Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (75 page)

While
Red River
was getting under way, members
of Hawks’s family were making some important changes in their lives. With her husband safely away, Slim was able to see a lot more of Leland Hayward, and by mid-September he had already asked her to marry him, despite the fact that they were both still married to others. Discharged from the Army Air Corps, Peter headed back to Arizona State, while David was entering junior year at Uni and sharing
the Moraga Drive house with Slim. Almost as soon as his father left, David starting going a bit wild, and after a face-off, Slim was forced to call Hawks to tell him that she could no longer deal with his unmanageable teenage son and that Hawks ought to give him a job on the picture to keep him out of trouble. (No mention was made that this would make it far easier to conduct her affair with Hayward.)
So Slim put David on the train
and sent him out to his father, who had the prop master, Bob Landis, put him to work.

But David’s best memory was not of the shoot but of a bear-hunting trip he took with Wayne and Clift. “We had an old Army sergeant as a guide. It was near the Mexican border. We were looking for smaller Mexican brown bears and we rode and rode through the mountains. We never saw
any bear but we did get lost. The guide admitted that he didn’t know the way back. So John Wayne took charge, and he really and truly led us back. One horse fell, lost its footing and broke its leg, and we had to shoot it.” Writing to a friend about this incident, Clift joked, “You see what happens when you turn a bunch of fascists loose in the hills?” David worked all the way through the production,
including on the Hollywood stages, before going back to school.

Less fortunate was Peter, who visited the location and was driving back to Tempe on September 23 with a girlfriend and another couple from school when he had a terrible automobile accident, breaking his knee, fracturing his pelvis, and suffering severe lacerations. David went up to see him in traction in Tucson, and shortly Slim
flew in to visit him while on a mission of her own: to have it out with her husband, face facts that Hawks had never acknowledged, and agree on a separation. Leland Hayward’s name was never mentioned, but the news of the Hawks’s split made both Louella Parsons’s and Hedda Hopper’s columns, with the former reporting that a divorce would be pursued as soon as
Red River
was finished, the latter giving
the reason as “Slim’s reluctance to play mother to children almost as old as herself.”

To remove herself from the firing line, Slim shortly made another of her escapes, this time back to Idaho to see Hemingway during hunting season. Slim, Mary, Hemingway, and the writer’s two sons spent several days shooting partridge. But on October 31, when Slim was unloading her Browning 16-gauge automatic
shotgun, one shell accidentally discharged, singeing hair off the back of Hemingway’s neck. After a long pause, Slim threw her gun down and became hysterical, yelling, “I almost killed my friend.”

Hemingway and Mary were getting along particularly well that fall, and with Slim now in love with Hayward, the edge was off their flirtation, even if the mutual attraction was still there. As Hemingway
confided in a letter, Mary asked him, “‘Papa I don’t have to worry about Slim do I?’ I told her no, honestly. And there it was.”

In Arizona, the shooting of
Red River
progressed slowly. Even with the reliably experienced second-unit director Arthur Rosson handling most of
the heavy logistics with the cattle, it seemingly took forever to get some scenes done. As Hawks remarked, “Go out and try
to tell fifteen hundred cows what to do!” Rain Valley Ranch, where about half the film was being shot, lived up to its name with downpours that delayed work. Symington instantly regretted having rented his property for the movie, complaining after only two weeks that they “are just about ruining my ranch.” Borden Chase, who came to location to keep working on the script, boozed it up constantly and
was contrary with Hawks about everything from dramatic emphasis and the weapons the characters carried to the type of cattle Hawks used. Historically, all the cattle should have been longhorns, but since there were simply very few of them to be had, Hawks had no choice but to put the longhorns close to the camera (another time-consuming procedure) and leave the Herefords in the backgrounds. Chase
continued to gripe about Hawks and his changes for the rest of his life, while Hawks countered “Chase wasn’t content with writing a story; he wanted to tell you how to do it.” Finally, he said, “I thought he was a goddam idiot.”

