Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (51 page)

As it happened, the film had a happy consequence for Rosalind Russell on a personal level. During the shoot, she became quite close to Cary Grant, adoring his humor and charm on and off the set. They went dancing together occasionally and Grant, who was seeing
the actress Phyllis Brooks at the time, kept telling his costar about a good friend of his, the Danish-born agency executive Frederick Brisson. Finally he introduced them, and in 1941, Grant was the best man at the wedding of Brisson and Russell.

The comparison needn’t be pushed too far, but there is a case to be made for considering Howard Hawks the cinema’s closest equivalent to Ernest Hemingway. Born three years and about 120 miles apart, the two men shared an upper-middle-class, Midwestern, WASP background; an appetite for hunting, fishing, and other rugged pursuits; and an inclination to brag and
take credit. Both men also made their decisive artistic marks with works haunted by the specter of World War I. Of course, the differences between them may have been even more significant: Hemingway had enormous problems with his father and mother that helped him develop a significant rebellious and ornery streak; he rejected the convention of an elite education for more plebian journalistic work,
took part in the war, settled in Paris at a young age with the specific intention of becoming recognized as an important writer, and was politically engaged. Hawks, in contrast, accepted all the advantages of his pedigree, was friendly with his parents, never saw combat, felt aloof from social and political issues, and essentially bought, socialized, and married his way up the career ladder. Nevertheless,
the two had in common a certain taste in material and a similar approach to character and story; a predisposition to strong, confident men (with discreetly revealed vulnerable streaks) engaged in dangerous work; a high regard for physical capability and mental professionalism; a preference for conveying meaning through their characters’ actions, gestures, and looks; an exceeding intelligence
and aversion to the pretentious; a sometimes adolescent view of human endeavor that could often be abruptly offset by stunning expressions of insight and maturity; an unusually developed sense of the moment, of the fleeting nature of relationships, love, and life; a cool, pared-down style ideal for describing the physical nature of things, as well as for eliminating from concern anything not
immediately germane to what interested them in a scene; a wry humor; and a poet’s way of refining and transforming the commonplace into the rarefied and deeply meaningful.

Most of Hemingway’s work posed at least some censorship problems for Hollywood filmmakers, so, as of 1939, only one of his novels,
A Farewell to Arms
, had been made into a picture, an almost achingly beautiful, highly romanticized
one directed by Frank Borzage for Paramount in 1932. The author had not cared for it, but he did approve of Gary Cooper as an ideal physical embodiment of his hero, Lieutenant Frederic Henry. Since that time, Hemingway’s celebrity had continued to grow, but his literary reputation was stalled; after the publication of
A Farewell to Arms
in 1929, he had produced only two middling book-length works,
Green Hills of Africa
in 1935 and, two years later,
To Have and Have Not
. He had also spent a great deal of time covering the Spanish Civil War, raised money for the ill-fated Republican cause, and written a play about it,
The Fifth Column
.

In March 1939, in a frank attempt at a knockout punch to regain the heavyweight championship among American novelists, Hemingway embarked on a massive novel
of romance, courage, and political commitment set during the Spanish Civil War. A month later, he was visited in Havana by a friend, the famous former football player Shipwreck Kelly, who told him that a friend of his, Howard Hawks, was interested in making a film of Hemingway’s 1936 short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” The writer became excited at the prospect, and the men began
speaking in terms of a film shoot–cum–African safari that would occur as soon as Hemingway completed work on his book.

In October, while Hawks was in the midst of production on
His Girl Friday
and Hemingway was spending his first autumn hunting in Sun Valley, Idaho, plans were laid for Hawks, Slim, and Shipwreck to visit the novelist in December. But the novelist wouldn’t be back in Key West
until the middle of the month, so just after Thanksgiving, Hawks drove Slim cross-country for her first visit to New York City, which surpassed her wildest dreams. This most social of young women was in constant ecstasy as she met Hawks’s friends from the Hecht-MacArthur circle at the most fashionable restaurants and boîtes in town. Things continued in high gear as they were joined by the spirited
Shipwreck Kelly for the drive to the southernmost tip of Florida to meet the great writer.

