Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (71 page)

As Hart noted, croquet, when properly played, “is a fascinating adult game, requiring skill, stamina and iron nerves,” and Hawks possessed those qualities in spades. Unlike the emotional and ill-mannered Zanuck, Hawks approached the contests with the calm precision of the engineer that he was, which took nothing away from the fearsome power with which he knocked opponents’ balls
away. The fad for croquet continued into the next
decade, but it reached its peak at Hawks’s home that weekend. Hawks received official recognition for his standing in the sport when he was inducted into the Newport, Rhode Island, Croquet Hall of Fame.

Later in July, the summer’s other major social event at Hog Canyon took place: the wedding of director Jean Negulesco to Dusty Anderson. A wild-spirited
Romanian whose prankishness and competitiveness made him good company for Zanuck, Negulesco was a quickly rising director at Warner Bros. and met Hawks socially through Feldman. He had Hawks’s number, knowing full well that the director was “a preposterous, imaginative, and inspired liar,” but thought it better just to grin and bear it than to challenge him. But he also admired Hawks tremendously,
calling him the “Great White Father” and coming to him whenever he had a story problem. Negulesco was also crazy about Slim—”I considered her to be perfection,” he admitted—and actually asked her to get to know Dusty Anderson and give him her opinion before he proposed marriage. Slim not only approved but threw the wedding, which took place in an idyllic spot at Hog Canyon on a little
rise surrounded by trees, blooming flowers, and buzzing hummingbirds. Hawks stood in as best man, although he slipped away from the wedding celebration as quickly as possible to get a croquet game going.

It was during the war years that the first noticeable cracks began to appear in the monolithic studio system. Provoked by Jack Warner’s wresting away of the best picture Oscar for
Casablanca
at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1944, the film’s producer, Hal Wallis, left Warner Bros. later that year to form his own production company, releasing through Paramount. After long flirting with a partnership with Hawks, Gary Cooper created his own company, International Pictures, and personally produced
Along Came Jones;
it wouldn’t be long before numerous other top stars, including Bogart,
would follow suit. Mervyn LeRoy became the first director with his own autonomous deal at Warners, something Michael Curtiz would later emulate. Directors whose careers had been interrupted by military service came back in a new, more serious mood, determined to make films that said something, that had social and thematic weight. To this end, Frank Capra, William Wyler, and George Stevens, along
with the producer Sam Briskin, formed their own company, the short-lived Liberty Pictures, and John Ford formed Argosy Pictures with Merian C. Cooper. Other prominent directors who hadn’t gone to war also broke their studio chains: despite grave warnings from Hawks, Preston Sturges made the ill-advised decision to leave Paramount after a string of hits and become partners with Howard Hughes, and even
Victor Fleming, by then in his early
sixties, left MGM after fifteen years to join the independent producer Walter Wanger in making the giant-budgeted
Joan of Arc
with Ingrid Bergman, with whom Fleming became involved in a desperately intense May-December love affair.

For years, Charles Feldman had shrewdly made his clients far more money than they would have seen otherwise by generally steering
them clear of long-term studio contracts in favor of picture-by-picture deals. By the late 1930s, he began having some luck in pioneering the packaging of clients and material, thus giving talent a bit of leverage in a system in which the studios held all the cards, and in the early 1940s he had muscled his first producer’s credits on
The Spoilers
and
Pittsburgh
. In February 1943, during the effort
to get
Battle Cry
off the ground, Feldman and Hawks had formed H-F Productions. At first it was a simple partnership whose function was to acquire literary properties that Hawks wanted to make into films, with the idea of selling them to the studios for far more than it had paid. Toward the end of 1944, while in the middle of production on
The Big Sleep
, H-F bought three very interesting books,
all of which were turned into excellent scripts that Hawks was very serious about directing.

In October 1944, Samuel Fuller was a G.I. who, having made the D-Day crossing four months before, was pushing through France toward Germany. The publication of his mystery novel
The Dark Page
during some of the toughest days of the war was later immortalized by Fuller himself in
The Big Red One
, when
the Fuller character has trouble convincing his fellow dogfaces that he is the author of the book they’re reading on the front lines. But the true story went further than that. Hawks and Feldman bought the screen rights to the novel for fifteen thousand dollars, an unimaginable windfall for a soldier about to enter the final winter of the war. When he finally managed access to a typewriter in Germany
in December, Fuller made only one request of Hawks: that the premiere be held for the entire First Division. The novel combined elements of
The Front Page
and
Double Indemnity
, telling of a newspaper editor who commits murder and pushes his favorite reporter to try to solve the case.

