Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (6 page)

By the turn of the century, when Howard Hawks was four years old, Neenah, Wisconsin, was a town dominated by fourteen churches, including the First Presbyterian, to which the Howards belonged. There were more churches than there were paper mills, hotels, and restaurants. There were seven hotels, seven horse shoers, six restaurants, four dentists, four cigar manufacturers,
four harness makers, three newspapers, three wagon makers, three hardware stores, three ice cream parlors, two banks, one bowling alley, one telephone company, a flour mill, a brewery, and Sam Wing’s laundry. Within the next couple of years, two billiard parlors opened up, as did two gun-and-ammo shops.

From the beginning, the Hawks boys were pampered like American royalty. All their clothes
were of the finest material and cuts, their hair was groomed daily and slicked down in the current fashion, and C.W. outdid himself in finding the most elaborate and expensive toys to give them. This wasn’t at all surprising, in that by the standards of the day he had also displayed an indulgent attitude toward his daughters, encouraging and delighting in their adventurous streaks. Helen and Bernice
were the first girls in town to ride bicycles and, later, to drive automobiles, and when the early aviator C. P. Rogers came through the Fox Valley, Bernice reportedly paid him five hundred dollars to take her up in his rickety early plane. One doesn’t have to look far to find the models for what later became known as “the Hawksian women”; they were Howard women.

Two years older than Kenneth,
little Howard was close to and protective of his younger brother. But it was a different story when the family’s next son, William Bellinger Hawks, arrived in 1902. The oft-repeated family story had it that to get him out of the way, six-year-old Howard was sent to the home of a friend, Judge Cleveland, the day William was born. Resenting his new brother, Howard offered to sell the baby to the judge,
sight unseen, for ten cents.

Theda Clark’s letters provide a few little snapshots of the young Howard Hawks, including one of a traumatic event he was never heard to speak about
as an adult. On June 14, 1900, just after Howard’s fourth birthday, Theda wrote that a little playmate of Howard’s had drowned in the Fox River right across from his house, and that Howard had apparently witnessed it.
With the boy’s heavy German mother lumbering in hysterics toward the scene, Howard ran up the sidewalk to Theda and said, “Aunt Theda—Aunt Theda—a little boy drowned!” The tragedy deeply depressed Helen, since her little brother had died the same way.

The following year, after having made a very Henry Jamesian tour of Europe and having begun her very active philanthropic career, Theda finally
married Will Peters of Goshen after an up-and-down six-year romance that did not enjoy the unqualified enthusiasm of Theda’s mother. The correspondent for the
Chicago Chronicle
couldn’t help but mention that “disparity in the conditions, however—an heiress to millions and a comparatively poor newspaperman—engendered complications which prevented the marriage for over six years.” In other words,
the Clark-Peters romance had the making of a perfect screwball comedy, thirty-five years before Howard Hawks helped pioneer the genre. At the ornate wedding at the Clark home, Frank was the best man, while the bridesmaid “preceded little Howard Hawks, who was dressed all in white and carried a massive bouquet of American beauty roses.”

As had Helen, Theda settled initially in Goshen. But since
Will, having left his job as managing editor of the
Goshen Times
, was on the road a great deal in his new, better-paid position as a salesman for the Philadelphia wallpaper company Cresswell & Washburn, Theda still spent much of her time in Neenah. She would very often have Howard and Kenneth over for lunch, and she wrote to a friend that “such great, dirty, freckled, rowdy boys you never saw
and all out at the knees.”

Theda was unstinting in her charity work. Her hero was Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago, and she donated the land and a great deal of money for the construction of a superb, Roman-style library in Neenah. Theda and Helen each became pregnant at virtually the same time early in 1903. On October 17, Helen gave birth to her fourth child and first girl, Grace. But the
very next day, Theda, who had experienced an increasingly difficult pregnancy, was unable to deliver normally, and the baby girl had to be “taken with instruments.” But the hemorrhaging could not be stopped, and the next day, with her sister, Will, Helen, and a Dr. Barnett attending her helplessly, she bled to death. Theda, who had just turned thirty-two, had the largest funeral Neenah had seen
since her father died. In her will, she had designated a large sum of money for the construction of Neenah-Menasha’s
first hospital, which was shortly built and has operated ever since right across the river from her former home.

