Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (89 page)

It was one of those pictures that was a lot more fun to make than to watch. Lorrie Sherwood said that, because of Fred
Allen and Oscar Levant, “I never had so much fun in all my life, and Mr. Hawks had a wonderful time.” Hawks liked both men enormously and socialized frequently with Levant in years to come. Levant also developed a big crush on Dee. In one important scene, the kidnappers were supposed to be asleep on the ground in their nightgowns when a large bear prowls through the camp. At the last minute Hawks
decided to use stuffed dummies for the scene, and the entire crew was then stunned when the bear, named George, went directly over and clamped his jaws around the head of the dummy that was supposed to be Fred Allen.

Dampening the high spirits were the reactions of studio executives, who, Hawks admitted, were “horrified” when they saw that he had turned the story into something of a slapstick
burlesque. Critics and audiences weren’t much better disposed to Hawks’s episode. Having made the film in
imitation of some English art-house hits, Fox decided to launch it on September 19 at the tiny Beverly Canon Cinema in Beverly Hills, just around the corner from Feldman’s Famous Artists offices. To everyone’s amazement, it broke the house record with a $9,200 opening-week gross and went on
to a fourteen-week run. Clearly, then, the film had an appeal to the same upscale audience that patronized foreign films. However, it was obvious to everyone that
Ransom
, which was placed next-to-last in the sequence of stories, was a misfire. By the time the film debuted in New York City, on October 16, Fox had removed Hawks’s episode entirely, telling the press that it was felt that the overall
feature, which ran 117 minutes with
Ransom
included, “would be a better picture without it.” With the
Full House
title no longer truly applicable, wisecracks ensued about how Fox ought to change it to
O. Henry’s Four of a Kind
. It enjoyed extended runs at the TransLux in New York, the Surf Theater in Chicago, and at similar big-city art houses around the nation. The highest it ever ranked at the
national box office was number eleven one week in early November, but this was achieved in limited release. In this light, its eventual earnings of $1 million were hardly disgraceful.

While
The Big Sky
was still playing at the Criterion,
Monkey Business
opened at the Roxy in New York on September 5 for a strong three-week run. Reviews and audience response were mixed, however, bearing out Hawks’s
contention that miscalculations in casting and structuring hurt the film. As it fanned out around the country, the picture failed to live up to the studio’s hopes that it would be the comedy sensation of the year, on a par with
I Was a Male War Bride
. It peaked at number seven in popularity nationally in mid-October, ranked number eleven for the month, and finished the year in a disappointing
forty-seventh place at the box office, with just $2 million in rentals.

Ironically,
Monkey Business
, an overtly commercial comedy of no particular distinction, shortly became the unlikely rallying point for a handful of French critics advocating recognition for Hawks as a serious artist, as Hawks would discover to his surprise when he got to Europe. Some of the most sophisticated students of
Hawks’s work have made cogent cases for the preeminence of the film among the director’s comedies. Robin Wood described it convincingly as his most “organic” comedy, matched it intriguingly with
Scarface
as a portrait of the reversion to primitivism, and admired the way the subsidiary characters—elderly Oxly, the naked baby boy, Edwina’s disapproving mother, the immature Miss Laurel—fill in the
various stages of life not embraced by the age-reversing trips. Gerald Mast praised
its immaculate structure; convincingly presented the film as, in many ways, the mirror image, or extension, of
Bringing Up Baby;
and pointed up the Shakespearean parallels in both pictures. Both critics applauded the manner in which
Monkey Business
interlaced its thematic concerns with humor, as well as the way
excess pushed an ostensible comedy to the brink of tragedy.

Still, the best Hawks films are those in which one feels that the process of making the film helped it find its natural and proper form, and this is nowhere evident in
Monkey Business
. Aside from some of the unusually muted moments devoted to discussion of the Barnaby-Edwina marriage, most of the action seems mechanical and laborious,
almost as if done by rote according to a preexisting plan. In fact, the film remains most resonant for its depiction of a long-term marriage—unique in the director’s work—and its utterly fantastic means of reviving a dwindling relationship, something Hawks could never do in life. The sweet renewal of Barnaby and Edwina’s marriage by the end of the film was, as far as Hawks was concerned, purest
fantasy.