Taking a breather from writing
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, Hemingway was rather depressed, as his soon-to-be ex-wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, had taken the kids away for the holidays, and the current woman in his life, the journalist Martha Gellhorn, who would later become his third wife, had gone to cover the war
in Finland, leaving him quite alone at Christmas. He lit up, however, upon meeting Slim. As she put it, “There was an immediate
and instant attraction between us, unstated but very, very strong.” She was, she admitted, “starstruck,” but she always insisted that there was no physical attraction on her part and that nothing ever happened between them. Like Martha Gellhorn, Slim was put off by the
writer’s sloppiness and poor hygiene. For his part, Hemingway, enormously attracted by her looks and wit, flirted with “Miss Slimsky” constantly but transformed his sexual feelings into a fatherly overprotectiveness. Slim remained in his life until his death, sparking jealousy in Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary; ironically, Slim’s two husbands during this period, Hawks and Leland Hayward, were among
the Hollywood figures with whom Hemingway had the closest dealings, which helped bring Slim back into his orbit time after time.

Hemingway found in Hawks a man after his own taste, a rugged, quiet-spoken gentleman who liked to hunt, fish, and drink. Home movies Hawks took of the visit show the group skeet shooting, carrying passels of freshly shot game birds, deep-sea fishing, and boating through
swampwater, with Slim looking impossibly elegant at all times, Hawks creating a dapper and dashing impression, and a beaming, shirtless Hemingway puffing out his chest when caught by Hawks’s lens. Behind all the socializing lay the subject of Hemingway writing for films; Hawks had already gotten William Faulkner to work for him, and while Hemingway had a much more commercially viable name than
his southern rival, he also had considerably higher expenses and was always in need of more money. Still, Hemingway was nearly alone among major novelists in having refused the lure of big Hollywood paychecks. He had seen how F. Scott Fitzgerald had been humbled by studio bosses and rewrite men, and he was in a position just exalted enough to maintain a condescending attitude about the movie factories,
willingly accepting their money for film rights but refusing to actually go there to work. Given that the studios intermittently tolerated even the needy Faulkner’s wish to work at home in Mississippi, Hawks figured that the best approach would be to quietly present a carte blanche opportunity under which he and Hemingway would work however and wherever the writer wished.

It wasn’t hard for Hemingway
to see where Hawks was leading him and, unsurprisingly, he resisted. As for what came next, there is no account of it other than Hawks’s own, one of his most outrageous examples of ballsy one-upsmanship. Hawks claimed that he told America’s leading writer that he could make a film out of anything Hemingway wrote; “‘I can make a movie out of the worst thing you ever wrote.’ He said, ‘What’s
the worst thing
I ever wrote?’ I said, ‘That piece of junk called
To Have and Have Not
. ‘I needed the money,’ he said. I said, ‘Well, I knew that. At least I had to guess it.’ He said, ‘You can’t make a picture out of that.’ And I said, ‘No, but the two leading characters were marvelous in their relationship with each other. What about if we told how they met?’” From that point on, Hawks maintained,
the two men spoke in depth about the characters of Harry Morgan and Marie, what they were like and what happened to them. The extent to which Hemingway actually helped Hawks envision the sort of film
To Have and Have Not
eventually became is highly questionable, given that it has so little to do with the source novel, but whatever it was represented the only direct input Hawks ever got from the
writer on one of his films.

As it happened, Howard Hughes had just paid Hemingway ten thousand dollars for the film rights to
To Have and Have Not
that July. Knowing this, and pretty sure at this point that he would soon be forming a new partnership with Hughes to make movies, Hawks may in fact have been shrewdly manipulating Hemingway for ideas on what he hoped would be his next picture. Also,
if Hawks had the writer in his camp, Hughes would be hard-pressed to give
To Have and Have Not
to some other director. Even if he hadn’t persuaded Hemingway to write for him, Hawks left Key West in excellent spirits, having befriended the world’s most famous novelist, leaving the door open to further exchanges and potential collaborations.

If Hemingway needed money, so did Hawks. His gambling
debts always had him living close to the financial edge. Sooner or later, his much-desired divorce would come through, but that would cost him plenty. And Slim’s expensive tastes, added to his own profligacy, created cash outlays such as he’d never encountered before. Most of all, however, his ego and competitive side demanded that he make more. By almost any standard of the era, Howard Hawks made
a great deal of money—$112,500 in the 1939 calendar year, during which he directed two pictures. But he knew that many other directors—men considerably less talented, in his view—were earning considerably more.

