Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (88 page)

Naturally, Hawks filed a lawsuit against Steinkamp and his numerous partners, charging that his work had
been pursued “in a careless, negligent and improper manner” and that nothing had been done to compact
and stabilize the earth or to install any drainage controls. The suit asked double Hawks’s estimated $185,000 in damages. The defendants tried such tactics as claiming that the avalanche was an act of God and an unavoidable accident and even that Hawks should have known better than to build a
house at the bottom of a canyon where one day such a thing was bound to happen, but the court found that there was no question that the defendants had been negligent. It took until 1957 for the final judgment to be rendered, at which point Steinkamp was ordered to pay Hawks $64,596 in damages, plus court costs. By this time, Hawks didn’t even own Hog Canyon anymore.

By the spring of 1952, RKO
already looked like a slowly sinking ship, and Hawks was searching for a good way to jump off. Like just about everyone else, the director couldn’t pin Hughes down to a meeting or even get him on the phone, even though he was anxiously awaiting his approval of his cut of
The Big Sky
. Dore Schary, now at MGM, wanted Hawks to direct a Cary Grant film, but Hughes couldn’t be reached in time to obtain
the clearance. Hughes did want Hawks to go ahead with
The Left Hand of God
, but only if he could do it for $1.5 million with Kirk Douglas in the lead. By this time, Hawks had cooled off entirely on the project and adamantly refused to consider using Douglas. With Hughes determined to hold Hawks to his contract, numerous counterproposals were made, but time went by, Hughes sold
The Left Hand of
God
to Fox, and, in the fall of 1952, Hughes relinquished control of the studio, if only temporarily. But it was the opening Hawks needed to escape any further commitments to RKO.

Hawks’s RKO contract did provide for him to continue meeting his preexisting obligations to 20th Century–Fox. Zanuck was anxious to get him back in the fold, Hawks needed to keep earning money, Cary Grant was under
contract to the studio, and Zanuck and producer Sol Siegel had a comedy for which they felt the Hawks-Grant combination would be ideal.
The Fountain of Youth
, or
Darling, I Am Growing Younger
, as it was soon called, was originated by Harry Segall and handed off to I. A. L. Diamond, a young writer shortly to become renowned as Billy Wilder’s partner. Both Zanuck and Siegel were pleased with Diamond’s
elaboration on the original, but when, in early October, Hawks signaled his availability, Diamond was off and Hecht and Lederer were on. As soon as
The Big Sky
wrapped in mid-November, Hawks and Zanuck spent a weekend in Palm Springs sorting through the story in detail, at which point the writers shifted into high gear, delivering their rewrite on December 10. Siegel read it overnight and raved
to Zanuck that “they have rescrambled all the elements of our script and have done an amazingly good job considering the short period of time
they were on it. My feeling is that if Cary likes their version there is nothing to worry about. This can still be the funniest picture of the year.”

The story turned on the discovery of a youth serum that makes adults behave like spirited college kids
or, with an extra dose, schoolchildren. It was an age-old theme, and, like
The Thing
, it gave Hawks the chance to needle scientists, which he did right from the beginning by having a monkey be the one who “discovers” the youth potion. It was a premise pregnant with both farcical and serious potential, and while the film was intended primarily as a broad comedy, Hawks was not oblivious to its serious
aspects, nor was Zanuck.

Following his usual instinct, Hawks wanted to cast a very young actress opposite Grant and show that Grant’s character, Professor Barnaby Fulton, a close relative to the paleontologist in
Bringing Up Baby
, had “turned into sort of a fogey; then he was rejuvenated and remained younger for the rest of his life. That was the point.” No theme could have been closer to Hawks’s
heart at that very moment, as, at fifty-five, he was in the flush of a major romance with a woman in her midtwenties. He was very partial to the script’s summation line, “You’re only old when you forget you’re young,” and until the end of his life, Hawks rarely spent time with people anywhere near his own age, preferring to socialize with men and women decades younger than himself. Hawks kept
suggesting well-known young actresses, particularly Ava Gardner, for the film, but even then Grant had begun resisting costarring opposite such young women (not always successfully), and Fox finally decided to give the part to Ginger Rogers, a choice that didn’t thrill the director. At forty-one, she was the oldest leading lady ever to appear in a Howard Hawks film; remarkably, she and Grant played
the only leading couple in any Hawks sound film already married when the story begins. Furthermore, Hawks had originally envisioned that only Grant’s character would regress into childish behavior by using the drug. But Rogers insisted upon doing the “getting young thing” as well, and Hawks was forced to acquiesce, though he realized that the antics performed by Grant would seem tiresome when Rogers
repeated them.

