Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (45 page)

When RKO executives began seeing dailies of the film, their worries had to do with things like Grant’s owlish glasses and Hepburn’s out-of-control hair, which they believed reduced the stars’ appeal. They had also expected a sweeter, more glamorous approach, as opposed to what they perceived as a hard, unromantic tone in Hawks’s direction. But this
hardly compared to their alarm when the schedule for RKO production number 999 began getting completely out of hand. There was nothing the studio’s designated associate producer, Cliff Reid, could say to the far more powerful Hawks to get him to speed up, and the stress of his own impossible position made him physically ill.

By late October, the RKO executive suite was in a shambles. Sam Briskin,
who had come to the studio nearly two years earlier from Columbia, was fed up with many things: the company’s disorganization, partly caused by its being in receivership; the fact that his decisions were constantly being undermined by the conservative receivers; the fact that Pan Berman had first call on the studio’s leading talent, and that he, Briskin, had only once had access to one of the
company’s top artists—Hepburn for
Baby
. In the first week of November, Briskin quit as vice president of production.
Two weeks later, Berman was officially put in charge of A pictures, while Leo Spitz took control of the B unit. Throughout all of this,
Bringing Up Baby
was conveniently ignored, and it didn’t bother Hawks a bit that the administrative disarray resulted in there being no one on
the lot who could intervene in the forceful way of a Hal Wallis or Sam Goldwyn. Originally, the film was scheduled for a fifty-one-day shoot, ending November 20. By that time, Hawks had barely shot half the movie. With scarcely a break for Christmas and New Year’s, shooting finally finished on January 6, 1938, after ninety-one days, forty days over schedule; the duration was so unusual that
Variety
gave it special coverage. Fulfilling the studio’s worst fears, the cost soared correspondingly, to $1,096,796.23, or about 40 percent above the already lavish original budget. Nearly a third of the overages were caused by an option and hefty penalty payments to the two stars that kicked in when filming ran past the limits earmarked in their contracts; Grant and Hepburn each ended up earning
just over $120,000 for the picture, nearly $50,000 more than their original salaries.

The film’s editor, George Hively, had been cutting the picture right along through production, so that RKO, desperate to see returns on their huge investment as quickly as possible, was able to make finished prints within a matter of days and hold two previews almost at once, on January 17 in Huntington Park
and two nights later in Inglewood. Audience reactions could not have been better: An “excellent-plus” and an “A-plus” in two separate studio assessments. Despite the smash responses, Pan Berman felt the picture needed to be cut further and did so over Hawks’s strenuous objections. A subsequent preview with the shorter, and final, version at the Chicago Theatre was equally successful, with the report
of a “terrific” response from the sold-out house fueling great optimism in the front office that their
Baby
might just make some money after all.

As for the Hays Office, it found the dress-tearing incident “border-line business” that “may be deleted by a number of the political censors boards, both in this country and England”; indeed, the strict Ontario censors objected to Grant’s slapping his
hat against Hepburn’s bottom and her retort, “Will you please stop doing that with your hat?” Hawks, Nichols, and Wilde had been clever enough to sneak their more subtle but quite outrageous sexual humor through under the censors’ noses. Not only did the bone-in-a-box references get through undetected, but so did all the other “bone” jokes, including the one in the opening scene in which Grant’s
David Huxley, pondering the quite erect-looking dinosaur bone he holds in his hand, innocently remarks, “This must belong in the tail.”

The early trade press served up excellent “money” reviews, and the reactions by mainstream critics were equally favorable. Everyone liked the picture enormously. “Audiences used to roar at this one,” an RKO executive admitted, and Hawks often recalled that
the laughter was so great that it prevented people from hearing many of the other funny lines. But despite it all, the picture didn’t do nearly well enough at the box office to approach recouping RKO’s investment.

