Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (29 page)

Bright heard a true story from a racer about how a jealous driver had caused the death of a friend
during a race and related it to Hawks, who was unresponsive. Bright was later amused to learn that Hawks had told the story to Zanuck as if it were his own, whereupon Zanuck recounted it back to Glasmon and Bright as if
he
had thought it up. This would be a typical example of Hawksian credit-taking if such an incident had not already been present in the treatments originally written by Hawks and
then Miller.

While Hawks and Koenekamp remained in Indianapolis to shoot some racing footage, Glasmon and Bright were ordered home to knock out a draft. In their presence, Zanuck dictated a nine-page, single-spaced letter to Hawks that contained all their combined ideas about the script, a document that reveals Zanuck’s leading role in making Warner Bros. films the sharpest, most vibrant, and
fastest-paced of the early 1930s. Zanuck posited that although the story “may be lacking in plot twists, such twists are not essential with so colorful a background and such a sound foundation for a dramatic, human story.” He also insisted that the script be cut down by a third, to no more than one hundred pages. The dialogue, he felt, “is lacking in the sparkle and the quick wit of the modern picture
… we should tell our story in the modern manner of compressed drama.… What we want to achieve is the rapid story progression that we had in
The Public Enemy
and you had in
The Dawn Patrol
.” To this end, he made dozens of specific points and suggestions and was vigilant about discarding clichés. He also felt that Anne shouldn’t fall in love with Eddie after spending just one night with him. “The
next sequence is after a lapse of time, and gives her time to fall in love with him. Otherwise he would have to have a terrifically long donniker to have her fall in love with him overnight.” He also expressed alarm over the budget, pointing out that even
The Dawn Patrol
, one of Warners’ biggest
hits of the previous year, “made a net profit of less than $200,000—and pictures are not making anywhere
near as much as they were when
The Dawn Patrol
was released.”

After doing one rewrite of the first draft, Glasmon and Bright were ushered off the picture. Niven Busch, a twenty-eight-year-old writer just in from New York, where he had written for
Time
and the
New Yorker
, was brought in to rewrite during the shoot. For some reason, Zanuck believed Busch was supposed to be great with dialogue,
although Busch had never written any in his life. Every evening after shooting, Busch would go to Hawks’s Bedford Drive house, where “with unerring accuracy [Hawks] would describe how the [next day’s] scene should go. I’d make rough notes, and then I’d go back to my apartment in Hollywood, with my memory fresh, [and] I’d write the scene, which would take me till after midnight.” The next morning,
Busch would be on the set with the fresh pages. Aside from the dialogue Cagney changed (and, in Busch’s opinion, mostly improved) to suit his style, Busch claimed that all the dialogue in the picture was his. Busch, who went on to write such Western landmarks as
The Westerner, Duel in the Sun, Pursued
, and
The Furies
, also appeared in the film briefly as a gambler, ad-libbing a scene with Cagney.

Although he admired Hawks’s talent, Busch admitted that he was hardly awestruck and “sort of felt [Hawks] was covering up something.” Later on into the shoot, when he was feeling more confident, Busch dared to suggest that a scene ought to be written differently than the director was advising. Hawks stopped him with “his reptilian glare. The man had ice-cold blue eyes and the coldest of manners.”
As Busch recalled it, Hawks then said, “‘Niven, we have no time to waste. I want to explain something to you. What we’re writing and shooting is my adaptation of a play by Kenyon Nicholson called
The Barker
. It played on Broadway for two years. I have taken it out of a carnival setting and put it on the racetrack. It’s working very well. Nobody is going to understand its source. Now, here is
The Barker
.’ And he pulls out of his back pocket a tattered, coverless Samuel French play edition. He opens it and he says, ‘Here is the scene we’re shooting tomorrow. Write it the way it is here, but don’t use the same words!’” Busch later asked him if he wasn’t worried about a plagiarism suit, but Hawks replied that there was nothing to worry about since Warner Bros. already owned
The Barker
.

The first day of production was a night shoot on December 7 at Ascot Motor Speedway that lasted from 6:30
P.M.
until 4:30
A.M.
Thirteen race cars were photographed in action at what was known on the circuit as the
“killer track” because, since its construction in 1924, it had claimed the lives of twenty-four drivers, more than any other track in the nation during the same period. Two additional
outings were made to Ascot, and the worst mishap occurred when the car driven by Leo Nomis turned over and injured him. On the weekend before Christmas, Hawks and the crew also traveled to Ventura Race Track up the coast, although fog, low clouds, and wet conditions severely limited what could be shot there.