Hawks saw
The Dark Page
as “a very unusual relationship between two men … a form of love story between two men,
where the love of the editor for the reporter and the editor’s pride in the work of the reporter allows him to egg the reporter on to uncovering the crime committed by the editor.” Hawks hired Jules Furthman for $25,000 to write the adaptation after the writer finished his work on
The Big Sleep
, and when Hawks later left Warner Bros. and formed his first production company, Monterey
Productions,
along with Feldman and Slim, he essentially sold the novel and script to himself for a five-thousand-dollar profit. Monterey hired Fuller, now returned to Hollywood, to write a new script, for which he received an additional five thousand dollars.

After considering Edward G. Robinson, Bogart, and Cary Grant, and failing to interest Gary Cooper in the material, Hawks briefly entertained doing
it with unknowns, but when Feldman convinced him it was the sort of story that demanded stars in the leading roles, Hawks decided to sell. Edward Small’s syndicate, Motion Picture Investors Corporation, which not so coincidentally arranged the financing for Hawks’s
Red River
, bought
The Dark Page
from Hawks for $100,000, and Small ultimately produced a disappointing version of it, Phil Karlson’s
Scandal Sheet
, starring Broderick Crawford and John Derek, in 1952. When Fuller found out about the sale he exploded, and he threatened legal action over the fact that Hawks had made more than fifty thousand dollars’ profit horse-trading his work. He also accused Feldman, who was his agent as well, of sharing in the profit, a charge Feldman denied by claiming that his only payment had been 10
percent of the original fifteen-thousand-dollar sale. Fuller, who became a director himself in 1949, finally calmed down and, in later years, was sorry only that Hawks didn’t make the film himself as originally planned.

Within two weeks of acquiring
The Dark Page
, in October 1944, H-F bought two other novels,
The Black Door
and
Dreadful Hollow
. Written by mystery specialist Cleve Adams, whom
Hawks had hired briefly on
The Big Sleep, The Black Door
, for which H-F paid four thousand dollars, had the potential to rival that film in its portrayal of rampant corruption and pervasive evil. As adapted by Leigh Brackett, it was a lewd, licentious tale that would have offered Bogart an opportunity to take the sexual insolence of his Philip Marlowe to an even greater extreme. The story, later
variously known as
The Turning Door
and
Stiletto
, sees former narcotics agent James J. Flagg pulled into a convoluted drugs-and-gambling scheme on the pretense of being hired by a senator to keep track of his wildcat daughter. Brackett wrote it in breezy, highly entertaining style, and her dialogue, particularly in the provocative sex scenes, is notably sophisticated. While derivative of both
Chandler and Hammett and no less confusing than
The Big Sleep
, it would seem to have had all the makings of a winning commercial picture if done by a combination such as Hawks and Bogart. As had been the case with
The Dark Page
, the pair’s mutual disaffection, and the director’s departure from Warner Bros., left it by the wayside.

Dreadful Hollow
was something altogether different and would
have marked a radical departure for Hawks had he ever made it. H-F purchased Irina Karlova’s gothic horror novel for $2,500 two years after its publication, and Hawks never considered anyone other than William Faulkner to adapt it. Because the only known copy of the script reposed in Hawks’s possession, this major screenplay remained utterly unknown to Faulkner scholars for decades, as it was not
even mentioned in Joseph Blotner’s exhaustive 1974 two-volume biography. Even now, it is not entirely clear when Faulkner actually wrote the script, since he did not date it, but the best guess would be around 1947. Although quite different in surface intent from “A Ghost Story,”
Dreadful Hollow
bears an equally fascinating kinship to Faulkner’s work as a novelist, recalling his frequent theme
of grievously inbred, twisted families, with the difference that these characters have roots in Transylvania rather than the American South.

Jillian Dare, a pretty nineteen-year-old, takes a job as a paid companion to the Countess Ana Czerner, at an English house called the Grange, which is also occupied by a threatening woman named Sari. Strange events, including a rabbit found with its throat
torn out and its blood removed (this after Sari has been glimpsed in the kitchen with a bowl of blood), and a large, batlike shape that flies at Jillian and spits out a curse in a foreign tongue, make her fear she’s going mad. Sari confines her to her room, which leads Dr. Clyde, whose father knew Czerner’s secret, to appeal to the police.