The highly erratic commercial performance of
Bringing Up Baby
was deeply perplexing to the industry in 1938 and, in a sense, remains so today. With theater manager Cliff Work “guaranteeing
a refund to any patron who does not enjoy this picture,”
Baby
began its world-premiere engagement at the Golden Gate in San Francisco on Valentine’s Day and, backed by great reviews, did bang-up business. As the film fanned out across the country, it did solidly in such markets as Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, Cincinnati, and Washington, D.C., but came up short of expectations in numerous other
cities, especially in the Midwest. But the real shock of its disappointment hit with its opening on March 3 at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Grossing only $70,000 at the 5,980–seat house, where strong attractions generally pulled in $100,000 or more,
Bringing Up Baby
was precipitously yanked after only one week, suggesting, as
Variety
dryly noted, that “the Katharine Hepburn draw, as expressed
in some quarters, isn’t what it used to be.” Subsequent runs in New York were equally weak. The film’s box-office track record was utterly without comprehensible pattern and wasn’t entirely bad by any means; its conspicuous flop in New York forged the impression of a failure where it mattered most, and the film needed to be a huge hit to compensate for the egregious budget overages.

In its initial
run,
Bringing Up Baby
grossed just $715,000 in the United States. Overseas, it pulled in $394,000, bringing the total to $1,109,000. A 1940–41 reissue generated an additional $150,000. To trigger Hawks’s percentage participation, the picture would had to have grossed $1,875,000, and it never came close. When all was said and done, RKO lost $365,000 on the film, fulfilling everyone’s worst initial
fears.

The common reasons advanced for the picture’s relative initial unpopularity are that it was too sophisticated, that the characters were too intellectual, that there was no real romance in it, that the lighting was too dark for a comedy. Most famously, Katharine Hepburn was accused, in a list prepared by Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theatre Owners of America, of being “box
office poison,” a distinction she shared with Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, and others.
But Hawks, who always insisted that there was something wrong with a film if it failed to win a large audience even if critics considered it great, had a more subtle reading of why the film fell short. He eventually concluded that
Bringing Up Baby
“had a great fault and I learned
an awful lot from that. There were
no
normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball and since that time I have learned my lesson and I don’t intend ever again to make everybody crazy.”

It took a couple of decades, but
Bringing Up Baby
began building a reputation when it started being shown on television in the 1950s, and by the late 1960s, when film buffs started drawing attention to
the sometimes underestimated talents of Cary Grant and Hawks, and to the wonders of 1930s romantic comedy, the film finally achieved its deserved position as one of Hollywood’s most perfect and brilliant comedies. Perhaps nothing did so much to ratify the classic status of
Bringing Up Baby
as Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 hit comedy
What’s Up, Doc?
, starring Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand. After
having paid homage to John Ford and Orson Welles with
The Last Picture Show
the year before, Bogdanovich, plausibly enough, told everyone how
Bringing Up Baby
had inspired him this time out, which was like an invitation to the press to compare the new film unfavorably to its model. Audiences didn’t know or care, but suddenly
Bringing Up Baby
was being referred to as one of the greatest comedies
ever made. It only took thirty-five years. But it did give the film a new lease on life, one that has continued ever since.

As a comedy, as well as a love story, the film represents a huge advance on Hawks’s only previous farce,
Twentieth Century
. It is aggressive and dark but stops just short of spinning out of comic control toward the end and of pushing too far into the comedy of humiliation,
that hallmark of his postwar comedies. His collaborators could not have been more felicitous, and it represented one instance in which all the fun the actors and filmmakers were having actually spilled into the picture for the audience’s benefit.

There was, however, a price for the indulgence that helped create the greatness of
Bringing Up Baby
. And that price was
Gunga Din
.

With
Bringing Up
Baby
finished and in release, Hawks had every intention of moving right back onto
Gunga Din
. Once Berman assumed full control of RKO’s major projects, he, too, wanted to reactivate it, and in early 1938 he assigned the writer Anthony Veiller to cut down the Hecht-MacArthur-Hawks-Nichols script, which ran to 284 pages, enough for at least a four-hour movie. Berman and Hawks met numerous times during
February and March to discuss the picture, the result of which was a growing distrust on Berman’s part that Hawks would ever toe the line when it came to budget or scheduling matters; Hawks had plenty of excuses for what had happened on
Bringing Up Baby
, but
Gunga Din
would be a far grander production, one that promised, at about $1.5 million going in, to have the biggest budget ever for an RKO
film. Berman had no doubt that Hawks could make a fine, rousing picture of
Gunga Din
, but nothing the director said could make the producer forget that Hawks was, in his experience, “slow and difficult.” Berman eventually made his decision: “I was afraid he would go over budget so much that I would be in trouble. So I didn’t go with Howard. I went with George Stevens who, up to that time, had
made pictures quite reasonably for us.” For his part, Hawks didn’t think much of Berman’s overall track record as a producer, and he made Berman’s decision easier by telling him, “I don’t think I want to trust myself to your judgment.”

