Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (2 page)

Howard Hawks was born to wealth and privilege. The oldest of five children, he was
told he could do anything he wanted to do and was pampered and endlessly spoiled by his maternal grandfather. As a very young man he was among the first Americans to race cars and fly planes. It was his grandparents, and not his genteel parents, who had boldly sought opportunity in the Midwest and built the family fortune on both sides, and it was with them that he identified most strongly. Outside
of his spectacle of antiquity,
Land of the Pharaohs
, and the second half of
Come and Get It
, and except for some individuals in his comedies, the characters in his films are essentially classless, working men and women who establish their personal worth by how well they do their jobs and how they relate to one another. Many writers and several of the greatest filmmakers have made of their work
a sweeping autobiography, disguised to greater or lesser degrees. Hawks’s oeuvre does not represent an autobiography; rather, it constitutes a massive self-projection, a portrait of his fantasy of himself as a great flier, racer, soldier, explorer, pioneer of industry, detective, criminal, lover, hunter, and sheriff. All these purposeful men of action served as good characters for the movies, but
they were also ideal vehicles for Hawks to explore his own notions of excellence.

To achieve this within the structure of the commercial film industry, which became increasingly rigid, stratified, and dominant during the period he was building his position in it, Hawks clearly needed to establish a reputation and the power to steer his own course. In this line, he pursued a singular strategy
with, arguably, greater success than any other director of his era. Hawks officially directed forty feature films, eight of them silents, far fewer than such contemporaries as John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, Frank Borzage, King Vidor, and W. S. Van Dyke, all of whom got a head start in silents by roughly ten years, but more than Capra, McCarey, Milestone, and Mamoulian, who began their careers
at roughly the same time. But Hawks maintained a more resolute control over his projects than any of them, making a remarkably small number of pictures that were not of his own choosing and only occasionally finding himself on the losing end of a battle with a studio boss (usually Sam Goldwyn). Of the nonwriters among major Hollywood directors, only Cecil B. De Mille, Alfred Hitchcock, and William
Wyler had as much or more say over their productions as Hawks did for as long a period, which in his case was nearly forty years.
With rare exceptions, Hawks created or chose his stories, selected his writers and worked very closely with them, enjoyed decisive influence over casting, shot to his heart’s content while constantly reworking his scripts, and kept compromises with the studios to a
remarkable minimum.

What drove him to achieve this was an insistent, overpowering will to independence. What enabled him to do it was a potent mixture of arrogance, intelligence, wealth, antiauthoritarianism, skill at intimidation, impudence, and willingness to walk away. Few were able to play the studio heads better than Hawks; he could be as cagey as they were, and even though they were the
absolute bosses in Hollywood, Hawks represented the refined, accomplished, well-mannered, Ivy League, blue-blooded WASP whose acceptance they craved. They must have felt Hawks’s condescension; they were dealing with a man who, from the beginning of his career, conveyed the impression of independent wealth even when he was virtually broke. In the tycoons’ minds, this guy could take it or leave it;
he didn’t
need
them, which made his bargaining position with them all the greater. Little did they know that he felt so insecure as a director on his first few pictures that he regularly had to pull his car over on his way to work in order to vomit. Only later would the imperious confidence become entirely genuine, after years of practice and expert bluffing.

But what gave Hawks his real ace
in the hole with his bosses is that his aims were at one with their own. He wanted to make good films with big stars and bring in a lot of money. His idea of a great film story was one in which a handsome, tough, masculine man, in a risky predicament and normally at the center of a small professional group, performed valiantly and stoically under great pressure and won a beautiful young woman while
doing it. What could be more appealing to a wide audience than such a story? For Hawks, there was something wrong with a picture if it didn’t go over with the public. Unlike John Ford, his drawer was not full of difficult, uncommercial, socially conscious scripts that he thought perhaps he would be allowed to make if he would play ball with the studios. No, the issue with Hawks was that he wanted
to make his films
his
way and on his own terms. Very early on, he discovered that his own tastes and those of the public were remarkably in sync; if he liked an actor, audiences tended to like him; if he thought something was funny, other people tended to laugh as well. This conviction bolstered his position with the studio heads and fostered his belief that he should just be left alone to make
his movies, that he would deliver something the studio bosses and the public would like. And he nearly always did.

