Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (5 page)

By this time, the other dominant family industry was the Hawks Furniture Company. Established in 1873 by Cephas, Eleazer, Joel, and partner Daniel
Fravel, the operation started small, with eight employees, making inexpensive, unfinished bedstands and tables. But it grew quickly into the second most important business in Goshen, turning out ornate chamber suites of mahogany, bird’s-eye maple, and quartered oak that went out to customers worldwide.

As the century was drawing to a close, the Hawkses so completely dominated Goshen life and
business that writers of the city’s history could barely contain themselves paying them homage. The
Manual of Goshen
proclaimed that the Hawks brothers’ talent for business was so great that “one almost believes they have a perpetual royalty on doing things at precisely the right time, which largely accounts for their bags of golden sheckels.… The historian, like sensible people generally, will
join in the refrain, ‘Pass up more Hawkses if you would supplant poverty by plenty.’”

* * *

The year 1891 was a year of wrenching personal loss for the Hawks family. On May 19, Grace, the only surviving daughter of Eleazer and Jennie, who had lost a later daughter in infancy, died suddenly at the age of twenty-three. Exactly a week later, on May 26, Eleazer passed away, at seventy-two. This
double loss left Jennie devastated and, with time, increasingly irrational and difficult; it also left Frank Winchester Hawks a very wealthy twenty-six-year-old. Although involved in the family businesses since graduating from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Frank had not yet shown either the zeal or the traditional Hawks industriousness to integrate himself into the inner circle of management.
With Cephas now seventy-eight, and as involved with his voracious reading as he was with business, control of the Hawks industries was falling into the hands of Cephas’s eldest son, Frank E. C. Hawks, who was now forty-three.

With his father dead and living with his grieving, inconsolable, unreasonable mother at the large frame house on Fifth and Jefferson, young Frank Winchester Hawks was at
sixes and sevens throughout 1891, faithfully tending to his mother as best he could but increasingly looking for a place for himself in the Hawks’s well-built, well-to-do, insular universe. Destined to become the first Hawks to leave Goshen, he would meet the woman who would give him a way out the following year.

The leading lights of young society in Neenah, Wisconsin, in the early 1890s were
unquestionably Theda Clark and Helen Howard. Theda, born in 1871, was the daughter of Charles B. Clark, cofounder, in 1872, of Kimberly, Clark & Co., which was on its way to becoming one of the most successful paper companies in the United States and, as the inventor of Kleenex, certainly the most famous. Helen, born the following year, was the daughter of Charles W. Howard, also from impoverished
origins, who had similarly worked his way up to an exalted position in the paper business. In east-central Wisconsin at the southern, upriver end of the Fox River and the northwest tip of Lake Winnebago, Neenah was one of the economic miracles of the 1890s, a town with a local industry so strong that it barely felt the terrible depression of 1893–97. During this period, there were twenty large
paper mills along thirty-seven miles of the Fox River—all successful. Like the city-building pioneers of New England, the founders of the factory towns of the Fox River Valley used as their models the industrial giants of Great Britain, Birmingham and Manchester. When their communities didn’t reach those proportions, they scaled back their ambitions, settling for contented, Republican, enormously
profitable, immensely comfortable
stability at a time when—before the sweeping democratic reforms of Governor Robert La Follette in the 1900s—power in Wisconsin was completely in the corrupt hands of the few men at the top of the state’s leading industries.

Charles W. Howard arrived at this growing community in 1862, when he was seventeen. The son of Charles Howard, a native of the Isle of Man,
and Hannah Hopkins, of Maine, he was born in Gardiner, Maine, on May 7, 1845. No other information has come down about his parents or early life, perhaps by his own design, as he set the style his famous grandson was to emulate in the fabrication of tall tales and outrageous lies that everyone knew were phony but no one dared challenge to his face. In 1866, he married Euphemia Brown, who was born
March 10, 1844, to Scottish natives. During his twenties, Charles ran a harness shop, one of several catering to the extensive horse-and-buggy trade and located on the working-class western end of Wisconsin Avenue, a world away from the affluent eastern section of the avenue, to which he would eventually rise. As of 1870, the Howards still lived at 19 Boarding Street, and the value of their personal
estate totaled a mere three hundred dollars.

