Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (77 page)

Preoccupied with
Red River
, Hawks did nothing with the Hemingway project at first, but when Samuel Fuller visited Hawks’s office one day to discuss a possible writing job, he noticed several books on the shelf above Hawks’s desk. “I own all these,”
Hawks offhandedly said. Taking a closer look at some of the familiar titles, including
The Sun Also Rises
, the young screenwriter replied, “Well, I own them too,” whereupon Hawks said, quietly but with emphasis, “No, Sam, you don’t understand. I
own
them.” When Fuller enthused about the Hemingway, Hawks asked if he would be interested in writing the script, but was stunned when Fuller, carried
away with excitement, suggested his idea for a great opening scene: in a tent near the front during World War I, an injured Jake Barnes is on the operating table; the nurse is Brett, and the light from the lantern shines upon her as we hear Jake’s balls drop, one, then the next, into a bucket. Thus, in one vivid scene would the audience be clued in to the nature of Jake’s malady and Brett’s knowledge
of it. (Though Hemingway never explicitly detailed the injury in the novel, he elsewhere indicated that Jake lost not his balls but his penis, leaving him with the ability to still feel sexual desire but unable to do anything about it. Fuller misunderstood this, while Hawks’s insight into this crucial component of the story remains unclear.) Needless to say, Fuller did no work on this script.

All of the companies approached about Hawks’s services were very keen on the prospect of his making
The Sun Also Rises
, but without a script or even a clear idea on Hawks’s part of how to get around the problems that had stumped everyone else for so long, the project obviously couldn’t move ahead anytime soon and would not solve Hawks’s immediate need for cash. The project was put on hold, to surface
as an ever-intriguing possibility at several points over the next few years.

Suddenly, Hawks got a call from the last man in Hollywood, except for Louis B. Mayer, he ever expected to work for again—Sam Goldwyn. After having reduced his productivity during the war and finally won his long-cherished Oscar for
The Best Years of Our Lives
as well as the Irving Thalberg Award from the Academy, Goldwyn
was resuming a schedule of two films per year. Several of his big stars had either played out their contracts or slipped away during the war, but in 1943 he signed the multitalented comic entertainer Danny Kaye and launched him on an enormously successful screen career in a string of Technicolor comedies and musicals. The
fourth of these,
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
, was due out in July, and
Goldwyn had the brainstorm that Kaye’s vehicle for 1948 should be a remake of
Ball of Fire
, then only five years old. At the enormous price of $100,000, Goldwyn hired Harry Tugend to adapt Wilder and Brackett’s script.

In various interviews, Hawks claimed that Goldwyn came to him practically begging for an idea for Kaye and that he, Hawks, hatched the
Ball of Fire
idea, but Tugend was hired in
January and finished his first draft in March before Hawks was even approached by Goldwyn. All through the winter, Goldwyn had intended to have William K. Seiter direct, and it was only in March, after Seiter proved unavailable, that Goldwyn spoke to Hawks in Palm Springs. For reasons that were never spelled out but undoubtedly had to do with the success of the original picture, Goldwyn decided
that Hawks, who obviously didn’t respect him and always caused him trouble, was the only man for this job. Hawks didn’t want to take it, but Goldwyn finally made him in an offer that, in Hawks’s current desperate straits, he simply couldn’t refuse—$250,000. In one interview, Hawks stated that he earned $25,000 per week, but had this been the case he would have made, with overages, $350,000 for the
job; Goldwyn had wisely hired him at a flat rate.

Hawks dealt with Goldwyn without even informing Feldman, and the agreement was reached by the beginning of April, just as Monterey was closing up its offices on the Goldwyn lot. It was a deal that, as even Hawks later admitted, Goldwyn came to regret, due to its pointless extravagance—he was paying his director nearly four thousand dollars more
than he was paying Danny Kaye, and for as anonymous and indifferent a piece of work as any journeyman would have done for one-third the price.

