Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (43 page)

The reviews of
Come and Get It
were, in fact, very good, always citing Rosson’s spectacular logging footage at the beginning and
commenting that the work of the two directors seemed to blend seamlessly. No doubt without his brother’s knowledge, Bill Hawks cozied up to Goldwyn by wiring him as to how pleased he was with how the picture had turned out, and actress Louise Dresser cabled the producer to rave about Frances Farmer and insist that the newcomer was the perfect choice to play Stella Dallas in the new film Goldwyn was
having trouble casting. Edna Ferber was two-faced, one day congratulating the producer for “the courage, sagacity and power of decision which you showed in throwing out the finished Hawks picture and undertaking the gigantic task of making what amounted to a new picture,” on another refusing to do any publicity because she felt her motivating ecological theme had been completely ignored in the
adaptation. The one real compensation for Goldwyn, such as it was, came at the
Academy Awards. The film editor Edward Curtiss, cutting his sixth and final feature for Hawks, was nominated, but Walter Brennan, validating Hawks’s eccentric choice of him for the role of Swan Bostrom, won the first Oscar in the newly created supporting actor category.

Come and Get It
, in the end, remains most compelling
as the one film that reveals Frances Farmer as an alluring personality and might-have-been great star. Despite her literally breathtaking beauty, she was bland, and blandly used, in every other film she made, but she came entrancing to life for Hawks as the first Lotta. She also inspired Hawks in his most concerted effort yet to create a feminine screen persona from scratch, and the early
Lotta certainly stands as the first fully realized prototype of the Hawksian woman. To achieve this Hawks required not only sufficient artistic inspiration and erotic stimulation from the actress with whom he was working but also total cooperation from her and, crucially, a guiding hand from screenwriter Jules Furthman. Despite his numerous successes, Hawks wouldn’t find quite this synthesis again
for nearly a decade.

RKO had flirted with hiring Howard Hawks to direct a picture back in 1934, when
King Kong
creators Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack were trying to launch a biographical film about the intriguing British World War I figure T. E. Lawrence, starring Ronald Colman, but this never materialized.

Sam Briskin, whom Hawks had known when he was
general manager of Columbia Studios in the early 1930s, was now running the studio, although the most profitable pictures, notably the Astaire-Rogers musicals, came out of Pandro Berman’s unit. Berman was loyal to one of the studio’s most celebrated stars, Katharine Hepburn, although the actress’s last several films had been bitter box-office disappointments.

Looking to add some high-powered
directorial talent to the studio, Briskin contacted Hawks as soon as he heard about the blowup at Goldwyn. Although the contract was not finalized and signed until the following March, its basic terms were established at two meetings at the end of August and the beginning of September, at which Hawks’s lawyer, Mendel Silberberg, extracted very lucrative terms for his client: over the course of two
years, Hawks was to receive $130,000 per year, payable at $2,500 per week, for his exclusive services for directing up to three pictures per year. A complicated sliding scale was also negotiated by which Hawks would receive 10 percent of the gross of his pictures once receipts exceeded 1.75 times the negative cost, up to 25 percent once the gross exceeded three times the negative cost. Highly favorable
option and credit clauses were included, as was the provision that the director was not to be assigned to an Astaire-Rogers picture.

At once, Hawks’s agent, George Volck, sent Briskin a list of stories in which Hawks was interested. Foremost among them was a script by Zoë Akins and Hawks called
The Food of Love
, a frantic romantic comedy about a group of classical musicians on tour. It had some
of the crazy, as well as
train-bound, qualities of
Twentieth Century
, just as it also dealt with slightly pretentious people in the arts. Among the fourteen other properties on the Hawks-Volck list were Sidney Howard’s
Yellow Jack, Lulu Belle
, a Hecht-MacArthur story called
The Russian Ballet, Two Years Before the Mast
, and Rafael Sabatini’s
The Tyrant
.

The studio countered with a project that
had frustrated several screenwriters, including William Faulkner, over the years and had just been acquired that June when the producer Edward Small joined RKO.
Gunga Din
, Rudyard Kipling’s 1892 poem, told of a British soldier’s admiration for the loyalty and heroism of a native water carrier during a time of difficult campaigns against rebels in northern India. A year after the successes of
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
and
Clive of India
, Small’s Reliance Pictures had bought the rights to
Gunga Din
. Once Small became an RKO producer in June, the studio had Lester Cohen and John Colton, the author of
The Shanghai Gesture
, tackle the material, and King Vidor was mentioned as a possible director.