In all events, Rogers’s casting helped prevent Hawks’s personal conception of the piece from coalescing, something he unkindly took out on her during filming. From the start, he kept the relationship formal and remote by addressing her only by her real name, Virginia. Rogers was a first-rate caricaturist, and one day she sketched a fine portrait of Hawks, accentuating his stern
visage and turned-down mouth. As Robert Cornthwaite, who had a small part in the picture, remembered it, “Hawks kept walking
up and down ignoring it, while Ginger was glancing up expectantly hoping for a compliment. He never said anything and, finally, she rubbed it out. I don’t know if it was a coincidence or not, but in the next scene he humiliated her, … saying, ‘No, no, no, Virginia, not that
way,’ over and over, but not telling her what to do, until she was devastated.”

Hecht having moved on to other projects, Lederer continued to revise the script to Hawks’s and Zanuck’s specifications. Hawks, for example, came up with the running gag involving the water cooler as the source of the youth formula and instructed that while everything the characters did “under the influence” should
be funny, it should also have serious consequences later on. For his part, Zanuck insisted that the film “should leave the audience with this thought: ‘Be satisfied; let well enough alone; let nature take its course; youth is not all it’s cracked up to be. The green pastures which we see in the distance aren’t always so green when seen close up.’”

Although Hawks and Lederer loaded the script
with nearly as much sexual innuendo as they had the much-laundered
War Bride
screenplay, no one expected the Breen Office to unilaterally object to the entire premise of
Darling, I Am Growing Younger
. But it did, stating that this comedy about a youth-restoring formula “amounts to a story of the invention of an aphrodisiac, which mainly exploits the … ‘sex-sational’ aspects of this drug.” In the
submitted shooting script, the main reaction Ginger Rogers’s Edwina has to the drug, called Cupidone, is to get her husband on a second honeymoon and into bed, while Charles Coburn’s Mr. Oxly is motivated to use the formula as a sex stimulant in his relationship with his voluptuous young secretary, Miss Laurel, played by Marilyn Monroe. All of this was utterly unacceptable to the MPAA, which forced
the drug to be renamed B-4 and changed Oxly’s interest in the elixir to a commercial, rather than personal, one. The censors also objected to “the light attitude towards marriage,” hardly a surprising element in a Hawks film, and innumerable suggestive lines and bits of business. Among the problems: Oxly’s continual leering at his secretary; Edwina’s far-too-explicitly revived interest in sex
on the honeymoon; and a climax in which a nude Barnaby pulls Edwina into the shower with him. Also requested for elimination were lines and words, such as “Tonight, we’re staying home for intellectual reasons” and even “old poop.” Most of the revisions were made and, as a result, the tone of the film overall was shifted from one of adolescent horniness to juvenile silliness.

With Chris Nyby just
then in the throes of trying to pare
The Big Sky
down to a reasonable length, Hawks began shooting
Darling, I Am Growing Younger
on March 5, 1952. The director had Grant wear much thicker
glasses than he had in
Bringing Up Baby
and noticeably slowed down the actor’s dialogue delivery in order to emphasize the character’s advancing age. He once again forced Grant to act opposite a scene-stealing
animal, although the actor didn’t mind the chimp nearly as much as he had the leopard. As always, Hawks structured his comic gags organically from the material and for his performers and had the rejuvenated Grant behave in ways that struck him as specifically appropriate to and funny for the former acrobat and music-hall performer; when Barnaby first takes B-4, he exults by executing a one-armed
cartwheel. Robert Cornthwaite said, “Cary Grant contributed a lot to his part. He had a remarkable memory of the games he had played as a kid, which he used for his character, and he brought a wonderful childlike quality to it.”

The veteran character actor Charles Coburn was a delight, and he proved adept at stealing scenes even from the seasoned Cary Grant. In one early scene, Coburn managed
to make his costar all but disappear by enshrouding him in cigar smoke. Later, as Grant recalled, “he had to chase and squirt Marilyn Monroe with a siphon of soda, a moment he approached with glee. Any seeming reluctance, he later explained, was only his indecision about
where
on Marilyn’s … um …
ample
proportions to
squirt
the soda. Miss Monroe seemed to present so many inviting parts. Everyone
on the set awaited the moment with goggling eyes. You could hear a pin drop. Eventually Charles gave it a healthy squirt, and missing Miss Monroe, he hit me full in the puss, thereby completely obliterating me from the scene again.” (In the film, Grant is nowhere seen being squirted by Coburn.) Hawks liked Coburn enormously and was willing to coddle the seventy-four-year-old actor in an indulgent
way. To conserve his energy for the actual shooting, Coburn often napped in a chair he kept near the set. As Cornthwaite recalled, “He snored very loudly, and he often did so right through a take. It would often disrupt takes, but Mr. Hawks would just do it over again. He wouldn’t allow them to wake him up or interrupt him. He was very considerate of him.”