Hawks spent his entire career first forging, then trying to expand his ability to make pictures within the system yet independently of studio surveillance and interference. His methods and variable success at doing so form one of the main themes of this book, and it was not for
nothing that he always retained a special fondness for
Scarface
. The reason was not so much artistic as circumstantial; Hawks and Howard Hughes felt like partners in crime on that maverick production, which they made not only separate from but in defiance of the established industry. Making a film independently of the mainstream was an exceedingly difficult matter during the decades Hawks was
active, and whenever Hawks managed to do so, he proved to be his own worst enemy in terms of fiscal responsibility. Objectively, the armchair observer can postulate that Hawks was better off working under conditions of creative tension with Jack Warner and Hal Wallis, or with Harry Cohn, than by his own devices. No matter: the point is that Hawks constantly strove to be as free from the bridle as
possible; when he felt it at all, he bit and kicked. In practice, this led him to break contracts and jump studios with fearless regularity—in the sound era, only once did he direct more than two films in a row at a given studio, a rare occurrence in those years of long-term contracts.

Hawks fought hard for the right to tell stories his way, to not be bossed or pushed or compromised. But to what
end? Did he really possess the soul of an artist who simply had to create, an artistic urge that can be compared seriously to those of his friends Hemingway and Faulkner or to compulsive, self-consciously artistic filmmakers like Welles, Bergman, and Godard? Would Hawks even have entered the arts at all in another era, without the combined allure of fun, luxury, big money, elite status, beautiful
women, social power, and, incidentally, self-expression offered by the movies? When assessing the early lives and biographies of most of the cinema’s pioneering artists, one develops the collective impression of a bunch of clever but somewhat aimless types who were lucky enough to stumble onto a good thing at the right time. Certainly, for people born in the last decade of the nineteenth century,
the cinema, such as it was, did not yet exist as something anyone would aspire to as a profession. In any event, one rarely, if ever, hears of an American who set out in the late 1910s or 1920s with serious artistic ambitions that could be achieved only in films.

For his part, Hawks intended to be an engineer. He did read widely, but he was never drawn toward music, drama, creative writing, or
newspaper work. The impulse toward artistic self-expression seemed not to be there. But when, in his own way, he stumbled into movies, when he began to see
how vividly moving images could convey fantasies of action and accomplishment and distilled, idealized renditions of human behavior, he began to understand what he might be able to do. Hawks had always found that he could do most things better
than most other people, so he rightly reasoned that it would be that way with movies as well. Only later would he see that everything he believed and everything that excited him could be conveyed through the stories he told in pictures.

Hawks, then, was an intuitive, rather than an intentional, artist, in the sense that he did not set out to make statements about life, the condition of mankind,
politics, war, history, or social conditions. Although he thought very highly of himself, Hawks—like Ford, Walsh, and a few other rugged pioneers who started in the silent cinema—always positioned himself as a craftsman. “All I’m doing is telling a story,” he invariably said. If you wanted to call him an artist, that was your privilege, but he was never going to be the one to do it. He steered
clear of anything that smacked of the highbrow, the literary, or the intellectual. Although they are both often referred to as prototypical macho and cynical men of action, Hawks was, as a director, almost the diametrical opposite of John Huston. For all his personality, skill, and distinction, Huston spent much of his career adapting important works of literature for the screen and trying to be “faithful”
to them. Nothing could have been further from Hawks’s intent in making a movie; he couldn’t be bothered to read Melville, Joyce, McCullers, O’Connor, Lowry, or, for that matter, Freud, much less make a film inspired by them. On the rare occasions—arguably, only three or four times—when Hawks tackled the work of a distinguished author, he made it a point to be as unfaithful and irreverent
as possible, never more so than with
To Have and Have Not
. When Huston tackled an estimable preexisting work, there was usually, although not always, the impression of the original being pared, hammered, twisted, chopped, and remolded so it would fit into a cinematic box. When Hawks took on a property that had succeeded in a previous incarnation (notably
Twentieth Century; The Front Page; To Have
and Have Not
, despite its minor reputation;
The Big Sleep; The Big Sky;
and
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
), the feeling was more that the original had been entirely dismantled, cleverly rethought, and meticulously reassembled in accordance with the logic of the cinema and the imperatives of Hawks’s own personality. And in all cases, despite the presence of diverse writers, it was Hawks who directed
the re-thinking and the enormous changes that were made to each one, and he, not the original authors or subsequent scenarists, determined the films’ personalities.