When
Gunga Din
was proposed to Hawks, he was immediately enthusiastic, and it’s easy to
see why: the devil-may-care, rambunctious, fun-under-pressure potential in it appealed immensely to his sophisticated teenage-boy mentality; the story was mainly about men on a mission; and it seemed like a surefire commercial bet. In a stroke of great fortune, Hecht and MacArthur were available immediately, and within two weeks Hawks was on the
Chief
heading for New York.

It is not known whether
Hawks heard of Irving Thalberg’s death before or after boarding the train on September 14, the same day Thalberg died, but he can hardly not have known that his brother-in-law had been bedridden since September 8 and in an oxygen tent for two days before his death. But Hawks went east anyway, escaping the afflictions of the Thalberg-Shearer clan, avoiding the gigantic funeral and relieved at
the prospect of resuming his unfettered bachelor’s life in Nyack and at his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Working mostly at the hotel, Hawks, Hecht, and MacArthur had great fun throwing numerous diverse ingredients into the stew that became the
Gunga Din
script. In addition to the poem, the team turned to Kipling’s 1888 story collection
Soldiers Three
for their three leading characters, an Irishman,
a Scot, and a Cockney; threw in an almost unavoidable dash of
The Three Musketeers
, and lifted virtually intact the ending of
The Front Page:
in place of the editor Walter Burns seeing his star reporter and the latter’s bride off on their honeymoon, then having him arrested for stealing the watch he gave him as a gift, the
Gunga Din
script had the Scotsman
and his new wife depart after all the
adventures were done, only to have the Irishman shrewdly arrange for his buddy’s arrest for desertion.

At the end of October, by which time Hawks and his writers had the story line set and about thirty-five pages of script finished, Athole surprised her errant husband by doing something uncharacteristically bold and assertive: she went to New York to confront him about their marriage. Knowing
that direct, emotional challenges to his behavior, authority, and independence were utterly abhorrent to Hawks, Athole couldn’t really have expected much good to come from this approach, and it didn’t. More adamant than ever that there was no hope of salvaging their marriage, Hawks sent her packing almost as soon as she arrived. Shattered by her husband’s callous attitude toward her good intentions,
Athole returned to Los Angeles and went into an unchecked tailspin, the worst emotional collapse of her life. After undergoing tests at UCLA Medical Center and being diagnosed as a schizophrenic, Athole entered Las Encinas sanitarium in Pasadena, an exclusive facility that treated mainly alcoholics. There, with the approval of her UCLA physicians, she underwent electric-shock therapy, which was
designed to stabilize her condition for the moment. However, doctors were distinctly pessimistic about her long-term prospects, predicting an incurable pattern of breakdowns followed by seeming recoveries, leading to a major collapse resulting in total loss of identity.

Accepting, as did everyone else, the physicians’ analysis, Hawks endorsed the prescribed treatment but kept his distance from
Athole. Increasingly, the children, particularly little Barbara, were tended to by Hawks’s parents. Norma, who might otherwise have been expected to look after her sister, was at that very moment suffering from a traumatic physical and emotional breakdown as a result of Irving Thalberg’s death. After a long bout with pneumonia, the disease that had killed her husband, Norma was advised by doctors
to give up her career for at least a year, and she repaired to Phoenix to convalesce through November and December. For good measure, Bill Hawks and Bessie Love, whose marriage had been deteriorating for some time, officially announced their separation at the end of September; by mid-December, the divorce became final, and Bessie, having been granted custody of four-year-old Patricia, moved to England.
During this time, Hawks also received word of the death of Charles Furthman, Jules’s brother and the screenwriter of
Underworld
, after a bout with pneumonia.

For Hawks, it was easiest, and most expedient, to stay well clear of all this unpleasantness, which he did until mid-December, returning just in
time to spend Christmas with the family. As far as
Gunga Din
was concerned, Hawks was basically
happy with what Hecht and MacArthur had done, although, as sometimes happened with them, they had either run out of steam or become distracted by other projects before satisfactorily finishing the third act. So at the beginning of 1937, Hawks called in Dudley Nichols. But the project became stalled over casting difficulties. Hawks wanted to use two MGM stars, Robert Montgomery and Spencer Tracy,
to play the Scotsman Ballantine and the Irishman MacChesney, respectively, with British actors Robert Donat and Roger Livesey considered possibilities for the more secondary role of the Cockney Cutter. Sam Briskin upped the ante, asking Louis B. Mayer for the stellar trio of Clark Gable, Tracy, and Franchot Tone in return for the rights to the much-cherished
Rio Rita
, in which Mayer hoped to team
Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. But while Tracy and Tone might be available, even Hawks could do nothing to pry his friend Gable away from MGM on a loan.

