Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (31 page)

After three weeks of studio work, in mid-May the company moved down the coast to San Diego to do seven days’ work on the wharf, where they ran into constant delays because of noise from boats, planes, and whistles. After a couple of more days back at the studio, on May 28 the crew moved to Catalina Island off Los Angeles
for the duration of the shoot. Joined by Rosson’s outfit, Hawks then shot all the shipboard sequences with the principals. Hawks arrived at the Isthmus of Catalina on his own yacht and took to directing wearing a blue pea coat and captain’s hat. By chance, the film version of Somerset Maugham’s
Rain
(ironically, the play Tony and his henchmen go to see in
Scarface
), directed by Hawks’s friend
Lewis Milestone and starring Walter Huston and Hawks’s old flame Joan Crawford, was being shot at the Isthmus at the same time. Every evening
there were cocktails and lively parties onboard the yachts of the combined companies.

Ray Griffith was on hand to represent the studio and engaged Hawks in almost daily conferences regarding the script, which was continually in flux. Root was still around
to contribute his ideas, especially for the ending, which remained unsettled, and he initiated what became a lifelong friendship with Zita Johann’s husband, the future producer John Houseman, who stayed close to the production to be with his wife as well as to learn everything he could about the filmmaking process. Houseman claimed that for a short time, thanks to his wife’s agent, Leland Hayward,
he “became one of the five writers whom Hawks kept in various hotel rooms writing different versions of the script, from which he would, each morning on the set, extract the lines that took his fancy. Not one word of mine was ever used and I soon stopped trying and spent all day on the pier watching him shoot.” (Who the other two writers might have been, if they existed at all, cannot be fathomed.)

Shooting of the climactic shark attack involved using two giant sharks Rosson’s crew had caught and then frozen, which were subsequently wired to “perform” violent actions for the scenes. Finally, on Saturday, June 11, a day that stretched until 4
A.M
. Sunday, when Hawks filmed Richard Arlen getting hooked in the neck, the production wrapped after forty-one days, seventeen days over schedule.
Two weeks later, one more day of filming was required to enact the beach campfire scene among the three principals.

Watching Hawks throughout the shoot, Root came away exceedingly impressed with his boss’s “supreme ego and self-confidence that, in a jam, he could pull it off.… He was magnificent in a pinch.” At the same time, “He didn’t play God or fling his ego about like some others. As a director,
he was the ultimate pragmatist, who’d found out that certain things worked and others didn’t, which resulted in a simplicity that was impressive.” In other ways, the writer found Hawks a curious case. “He seemed to be more an observer as a director, more than the one who was making it happen.… He didn’t seem to give the actors much direction. He let the actors bring the scenes to life. He
let the actors do it first their way, and he knew when he didn’t like something.… On the stage or story, you always knew where he was coming from, you always knew what he thought of something. This was certainly not true in his private life.”

On June 28, four days after the completion of
Tiger Shark
and two other pictures, Warner Bros. closed its gates until August to consolidate and
cut costs
during a difficult period. Hawks’s films only helped the studio, however, as both of his 1932 films for the studio did very well at the box office.
The Crowd Roars
had opened in March to great figures at the Winter Garden in New York, and in May, just as
Scarface
was beginning to fan out across the country, the racing picture debuted in Los Angeles with strong results, which were repeated throughout
the country.

Tiger Shark
, which opened a very big four-week run at the Winter Garden in New York on September 22 and was a strong attraction for the studio, stands as a fine example of Hawks’s talent for injecting unexpected comedy into inherently dramatic, even tragic, material. At least one critic felt that the milieu and narrative trajectory of
Tiger Shark
suggested Eugene O’Neill, and it’s
easy to imagine the story played for heavy, somber effect. If less profound, Hawks’s approach of mixing moods and blending tones seems more modern and invigorating. It also planted a thematic seed that would be taken up in another, massively successful shark tale more than forty years later.