During his wife’s preoccupation with Theda’s illness and death, Frank Hawks busied himself with the countless details pertaining to the family’s new home. If not quite
a mansion, the house—at 433 East Wisconsin Avenue, three lots west of the Howard abode—was certainly grandly imposing, a three-story structure with fifteen rooms, built at a cost of $20,000 (more than $400,000 by 1990s standards). Frank even imported an architect from Boston, the first time an outsider had ever been brought in to Neenah to design a building. A large, rambling house, elegant in
brown-gray shingles and fieldstone and exceedingly well built, it had a backyard stretching an entire city block north to Doty Street, a dream for young boys. There were two bay windows on either side of the front door, an east-facing porch, a grand front staircase, and dark wood beams and appointments on the first floor. Four bedrooms, one with a sitting room, took up the second floor, while the
third had two bedrooms and a ballroom. Six fireplaces helped heat it. When Howard made
Ball of Fire
years later, he noted the similarity of the professors’ home to the one in which he spent part of his youth, saying, “I know what this kind of house is like.” Across the street and down a house was a small landing for boats, while 150 yards further east was beautiful Riverside Park, dotted with
many trees. About a half mile further east was the shore of Lake Winnebago. It was, in all ways, one of the half dozen most impressive private homes in Neenah, and an idyllic place for children to grow up.

But by the time the family moved in, in 1904–05, the first signs were appearing that the Hawkses wouldn’t be staying in Neenah much longer. Already rather debilitated after delivering William
and Grace, and devastated by the loss of Theda, Helen was brought to the limit by the birth of a fifth child, and second daughter, also named Helen, in 1906. After having borne so many children, she became “professionally ill,” in the opinion of a friend, and needed to find a way to recapture her health. Helen’s doctor advised her to leave Wisconsin, particularly during its brutal winters. Frank
didn’t have to work, so they spent the winter of 1906–07 in Pasadena, California, a town northeast of Los Angeles that had recently caught on as a popular destination for well-to-do families from the East and Midwest. Initially, the Hawkses returned to Wisconsin during the summer, but by 1910 they left Wisconsin behind for good. C.W., who took to wintering in Pasadena himself, said, “It was too
damn bad they didn’t know this before they built the house,” but they shortly rented it to
C. B. Clark Jr., Theda’s brother, who later became mayor of Neenah. In 1912, Frank finally sold the house.

In the early 1900s, the ranks were thinning in Goshen as well; Frank’s very successful uncle Joel P. Hawks died on April 8, 1905, at the age of eighty-three, while his aunt Sarah died a little more
than a year later, at eighty-two.

As for old C. W. Howard, he finally sold, at great profit, his interest in what had become the Island Paper Company; retired from active work; made investments, such as one in a hotel across the river in Menasha; devoted considerable time to the Winnebago Humane Society and the Mason Lodge; traveled extensively in Europe with his wife; and gave his eldest grandson
whatever he wanted. When Howard, barely old enough to drive legally, showed an interest in auto racing, C.W. bought him a Mercer race car. And just as he had indulged his daughter Bernice’s interest in flying, C.W. arranged for the teenage Howard to take flying lessons in California so that he could qualify as a pilot; Kenneth soon followed suit. Partly because of his family’s wealth, but even
more because of the way his grandfather catered to his every whim from the earliest age, Howard was accustomed to getting what he wanted. C.W. always told him he was the best, that he could do anything, and why shouldn’t the boy believe him? Howard also learned the art of the tall tale from his grandfather: if you told it often enough with a straight face and didn’t permit contradiction, it became
part of your personal lore, if not simply taken as the truth. America, at that time, was made for an adventurous young boy of privilege like Howard Hawks, and his family’s position gave him the means to take advantage of it. At the same time, every man on both sides of the family as far back as anyone could trace had been engaged in very traditional business; they had pioneered, worked hard, been
good farmers, fighters, cattlemen, millers, builders, and furniture makers. Except for C.W.’s amateur theatrics and Helen’s interest in music, no one in the family had ever shown the slightest inclination toward the arts, for branching away from the practical into the realm of the imagination.

