Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (42 page)

Even more taken with her when she came in to read, ostensibly for a small part, Hawks told Farmer at the end of their first meeting that she should play the lead. The actress was all for that, and
Hawks worked intensively with her in preparation for a screen test. Against her director’s wishes, however, she insisted on wearing heavy makeup for the test; deliberately giving her free rein, Hawks stood by silently as she acted up a storm. When he screened the result for her, she immediately recognized how bad she had been, and from then on was Hawks’s devoted pupil, following his advice on all
matters and trusting him implicitly. As research for a second test, Hawks took her on a tour of Los Angeles dives looking for prostitutes or loose women whose attitudes Farmer might adopt for her performance. Hawks said that they finally found a waitress in a beer joint who would serve as a fantastic model, and he asked the actress to come in every night for ten days to watch her every move. On
her own, Farmer apparently went even further to research the first Lotta, the saloon singer: “I went into the red-light districts of Los Angeles, wearing a black wig to disguise myself, and studied the girls who worked the streets. I learned their mannerisms. The way they talked out of the sides of their mouths, with a cigarette dangling from a corner. I acquired their speech inflections. I watched
how they drank their liquor and picked up their men. I mimicked their swagger, their cheapness. And I completely immersed myself in the role, studying it from every angle.”

For the second test, Farmer used no special makeup, only the black wig, and “she was just fabulous,” according to Hawks; “her whole attitude changed, her whole method of talking.” For Hawks, Farmer was the ideal actress, a
young woman with spirit and a natural rebelliousness who was beautiful, innately talented, hardworking, and hung on every word he said. Until the end of his life, he sang her praises, once saying that only Lombard and Rosalind Russell could be mentioned in the same breath with her,
another time flatly stating, “I think that she had more talent than anyone I ever worked with.”

Hawks casually mentioned
that she went out with him on his boat a couple of times “wearing her sweatshirt and her dungarees and carrying a toothbrush in her pocket”—just the sort of comment he might hope would lead people to suspect he’d had an affair with her. It is possible, and most certainly Hawks would have liked to, but the evidence weighs against it: two years before, Farmer had married the young actor William
Anderson, [who was just beginning his screen career under the name Leif Erickson,] and she was not known to have strayed outside her marriage until her later, disastrous affair with Clifford Odets; neither Hawks nor Farmer ever said as much themselves, and Meta Carpenter, who was with Hawks virtually every minute during the making of
Come and Get It
, believed nothing happened. On the other hand,
Hawks was ultradiscreet, and as both he and Farmer were married, they conceivably could have made a point of keeping an affair absolutely secret from everybody.

Farmer was receiving a mere seventy-five dollars a week under her contract at Paramount, which asked for double that to loan her to Goldwyn; for her wonderful performance in
Come and Get It
, the actress received precisely $562.50, with
Paramount pocketing the same amount. By contrast, Edward Arnold earned $52,500, and Hawks took home $73,150. But Farmer, well aware of the career-making opportunity at hand, threw herself into her role and, in working with Hawks, enjoyed the one genuinely rewarding professional experience of her aborted screen career. “Howard Hawks was one of the finest and most sensitive directors in the business,”
she said. “He gave every scene a minute examination, both psychological and visual, and under his direction I was secure and full of anticipation.” Farmer wore her stiff, cumbersome costumes at home to become completely comfortable in them, and even though her voice was naturally low and resonant, just the way Hawks liked it, she worked with him to improve it further and pitch it slightly differently
for each of her two characters.

With Goldwyn recovering from his operation in New York and no one at the studio able to restrain him, Hawks pushed Furthman further in his rewriting, especially of the early sections, to accommodate their new conception of the first Lotta and the outstanding actress Hawks had found to play her. On May 20, Athole gave birth to a baby girl named Barbara, but according
to Meta Carpenter, Hawks disappeared that week, heading to Mexico on a solo trip. However, by May 30, his fortieth birthday, he
was back in Hollywood to attend the premiere of
The Road to Glory
at Grauman’s Chinese with Norma Shearer. Two weeks later, Hawks sued Universal for what he judged to be an unpaid $45,000 for his work two years before in preparing
Sutter’s Gold
, which James Cruze had
finally, and unmemorably, directed. Six weeks later, Universal and Hawks settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Rounding out the casting of
Come and Get It
, Hawks had no problems with Goldwyn contract player Joel McCrea for the role of Barney Glasgow’s son, the young romantic lead, but amazed everyone by insisting on skinny Walter Brennan to play Barney’s best friend, Swan Bostrom, “the
strongest man in the North woods” and the man who ends up marrying Lotta. Also onboard was the lean, strikingly handsome tennis star Frank Shields, as the working-class kid Barney’s daughter wants to marry.