But Charles kept saving and looking for angles, and by 1874 he was able to become a partner in the A. W. Patten Mill, where he learned the business and reaped the benefits of the mill’s unique system of using old paper stock for its raw material; for a while, its capacity of three tons of paper every twenty-four hours bested by fifty percent even what
Kimberly-Clark’s Globe Mill was producing. In 1877, Charles bought Patten’s flour mill and started up a new business with John R. Davis Jr., called Howard & Davis. Through the 1880s, Charles’s mills were so successful that he emerged as one of Neenah’s leading industrialists, building a large, three-story Victorian house sporting gray shingles, three gables on the roof, a porch stretching across
the entire front expanse, and enormous picture windows, from which he could see bits of the Fox River peeking out from behind the even more enormous mansions of his neighbors across the street on East Wisconsin Avenue: John A. Kimberly Sr., John A. Kimberly Jr., and perhaps the area’s most powerful individual, the lumberman and politician F. J. Sensenbrenner.

Money was the sole arbiter of social
standing in this boom town, and if Charles Howard, now known as C.W., could afford a grand home on Park Row, the most fashionable strip of East Wisconsin Avenue, facing the park and lake, he was entitled to it. Nevertheless, C.W. was something of a pariah even among this city’s generation of nouveau riche. By one local account,
he “was unfavorably known as a braggart, drunkard, and bully. A habitué
of the Russell House barroom, C.W. was prone to wild exaggerations and fistfights. On more than one occasion he publicly announced that he had made more than $500,000 buying and selling a single Menasha paper mill. After a trip around the world he also informed the local residents that the world was flat: “This idea that the world is round,” he told lumberman Henry Sherry, “is all damn nonsense.”

Unlike his more fastidious neighbors, C.W. also had a taste for the stage, and he sometimes starred in local theatricals, where he could bellow away to his heart’s content in the most extravagant Victorian-era fashion. His reputation for pulling hoaxes reached its peak in 1883, when “he shattered his office window with a marble, lodged a bullet in the soft plaster of the opposite wall, and then
excitedly told the police [his wife’s brother, J. W. Brown, was chief of police] that some mysterious assassin had nearly killed him while sitting at his desk, leaving the sleepy little town in a complete uproar for more than a month.” (Charles Coburn comes to mind as the actor who most ideally could have played C. W. Howard.)

But his wife tolerated her husband’s excesses, and C.W. doted on his
daughters Helen, born in 1872, and Bernice, born four years later. A first child had died in infancy, and although it was never discussed, there was almost certainly another daughter, Emily, who died very shortly after her birth in 1873. The tragedy that most marked the family, however, was the accidental death of the couple’s only son, Neil. Born in 1879, Neil was just four or five when he drowned
in Lake Winnebago.

Helen and Bernice were both smart and curious, and Helen and Theda Clark became best friends very young when they began attending the tiny Point School, the last of the city’s one-room country schoolhouses. Still renowned locally because of the outstanding Theda Clark Medical Center and other facilities bearing her name, Theda was Neenah’s golden child, a bright, high-minded
princess of wealth and refinement whose noble goals were to cultivate her mind and help others. As Theda and Helen hit their teens, they began organizing elaborate socials and dinners, and then decided to attend college together, thus becoming part of the first generation of American women to pursue advanced education rather than “finishing schools.”

Henry Wells, who had made his fortune with
his Wells Fargo Stagecoach Lines, founded Wells College in 1866 in Aurora, New York, intending it to offer women an Ivy League–level education, on a par with what men received at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. The school never grew large
enough to become a significant force, but in 1888, when Theda and Helen enrolled as freshmen, Wells was still one of the most desirable, exclusive schools young
American women could consider. It was also about to enjoy a particular cachet as the alma mater of Mrs. Grover Cleveland, the new First Lady. Their graduating class in June 1892 consisted of seven women, and the commencement address was entitled “Free Individuality, the Goal of Civilization,” which promoted “a desire for higher ideals and for characters free from selfishness and contaminating vices
which lead to divorce, suicide, and often living death.”