The news wasn’t broken to Hawks directly but, rather, to his brother William, who was informed at a meeting with RKO brass on March 17, 1938, that not only was
Howard off
Gunga Din
but the studio was terminating his contract. Two days later, a distressed Howard wrote back protesting the studio’s decision, stating that he would suffer “very substantial damages” if he didn’t make the film, and insisting that he was “ready, able, willing and anxious to complete the direction of said photoplay
Gungha Din
[sic], and to comply with all of … obligations under
said contract.” On March 21, RKO sent Hawks a letter citing numerous contractual defaults and breaches on Hawks’s part and informing him that their decision to dump him was “neither arbitrary nor unreasonable,” as he had claimed, but “arrived at after mature deliberation. We believe, in good faith, that sound business judgment makes this step necessary.” Certainly the deciding factor in letting
him go was that since the fall of 1936, RKO had paid Hawks $242,500 (including a $40,000 payoff to get rid of him) for the privilege of losing more than $350,000 on
Bringing Up Baby
. The bottom line on the studio’s relationship with Hawks was not pretty.

Bringing Up Baby
also proved to be the last straw in RKO’s association with Katharine Hepburn. The studio had brought her to Hollywood in 1932,
given her starring roles from the outset, and tailored fourteen productions to her specifications. Now, even with her greatest ally, Pan Berman, holding the reins of power, RKO could no longer justify pouring good money after bad on this high-priced star. She had originally been announced to play another dizzy heiress in
The Mad Miss Manton
, but Barbara
Stanwyck won that choice role when
Bringing
Up Baby
went over schedule. Once the Hawks film was completed, RKO contemptuously offered Hepburn a part in a modestly budgeted programmer,
Mother Carey’s Chickens
. When she refused it, the studio gave her the choice of taking the role or buying out her contract. Although most actors couldn’t have afforded to do so, Hepburn’s personal fortune afforded her the luxury of choosing the second option,
which she did to the tune of $220,000. Her career upswing of
Holiday
and
The Philadelphia Story
lay just ahead.

George Stevens, ironically, ended up going forty days over schedule on
Gunga Din
(the same amount as Hawks had on
Bringing Up Baby
) and bloating the budget by some $400,000, to an enormous $1,909,669. Therefore, even though the film was a smash hit, it still didn’t cover its costs in
initial release. The Stevens film has been widely enjoyed and even loved over the years, but one suspects that Hawks, with his great feel for both adventure and comedy, would have made something more lasting and memorable out of it (though it remains doubtful whether Hawks would have eliminated or even softened what today seems an almost unbearable jingoism and white supremacy; this was a hallmark
of the Hecht and MacArthur script, which Hawks had such a significant hand in shaping).
Gunga Din
remains one of the most prominent “might-have-beens” of Hawks’s career, a picture that very well could have been one of his best, as well as one of his most successful. Hawks was acutely disappointed not to be able to make it. But there was consolation—both for him and for the public—in what he ended
up doing instead.

In the wake of the RKO fiasco, Hawks had to dodge more trouble of his own making in the persons of underworld figure Ben Kaufman and bookie Donald Miller, whom he owed nine thousand dollars from a 1937 gambling debt. Hawks was now denying that he owed it, despite a promissory note payable the previous July 3, and went so far as to claim that since the debt stemmed from gambling,
the transaction had been illegal and therefore could not be enforced: Charges were filed against Hawks in any event, but he managed to elude a summons served him on April 8 by having his household help lie that he was in New Orleans and wouldn’t be back for a month. The case dragged on for another year until it was thrown out.