As for Monroe’s limited but prominent
appearance in the picture, it was the last of the initial, pneumatic sex-kitten phase of her career—her next picture,
Niagara
, gave her a full-blown lead and true stardom. Forced to wear a dress she detested, she was out of sorts during the shoot, and even though she was only in a few scenes, the company was forced to work around her. The reason, everyone learned later, was trouble with her appendix,
which was removed as soon as she completed her role. Neither Hawks nor Grant responded to her allure in the least. Hawks, in Cornthwaite’s view,
was disdainful of Monroe as a talent and a person and was using her services only because, as Hawks put it to Cary Grant and John Wayne, “I think the overdeveloped quality in that little girl is going to be kind of funny.” Grant remarked, “I had no idea
she would become a big star. If she had something different from any other actress, it wasn’t apparent at the time. She seemed very shy and quiet. There was something sad about her.” Cornthwaite shared a scene with her and flatly said, “Marilyn was terrified. She had just a few words, and she rehearsed them again and again.… She was very determined to do the things she was scared of.” Hawks believed
that Monroe had a horrible inferiority complex, and he invariably noted inaccurately that “nobody dated her, nobody took her out, nobody paid any attention to her.” In fact, it was during the shooting of this picture that she began dating Joe DiMaggio; she often had to be torn from long phone calls with him to go to work. They were a serious item by the time of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, and they
married in 1954, so it is hard to imagine what Hawks was thinking. Putting it charitably, one could say that Hawks and Monroe developed no special rapport with each other on their first collaboration; more bluntly, Hawks considered Monroe “so goddamn dumb” that she was wary and afraid of him from then on. Still, Hawks admitted that she did a fine job in the film and that “the camera liked her.”

Monkey Business
, as the picture was retitled toward the end of production, fairly flew through shooting, especially by Hawks’s standards, wrapping after eight weeks on April 30. Scarcely three weeks later, on May 22, Hawks was back behind the cameras, directing perhaps the most desultory twenty-seven minutes of footage he ever exposed. Hollywood had never been especially partial to omnibus films,
but the recent success of three British pictures based on stories by W. Somerset Maugham—
Quartette, Trio
, and
Encore
—inspired the studio to allow producer André Hakim to give the format a try with
O. Henry’s Full House
, from tales by one of America’s most famous authors and with segments directed by top in-house talents. The episodes had begun shooting the previous November, and all but the final
one were in the can—Henry Koster’s
The Cop and the Anthem
, Henry Hathaway’s
The Clarion Call
, Jean Negulesco’s
The Last Leaf
, and Henry King’s
The Gift of the Magi
.

Saying he did the job simply as a favor to Zanuck but talked into it by a $28,000 paycheck for one week’s work, Hawks didn’t care at all for the story, an eight-page ironic comedy about two small-time con men in rural Alabama who
kidnap a ten-year-old boy with the intention of collecting two thousand dollars for his safe return. The child turns out to be a terror, however,
and they end up accepting his father’s demand of $250 in cash to take the kid off their hands. Nunnally Johnson had done a straightforward adaptation, but when Hawks inherited the oddball cast of radio humorist Fred Allen and professional cynic Oscar
Levant to play the kidnappers, he called in Hecht and Lederer to do a quick rewrite. This, along with the performers’ ad-libs, threw the tone off more than it altered the course of the story itself; Hecht and Lederer concentrated on the cynical kibitzing between the two men, which was elaborated upon by the comic performers themselves, but in the end it really didn’t matter.
The Ransom of Red
Chief
was a lost cause, a silly little story that holds the unfortunate, if not unique, distinction of being a comedy without a single laugh in it. Hawks managed a couple of scenes of boldly protracted slow-burn comedy, but the only truly Hawksian touch, and only noticeable by a sharp eye at that, is the outrageous attention seeking of a sexy Tobacco Road floozie (Gloria Gordon) in the background
on a porch as the men visit town. If this represented Hawks’s idea of the sort of backwoods nymph he imagined for
Sergeant York
, one can only be relieved that Hal Wallis put his foot down in that instance. Also rather startling is Hawks’s view of children as expressed by this episode and the films he made on either side of it. Granted, the boy in
Ransom
was portrayed by Lee Aaker very much as
written in O. Henry’s story, but the depiction of children here, in
Monkey Business
, and in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
makes kids, collectively, out to be nothing short of little terrorists, and there are very few other children in Hawks’s films to balance this perspective out.