Even though many people remembered
Red River
as a friendly shoot, the company was divided into opposing camps and stray offshoots. Wayne’s misgivings about Clift were
mild compared to the scorn of some members of his hard-drinking, ultramacho entourage, including the makeup man Web Overlander, who sneered, “Clift couldn’t take a piss by himself. Hawks must be an idiot if he thinks that s.o.b. can act.” Later, Wayne told a journalist, “Clift is an arrogant little bastard.” Naturally, the sensitive Clift noticed the gulf between the Wayne clique and himself. At
first, he tried to be one of the guys, accompanying Wayne and David Hawks on the bear hunt and sometimes sitting in with his costar and director at their frequent nocturnal poker games, but Clift later noted, “They tried to draw me into their circle but I couldn’t go along with them. The machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary.” Clift, whose moods always fluctuated dramatically,
spent a good deal of time alone and even left the location entirely when he had enough time off. He shared a tent with Walter Brennan and Noah Beery Jr., and after the initially amusing Brennan started recycling his anecdotes for the third and fourth times, the two younger men “turned to each other in self-defense” and developed a strong friendship.

Hawks may have been turned off by Clift’s intense,
ultraserious personality, but unlike Wayne and the rest, he was very excited by what he was doing in front of the camera. “He
worked
—he really worked hard,” Hawks said admiringly. Clift also continued to learn. The young actor thought that his biggest scene in the picture would be the pivotal one in which he takes
over the cattle drive from his mentor. “Don’t be too sure about that,” Hawks warned
Clift, whereupon he went to Wayne and told him that Clift was looking forward to walking away with the scene. When the cameras rolled, Wayne, on Hawks’s advice, looked away from Clift, glancing at him only briefly, while quietly but fiercely delivering his devastating lines, concluding with, “Every time you turn around, expect to see me, ’cause one time you’ll turn around and I’ll be there. I’ll
kill you, Matt.” There was nothing Clift could say, and Hawks, after letting him stand there for a moment, told him off-camera to just walk away. Afterward, Clift admitted to his director, “My big scene didn’t amount to much, did it?” and Hawks told him, “Anytime you think you’re going to make Wayne look bad, you’ve got another think coming.”

But the big test would be the climactic fight scene.
As in Chase’s original, Dunson is injured by Cherry, although not so seriously that he can’t shoot accurately. Building up to it stunningly by having Dunson relentlessly ride, then walk through a sea of cattle, Hawks had Dunson try to provoke Matthew into drawing by shooting all around him, even nicking him, then becoming disgusted and beating him silly one-handed while Matthew passively takes
it all. Only then, when Dunson thinks it’s all over, does Matthew respond with one big surprise slug, landing Dunson in the dust. Hawks spent four days choreographing and photographing the battle down to the most minute gesture, having Clift kick Wayne and then ram him with his whole body, thereby working around the size imbalance as much as possible. Crucially, he also kept the fight short. More
than thirty years later, Hawks admitted that “My arm’s still sore from trying to show Montgomery Clift how to throw a punch.”

The bigger problem was the resolution Hawks devised for the fight. Hawks could not bring himself to kill off either of the leading characters, by now having turned against “killing people off for no reason at all”; in a departure from his serious films of the 1930s, he
wanted his audiences to leave happy. So to let Dunson live, he reworked the scene to have Tess Millay step in with a gun and tell the two brawlers that they’re being foolish, that they know they love each other and should stop acting like boys and make up. Chase was just the first of many to criticize this turn of events, calling it “garbage,” and Clift disliked it because “it makes the showdown
between me and John Wayne a farce.” Hawks defended the logic of the scene but also acknowledged that it was “rather corny,” that he never really cared for it. He thought that Joanne Dru’s performance was partly to blame, but he still felt that the basic emotions and actions of the scene were valid.
“If we overdid it a little bit or went too far, well … I didn’t know any other way to end it.” The
only person to recognize that Hawks had stolen this ending from another picture was Borden Chase: it was the conclusion to
The Outlaw
that Hawks and Furthman had devised six years before. When Howard Hughes found out a few months later, it was one of the few times Hawks couldn’t just take the high road about one of his deceptions.

As usual, Hawks beefed up Walter Brennan’s part, almost a nonentity
in Chase’s original story, as filming progressed, particularly using it as a way to give many scenes a humorous, upbeat tag, which effectively preempted any sour aftertaste Dunson’s remorseless behavior might have created for some viewers. Aside from the ending, the most significant story change Hawks made on location was the radical hatchet job he did on Cherry Valance’s character. This was
due almost entirely to Hawks’ displeasure with John Ireland. In stark contrast to Monty Clift, Ireland didn’t take his big break seriously, didn’t work hard, didn’t become a cowboy. Instead, he was usually drunk or stoned, and unreliable in his scenes. He also started an affair with Joanne Dru, whom he later married. (It has often been claimed that Hawks became incensed because the director himself
was involved with Dru, but it was her husband, Dick Haymes, who would have had cause to be jealous.) Everything about Ireland’s approach to his work rubbed Hawks the wrong way, and he reacted by whittling his part down as much as he could, giving his lines to others, and depriving him of his pivotal role in the story’s climax.