Goldwyn wanted to get the picture rolling by the first week in June to ensure delivery to exhibitors before the end of the year, but Hawks’s lingering dissatisfaction with the material, particularly
the second section, caused him to delay until June 20. From the beginning, the atmosphere on the shoot was tense, “thick with strain, indecision, and malevolence,” according to Meta Carpenter. This stemmed mainly from Hawks’s unhappiness over the story line and his doubts about ever being able to shape it to his own liking. Despite the months of preparation, the director, Carpenter felt,
“was putting scenes in front of the camera before he was completely satisfied that his players were ready.” The ranks were not divided nearly to the extent they had been on
Barbary Coast
two years before, but feelings were mixed about Farmer; it took Edward Arnold practically no time to realize how good she was, but others considered her remote and self-absorbed. Hawks continued to work closely
and patiently with her, and the unsettled feeling on the set was partially alleviated by Walter Brennan, who always lightened the mood, and cinematographer Gregg Toland, a sympathetic and generous collaborator for Hawks as well as the cast.

On July 4, with two weeks of filming completed, Goldwyn arrived from New York to continue his convalescence at his Beverly Hills home, although he was still
too sick to go to the studio. This bought Hawks a bit of time, as did Goldwyn’s preoccupation with how much film William Wyler was shooting on
Dodsworth
, the other Goldwyn production of the moment. Working on a customarily lavish Goldwyn schedule of fifty-four days and a $973,000 budget, Hawks wasn’t particularly behind or over schedule, but he was fussing over Farmer’s performance and adding
plenty of business not laid out in the script; a barroom brawl climaxes memorably with participants
dangerously flinging large metal serving trays around the room like Frisbees, something Hawks recalled seeing at a saloon in San Francisco. Hawks knew Goldwyn well enough to realize that his boss would be furious at any changes he made in the work of a big writer like Edna Ferber, so he tried to
put off showing him anything, telling Frances Goldwyn that her husband should wait until he was entirely recovered before seeing the footage. Finally, however, Goldwyn would not be denied, and as Hawks had predicted, he blew his stack. “I found that Hawks had filmed a completely different story from what you had written,” the producer wrote to Edna Ferber. “After I saw what he had filmed, I suffered
a relapse for a full two weeks; it upset me so.” Hawks asked Goldwyn to have associate producer Merritt Hulburd work with him to try to bring the story back around to what Goldwyn had in mind, and Hawks continued shooting, pressing further into the second part of the story, which he found particularly disconcerting.

According to Hawks, the end came after he delivered some newly written scenes
in an attempt to placate his producer. Liking what he read, Goldwyn asked who the writer was, and when Hawks said he was, Goldwyn became apoplectic. “Writers should write and directors should direct!” he supposedly bellowed. Hawks later said that, deeply insulted by Goldwyn’s obstinate silliness on this point, he quit; equally adamant about showing who was in charge, Goldwyn insisted that Hawks was
fired. No one can say for sure, but Meta Carpenter recalled that after this fateful meeting, Hawks simply returned to the stage, picked up his things, and vanished without a word to his cast or crew.