Willing to gamble on his ability to bring in a big box-office winner and anxious, as ever, to work independently, as far as possible away from the control of the moguls, Hawks renewed
his association with the maverick Howard Hughes, who was now ready to get back into film production as an independent with a distribution deal at 20th Century–Fox. Early in 1940, Hughes signed two directors he had worked with previously, Hawks and Leo McCarey, to two-picture deals unlike anything the major studios
were willing to acquiesce to at the time: standard salaries plus substantial cuts
of the profits. Thus, they felt themselves to be partners with Hughes, not employees.

All through the preliminary stages of script work, casting, and preproduction, this arrangement worked just fine as far as Hawks was concerned. While McCarey and Hughes vainly tried to revive their coveted adaptation of the bizarre Hollywood novel
Queer People
, which the studio heads had lobbied to block some
eight years before, Hawks and Hughes readily agreed to go ahead with a highly fanciful telling of the Billy the Kid story. Hawks said that in New Mexico, on his way back from Florida with Slim, he’d heard the legend that Billy had not really been killed by his friend Pat Garrett but that “when Billy fell in love, Pat Garrett blew the face off another man, said it was Billy the Kid, and Billy and
the girl went off to Mexico and lived happily ever after.” This sentimental fantasy has always been a fringe Billy the Kid legend, one that even Sam Peckinpah briefly indulged while making his film on the same subject thirty years later.

Starting with this premise, which again involved a sort of love story between two men that is disrupted by a woman who comes between them, Hawks took a very
willing Slim back to New York in early February so he could work with Ben Hecht on a story treatment and the beginnings of a screenplay. At the same time, Hawks advised Hecht on the writer’s next production venture,
Angels over Broadway
, which he hoped to start directing alongside Lee Garmes in the Bronx in March. Hawks’s hand is evident in the cast Hecht assembled—leads Douglas Fairbanks Jr.,
Rita Hayworth, Thomas Mitchell, and John Qualen were all Hawks veterans—and when Hecht’s hoped-for independent financing failed to materialize, Hawks provided the crucial link to Harry Cohn that enabled the film to proceed at Columbia, even if it meant relocating the shoot to Hollywood. Hecht’s preoccupation with his own film prevented him from continuing with the Billy the Kid project, so Hawks
returned to Hollywood and once again called upon Jules Furthman, who wrote an exceedingly ahistorical script about Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Doc Holliday, and a fictitious girl who ensnares Billy.

While the screenplay was being prepared, Hawks set in motion the purchase of the property where he would shortly build his dream house, where he and Slim would live. At first, Hawks couldn’t understand
why Slim didn’t want to live in the lovely house he’d owned for so many years; after all, it was one of things that had impressed her so much when they first met. All the same, she couldn’t help but think of it as Athole’s home, and she
eventually managed to persuade the man she was going to marry to find some new land and build a house just for them. In the event, it didn’t take long to find
just the right spot. Victor Fleming, just then in the flush of his career pinnacle of directing
Gone with the Wind
and
The Wizard of Oz
in the same year, lived in one of the loveliest spots in the Los Angeles area, in a gently sloped canyon along Moraga Drive off Sepulveda Boulevard in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, near Bel Air and Westwood. Through a complicated process by which
Fleming agreed to subdivide his property in concert with some surrounding land controlled by Security First National Bank of Los Angeles, Hawks was able to obtain an extraordinarily beautiful 105-acre plot just beyond Fleming’s.

Located in a natural canyon above Hog Creek, with slopes rising to the east, west, and north and covered with shrubs and trees, the land was perfect for a gentleman such
as Hawks who wanted to keep and breed horses, play host to guests in an impressive but relaxed manner, and create a superb outdoorsy environment for his young wife and growing kids. Once this was settled, Slim took it upon herself to supervise every element of the home’s construction and decoration down to the tiniest detail. The look of what became the S-Bar-S Ranch at 1150 Moraga Drive was very
closely based on Van Nest Polglase and Perry Ferguson’s casual American ranch design for Katharine Hepburn’s Connecticut home in
Bringing Up Baby
, but the actual architect was the celebrated Myron Hunt, one of Frank Hawks’s closest friends in Pasadena and the designer of, among other things, the Rose Bowl. When it was finally finished, with a pool, vast lawns, stables, barns, horse paddocks, extensive
wooden fencing around the corral, and a large garden planted entirely by Slim enhancing the comfortable but unostentatious wood-and-stone house, the estate was a masterpiece of understated taste and refinement, a rural paradise in an unspoiled urban setting, a man’s castle with a very smart feminine touch. As David Hawks said, “Anybody would have loved to live in the stable.”