Nonetheless, Ireland did get to share one of the film’s most memorable
scenes, the one in which Cherry and Matthew compare guns and have a tin-can-shooting competition. As soon as Cherry signs on for the drive, he and Matthew head off together for their mutual sizing up. “That’s a good-looking gun you were about to use back there. Can I see it?” Cherry remarks, to Matthew’s amusement. “Maybe you’d like to see mine,” he adds, as they swap weapons. “Nice. Awful nice,”
Cherry enthuses, before they match each other shot for shot hitting the can. The scene, not in the script, was an inspiration Hawks had on location and has often been cited as a prime and quite funny example of the homosexual subtext in much of Hawks’s work. Real Hollywood insiders have long chuckled at an even more private meaning to the “mine is bigger than yours” motif of the scene, since
John Ireland was well known to pack one of the biggest pistols in town, right up there with Milton Berle and Dan Dailey.

Red River
marked a poignant transition in the lore of the cinematic Old West as the only film in which Harry Carey and his son, Harry Carey
Jr., appeared together, even if they didn’t work in the same scenes; it was the father’s second-to-last picture, and the son’s third.
Carey Sr. and Hawks had maintained a mutual admiration society ever since
Air Force
, the actor feeling that he gave the best performance of his life in that film and his director expressing his regard by giving him a Tennessee Walker, even though Carey already had fourteen horses. All the same, while Carey’s wife, Olive, adored Hawks and was very friendly with Slim, Carey himself found Hawks too
distant and reserved for his taste and did not enjoy his experience on
Red River
. Already quite ill, Carey played the cattle buyer at the end of the picture, and Hawks became unusually severe with him when the actor couldn’t give him a certain look he wanted. “There was no problem with the dialogue,” his son said, “but he didn’t do it the way Howard wanted and Howard wasn’t nice about it.”

Harry
Jr., then twenty-five and fresh from Raoul Walsh’s
Pursued
, wasn’t part of the original cast of
Red River
but was hired after Hawks fired an actor who called in sick when he was actually drinking in Tucson. Since the character doesn’t make the long trek to Abilene, Hawks decided not to bother recasting it until returning to Hollywood, at which point John Wayne suggested Carey. Hawks, the actor
remembered, wrote most of the character’s dialogue on the set and suggested giving him a slight stutter. This gave Walter Brennan the opening he needed, and the great character actor continually pestered the kid about how he wasn’t stuttering right and demonstrated by “doing this stuttering thing like it was an affliction,” to the vast amusement of the director. Hawks also found a typically indirect
way of bolstering young Carey’s confidence. “When we started shooting it, Howard said, ‘Cut’ during the first take. I thought, ‘Oh, God, that’s it,’ and Howard said, ‘Duke, you got out of character there, you were smiling,’ and Duke said, ‘Well, I guess I did it because he was doing such a good job,’ and that made me feel great.” At another point, Hawks asked Carey if he knew any cowboy songs
and had him sing his choice, “Ridin’ Old Paint,” to the accompaniment of actor Glenn Strange’s guitar, as the scene began; a year later, Burl Ives sang the same tune at Harry Carey Sr.’s funeral.

In mid-November, the company decamped for Los Angeles, where filming resumed at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios. One of the stages contained an enormous, 110 × 120–foot simulated desert that was used for
all the nighttime camp scenes, the Indian raid, and various close-ups.
Red River
remains lodged in the memory as an expansive, outdoor film, but if watched closely, it reveals itself to be shot significantly inside. The opening scene, for instance, is striking for its wagon-filled landscapes and the sight of
Dunson and Fen cutting well-defined figures against the sky. Jarringly, however, most of their dialogue exchanges were done later in the studio against a rear-projection
screen and intercut with the location footage to less than graceful effect. The entire film is marked by this technique, something numerous other pictures, such as
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, were also guilty of during this transitional period from traditional studio work to vastly increased location shooting.