Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (23 page)

A less enthusiastic assessment
came from the leading agent Myron Selznick, the brother of one of Hawks’s least favorite Hollywood executives, David O. Selznick: “Mr. Hawks has directed several good motion pictures, and in my opinion is a good director, but … in my opinion there are many directors who could satisfactorily and artistically perform services of the kind and character performed by Howard Hawks.”

Amazingly, the
most halfhearted endorsement came from Hawks’s own agent, Ruth Collier, who had spent the previous summer unsuccessfully attempting to find Hawks work with some of these same moguls who now found the director’s talents so extraordinary. “Based on my efforts to secure employment for Howard Hawks as a motion picture director,” she remarked, “I am of the opinion that he is a good director but that it
is reasonably possible for his services to be satisfactorily replaced by other motion picture directors.”

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. contributed his view about
Chances
, which by March he had already finished starring in, under the direction of Allan Dwan: “I was personally present when Howard Hawks made several suggestions for changes in connection with the adaptation of said story, and I personally
know that several of the suggestions made by Howard Hawks were actually used in filming said motion picture.… In my opinion … the suggestions of Howard Hawks strengthened and improved said motion picture.”

Hawks responded to First National’s charges by issuing a total denial of everything the studio claimed: no, he did not refuse to work on
Chances;
no, it was not true that in Warner’s office
he “threw on his desk the books mentioned in his affidavit, or any other books, or that I stated I would not make any of them”; no, he had not asked Warner to enter into a separate
agreement to make one film per year of his own choosing; no, “it is not true that my services cannot be replaced, but on the contrary it is true that First National secured the services of another director to direct
…
Chances
”; yes, it was true that he participated in one story conference concerning the film, “but it is not true that in said conference I made or offered no suggestions of my own. On the contrary, I talked in extenso … and I now state that a great many of the suggestions that I made were actually used”; but no, “it is not true that I refused to work.”

A succession of demurrers, delays, and
broken trial dates, and requests for restraining orders was paraded through the court all spring. By far the most extraordinary document filed during the entire proceedings was a statement by Hawks denying everything First National and their high-powered allies stated was special about him. A blanket admission that he possessed no special skills whatsoever, it may be the biggest lie Hawks ever uttered,
and is worth printing nearly in its entirety for its full astonishment value:

This defendant denies that he has developed or has a method or technique of directing motion pictures, and/or of doing and/or performing the other duties of a motion picture director which were or are peculiar or unique to himself alone, or which cannot be or are not duplicated by any other motion picture director.
Said defendant denies that he has or is possessed of the ability to do or perform all of the special duties of a motion picture director … or in an unusual or extraordinarily able manner, and/or as a result thereof, to produce or direct high-class or exceptionally successful motion pictures. Defendant admits that he has directed and produced in the last past several years a total of nine motion pictures,
some of which motion pictures have been and are financially and artistically successful to a certain degree, and alleges that other of said motion pictures which he has directed and produced are motion pictures which have not been financially or artistically successful. Defendant admits that he directed the motion pictures entitled
The Dawn Patrol
and
The Criminal Code;
the defendant has no information
or belief upon the subject, and basing his denial upon said ground, denies that each of said motion pictures has been or is highly successful, or that each of said motion pictures is or has been declared by motion picture critics and reviewers to be among the best motion pictures produced; defendant denies that by reason of his ability … or by reason of the successful character of motion
pictures directed or produced by him, he has acquired
or has a nationwide reputation as an outstanding and/or unusually able motion picture director, and denies that the defendant commands or has commanded a high salary.

Hawks concluded by confessing that when he signed the First National contract, he “had been unable to obtain work for a great many months,” and therefore “was compelled to and
did accept such provision in said contract” that he might not have otherwise.

Already irritated with Jack Warner and Hal Wallis for refusing to make a court appearance on the specious grounds that neither was actually an officer of First National, the judge in April denied the company’s application for a temporary injunction against Hawks and Caddo. Two months later, with
Scarface
about to roll
and a trial date yet to be set, the matter was suddenly dropped. The big boys had failed to stop Hughes and Hawks from proceeding with their reckless, independent film, but there would be other places to ambush them down the road. In the meantime, what might have seemed like a logical solution before all the legal huffing and puffing began was agreed to out of court: Hawks’s old First National
contract was torn up and a new one was signed, stipulating that immediately upon completing
Scarface
, Hawks would return to First National to make one film a year for two years. With First National pleased to be saving a degree of face, the deal was signed June 22. The next day, Hawks, having got what he wanted, started shooting what would always remain his favorite film.

