kenneth Hawks saw his own love life take off. In the late summer of 1926, at the canteen at the Fox studios, Kenneth was introduced
to the actress Mary Astor. Only twenty, this patrician beauty, also a Midwesterner by birth, had already acted in more than two dozen films and had been something of a star since appearing in
Beau Brummel
in 1924, opposite John Barrymore, with whom she had had a wild affair. For their first date, Kenneth asked her to the Mayfair Society ball, and by that fall they were dating regularly. She described
their early time together in her autobiography,
My Story:
“I liked being with him; it was never hectically romantic, with the emphasis on sex. I liked his quiet good manners and his good taste. He had prematurely grey hair, very twinkling blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, and a grin a mile wide.”

Mary was working constantly, and when she went away on location, Kenneth visited her as often
as possible. He fell hard very quickly, and when she stunned him by confessing her recent passionate involvements with Barrymore and another man, he decided that her honesty made him think even more of her. When he proposed, she gently put him off for a while, uncertain as to whether she was ready for marriage, but Kenneth persisted. She liked Frank and Helen Hawks, her parents liked him, and by
February 1927, Mary decided she would marry Kenneth. As she explained, “We had built a wonderful companionship. He was a very real, substantial person, comfortable to be with. Wherever we went together we had good times. We worked hard, both of us, but we also found time for fun.” They played golf and attended sporting events and premieres, and she was very impressed with his thorough knowledge
of the moviemaking process. Distressed at how little money he was earning compared to the star salaries Mary was raking in, Ken refused to set a date until his new Fox contract was approved, but Mary, realizing what a “fair-haired boy” Ken was at Fox, had no doubt that her fiancé was a young man with a decidedly bright future.

The couple spent a good deal of time at the Hawks family home in Pasadena,
which she found warm but clouded by the dire illness of Grace Hawks, who, at twenty-four, was suffering from severe tuberculosis. Despite the intense objections of her three brothers, Helen Hawks’s staunch Christian Scientist beliefs prevailed, and Grace was not sent to a sanitarium. Grace slowly deteriorated, and the boys privately blamed their mother for what they saw as their sister’s
unnecessary death, which came on December 23, 1927. The funeral was held two days after Christmas.

In the spring of 1927, as Mary was starring in Lewis Milestone’s
Two Arabian Knights
, the first major film produced by Howard Hughes, she and Kenneth matched up the latter’s younger brother, Bill, with Mary’s friend the actress Bessie Love, setting another betrothal in motion. During this time,
Mary and Kenneth decided to abstain from sex until they got married, even though the date still lay vaguely in the future. Although Mary agreed to the arrangement, it came to bother her as the weeks and months wore on. By contrast, “Ken seemed not to mind,” she allowed; “he was not a sensual person at all. He had none of the deep, fierce passion that I had known. He was very affectionate and demonstrative;
often we sat in a big chair, with me curled in his lap, and read from the same book.”

There were numerous joint outings with Howard and Athole. On the weekend beginning Thursday evening, August 11, 1927, they all attended
a dinner party at the Biltmore Hotel at which Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer announced their engagement. On Friday night, the entire Hawks family assembled to celebrate Kenneth’s
twenty-ninth birthday, and on Saturday, the quartet joined Victor Fleming and Arthur Rosson and the latter’s wife, Lou, for a weekend excursion to Santa Barbara, where Howard gave rides on his new Chris-Craft. On September 29, they all attended the Thalberg-Shearer garden wedding, where Kenneth uncharacteristically made a fool of himself by shouting, “Yea-a-ay!” when Herman Mankiewicz ceremoniously
carried out the Cup of Life, which Kenneth took to be a giant champagne goblet.

Finally, at the beginning of December, Kenneth received his new contract, at one thousand dollars per week, and set the wedding date for February 24. Kenneth and Mary rented a small house on Alcyona Drive on the hill above Vine Street and Franklin, not far from where Kenneth and Howard had lived together; furnished
it beautifully; and left the evening of the wedding on the train for New York. Mary Astor loved Kenneth, but she knew something was amiss when her husband, on their wedding night, simply kissed her good night and repaired to his own berth to go to sleep. But the whole matter was, she said, “not a subject Ken and I could discuss freely. He possessed a kind of natural delicacy that seemed inviolable.
In our own relationship we were happily comfortable, but I clearly sensed the existence of an intangible line that I could not, and did not want to, cross over.”

During their honeymoon, they saw a play at nearly every performance time in New York; visited Ken’s alma mater, Yale; took the train to Florida and a plane to Havana; then sailed back to Los Angeles via Panama. During their monthlong
trip, they never once had sex. In the coming months, Mary acknowledged, her “marital relations with Ken were, in effect, nonexistent; their infrequent occurrences were brief and unsatisfactory. Total abstinence was easier than this; but either solution caused me to be nervous and upset.” Mary eventually sought refuge in the eager attentions of a Fox executive, Russell Bradbury, who convinced her
that Ken was more interested in making movies and playing golf than in developing any sex life. Although tortured from the beginning by her betrayal, the frustrated Mary finally gave in and started an affair. But she soon became pregnant—definitely not by Kenneth—and had an illicit abortion, which she somehow managed to hide from her husband. Mary’s mother finally told Ken what his wife was up to,
and the couple was finally forced to clear the air about things, which in the end helped the relationship. The marriage became
stronger, and they took a new, larger house on Appian Way at the top of Lookout Mountain and entertained quite a bit, although Mary Astor never did say if their sexual relations ever markedly improved.

