Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (61 page)

Slim had promised her husband that when he returned from the demanding shoot in Tampa, he could look forward to moving into his new home. But much to her annoyance, the war had created a few inconveniences. Priority given to war-related goods meant endless delays in the shipment of their Louisiana furniture, so the house was barely furnished; there was not yet any gas; and
even Hawks’s money and connections couldn’t immediately secure them the 125 feet of scarce electrical wire they needed to illuminate the house. In time, however, it all arrived, and the Hawkses—five of them, at first—finally moved into what Lauren Bacall later called the most beautiful house she had ever seen.

Slim had done her job to a fare-thee-well. The Hog Canyon home was decorated in discreetly
fabulous taste; it was luxurious but comfortable American design at its best. Anything anyone could want—pool, stables and corral, huge wooded grounds—were at hand; it was in the city, close to both work and the sea, yet it had a completely rural flavor. Despite her own aversion to bluegrass country, Slim even accommodated her husband’s wish for the white rail fences he had admired so much
in Kentucky.

Although the Hawks children all officially moved into the house in Hog Canyon, they were in various states of flux at this point in their lives. Having graduated from Beverly Hills High School, Peter had enrolled at the Arizona State University but in 1942 was drafted and entered the Army Air Corps, based at Hamilton Field in Northern California. David entered eighth grade at Emerson
Junior High in West Los Angeles. But separated from all of his friends, he began falling in with a quasi-delinquent crowd, which later led his father to send him to the Black Fox Military Institute, a boarding school in Hollywood.

Barbara, at just six years old, was another, more delicate matter. After the divorce, Athole had taken Barbara with her to Santa Barbara, where they stayed in great
luxury for a few months at the exclusive San Ysidro Ranch,
which was owned by Ronald Colman, followed by a spell at the lodge in Sun Valley. When the burden of taking care of an active child proved too taxing for the unstable Athole, Barbara moved in with her father, first on Bellagio Road and then, briefly, at Hog Canyon. The highlight of this short spell was her friendship with their neighbor
Victor Fleming’s two daughters, Victoria and Sally. “I’d always spend Saturday night with the Fleming girls,” Barbara remembered, “and Sunday breakfast was always a huge buffet.”

Hawks, however, was hardly a candidate to be a fully responsible, attentive father who could be expected to look after the daily needs of a little girl, and Slim didn’t see why she should be called upon to single-handedly
raise a daughter not her own. So Barbara was sent to live with Grandpa and Grandma Hawks in Pasadena. Seventy that year and having had five children of her own, Helen Hawks was far from thrilled about the prospect of raising another one, but was able to face the challenge with the help of her closest friend, Katherine Ogden, who had lived with Helen and Frank since shortly after seeing her young
soldier husband drown on their honeymoon around the time of World War I. Katherine, who had never remarried or had children, was delighted to have Barbara in the house, and even if the little girl was terrified of her “aunt” much of the time, she still received much doting attention from her. She was enrolled in a girls’ school, Westridge, three blocks away, pursued her passion for horses, and
saw her father infrequently, mostly on holidays. “My grandparents’ house had a telephone room,” Barbara recalled, “and my grandmother always thought she was being so smart, going in there, and five minutes later a phone call would come from Dad after he hadn’t called for a month.”

As soon as Hawks checked off of the Warner Bros. lot at the end of October after thirty-four weeks of work on
Air
Force
(more than twice the amount he was expected to work on any picture under his deal), he told Charles Feldman he had no intention of going back to fulfill the rest of his contract. He was livid at the way Hal Wallis had treated him throughout the shooting, capped by Wallis’s treachery involving Vincent Sherman. He categorically refused to work with Wallis again, which would make his life at
the studio quite difficult. After a month’s cooling-off period, Feldman agent Ned Marin arranged an evening’s get-together with Hawks and Jack Warner, but Hawks was still too hot about it all to agree to come back just yet; even if he did, he told Warner, he would only deal with the front office, never with Wallis.