This happened on Saturday, August 8, Hawks’s forty-second day on the picture; according to the schedule, there were only twelve days of shooting remaining. For eight days, the production was shut
down. For public consumption, Goldwyn and Hawks were described as having parted ways “amicably when impasse was reached over story angles and concluding episodes.” Hawks even issued a statement “asserting that he believed Goldwyn should complete the picture in his own manner.” But this was all a cover for violent feelings on both sides. As Meta Carpenter confirmed, “The rupture was far more bitter
than that, and the amicability stressed in the news release was blatant fiction.” According to Hawks, Irving Thalberg pleaded with him to patch things up with Goldwyn and finish the picture, but he refused to have anything more to do with the producer. For his part, Goldwyn brought Jane Murfin back to quickly rewrite the final scenes; then he had the brainstorm of getting William Wyler, who was
just finishing
Dodsworth
, to take over
Come and Get It
. For any number of reasons, Wyler
refused out of hand, which sent Goldwyn into such a fury that Wyler had to flee from the producer’s house. But it shortly became clear that Wyler’s contract obliged him to abide by Goldwyn’s wishes or face suspension, in which case someone else would be brought in to finish
Dodsworth
. Facing the facts, Wyler
reluctantly called Hawks to tell him what Goldwyn was forcing him to do, and, was surprised to learn that Hawks was still angling to get back on the project, although not to the point of becoming Goldwyn’s obedient servant.

In the finished film, it is pretty easy to tell where Hawks left off and where Wyler began; the latter’s scenes dominate the final half hour, and his more sincere, elegant,
decorous style is apparent in the lavish garden party set piece and the assorted declarations of love that finally force Barney Glasgow to face his old age and allow his son and the young Lotta to go off together. Amidst the extreme conventionality of the film’s final stretch is one crucial moment that foreshadows a famous Hawksian scene more than a decade hence: when Barney discovers his son kissing
the woman he adores, he slaps him, whereupon Richard knocks his father down; at this, Lotta gets between them, much as Joanne Dru would intervene in the battle between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in
Red River
. Ironically, the scene was staged by Wyler, although conceived by Furthman and Hawks.

A grouchy Wyler started filming his scenes on August 19, and if anyone was unhappier about the turn
of events than Wyler, it was Frances Farmer. She legitimately felt abandoned, even betrayed, by the director who had left without explanation after winning her complete trust. “He brought her on and then left her high and dry,” lamented Joel McCrea. “Well, Hawks didn’t care about anybody except himself.” Farmer hated Wyler’s directorial technique of brusque, uncommunicative bullying and endlessly
repeated takes, such a far cry from Hawks’s quiet, attentive support. “Acting with Wyler is the nearest thing to slavery,” she complained, although she still felt that her performance succeeded. “I was basically satisfied with my interpretation of the trollop, but the daughter role of a gentle, innocent girl was in no way challenging,” she said, echoing Hawks’s own reservations about the second
half. For his part, Wyler, intensely aware of the actress’s resentment of his presence, hated her right back: “The nicest thing I can say about Frances Farmer is that she is unbearable.”

Wyler finally finished on September 19 after twenty-eight days of work, adding more than the ten minutes Hawks always alleged he had, but far less than what Goldwyn falsely claimed to Ferber: “I threw away most
of what Hawks had photographed, put William Wyler on the picture and spent
a good two months rephotographing it.” Hawks shot for forty-two of the seventy days
Come and Get It
was in production. With the $172,848 spent on the additional work, the final budget came in at a hefty $1,111,200.

But the contentiousness was far from over. The bad blood between Goldwyn and Hawks was such that the producer
initially removed his first director’s name entirely from all advertising and publicity for the film, using only Wyler’s. With the Screen Directors Guild still not recognized by the studios, there was no one in a position to officially object to this but Wyler himself, who wanted no credit at all and, for the rest of his life, did not consider it part of his true body of work. Rather than face
the embarrassment of sending out a major film with no director listed at all, Goldwyn put both men’s names on it, with Hawks’s coming first. Even so, in interviews just before the film’s release, Goldwyn went to great lengths to minimize Hawks’s contributions. Still, the producer was confident that the picture would gross $2 million worldwide, thus ensuring him a profit.

After a heavily publicized
world premiere in Frances Farmer’s hometown of Seattle,
Come and Get It
opened commercially at the Rivoli Theater in Manhattan on November 11 and shortly thereafter in other key cities, to less than smashing results.
Variety
judged it “one of season’s major disappointments. Campaign was big and good, notices were excellent, but it’s apparent that Edward Arnold hasn’t quite enough on the ball to
pull ’em in alone. No femme names either, which is hurting.” Ultimately, the film grossed $876,436 in the United States and half that overseas, leaving it well short of the break-even point. With
Dodsworth
an outright commercial flop, it was a poor year for Goldwyn.