As usual, the family
passed the 1930–31 holidays at Frank and Helen’s in Pasadena, and so much had changed from the previous Christmas. Little David, their first real grandchild, was over a year old, while Peter was now five. Athole was feeling well, not having had the slightest sign of a relapse since her son was born. Howard, thanks to his break with Warner Bros., was officially out of a job, even though he had directed
one of the biggest hits of the year. Bill, celebrating the first anniversary of his marriage to Bessie Love, who had appeared in five pictures that year, told the family that he would soon be starting his own finance-management company, with show-business personalities as his prospective clients. All in all, the Depression had not hit them particularly hard, compared to most families in America;
Frank’s investments and orange groves were solid, and Howard was thriving and building a big house in Beverly Hills. But none of this could make up for the void that was all too obvious and still painfully felt, the absence of Kenneth at Christmas dinner for the first time.

The day after New Year’s, Hawks bid farewell to Victor Fleming, who, with buddies Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and John Monk
Saunders, set sail for Japan on the first leg of a ten-month journey that would result in a larky semidocumentary film,
Around the World in Eighty Minutes. The Criminal Code
opened the next day, and in the middle of January, just as Warner Bros.’
Little Caesar
was opening like gangbusters around the nation, Hawks signed his deal with Hughes to direct
Scarface
for $25,000.

The two recent adversaries
and new partners had quite a bit in common. Tall and rangy, with somewhat drawling ways of speaking and a craftiness lurking behind their reserve, the two Howards loved planes, golf, and dazzling women, although Hawks’s taste in the women tended toward the classy and well-bred, whereas Hughes preferred brassy starlets. Although more of a Hollywood insider than Hughes, Hawks privately viewed
most of the town’s potentates as fools or clowns and could easily play into Hughes’s own contempt for the studio bosses from a more informed and experienced vantage point.

At the time they teamed up, Hughes had already produced seven movies in just four years. In 1926, two years after inheriting a vast fortune, the twenty-year-old Hughes had come to Hollywood thinking it would be fun to make
pictures. To the town’s amazement, he started off with a surprise hit,
Everybody’s Acting
, which went out through Famous Players– Lasky. Aligning himself with United Artists, Hughes next made
Two Arabian Knights
, a buddy comedy not unlike
A Girl in Every Port
that also scored big and won Lewis Milestone an Oscar for direction. While immersing himself in his three-year labor of love, the aviation
epic
Hell’s Angels
, much of which he directed himself, Hughes also produced the comedy
The Mating Call
, the early gangster melodrama
The Racket
(which contained some seeds of
Scarface
), and three appallingly silly flops—
Cock of the Air, Sky Devils
, and
Age for Love
, the last two starring the petite former Broadway showgirl Billie Dove, whom Hughes was trying to make into a star and who most people
felt would become his wife. Having lost money overall in the motion picture business, Hughes decided that gangster pictures provided the nearest thing to a guaranteed profit. He figured that if he made the greatest underworld saga the public had yet seen, it would stand a good chance to be a smash. To this end, he put his own directorial aspirations to the side, swallowed his pride, and pursued
the man he had decided was the best director in Hollywood.

The erroneous assertions of Ben Hecht’s biographer to the contrary, Hawks preceded the writer onto
Scarface
. Both Hawks and Hughes had
had prior dealings with the cynical, prodigiously talented former Chicago newspaperman. Hawks and the writer had hit it off when they met in connection with
Underworld
four years earlier, and Hecht, not
known for his generous opinions of movie folk, had fond feelings for Hawks: “I like him,” he wrote to his wife. “He is one of the few half humans—to whom movies are a pleasant sideline, a thing to be done as work, not to be lived as a career.” For his part, Hughes bought Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s great 1928 play
The Front Page
in the fall of 1930 for $125,000, and had Lewis Milestone filming
it by late January of the following year, when the team for
Scarface
was just coming together.

