Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (83 page)

Hawks’s romance with Marion Marshall had proceeded in fits and starts. In May, word slipped out that they were on verge of getting married, which prompted a denial from Marshall that they were even engaged. On New Year’s
Eve, the couple went public with the announcement that they would be marrying soon, probably on February 26, the second anniversary of their first date. Plans went ahead accordingly but, suddenly, on February 24, amidst rumors of serious problems, the wedding was abruptly called off. Jane Greer, a good friend of Marshall’s, suggested that the young actress was disappointed that Hawks wasn’t proposing
her for any big film parts, and Marshall, who fancied herself a new Carole Lombard, was particularly irked that Hawks didn’t more aggressively pursue remaking
Twentieth Century
at Columbia, with her in the female lead. When the wedding was canceled, Hawks disappeared to Arizona, while Marshall commented, “There
is nothing to say, it’s just over. We came to the decision some time ago. We just decided
not to say anything about it.” Ironically, Marshall promptly signed a contract with Hawks’s old nemesis Hal Wallis, who cast her in films opposite Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis; in 1952 she married the director Stanley Donen. Through the l960s, Marshall was married to the actor Robert Wagner. She eventually became a prominent Beverly Hills dress designer with her own shop.

Although no one, with the probable exception of Feldman, knew the full extent of Hawks’s financial problems, Hawks was treading on thin ice by the time 1950 arrived. Unable to induce Zanuck to back “Morning Star” or “Dreadful Hollow,” Hawks told Feldman to set up another deal for him at a different studio so he could receive a new infusion of cash and have a card to
play against Zanuck. Hawks put his middle name on the shingle of his new production company, formed to supplant the moribund Monterey, and Winchester Pictures struck a three-picture deal with RKO, agreed upon in the final week of February, when Hawks was to have married Marion Marshall, and finally signed in May.

Hawks had not worked at RKO since having been dismissed from
Gunga Din
more than
a decade before, and many things had changed at the studio, none of them for the better. After producing the postwar flops
Mad Wednesday
and
Vendetta
, Howard Hughes had announced that he was once again abandoning the motion picture business. The industry was therefore stunned when, in May 1948, he bought a controlling 24 percent in RKO from Floyd B. Odlum’s Atlas Corporation. Realizing everyone’s
fears, Hughes soon began running the studio into the ground.

Under his erratic, reckless stewardship, Hughes eviscerated a strong company that, in the immediate postwar period, had ranked number-three in box-office earnings after MGM and 20th Century–Fox. He drove away his successful head of production, Dore Schary, who was quickly hired by MGM; fired seven hundred employees, or 33 percent of
those on the regular payroll, within four months of his takeover; instantly kowtowed to Justice Department pressure to separate RKO’s theater chain from studio operations, thus breaking ranks with the four other majors and leading the way for the splintering of the true studio system; placed himself in the fore-front of the anticommunist witch-hunt that saw many of the studio’s top talents placed
under clouds of suspicion or driven from the studio; and
reduced budgets and the number of pictures to a fraction of their former levels. Almost overnight, RKO became a virtual B-movie studio, for which Hughes’s patented lurid campaigns failed to compensate. Hughes didn’t want serious and talented filmmakers on the lot, and they didn’t want to work for him. After a period of peak profitability,
RKO lost increasing amounts of money in each of the first three years it was controlled by Hughes, with film-generated revenues plummeting an astounding 77 percent during that period.

It was when matters got that bad that Hughes—who didn’t even maintain an office on the lot, preferring to remain squirreled away at the Goldwyn Studios—was convinced that he had to make a few A-type pictures in
order to bolster the studio’s image in town and to generate some major profits. When Hawks signed on, he joined Walt Disney, Sam Goldwyn, and the producer Edmund Grainger among the group that Hughes expected to generate big grosses for RKO. Even though he still resented Hawks for
Red River
, Hughes implicitly believed in him as an almost infallibly commercial director. As for Hawks, he knew that
Hughes would be far too busy to meddle in his productions and felt that he had a special understanding of the tycoon since, unlike most other filmmakers, he had always landed on his feet after his dealings with Hughes. Under the new agreement, Hawks would produce and direct two pictures and produce, but not direct, a third, all within a twenty-seven-month period ending in August 1952. Hawks would
receive $175,000 apiece for the first two and $125,000, less the director’s salary, for the third. Winchester was to retain ownership of the films, although specified penalties would reduce Hawks’s ownership and/or salary if the budgets exceeded $1.5 million on the first two, $1.25 million on the second.