Originally, the sexy Warner Bros. contract player Dorothy Mackaill was cast as Lee, Cagney’s
mistress, with Hawks’s playmate Ann Dvorak on-board as the temptress Anne. Just before shooting, however, Hawks decided he didn’t care for Mackaill and brought in one of the studio’s busiest young actresses, the spunky Joan Blondell, who had appeared repeatedly opposite Cagney of late. Once they got down to work, however, Blondell announced, “I can’t play a neurotic,” and Dvorak decided, “I
can’t play an ingenue,” so, with Hawks’s agreement, they swapped roles without even telling the studio.

Shooting six-day weeks right through the holidays, with only Christmas and New Year’s Day off, and wrapping February 1 after twenty-six days of filming, longish for a Warners film of the time, Hawks enjoyed himself thoroughly, mostly because of the cars and Cagney. His adolescent interest in
cars revived, Hawks recruited a dozen professional racers, including 1930 Indy winner Billy Arnold, to appear in the picture, and nothing like the wild action they created had ever been seen in feature films before. Both Dusenberg brothers came to the shoot to see what Hawks was up to with their cars, and Augie created a special tow bar that allowed one car to pull another and then release it automatically
at a desired moment. In one scene, the dust becomes so thick that it’s obvious the drivers can’t see through it, creating considerable suspense, although no one got hurt filming it. For another sequence, gasoline was poured over a section of the track, and the resultant fire made for an equally exciting spectacle. The racing scenes are decidedly the highlights of the film, and so intense
did they seem in their time that at the opening-night show caught by the New York press, several women became hysterical when Frank McHugh was burned and killed. “This is no movie for weak-hearted people,” the
New York Graphic
advised.

Hawks adored working with Cagney because the actor was always coming up with things that surprised him on the set. Most “personality” actors, like Cary Grant,
Gary Cooper, and John Wayne, delivered pretty much what their director knew they would. But Cagney “had these funny little attitudes, you know, the way he held his hands and things like that. I
tried to make the most of them, and I think we did pretty well even though I didn’t know how he worked.”

Even though Cagney’s Joe Greer is a hard-living, fast-talking guy in the manner of his earlier characterizations,
this was generally considered a “reformed” role for the actor, after his portraits of bootleggers and killers. But while the racing footage was widely admired as exciting, the scenes in between were found rather routine, even dull by many reviewers. Today, the premise of an older brother having to hide his girlfriend from his younger brother seems like a bit of a stretch, and as
Eddie, Eric Linden, like Phillips Holmes in
The Criminal Code
the year before, gives one of the rare bland “ingenue” performances in a Hawks film.

What’s more, it is clear here that Hawks hasn’t yet found his own formula for presenting women on the screen. Ann Dvorak, while good at what her cast-off lover role demands, plays a complainer, a woman who mopes about her sad predicament after being
dumped by Joe. As such, she is highly atypical for a Hawks character; her type, like Eddie’s, will quickly be banished from his world. The level on which
The Crowd Roars
promises to be most interesting, that of the rivalry between two adventurous brothers, also proves pretty much of a washout; the older brother is so dominant, and the relationship so unequal, that there is nothing particularly
interesting or complex about it.

A Midwesterner, Howard Hawks never felt the call of the sea. However, he did heed the call of fashion, and as sailing became the rage among picture folk, Hawks yielded to the urgings of his wife and bought a yacht. Athole had done considerable sailing off Long Island before coming to California, and after Hawks bought a sixty-foot Norwegian sloop (which he named, naturally enough,
the
Sea Hawk
), Athole became a very good sailor. With a good deal more time to devote to it than her husband, who in any event preferred golfing, flying, and hunting, Athole even took up boat racing. On one occasion during a race around Catalina Island, Athole’s brother Doug fell overboard, and witnesses credited Athole with saving Doug’s life, as she expertly brought the boat back around and
fished him out before it was too late. Docked at San Pedro, the
Sea Hawk
was often taken on family outings to Catalina on weekends. Hawks was game for a while, learning the rudiments of sailing and enjoying the social side of it. But he would often get seasick and “never took to it too much,” in their son David’s view. Finally, taking the helm one day, Hawks made a navigational error and Athole
corrected him. Furious at being faulted by his wife, Hawks never went sailing again.