While Hawks busied himself up to a point with his first production for Universal,
most of his time was occupied plotting new projects and
business schemes. He talked to Feldman every day and saw him almost as often. The idea of a Hawks–Gary Cooper team package was revived. Feldman didn’t represent the actor, and even persistent encouragement from Hawks couldn’t persuade Cooper to change agencies. But the real stumbling block to the team deal, as before, was the resistance of
most of the studios to giving away a large percentage of their profits.

The closest they came to a deal was at RKO, which was willing to completely finance any Hawks-Cooper ventures to the tune of $1.5 million pay them $350,000 per picture, and cut them in for 50 percent of the profits, an amount Feldman hoped to increase. To Hawks’s disappointment, Cooper went ahead with his own individual deals
elsewhere, even though a project turned up that seemed ideal. In the wake of
Sergeant York
, everyone in Hollywood was looking for a similar true-life inspirational story, and they thought they saw one in Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace. Tough and very savvy, unlike York, Rickenbacker played it cool while half of the top producers and agents in Hollywood courted him, including Selznick,
Jack Warner, Feldman, and brass from MGM, Fox, Paramount, and United Artists. Feldman’s pitch, of course, was that only the director and star of
Sergeant York
could do justice to Rickenbacker’s story. Feldman was in the midst of negotiating potentially unprecedented percentage deals for Hawks and Cooper at Universal and Fox on the Rickenbacker project, urging Hawks to go to New York to convince
Rickenbacker, when he abruptly accepted another offer. Hawks and Feldman had no choice but to turn their attention elsewhere; in this instance, in the direction of a beautiful young woman who had turned both their heads.

Ella Raines was a saucy twenty-one-year-old fledgling model when David O. Selznick made a screen test with her and a young Broadway actor, Gregory Peck, in New York in 1942.
Charles Feldman happened to be sitting in with Selznick when he ran the test, and much to the producer’s consternation, the agent decided to sign the young lady immediately. Inviting her to California, Feldman had a green Dodge and an apartment on Durant Drive in Beverly Hills waiting for her, took her to the Brown Derby, and began plotting her motion picture career.

One of Feldman’s key clients
was the French émigré actor Charles Boyer. In another of his money-making schemes, Feldman discussed with both Boyer and Hawks the idea of forming a company that would discover, acquire, and train new talent, then turn around and lease the performers to the studios at great profit. In addition to the financial side, this prospect appealed to Hawks enormously because he always preferred working
with
young performers he could shape and mold as he saw fit, who wouldn’t resist his methods or feel like they knew it all already. As soon as he saw Raines, he knew she was someone he definitely wouldn’t mind spending long hours with in training. Trim and coltish, she had the clear-eyed, direct look he so liked, a wholesome countenance with just a hint of sophistication and earthiness.

Introduced
by Feldman, whom Raines liked at once, Hawks took her to the Brown Derby, and after droning on about business and her career, turned the conversation with the subtlest of come-ons. “Do you ride?” the director inquired. Raines took him up on his invitation, and, she said, “I spent the next two weeks out at his ranch.” She knew that he was married, of course, but thought better than to ask any
questions. She put it simply: “I never saw Slim.” Hawks even showed off his latest conquest to some of his movie-star friends, including Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Raines, of course, could barely contain herself over all this attention and said of Hawks, “I loved him and adored him. I didn’t think he was a cold person at all. He was very charming, very thoughtful, very kind.”

Already the
gears were turning for Raines to do another, more elaborate screen test, which Hawks would direct, and for Raines to become the first and exclusive property of the new Boyer-Hawks outfit, called B-H Productions. This professional association gave Hawks a good excuse, once Slim returned from another of her “rests,” for having Raines come around the house on Sundays, when he would go over scenes with
her in preparation for the test.