Anxious to make another Western and on the lookout, after
Red River
, for another story about
a Great First Time, Hawks settled quickly on A. B. Guthrie Jr.’s novel
The Big Sky
, about an early expedition of explorers and trappers who travel up the Missouri River from St. Louis to Montana in the 1830s and the subsequent lives of two of them. Ironically, the book had been passed on by RKO at the time of its publication in 1947, when a reader’s report dismissed it as “lacking any sort of
plot which might be suitable for picture purposes.” Presumably, the report objected to its long, sprawling, and diffuse narrative, as well as to the fact that the two halves of the story occur seven years apart. It appears likely that the book came to Hawks’s attention through Gary Cooper, who had bought the rights to Guthrie’s new novel,
The Way West
, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Winchester
was able to obtain the earlier book for only thirty thousand dollars, whereupon Hawks hired
Air Force
and
Bringing Up Baby
writer Dudley Nichols, who had also written numerous John Ford films, including
Stagecoach
.

Deeply convincing as a detailed portrait of how things were in the unexplored West, Guthrie’s novel was praised for its historical authenticity and clearly bespoke its author’s
intense feeling for the land. It is also, to be sure, a rambling narrative, which begins with the journey up two thousand miles of river by a curious band of loners, adventurers, and misfits, most of them Creole French. The book relishes its characters’ antisocial attitudes, dwells at length on the hunting, and is quite rough and frank at times, discussing how such men dealt with the clap
and interacted with different tribes of Indians. The main characters are Boone Caudill, a Kentucky boy in his late teens who runs away from home and meets the slightly older Jim Deakins. Together, they join the largely French crew of the
Mantan
, a keelboat heading upriver with a runaway Blackfoot princess, Teal Eye, who is to be returned to her people in exchange for favorable trading rights.

Guthrie’s manner of storytelling is episodic and discursive, and little conflict is generated among the leading characters or members of the crew. But Hawks, deciding that he would devote his entire film to the boat journey, had strong ideas how to change that. Guthrie does very little with the relationship between Boone and Jim, but Hawks saw that latent in that friendship lay an excellent potential
“love story between two men.” In the novel, the Indian girl Teal Eye, found in St. Louis after having been kidnapped by a rival tribe, is only ten or twelve years old during the keelboat trip, or decidedly too young to figure in a romantic triangle with the two white men. By advancing her age by about eight years, Hawks created the compelling, if predictable, added dynamic to the plot. One of
the central characters in the book is the group’s wise and extremely colorful hunter, Dick Summers, an old coot who “speaks Injun,” knows the territory like the back of his hand, and possesses a sixth sense about the ways of nature and all its creatures. Hawks decided to basically transpose Summers’s personality onto one of the book’s much-discussed but little-seen characters, Boone’s long-lost mountain-man
uncle, Zeb, who turns up in the novel only in one episode, when the river travelers find the rather disagreeable old man working as a hunter for a company fort.

The first half of the novel charts the voyage of the
Mandan
into unexplored territory and ends shockingly with the Blackfeet’s massacre of the entire crew; only the hunters Caudill, Deakins, and Summers manage to escape with their lives.
The second half picks up the trio seven years later
and evolves into a movingly tragic tale of men who belong nowhere, neither with the Indians, whose ways they have largely adapted, nor with “civilized” white society. Hawks streamlined it into the story of a successful journey, one in which the men’s hard work pays off and the various conflicts, both within the group and between the group and
the two forces opposing it, the Indians and the big trapping company, can be resolved. He also took certain key characters from the novel’s abandoned second half, including the Blackfoot simpleton Poordevil and the menacing trapper Streak, and worked them into the story of the river journey. Hawks essentially dismantled Guthrie’s novel and rebuilt it according to his own interests, which lay much
more in the area of the interaction among men rather than in the bigger picture of history and the implications of the white man’s incursion into the wilderness of North America.