Just after the holidays, Hecht and MacArthur boarded the train from New York to Los Angeles, bringing with them a clean-cut young Midwesterner named John Lee Mahin, a Harvard graduate and former reporter who had just quit his job as an advertising copywriter on the strength of Hecht’s promise to add
him to his writing stable at two hundred dollars a week and find him a job in Hollywood. Ostensibly, Hecht and MacArthur were headed west to write the third act of
Twentieth Century
, the play they had started in the fall, and Hecht hoped Mahin would prove up to performing as ghostwriter on
The Unholy Garden
, which Hecht had recklessly agreed to write for Sam Goldwyn on the basis of $10,000 for
the story and the lure of $125,000, an unheard-of sum, for the finished script. Paying rent of $1,200 per month, Hecht and MacArthur installed themselves at the sprawling Youngworth Ranch, a seventy-five-acre avocado ranch in the hills of Culver City overlooking MGM, where they hosted brawling parties and became easily distracted from the task of finishing
Twentieth Century
.

In mid-January, with
Hecht recently arrived on the Goldwyn lot to cope with the unwanted
Unholy Garden
and Hawks just installed in offices Hughes had rented from the producer, Hawks bumped into the writer and called him into his office. The way Hawks told it, “I wanted Ben Hecht to write on [
Scarface
], and he said, ‘Sure, what are you going to make?’ I said, ‘A gangster picture.’ He said, ‘Hell, you don’t want to
make one of those things.’ I said, ‘Well, Ben, I’ve got an idea that the Borgia family is living in Chicago today. See, our Borgia is Al Capone, and his sister does the same incest thing as Lucretia Borgia.’ And he said, ‘Well, let’s start tomorrow morning.’ We did the script in eleven days.”

Hecht remembered the encounter quite similarly, admitting he didn’t like the idea of writing another
gangster film, but that he was talked into it by Hawks. There was no mention of the Borgias, however, and Mahin adamantly insisted that “
Ben
said that to
Hawks
. I heard him say that. The
Borgias have always been Ben’s favorite characters. Howard, bless his heart, probably knew who they were, but I think he looked them up in the encyclopedia. Howard was such a liar! That’s a typical example.”

Hecht said that when he jumped off
The Unholy Garden
Goldwyn “was in a state of epilepsy for about two days.” He also recalled, “I met with Mr. Hughes, who told me the story he had bought and I didn’t think it was any good. It was about two brothers, one turns out to be Capone and the other’s the Chief of Police, and they have a great struggle. So I didn’t trust Mr. Hughes, because he looked kind
of goofy. He had a very weak face. He was deaf, couldn’t hear anything you said, and he couldn’t talk, and he was lanky, and he seemed to be a messy-looking fellow all around. So I couldn’t imagine he had any money, so I made him pay me every night at 6 o’clock a thousand dollars, and then I would work the next day. I told Hughes I would make up a different story, and he said ‘What’s the plot?’

“I said, ‘I haven’t got any plot, but there have been several gangster pictures made, and I will double the casualty list of any picture to date, and we’ll have twice as good a picture.
The Secret Six
killed off about eight people. I will kill off twenty, and we’ll have the audience right in our hands.”

Prior to Hecht’s arrival, several other writers had tried to knock out a screenplay for
Scarface
. None had succeeded in pleasing Hughes, although two of the initial scenarists, Fred Pasley, a former Chicago reporter and crimeland expert, and W. R. Burnett, ultimately received screen credit. Burnett, a hard-boiled fiction writer hired because of his 1929 mob novel
Little Caesar
, was paid two thousand dollars a week for five weeks to write a script for
Scarface
. “I don’t say my script was very
good. I don’t say anybody could write a good script under those circumstances. It was a mess. Nobody really knew what the hell they were doing—except for Howard Hawks apparently. But I never got along with Hawks, and I didn’t work for Hawks when I was working for Hughes. I went in and talked to Hughes, and he gave me an office down the hall, and they started bringing in scripts. Pretty soon I
had twelve scripts piled on my desk, until I said, ‘What the hell’s all this?’