After his deep and passionate involvement in every phase of his last several pictures, Hawks couldn’t have cared less about this one, and the result was what he unequivocally called an “altogether horrible experience.” At first, he said, Goldwyn wanted
to set the story in 1922 with a New Orleans musical backdrop. This seemed both preposterous and musically limiting, so the slant was changed, with the professors no longer researching slang but modern jazz. The constant evolution of the script is testified to by the revolving door for writers that kept spinning right through production, with little input from Hawks. After Tugend completed a second
draft, Phil Rapp did a rewrite, whereupon the excellent writer Daniel Fuchs spent nearly as much time on revisions as Tugend had on his adaptation. Other writers were called in for spot work: former Kaye screenwriters Melville Shavelson, Robert
Pirosh, Ken Englund, and Everett Freeman all worked on punching up his dialogue; Roland Kibbee was paged just to write the Buck and Bubbles material. An
extraordinary collection of jazz greats was assembled for the picture—in additon to clarinetist Benny Goodman, who would play one of the professors, Goldwyn brought aboard Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, and Mel Powell—but the army of writers was unable to give them anything interesting to do or say. Entitled
That’s Life
during production,
A Song Is Born
, as the
picture was renamed, ended up as an unusual instance of a picture with no screenplay credit, other than the citation for Wilder and Monroe’s original story. Whether this was the result of a Goldwyn decree or because no one wanted it is unknown.

In what was otherwise a desultory shoot and film, the musicians represented the one saving grace. Hawks, whose own musical talent was limited to playing
two songs on the banjo, liked jazz and popular music and got a kick out of the jam sessions on the set. On numerous occasions, according to Virginia Mayo, Hawks “would stop the action and just listen to them play, which wasn’t very professional. Mr. Goldwyn wouldn’t like him wasting time like that.” Hawks sometimes invited the musicians up to his house, where his daughter Barbara remembers some
incredible evenings when Goodman, Powell, and a couple of the others would play and cut homemade 78 recordings into the small hours. All the same, Goldwyn’s squareness asserted itself in the narrow latitude he allowed Hawks and the musicians, jamming the latter’s contributions into narrowly defined corners, mostly early in the picture, and instructing his director not to let the white and black musicians
get too close together; even Hawks, not exactly known for his broadmindedness about race relations, balked at this and claimed to have become good friends with Louis Armstrong.

Hawks knew from the outset that he was stuck, and it only got worse. As Virginia Mayo observed, “This wasn’t his own film, it was Mr. Goldwyn’s film. Mr. Goldwyn was the boss.” Danny Kaye, known for his wild exuberance
and inventive antics, seemed straitjacketed by the part of the bashful academic. What’s more, he was temporarily separated from his wife, Sylvia Fine, which not only meant that she wasn’t there to write any specialty numbers or comedy for him but that he was, according to Hawks, “a basket case, stopping work to see a psychiatrist twice a day.” In fact, Kaye had one shrink appointment per day, at
noon, but the result was the same, with his director finding him “about as funny as a crutch.”

Even worse, after having promised Hawks that he wouldn’t have to use her, Goldwyn imposed Virginia Mayo, Kaye’s costar in all his previous
films, as the female lead. Hawks gave Mayo a miniversion of his routine for beginning actresses, sending her to an empty soundstage and making her scream to lower
her voice. “That didn’t work for me,” Mayo said. “I just got hoarse. I just had to try the role the way I ordinarily would.” But Hawks lavished most of his attention on the actress’s looks. “He liked every woman to sort of resemble his wife,” Mayo declared. “I had to wear clothes that were patterned after his wife Slim. And even my hairdo was patterned after Mrs. Hawks’ hairdo.” Receiving little
concrete direction from Hawks, Mayo watched
Ball of Fire
numerous times and privately rehearsed her scenes in imitation of Stanwyck. Nor could Mayo sing her own number, which was dubbed by Jeri Sullivan. Hawks considered Mayo, in a word, “pathetic.”

Once again, Hawks rounded up a genial bunch of character actors to play the professors but was saddled with Steve Cochran, whom he had tested for
The Big Sleep
and didn’t like, as the heavy (one arguable improvement the film made on
Ball of Fire
is that there’s less of the cornball gangster stuff). Aside from the musicians, the one compensation for Hawks was working again with Gregg Toland. Unlike
Red River
, however, for which Hawks had badly wanted his favorite cinematographer,
A Song Is Born
was utterly devoid of challenge or interest
pictorially, and looked it. That it was Hawks’s first film in color mattered to him not at all; Toland gave the film the bright, lavish look Goldwyn expected for his Danny Kaye comedies, but from a compositional point of view, he and Hawks approached their assignment so perfunctorily that they often just repeated setups from
Ball of Fire
. Hawks was so uninterested that he didn’t even attend dailies
and, late in life, claimed never to have seen the finished film.