In the received literary sense, Hawks’s life of the mind was not that of an intellectual; he did not follow intellectual pursuits, and he displayed or feigned astonishment at many of the exalted qualities some critics found in his
work. What, then, is one to make of François Truffaut’s observation that Hawks “is one of the most intellectual filmmakers in America”? Only that Hawks had an extremely well worked out set of theories, convictions, and principles about how to make movies and was articulate enough to express them in a simple, direct manner. Hawks thought long and hard about his profession, about what worked and
what did not, just as he might have about engineering, architecture, design or construction of any kind. Hawks knew how to take apart and reassemble cars, motorcycles, and planes. He could expertly copy any piece of furniture. His innate taste told him how to dress himself, and his advice helped his second wife become the best-dressed woman in the United States. Perhaps it was not such a great a leap
for him to be able to expertly construct, or reconstruct, a story for films, to design an inexperienced woman’s look, voice, and behavior to powerful effect on the screen, to know how a man should act in extremis. A great mystique has always surrounded film directing. Partly for that reason, Hawks aspired to the position early on, and he was incredibly fortunate to be able to achieve it and build
the rest of his life around it. But he approached it as a job, even as it allowed him to express his poetic flair for dramatizing Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.”

Hawks was concerned with men in action but he was not, per se, an action director. The scenes in his films of battles, flying, deep-sea fishing, logging, cattle driving, river boating, singing and dancing, pyramid building, animal
chasing, auto racing, and train crashing were usually done by second-unit directors and were often noticeably divorced from the fabric of the picture. Rather, Hawks was a master of events played out within tight quarters among a handful of people in a limited period of time; despite his reputation as an outdoorsman, as a director he was most comfortable in a drawing room, an office, a home, or a
hotel. These enclosed settings magnified the importance of every gesture and look, every remark, every decision, to the point where meaning, if you were looking for it, was densely packed into every moment.

Although often conceived of as a naturalistic director because of his relatively plain, straightforward, eye-level visual approach and his affinity for Hemingway’s stripped-down narrative
storytelling technique, Hawks was actually the most stylized Hollywood director this side of Josef von Sternberg, with whom he had more in common than anyone imagined at the time. At
their best, Hawks’s films, like Sternberg’s, conveyed a beautifully wrought philosophy of life entirely through action, embodied in characters who enact certain behavioristic rituals in a remote setting artfully detached
from the real world. Many critics have attempted to define this philosophy, which takes the form of a highly entertaining but nonetheless fatalistic variety of adolescent existentialism, one devoid of sentimentality, false hope, or religious reassurance. Man is the measure of all things in Hawks’s tough and sometimes bitter universe, but there is compensation to be had in friendship, unity
of the group, the assertion of intelligence over dumb brute force, and the rewards of a job well done. Perhaps the critic Molly Haskell put it best when she ventured, “In Hawks, the pioneer hubris, and rashness and naïveté, of the American converges with the austere, man-centered morality of ancient Greece.” In his work, she wrote, one sees “the picture of man poised, comically or heroically, against
an antagonistic nature, a nothingness as devoid of meaning as Samuel Beckett’s, but determined nonetheless to act out his destiny, to assert mind against mindlessness.”