In March 1927, just after
The Cradle Snatchers
was finished, Fox extended
Howard Hawks’s contract for a second year. He was to make three more films, for thirty thousand dollars per picture, and the studio included options for two years beyond that at a salary that stepped up by ten thousand dollars per picture per year. At once, Hawks was assigned to another exotic romance to which he felt he had little to contribute.
Fazil
was based on Pierre Frondaie’s 1922 French
play
L’Insoumise
, which had been a particular hit on the London stage under the title
Prince Fazil
. The piece concerned an Arab prince’s disastrous marriage to a free-willed Parisienne and was adapted by Philip Klein, a World War I veteran whose father was the playwright Charles Klein, and written by Seton Miller. With its emphasis on decor, costumes, heavy breathing, and fatalistic romanticism,
this was decidedly not Hawks’s cup of tea; nor did the director ever consider Fox’s all-American star, Charles Farrell, remotely credible as a volatile sheik. But Hawks still found many ways to make the best of a questionable situation, and while the film is indisputably artificial in the extreme, its sexual charge and numerous deft directorial touches make it a perfectly reasonable exercise in
Romeo and Juliet
–style tragedy.

The film begins by contrasting the old ways of the Arab world with the new customs gaining wide currency in Europe. In a scene found terribly gruesome by some at the time, Hadji Fazil is seen ordering the execution of a runaway servant. Just before the huge sword is about to come down, it is time for prayers; but as soon as devotion to Allah is paid, the blade
is raised again to complete the job. In vivid relief, Fabienne, played by the blond Norwegian star Greta Nissen, is seen “glorying in the freedom of the modern world” in Europe. At the outset, Fazil is a member of a particular Hawksian club: “Women do not interest me,” he says, upon being encouraged to continue his lineage.

While on a business trip to Venice, however, Fazil finds his interest
aroused when he spots Fabienne. In one of Hawks’s most arresting inventions, the two future lovers see each other in big open windows across a canal, and the remainder of the scene is shot from the point of view of a gondolier. The comic undertones here and elsewhere demonstrate the strong influence Lubitsch had on Hawks at this stage, as he did on so many other directors. Fabienne, displaying her
modern temperament, readily sleeps with the prince, and the morning-after scene is particularly lovely: beautiful
shots of Fabienne awakening and smiling rapturously, while Fazil is seen bowing in prayer toward Mecca. To keep himself amused, before one of the lovemaking scenes Hawks told both Farrell and Nissen privately that the other performer was very shy and that they would have to do something
provocative to bring the scene alive. “Well, they were two of the busiest beavers you’ve ever seen in all your life,” Hawks chuckled, and it is true that no Hawks film ever again featured nearly so much heavy kissing, touching, holding, and general overt physical sex as this one.

But the East-West rift soon asserts itself. Fabienne can’t bear the traditional role she is expected to play, and
Fazil is so miserable that he considers killing himself. Instead, however, he takes a harem, and when Fabienne visits it there are some imaginative shots, courtesy of cinematographer L. W. O’Connell—of one concubine, for instance, shaving her armpits, as well as some silhouetted nudity—that foreshadow the fetishism of Sternberg, although with Hawks it is less extreme. Fazil shuts down the harem, save
for the sexiest member of it, who is kept on as Fabienne’s servant, but Fabienne quickly becomes miserable being cooped up at her husband’s compound. As with
Romeo and Juliet
, there is no way out except death. Mortally wounded, Fazil uses his suicide ring on Fabienne so they will be together always and, after being unable to utter the crucial words throughout their entire relationship, finally
says “I love you” just before she dies. He follows quickly, to join her in another, better world.

On the one hand, this is the sort of melodramatic Hollywood hokum that Hawks saw fit to avoid for the remainder of his career, the end of his flirtation with the sort of sophisticated, European romance that was in vogue at the time but was never something he could make his own. On a more personal,
psychological level,
Fazil
, coincidentally or not, dealt directly with issues Hawks was facing in life at that very moment. As Fabienne says, “I am afraid of marriage, afraid of anything that might take away the freedom I love.” One needn’t take it too seriously, but
Fazil
is a worst-case scenario about marriage, a horror story about the fearsome consequences of taking the plunge, something that
was very much on Hawks’s mind when he was making the film. Faced with this story later in life, Hawks would undoubtedly have made a comedy out of it rather than such a serious piece. On the other hand, throughout the rest of his career, he chose to virtually never make any more films about marriage at all.