On all fronts, Hawks was enduring one of his most dispiriting seasons. During the spring, prior to the shoot, he spent as much time in Palm Springs as
Red River
would allow but happened to be home during the period Slim was overwrought with worry about Leland Hayward. As he had once four years before, Hayward began hemorrhaging
beyond doctors’ ability to stop it. Slim called in her own doctor, who performed an operation and concluded the bleeding was due to tension. Even through this, Slim’s attachment to Hayward was never discussed with Hawks, who, Slim said, “behaved like the gentleman he had been brought up to be. He knew I was suffering and he went out of his way to be sympathetic and supportive.” When Slim was telephoned
with the reasonably optimistic results of the operation, she was in her room and, she thought, alone. Then, as she recalled it in her memoir, the following scene played itself out:

Unknown to me, Howard had entered the room during this call. When I looked up, he was standing at the foot of my bed, watching my face.

“Is he going to be all right?” he asked, as though we were talking about an
old friend of ours.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Good,” he said softly. “I know how much you care for him. I’m glad he’s going to be all right.”

With that, Howard was gone. And I sat there for a long time, in total disbelief that my marriage had just ended with the most impeccable ease and grace.

On June 5, as Hawks was testing potential professors for
A Song Is Born
, Slim moved out of Hog Canyon and
took a house with sixteen-month-old Kitty a few minutes away in Brentwood. The details of the settlement would be worked out later, and it would take nearly a year for Hayward to obtain a divorce from his wife, Margaret Sullavan. But now, after several years of a household bursting with teenage kids, rich bikers, croquet players, illustrious guests, animals, and, above all, Slim’s sunny exuberance
and spirited sense of fun, Hog Canyon was quiet. Sure, Hawks could bring his girls there openly now, and David would be around through the summer, tinkering with cars and bringing dates by before leaving for Princeton in the fall. But without Slim, the parties were over. Hawks had built the house for her, and she had decorated it, furnished it, maintained it, bestowed it with her impeccable taste.
With Hawks as its sole master now, the atmosphere became muted, the help idle, the rooms empty.

A Song Is Born
began shooting on June 16 on an allotted seventy-six-day schedule that was then augmented to an incredibly cushy eighty-one days; it almost seemed padded to take Danny Kaye’s shrink appointments into account. Filming was briefly interrupted in early August when Hawks became ill, but
even with the leisurely timetable and the director not wanting to spend a minute longer on it than necessary, production fell gradually behind. Shooting finally ground to a halt on September 26 after eighty-seven days, eight days behind schedule. The budget was a lofty $2,851,983, virtually the same as that of
Red River;
there can be no question which made better use of its money.

United Artists
had originally hoped that
Red River
would be ready for release that summer, but with Dimitri Tiomkin’s score just completed and Hawks’s attention diverted elsewhere, it wasn’t even ready for its first sneak
preview until July 8. Another preview was held two weeks later, and while reaction was good, everyone agreed that the film was far too long. Tiomkin exclaimed, “If I never see another cow in
my life, it will be too soon.” Feldman gave Hawks a number of notes, some of which were heeded, while others were not: the picture was at least twenty minutes too long, with “too many cattle scenes,” and cuts should largely come in the first half; there were too many “yahoos” at the start of the drive, and at least a half dozen individual scenes were too long and could be cut by as much as half.
Hawks was so enamored of the film that Chris Nyby had to be brutal at times and force him to shorten it, and Feldman still wanted to change the title to something indicative of the size and importance of the story. All the same, the film was in excellent shape compared to the financial and legal quagmire surrounding it on all sides.

United Artists, which had been started as an idealistic dream
by Charles Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford in 1919, through which the filmmakers would control their own destinies, was in its most perilous straits ever in the late 1940s. Always the subject of fractious disagreements between surviving founders Chaplin and Pickford, the company was considered such a poor risk at that time that its banks either suspended loans to it
or demanded 100 percent guarantees on them. Making matters worse, some of its key producers, disenchanted with the corporate disarray, decided to withhold their product, thereby diminishing cash flow and creating a further reduced sense of confidence that UA could properly release a big picture. United Artists was finally able to force delivery of the films, but because they were all flops, the company
became even more anxious to get
Red River
into release; at least this one, executives felt, looked like a surefire winner.