Everything except common sense dictated that Hawks should join Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The one studio that was sailing through the worst of the Depression with its head above water, MGM had, in a few short years, unquestionably established itself as the classiest shop in town, the studio with the biggest stars, the largest reserves of
money, and the most glamour, power, and prestige. Although he still had to answer to Nicholas Schenck, Joseph’s brother and the head of MGM’s parent company, Loews, in New York, Louis B. Mayer was widely regarded as the most powerful man in the motion picture business. What other studio chief had spent a night in the White House, even if the president he had so avidly supported, Herbert Hoover, was
almost certainly about to be voted out of office in November? Mayer still had the clout to turn the tide against the California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair by flooding movie theaters with scare-mongering propaganda shorts about what would happen to the state if the socialist-minded author actually gained power.

None of this concerned Hawks so much as the fact that he knew Mayer, from
his previous tenure at the studio seven years earlier, to be a blow-hard, a phony, overemotional, hypocritical, unrefined tyrant whose taste in films—sentimental, gilded, weepy, family-and-country-oriented—couldn’t have been more antithetical to his own approach.

Tipping the scales in the other direction was the best motivation of all in Hollywood: nepotism. With Hawks’s stock so dramatically
increased over the past two years, Irving Thalberg was more anxious than ever to have his brother-in-law on his roster of directors, and it seemed only logical to him that bringing Hawks in would keep the family closer together. Knowing Hawks’s literary values, Thalberg also felt that Hawks could only benefit from MGM’s superior lineup of writers and vast trove of source materials, the most extensive
in the industry. After his trip around the world, Vic Fleming had rejoined MGM, and his best friend’s presence on the lot was
something they would both enjoy. For Hawks, it would also mean ultimate prestige after his pairings with the maverick Howard Hughes, the crude Harry Cohn and Jack Warner, and the rough-and-tumble Darryl Zanuck. But most of all, it would mean big, and much needed, money.

Although he spoke of it to no one except Fleming, Hawks was often in debt and in constant need of cash. Because he was born to it, inherited more, married into Hollywood aristocracy, and was now making more than most directors in town, Hawks had little sense of the value of earned money. His sporting hobbies and taste for planes, cars, the yacht, guns, country clubs, fine clothes, parties, and more
were par for the course in Hollywood and within reason considering his position. His decisions to build beautiful homes in the best parts of town were astute, but he never kept an eye on his earnings and, increasingly, he tossed away money gambling. Just as Hawks acted as though he were oblivious to his producers’ money during production, so he was with his own cash. “Howard borrowed large sums
from Victor Fleming at various times,” Wells Root said, most often to cover gambling debts to shady characters that could have walked straight out of
Scarface
. “He was a man of extraordinary courage because he wouldn’t let the underworld or anyone else phase him.”

Men express and play out their need for excitement and adventure in innumerable ways; for Hawks, it came in the thrill of the contest,
of placing himself at risk and on the brink of losing, but knowing that he was “good enough” to pull himself out and prevail. There was nothing more consistent than this in Hawks’s character; it was true in the way he directed films, for the characters in his films, and in the way he conducted his personal life. Unlike some of his friends and colleagues, such as Bill Wellman and John Huston,
who were wild and often irresponsible, Hawks was reckless but within a conservative shell. No one has ever claimed to have seen Howard Hawks lose his composure, his calm demeanor, or his sense of control, even when drunk, angry, or under severe pressure. By the same token, no one saw him deliriously happy or celebratory. “I suppose that, beneath that granite exterior, he must have had the same insecurities
as other people,” Root speculated. But none that he ever showed.

Moving from Warner Bros. to MGM, which Hawks did in July 1932, just after finishing
Tiger Shark
, was like writing his own prescription for frustration. He could convince himself that his relationship with Thalberg would accord him a privileged position, protection from the whims and dictates of Mayer. But Thalberg was no more a
believer in the cinema of the director than his boss, and he had, in fact, been the instigator of the
movement by producers and executives to retake control of the production process when he fired Erich von Stroheim from
Merry-Go-Round
at Universal in 1922. Since their bachelor days, when they had endlessly swapped film story ideas, Hawks, like so many others in Hollywood, had felt that Thalberg
“was the great genius in the picture business.” But in the end, the forces of studio policy, the star system, and sheer accident proved far stronger than Hawks, Thalberg, or their friendship, and Hawks’s spell at MGM turned into one of the most unproductive detours of his career. Even so, it provided the beginnings of two of the most enduring professional and personal relationships of his life,
those with William Faulkner and Gary Cooper.