When the to-and-fro over casting and budget considerations dragged into the spring, and as Edward Small, who hoped to produce
Gunga Din
, started to become frustrated over his position at RKO, Hawks began scouring about for another project
to tackle in the meantime. Ironically, the property Briskin most urgently pushed upon him was another Edna Ferber story, an
Iron Horse
–like saga about the early days of railroading.
Lawrence of Arabia
was mentioned again, as was
Two Years Before the Mast
. Hawks held out for something in a different vein, however, and eventually found what he was looking for in a short story by Hagar Wilde that
appeared in the April 10th issue of
Collier’s
magazine.

A thinly plotted tale of a paleontologist, a rich society girl, and a pet leopard, the story was recommended by RKO’s story department because the dialogue was “hilariously funny and the possibilities for further comedy complications are limitless,” even if the frequent presence of the panther in scenes was viewed as a potential problem.
Hawks liked it too, and the story was bought for an economical $1,004, although the wary Briskin, while agreeing to let Hawks proceed, expressed fears about the picture’s ultimate cost, declaring, “I am not interested in making a big picture of this story.”

A New York writer, Hagar Wilde had worked once before in Hollywood, for Howard Hughes on a four-week job. Briskin was warned that “the experience
was so distasteful and unpleasant that she is rather soured on the movies,” but she came out anyway and worked with Hawks for a few weeks fleshing out the characters and certain scenes. But Hawks soon recognized
that he would need a professional screenwriter and turned again to Dudley Nichols, a former newspaperman, most of whose credits were heavy dramas for John Ford, most notably
The Informer
, for which he had recently won an Oscar. (Nichols was also a driving force behind the nascent Screen Writers Guild, of which he would be elected president in late 1937.) Hawks kept Wilde on to retain the original comic tone and keep the characters consistent with what she had originated, while Nichols developed the structure and incident. Curiously,
Bringing Up Baby
would remain the major aberration
in Nichols’s lengthy career, the only outright comedy among his fifty-odd lifetime screen credits. Hawks paid him his ultimate compliment, saying, “he was awful good.”

As the script was labored over through the summer and grew to a mammoth 202 pages by the time shooting started, key casting was also finalized. Although Carole Lombard was briefly mentioned as a possibility for the dizzy heiress,
there was never any real doubt that anyone other than Katharine Hepburn would play Susan. Because of her shaky box-office record, Hepburn had many detractors at the studio, and her cost was steep: her RKO contract, which still had three pictures to go, called for her to receive $72,500 (more if the picture went over schedule) plus 5 percent of the gross between $600,000 and $750,000, 7½ percent
up to $1,000,000, and an incredible 11 percent of the gross from that point on. But Pan Berman was unswerving in his belief in her, and the role was tailored to her specifications.

The male lead posed more of a problem. The beleaguered, constantly frustrated scientist David Huxley didn’t seem like a very dashing, attractive role on paper, and several prominent actors, including Ronald Colman,
Robert Montgomery, Fredric March, and even Ray Milland, who had only just achieved top-billed status, turned it down. Cary Grant, who had just made his romantic-comedy leading-man breakthrough in Leo McCarey’s
The Awful Truth
at Columbia, had a three-picture deal at RKO and was tempted by the prospect of working with Hawks and, once again, with Hepburn, but he felt he didn’t know how to play an
intellectual. But when Hawks suggested that he keep the bumbling, bespectacled, always-anxious screen character created by Harold Lloyd in mind, Grant got the only directing tip he needed and came aboard, for $75,000. For some of the key supporting roles, Charlie Ruggles came over on loan from Paramount, and the Irish actor Barry Fitzgerald was borrowed from the Mary Pickford Company. The dusky,
twenty-one-year-old beauty Virginia Walker, who played David Huxley’s snooty fiancée in a sexpot-behind-the-pince-nez fashion, was
one of the first actresses Hawks put under personal contract, and he loaned her to RKO for the role. Romantically, however, it was Bill Hawks who took an interest in this Boston society girl, and she became his second wife when they eloped to Mexico the following June.