Nevertheless, Hawks was to spend a good deal of time shipboard through the first half of 1932. On February 1, immediately upon wrapping
The Crowd Roars
, First National announced that Hawks would make “a fish story” called
Tuna
. First, however, Hawks and Athole would take a much-needed vacation together. After
the breakneck schedule that saw him complete
The Dawn Patrol, The Criminal Code, Scarface
, and
The Crowd Roars
within two years’ time, Hawks needed a breather. Their marriage also needed some attention. Although raising Peter, now seven, and David, now two, was gratifying and more than filled her time, Athole felt seriously neglected by her always-busy husband. “She would get upset if he wouldn’t
be home at 6
P.M.
, even if it was just because of late work at the studio,” their daughter Barbara later said, and Hawks was rarely home by 6
P.M.
Athole had basically
recovered from the serious breakdown she had had the summer before, and at least she could be reassured that Howard’s fling with Ann Dvorak was over, presuming she knew about it at all, since the actress was engaged to the British-born
actor Leslie Fenton and would marry him in March.

Within a week of his finishing
The Crowd Roars
, Howard proudly packed up his new brand-new kelly green, four-door, dual-cowl, soft-top convertible Phaeton Dusenberg—very possibly the most beautiful automobile in America at that time—whereupon he and Athole set out up the coast for San Francisco. There, they boarded the U.S.S.
President Lincoln
for the four-day voyage to Honolulu.

Ensconced with his wife in a lanai at the Royal Hawaiian, where the couple had honeymooned, Hawks was in a mood simply to relax under the sun, swim, and have a few drinks. He had brought along Houston Branch’s twenty-three-page story outline for
Tuna
, as his hefty expense account was predicated upon his promise to Zanuck that he would work on it while he was
gone, but Hawks was of no mind to worry about it. If Hawks thought, however, that he’d be getting away from it all, he was in for a surprise, as Hollywood was a lot closer than he could have imagined.

Who should suddenly turn up at the bar of the Royal Hawaiian but King Vidor, Myron Selznick, Joel McCrea, Dolores Del Rio, and Clyde De Vinna? RKO’s big, exotic romance
Bird of Paradise
was intended
to shoot in Hawaii, but the local authorities were on a morality kick, and if, where, and for how long the company could film was open to question. Among the
Bird of Paradise
contingent was the thirty-one-year-old screen-writer Wells Root, a Yale man and former
Time
magazine drama critic who had been brought along to polish the dialogue. Selznick introduced Root to Hawks, who mentioned his own
script predicament to the writer. The next morning, Selznick was on the phone to Zanuck, and suddenly Root had a new job.

As Vidor’s demands on Root’s time were minimal, the writer put himself at Hawks’s disposal. “Howard said, ‘Meet me on the beach and we’ll talk about the story.’ But Howard didn’t want to talk about the story. He’d say, ‘I don’t feel like thinking about it today,’ and that
would be that. Really, he felt he was there on vacation, and he didn’t intend to work on a screenplay. Four weeks went by and we didn’t have a single line. I was getting nervous, because I was just a young writer, but he was so smooth and so pleasant about the whole thing.” Observing the Hawkses as a couple, Root found Athole “very quiet, reserved and composed.… She was a perfect lady, and a good
complement to Howard in that respect.”

Toward the end of March, Hawks and Athole and Wells Root and his wife boarded the
President Lincoln
for the trip home. “Howard said, ‘We’ll work on it on the ship,’ but then he didn’t want to work on the ship either. We got back to San Francisco and we still hadn’t done anything.

“I said, ‘I can’t go back to Zanuck and say that nothing’s been done.’ Howard
had this big, marvelous Dusenberg that he had driven to San Francisco, and he proposed putting our wives in back and discussing the script on the drive back to Los Angeles. So when we got to the car, he asked Athole to get in front. We got all the way back to L.A. and still hadn’t done anything. We had a date to see Zanuck the next morning, and Howard said, ‘I’m going to call Zanuck and tell
him we have the story but we had a new idea on the boat and we haven’t had time to write it up yet.’ He managed to put off Zanuck for about a week, and I went to Howard’s house and we worked like slaves.”