The fling with Ella Raines may or may not have been Hawks’s first since marrying Slim, but it was the first significant one, and it was at this time, scarcely a year into their marriage, that Slim began to figure out that her husband was no different from most of the other famous and powerful men in Hollywood. Hawks often would not show up for dinner when his
wife was expecting him, pleading late work or an important meeting. He would quietly slip in at four in the morning, and she would lie in bed, wide awake, pretending to be asleep; she even had to confront the old telltale sign of lipstick on his collars. Slim started hearing the rumors, eventually even learning the names of some of his dates, but, remarkably for such a spirited young woman, she never
confronted him about his philandering, accepting it as a fact of life for a successful, famous man in Hollywood.

Virtually anyone who could fool around did, and Hawks, even more so now that he was keeping company with Feldman, had constant opportunities. The number of major directors who did
not
stray outside their marriages
could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand, and in Hawks’s
macho crowd it was considered de rigueur. Before, he had always competed with Vic Fleming and come in second, but now he could imagine that he was taking up the slack, since Fleming had changed his womanizing ways after his marriage. But Fleming was the real thing, a man innumerable women lost their hearts and heads over. In his own diffident way, Hawks managed to fill up his scorecard but left
no one swooning in his wake; Harlow aside, women rated Hawks “a gentleman” in the sack as in the rest of his life, not someone who went wild once the doors were closed. In Slim’s opinion, Hawks didn’t have the sexual compulsion to be a Don Juan but pursued constant conquests to fulfill his own fantasy of himself as a great lover. Even though Slim represented his ideal woman, the sexual dynamic between
them was never vital or overwhelming. As she lamented, “Even at the height of our courtship he was a tentative partner. Sex was simply a physical need that had no relation to the person he was with.”

All the same, Ella Raines was happy with him for a while, especially since he was following through on his intention to put her in a picture. After
Air Force
, Hawks planned a similar, if much more
modest, war film as his first production for Universal.
Corvettes in Action
, as it was initially called, would glorify the role of the fast little ships that escorted large freighters and other vessels in convoys across the North Atlantic and that were particularly effective in battling submarines. The oceangoing equivalents of small fighter planes, they were “known for courage.” One of the film’s
characters declares, “They ain’t pretty ships, maybe, but brother, they got a lot of guts.” After
Air Force
, the Royal Canadian Navy was more than willing to participate. Planned for a medium budget, without top stars, it was a film Hawks decided only to produce, not direct. Instead, he gave that job to his old associate Richard Rosson, who hadn’t done a picture in six years. Lieutenant John Rhodes
Sturdy of the Canadian Navy, a Feldman client who lived in Montreal, wrote the script, although the prolific screenwriter Edward Chodorov did an uncredited major rewrite. Since Hawks would not be directing it, the film was placed outside his overall Universal deal. Feldman negotiated for his client to receive $35,000 plus 30 percent of the net profits.

But just as interesting for Hawks as his
renumeration was the chance to try out his new leading lady. Unlike
Air Force, Corvettes
was not an all-male action picture, and there was a nice, relatively undemanding part of a young woman whose brother is killed at sea and who must then stand by as her other brother and new boyfriend head off on a perilous new voyage.
For both Hawks and Feldman, there was no doubt whom they intended to put
in the role. In early January 1943, B-H Productions signed Ella Raines for twenty weeks at three hundred dollars a week, with an option for six and a half years. A couple of weeks later, Hawks, seeing no reason to share the actress with anyone else, deviously tried to push Boyer out of the picture, even though the deal had been finalized. Feldman was furious at Hawks for this, calling his behavior
“terrible and wrong and unfair” and threatening to take on the responsibility for Raines’s contract himself if Hawks didn’t patch things up with Boyer, which he was convinced to do.

On February 2, Hawks directed Raines’s test, a scene with Randolph Scott, already cast in
Corvettes
. Hawks lavished every attention on the newcomer, posing her effectively for the camera and coaching her in delivery.
As a favor to Boyer, Hawks also directed the Frenchman and Raines in a scene, and Boyer came away even more ecstatic than the others, which was saying a lot. The Feldman office decided that the “girl definitely has terrific ability and with careful handling should be star material.” Boyer indicated that he would seriously consider her for a picture he was planning, and Hawks had cleverly planned
the test so that, if successful, it could be inserted intact into
Corvettes in Action
, which it was.