Through the summer of 1952, Hawks considered many changes he might want to make in his life. The mess and construction going on around Hog Canyon made him think for the first time about selling it; many of his friends were heading off to Europe to make films and even to live, and there were stories, especially
The Sun Also Rises
, that he wanted to make there; if he did this, he would
want to unload his horses and reduce his entanglements at home. Making the whole plan more enticing were the hefty tax benefits he would accrue if he were to work overseas for eighteen months to two years. And perhaps he would marry Dee after all; if Hawks made the right deal with a studio, they could live lavishly overseas while he prepared some pictures, and Feldman told him that there were plenty
of European producers ready to drop bags of money at the feet of a director of Hawks’s stature. His parents were now dead and his boys were basically on their own. Barbara, now sixteen, would soon be sent to board at a girls’ school. She had been refused by the exclusive Marlborough School, as were all girls from show-business families, including the Disney daughters, and enrolled instead at Westlake
School near UCLA, where her cousin, Katherine Thalberg, was entering her senior year. It wasn’t a boarding school per se, but two “old maid” teachers lived there, and they watched over Barbara and the few other girls who needed a place to stay. Basically, there was little standing in the way of Hawks turning over a new page and possibly making a lot of money in the process.

However, he still
owed Fox one more picture and was open to trying something new there too.
A Song Is Born
to the side, one of the few genres Hawks had never tried was the musical comedy. In 1947, Hawks had spoken to Feldman about trying to do a movie musical, so when, surprisingly, Zanuck and Siegel proposed one to him, he was game.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
was a title that had already resonated throughout show
business for more than twenty-five years. Anita Loos’s 1925 book was one of the sensational and defining works of its era, a frank and ultimately rather downbeat look at a socially ambitious girl’s life in the Roaring Twenties. Loos and her husband, John Emerson, turned it into an equally successful play in 1926. In 1949, a Broadway musical version, with a book by Loos and Joseph Fields and songs
by Jules Styne and Leo Robin, became the rage, and Carol Channing became a star playing Lorelei Lee and singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Two years later, the show was still packing them in in New York, and with movie musicals at one of their all-time peaks of popularity, the film studios were outdoing themselves to win the rights. In November 1951, 20th Century–Fox won out, paying
$150,000, with Zanuck intending it as a vehicle for his biggest musical star of the 1940s, Betty Grable. By the time Hawks and Lederer were assigned to the project the following June, shortly after
Monkey Business
wrapped, Zanuck and his staff had seriously rethought their intentions for it. Grable’s star was on the wane, her salary was up to $150,000 per picture, and Zanuck, although he had no
personal sense of Marilyn Monroe’s potential, was allowing himself to be persuaded that perhaps this phony blonde was for real and ought to star as the musical stage’s ultimate blond gold digger. His greatest incentive was her price, which had reached its contractual ceiling of fifteen hundred dollars a week, with five years to go. Monroe was so incensed by this that she left the William Morris
Agency in favor of Charles Feldman, but even he, who was so close to Zanuck, couldn’t twist the tycoon’s arm on this point. Monroe ended up earning only eighteen thousand dollars on
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
.

But if Zanuck was to cast Monroe, he wanted insurance in the way of a major costar in the role of Dorothy; at Hawks’s suggestion, he got it in the form of Jane Russell. Howard Hughes, to
whom Russell was still under contract, only rarely loaned out his most famous female star, but Hughes owned a minority share of Fox and could sense that the musical would be a winning vehicle that would only raise her stock in Hollywood. Furthermore, Hawks had waived his financial interest in Russell on the understanding
that he would be able to borrow her anytime he wished. The time had come
to cash in this chip, but it still came at a steep price: Hughes demanded, and got, two hundred thousand dollars for Russell’s services and forced Fox to also engage her entire RKO entourage, including the cameraman Harry J. Wild and the makeup, hair, and wardrobe personnel. When Russell and her team arrived on the Fox lot, it was like Cleopatra arriving in Rome, and the good-natured actress played
it to the hilt just for the fun of it.