Hawks’s contractual obligations to various parties at the time he finished
Tiger Shark
were a bit fuzzy, even to the attorneys representing the companies he’d been working for. Technically, Hawks was still under contract to Howard Hughes’s Caddo Company under the terms of the multi-picture deal he’d signed in order to make
Scarface
. Though Hughes had
decided to leave the film business, at least temporarily, his attorney Neil McCarthy wasn’t ready to just tear up Hawks’s contract, but he did agree that the director was free to work for others. As for First National, even though Hawks had directed
The Crowd Roars
and
Tiger Shark
under a new two-picture deal, the studio still took the position that Hawks owed it another film from his previous
deal. In mid-June, upon finishing
Tiger Shark
, Hawks met with Hal Wallis to discuss possible story ideas, and the same old cycle started up again. Wallis proposed that Hawks direct Richard Barthelmess in something called
Shanghai Orchids
. Upon reading it, Hawks refused, whereupon Wallis, feeling it was within his rights, obstinately demanded that Hawks do as he was told. Whatever doubts, if any,
Hawks had about absconding for MGM vanished in the face of Wallis’s intransigence, and it was arranged that First National would simply turn over Hawks’s contract to Metro, on the condition that Hawks return to First National to fulfill his contract there by directing one more picture by the following April. As it happened, it would be two years beyond that before Hawks would return to the house
of Jack Warner and Hal Wallis.

The precariousness of Hawks’s finances can be glimpsed in a lawsuit he filed at the beginning of 1932, which prompted a retaliatory countersuit. One of the low points of his career had been his firing by Fox after he had finished the unreleasable
Trent’s Last Case
. From any reasonable standpoint, what happened on that forlorn picture was far from being entirely
the
director’s fault. But Hawks’s renegotiated salary had just kicked in at $50,000 per picture, so rather than continue to pay him, Fox decided to dump Hawks, even though the director owed the studio one more picture. Hawks did nothing about this for nearly three years. Finally, however, in need of more funds, he decided to sue Fox for the $65,000 he believed he was still owed under his contract,
since he claimed he was “wrongfully discharged” by Fox.

Insulted and annoyed, Fox fired back in May with a suit of its own, which stated that while in its employ in December 1928, Hawks had received a five-thousand-dollar loan from the studio, to be paid back on demand, or with the sum taken out of his salary if necessary. By the time of his firing in May 1929, Hawks had paid back just one thousand
dollars and therefore still owed Fox four thousand. Deposed in the case on June 7 while still on Catalina shooting the final scenes of
Tiger Shark
, Hawks claimed that the five thousand was an advance on salary at Fox and denied that he owed it. In the end, both cases came to naught.

Early in July, when an economically depressed Los Angeles was becoming swept up in the excitement of staging the
1932 Olympic Games, Hawks checked into his new offices on the MGM lot in Culver City. By chance, the six-week, five-hundred-dollars-a-week contract of a writer Hawks greatly admired was coming to an end. The writer was William Faulkner, and from a dry, businesslike meeting that apparently ended in a drunken bender grew a friendship that was central to the lives of both men.

In fact, Hawks had
been one of William Faulkner’s earliest American champions. Hawks was one of the few to have read the author’s 1926 novel
Soldier’s Pay
, which a few years later he recommended to some assembled literati at Ben Hecht’s home in Nyack. In the interim, the Mississippian had developed an ardent following within small circles for
The Sound and the Fury
and
As I Lay Dying
but was known mainly for his
notorious 1931 novel
Sanctuary
. This had made him something of a literary commodity, at least enough for Leland Hayward, then an agent with the American Play Company, to take him on for Hollywood representation. That winter, Sam Marx, the erudite head of MGM’s story department, inquired as to Faulkner’s availability, but the writer, expecting royalties from the unexpectedly popular
Sanctuary
,
declined the offer. However, when his publisher, Harrison Smith, went bankrupt early the following year, Faulkner, on the hook financially for the new home he had just bought in Oxford, Mississippi, felt he had no choice but to undertake a quick mercenary expedition to Hollywood, where he arrived for the first time in May 1932.