Later Jillian is discovered being readied to give blood
to the Czerner clan. The countess, in the form of a bat, swoops down at the intruders, but the crazed Sari catches her and axes her to death, chopping off her head, then follows her to the grave.

Faulkner’s approach to the potentially ridiculous events is consistently intelligent, as he maneuvers around clichés and wins confrontations with far-fetched plot developments, investing the script with
sufficient suspension of disbelief to make it work. Even more than the effectively drawn atmosphere, the dialogue is outstanding, full of funny local dialect, which is written like his southern speech even though the setting is Britain. Violent and a bit perverse for its time, and featuring a leading role that gave Hawks a perfect excuse to discover a new actress, the script excited Hawks, who
tried for years to interest studios in backing it. Warner never thought much of it and, a few years later, when he was under contract at Fox, Hawks tried unsuccessfully to push the project on Zanuck, who felt that it followed “familiar patterns like
Dragonwyck
and
Hound of the Baskervilles
.” Decades
later, after the deaths of both Faulkner and Hawks, producers occasionally inquired about the script,
but the rights quagmire, along with its relatively “straight” treatment of vampires by contemporary standards, have left it still unproduced.

One more project that came Hawks’s way was
Moss Rose
, Joseph Shearing’s novel about a chorus girl who worms her way into high society in late Victorian England, with near-calamitous results. Again, Hawks hired Furthman to write the script, and when he was
anxious to leave Warner Bros. in late 1944, he sidetracked discussions of other projects by insisting that he was planning on leaving imminently to make both
Dreadful Hollow
and
Moss Rose
for Fox in Britain, the latter most probably with Ginger Rogers in the lead. After Hawks dropped it, Furthman’s
Moss Rose
script remained at Fox, where Tom Read and Niven Busch rewrote it and Hawks’s old friend
Gregory Ratoff directed it to moderate effect in 1947.

Underlying everything during this period, from his numerous purchases of material to his procrastination over directing any more pictures for Warner Bros., was Hawks’s growing desire to break free and make films independently. Jack Warner realized he’d have to make some kind of settlement with Hawks, and in May 1945, four months after
The
Big Sleep
wrapped and just before Bogart and Bacall were married, Hawks sold his half-interest in the actress to Warners along with his share of the profits in the films he made at the studio, and packed up and moved into the H-F office at Famous Artists on Wilshire Boulevard; in August, his remaining obligations to the company were officially canceled. Hawks always claimed that he received a
flat $1 million in the exchange. Mysteriously, however, nowhere in the bulging archives of both Warner Bros. and Feldman is there any record of such a transaction. Of all of Hawks’s expansive claims, this is among the more plausible; at the same time, it could have been his way of demonstrating that he came up a winner despite losing Bacall.

In mid-May, Hawks and Slim went to Palm Springs for
a week, and it was very likely there that the utterly unexpected happened: Slim became pregnant. For at least a couple of years, Slim had known that her marriage wasn’t working, yet a woman as shrewd, status conscious, and well supported as she wasn’t about to leave her comfortable situation without a well-conceived game plan. In 1944, Hawks had been so solicitous after her mother’s death, tending
to all the arrangements and taking her to Palm Springs to recover, that Slim was willing to overlook Hawks’s subsequent indiscretions and aloofness for some time thereafter. In the interim, Slim, through her friendship with
Harper’s Bazaar
editor Carmel Snow, began
appearing frequently on fashion magazine covers (Hog Canyon also received increasing photographic attention), and Slim was on the
point of having to decide whether or not to accept Snow’s offer to become the West Coast editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
when she learned she was expecting. Overcome with both nausea and insomnia, she remained mostly bedridden throughout her pregnancy, wondering, as she remembered, “how I was going to raise a child in a loveless home, for the prospect of fatherhood had not changed Howard in the least.”
Far more interested in his pictures, his horses and gambling, his cars and motorcycles, and any girl he might manage to attract than in anything to do with Slim or their baby, Hawks become so irresponsible and inattentive during Slim’s pregnancy that his own mother told him to shape up. But nothing could induce him to truly change his ways.