Hawks and Russell, who had remained friendly over the years, were delighted to be working together at long last. Part of the understanding was that Dorothy’s role, more of a supporting part originally, would be built up to equal status with Lorelei’s in order to justify the top billing Russell, by Hughes’s decree, would receive. After it was decided that
the 1920s setting should be updated and that only the two lead characters, theme, and locales would be retained, Lederer, assisted by Lorrie Sherwood, sweated through the summer to drastically overhaul the material. Pointing out that the film had virtually nothing to do with the book and little to do with the play, the writer observed, “I had to make it up from scratch because there wasn’t any story.…
What amazed me was that the musical had no book to speak of, and you realize that it was actually a success as a revue rather than a musical story of a book.” At the same time, it had to be decided which songs from the show would be kept and how many new tunes might be needed. Ultimately, three of Styne and Robin’s Broadway originals were used: “I’m Just a Little Girl from Little Rock” (transformed
into the duet “We’re Just Two Little Girls from Little Rock”), “Bye Bye Baby,” and the immortal “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Hawks’s friend Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson collaborated on two fresh compositions, “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” and “When Love Goes Wrong, Nothing Goes Right.” In the end, songs and dances filled roughly 40 percent of the finished film.

Although he
had no gift for it himself, Hawks loved music, and in his nonmusical pictures, he often created scenes of group singing, which served to bring his diverse characters together in a communal activity. Hawks insisted, however, upon
not
directing the musical numbers in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. He had no background in musical theater, of course, and no feel for choreography, and he probably realized
that an expert in the field could do a much better job. The expert Fox chose was the ace choreographer Jack Cole, who had put Rita Hayworth through her paces in
Cover Girl, Tonight and Every Night
, and
Gilda
. Intense, wiry, neurotic, demanding, and personally
shy, he was a highly gifted man who frankly described his role with female stars as a combination brother and mother, which is what he became
for Monroe on six pictures through the end of the decade.

To give everyone an idea of what he had in mind for the numbers, Cole staged a test run of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” with Monroe lying on a black-and-pink Empire-style bed “wearing nothing but diamonds with a little horse’s tail coming out of her ass with a little diamond horsefly on the tail,” as Cole remembered it. With Monroe
seeming to be nude in her diamond-studded tights, the number was a knockout, but everyone agreed it was far too sexy for the finished film. Still skeptical of Monroe’s talent, Zanuck refused to believe that it was actually her voice on the playback and insisted that she come sing for him in his office to convince him, which she did. Monroe sang all her own numbers in the picture, with the exception
of the brief “No, definitely no …” introduction to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” which was dubbed by the band vocalist Gloria Wood.

Given the problems he had recently gone through on
Monkey Business
, Lederer knew that the Breen Office would be vigilant in the case of this new film. While the MPAA was able to accept the basic premise of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, it took immediate exception
to the “Two Little Girls from Little Rock” number, which it found “a glorification of immorality.” This was eventually ironed out with some changes in the lyrics, but Breen vetoed such suggestive phrases as “bosom companions” and “for two reasons,” as well as part of what became the most-quoted line in the film: “Those girls couldn’t drown. Something about them tells me they couldn’t sink”; the
latter was resolved by eliminating the second sentence from the line. However, the MPAA went on breast alert, insisting on seeing costume stills for all the outfits the stars would be wearing in the picture, just to make sure that they did not “attract focal attention” to their breasts or leave them not “fully covered.”

Zanuck, active as always on story points, insisted that the film maintain
its credibility by emphasizing the love story between Dorothy and the detective Malone, as well as Dorothy’s genuine affection for Lorelei. Zanuck also invented the entire dockside opening sequence in which the Olympic athletes become mesmerized by the sight of the two women approaching the boat, ending with the “couldn’t drown” line. In the studio head’s view, “This is not a satire. It is a solid
and honest comedy in the same terms as
I Was a Male War Bride
, for instance. In
War Bride
, the audience knew that our people had a very real problem and they never lost sight of that no matter
how ludicrous the comedy seemed at times.” Hawks couldn’t have disagreed more, as he was about to turn what had been a satire into a burlesque.