For quite some time after graduation, the Wells women traveled to visit one another at their homes around the country. These visits often lasted for several weeks apiece and involved a continuous succession of parties and dinners. Theda and Helen naturally went to stay with their friend Helen Curtenius, who lived in Goshen, Indiana, where
they met the young men Will Peters and Frank Hawks. Helen and Frank fell in love and became serious very quickly, while Theda and Billie, a young journalist, took considerably longer to work out their relationship.

Helen was far from the most attractive woman in Neenah, or even in her small class at Wells. With dark curly hair, wide-set eyes, and a prominent jaw, she had an undeniably horsey
look that was overcome by her quick intelligence and adventurous enthusiasm. Frank Hawks, on the other hand, was tall and handsome in a distinguished way, and certainly one of the most eligible bachelors in Goshen at that time. With its shady streets and slow, comfortable way of life backed up by reliable industry, Goshen felt very familiar to Helen, and she and Frank pursued their romantic, traditional
courtship by mail as well as in extended stays in the each other’s hometowns; Frank, for example, spent New Year’s Eve that year in Neenah, where Theda and Helen’s party was so minutely planned that all the women were dressed so as to present a history of feminine fashion in American history, from colonial days to the present. Compared to the warmth and liveliness to which she was accustomed
at home, however, Helen confessed to finding “a little strain of queerness” in the Hawks family, and had to suppress her natural zest and outspokenness to get along with Frank’s moody mother. By contrast, C.W. instantly adored the affable Frank and began treating him like the son he had only so briefly had.

For Neenah society at the time, the mere idea of a long-distance romance was decidedly
unusual, and for a girl of Helen’s standing to marry an out-of-towner caused no end of talk. But everyone agreed that the match of these two wealthy, bright, well-principled young people seemed ideal,
and their wedding, at the Howard home in Neenah on June 5, 1895, was the social event of the year, and the account of the event in the
Neenah Daily Times
the next day was placed at the top and center
of page 1.

By August, the bride and groom were settled at his mother’s home in Goshen. With Frank halfheartedly working at the mill and obliged to look after his mother, Helen agreed to stay there, and almost immediately discovered that she was pregnant. When Howard Winchester Hawks was born, the fact was promptly noted in the newspapers of both Goshen and Neenah. Six weeks later, in mid-August
1896, Helen and Frank brought the baby to Neenah for the first time and, in a letter to Helen Curtenius, Theda Clark provides a unique portrait of Howard Hawks as an infant:

Helen Howard Hawks and her flock have been home a week; the baby is a dear. If you can imagine Frank reduced to a pygmy, then you can see the child in your mind’s eye; they are so alike.

The baby cries much with colic, and
Helen is most devoted. I often sit with the lady when she rocks her “little man” to sleep at night. The whole family is wildly devoted and grandmother, mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins and dogs gather about to watch the miniature breathe.

C. W. Howard lavished attention on his grandson and spoiled him from the very beginning. In every way, Frank, Helen, and little Howard were more comfortable
in Neenah than in Goshen, but they kept their primary residence in Indiana. Just before Christmas in 1896, barely six months after Howard was born, an event of some note took place in Goshen: “The first motion picture ever shown in Goshen was brought to town by Frank Irwin.
Kinematographe
was promoted by the Trans-Oceanic Star specialty company and was touted as ‘the scientific wonder of the world.’
The Irwin Theater was packed Dec. 10, 1896, when the film was shown the first time, but the audience was disappointed and business began to dwindle after the first showing.”

Despite the fact that her family came to visit frequently, after three years in Goshen, Helen had had enough of living under the same roof with her mother-in-law. So after Kenneth Neil—his middle name a tribute to Helen’s
brother, who had died so young—was born on August 12, 1898, Frank moved the family to an apartment in a local hotel. This was just an interim step before the inevitable move to Neenah. C.W. had made a standing offer for Frank to join him in his business, and it was clear that Frank—who had so much money he didn’t need to work anyway and was somewhat
resented by his cousins Frank E. C. and Edwin
for his less-than-total commitment to the family businesses—would never amount to much more than a name on a brass plate at the Goshen Milling Company. So the move was made, beginning in late 1898. By early the next year, the family was finally installed at 437 Wisconsin Avenue East, just up the street from C.W.’s dark, Queen Anne style house at 409, and Frank was named secretary-treasurer of the
Howard Paper Company.