Hawks’s new secretary, Lorrie Sherwood, worked with Hawks and Nichols at their initial story meetings and, subsequently, taking the writer’s dictation; she said that Hawks laid down to Nichols how he wanted the characters
changed and the story to unfold. Nothing, she said, went into the script that Hawks had not either thought of or personally approved. “Everything Mr. Hawks did was his,” Sherwood averred. It could accurately be said that Hawks did the “adaptation” of
The Big Sky
, while Nichols wrote the screenplay, which, it should be noted, contained virtually no dialogue taken from the novel. He did so quickly,
turning out a 220-page first draft in two months.

Lorrie Sherwood would remain an important member of Hawks’s team for the next several years. A thirty-year-old Oklahoman of Irish-Indian descent who had once been married to a professional football player, Sherwood was cute, gregarious, and fun-loving, as outgoing as her boss was reserved. Having previously worked in publicity and casting for
Sam Goldwyn, she had just finished a job for Fred Zinnemann when she met Chris Nyby, who sent her to see Hawks. When she drove up to Hog Canyon on a weekend to meet him, she was greeted by the sight of four men playing croquet, one of them—Darryl F. Zanuck—wearing a French bikini. Like all of Hawks’s other female secretaries and assistants, Sherwood maintained that Hawks was always gentlemanly and
respectful and never crossed the line between the professional and the personal. At first, the chatty Sherwood was a bit unnerved by Hawks’s long silences, but she soon learned that with him “there was a time to talk and a time to shut up.”

In
The Big Sky
, much would depend on the quality of the personalities playing the main roles. Hawks’s first choices for the two male leads were
Gary Cooper
and Arthur Kennedy, even if Cooper was a good thirty years too old for either of the parts as written. Hawks then began juggling such intriguing combinations as Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando, Mitchum and newcomer Charlton Heston, Cooper and Montgomery Clift, then Brando and Clift, Brando and Sydney Chaplin. However, when Brando, who had just worked for Feldman on
A Streetcar Named Desire
, demanded
$125,000, it was too much for Hawks, who in a pique announced that he didn’t need big stars and would shoot the picture with unknowns.

Desperate for a major title from Hawks, RKO had insisted on a start date of no later than September 1, 1950, for the director’s first production. In an attempt to rush it, in early August Hawks organized a location-scouting trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Eugene,
Oregon, manned by prospective second-unit director Arthur Rosson and four others, who spent ten days checking out potential river-area shooting sites. Hawks joined them for four days and approved Jackson Hole as a suitable base of operations. But it was apparent to everyone that there was no way to get such an ambitious picture before the cameras in time to beat the winter. With Hawks securing
a promise from Hughes to keep Mitchum’s schedule free for the following summer, both sides agreed to postpone
The Big Sky
one year.

For his second RKO picture to direct, Hawks had the astonishing idea of doing a sex-reversal version of
Cinderella
, entirely in drag, with Cary Grant as the mother, James Stewart and Danny Kaye as the daughters, and Ginger Rogers as Prince Charming. Hawks claimed
that all the actors were enthusiastic to do it, although there is no evidence that a script was ever even attempted. It remained, however, a cherished project that Hawks and Grant discussed frequently over the next couple of years. Hastily, another picture had to be readied for an almost immediate shoot. The material was far from anything in which Hawks had shown an interest in the past, except for
“Morning Star”; it also provided him with the means of making by far his most politically charged film.

“I thought it would be fun to take a stab at science fiction,” Hawks said. He originally found the 1938 story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Jr. (originally signed with the pseudonym Don A. Stuart) in a magazine he idly picked up at the army PX in Heidelberg during one of the innumerable
delays on
I Was a Male War Bride
. “I was sitting there with nothing to do and no place to go and got to wondering: ‘What are people from another planet like?’ I don’t see why they should be so entirely different.”