In the early-morning hours of Wednesday, January 5, 1916, the temperature in Neenah reached 12 degrees
below zero, a record low for the winter. The west wind bit fiercely, but by that afternoon, as C. W. Howard walked to the Neenah Club downtown for a couple of drinks and some chat with the boys, the thermometer nosed slightly above zero. In the dark of the late afternoon, he boarded the 5:30
P.M
. streetcar for the short trip east
on Wisconsin Avenue. Euphemia had not been well of late, and C.W.
went directly up to his wife’s bedroom to check on her. It was there that he suffered a stroke. He was semiconscious at first, with his right side paralyzed, but he “soon lapsed into a stupor from which he never emerged,” according to the front-page story in the next day’s
Neenah Daily Times
. “Death came quietly and without the least suffering according to those at his bedside.” C. W. Howard died
at 2:30
A.M
. on January 6, 1916, at the age of seventy. The official cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, with a secondary cause of arteriosclerosis.

As befitting a man of his stature, C.W. had a large funeral. In ill health already, suffering from cancer of the uterus, Euphemia could not easily absorb the shock of her husband’s sudden death. She died just three months later, on April 13,
also at seventy.

In the distribution of C.W.’s estate, which finally took place in October 1918, it was revealed that his net worth, after the sale of his home, other property, and stocks, came to $264,090; this would have made him a millionaire many times over in 1990’s adjusted dollars. The great bulk of it went to his already very comfortable daughters, with Bernice receiving a lump sum of
$115,315 and Helen getting $57,657 immediately and an equal amount to be apportioned out in stages to her monthly. Helen’s children each received $5,736 (about $120,000 in current dollars), perhaps not enough to set them up for life, but plenty to send them into their adult lives in high style and without need of mundane employment.

The story of C. W. Howard had a bizarre postscript. Some years
later, after his daughter Helen had become a confirmed, perhaps even fanatic, Christian Scientist and adherent of cremation, she returned to Neenah. She had her father, mother, and brother Neil dug up and cremated (in Milwaukee, as no one closer by would do it). After mixing the ashes in an urn, she went out to Riverside Park and threw it in the river, where it was discovered decades later, with
the names and dates still legible, by scuba divers. The grave marker, a big red marble ball six feet in diameter that C.W. had bought for himself at the 1896 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Helen sold to the Abenschein family, whose grave it still marks today.

Pasadena in the first decade of the twentieth century was a garden grown of imported privilege and prosperity, an enclave of wealth and immaculate conservatism populated mostly by well-to-do former Midwesterners, like the Hawkses, seeking the year-round comfort of one of the most ideal climates in the country. Vast orange groves surrounded impeccably manicured estates and
a prosperous but unhurried downtown on Colorado Boulevard, and to the north and east soaring mountain peaks, which were topped with snow during the winter, formed a spectacular backdrop to the intense green of the city.

During the winter visits, Frank Hawks had installed his family at the ultrafashionable Maryland Hotel, and that is where they lived when they came out to stay in 1906, before
renting a house for a short time at 408 Arroyo Terrace. Frank, still only in his early forties, didn’t need to work. But he and C.W. made some hotel investments along the West Coast that gave Frank the excuse to travel occasionally, and he bought some orange groves in Glendora, less than twenty miles to the east, that engaged his active interest.

One of the most distinguished academic facilities
in southern California at the time was the Throop Polytechnic Institute, which later became the California Institute of Technology. Founded in 1893, the school was just down the street from the large, comfortable house Frank found for the family at 998 San Pasqual, which has long since been torn down. Throop, pronounced “Troop,” at the time encompassed all levels of classes, beginning with grade
school, and that is where Howard attended the sixth grade. But when the Throop trustees decided to concentrate all their effort on advanced education, the Grammar School Department was reorganized into a separate entity.

The new Polytechnic Elementary School opened on October 10, 1907, and Howard, Kenneth, William, and Grace Hawks were among the 106 pupils enrolled. Frank Hawks soon became a
trustee and remained on
the board for a decade. The school was, and still is, a coed, nonsectarian establishment that, in addition to the usual grade-school curriculum, gave special attention to industrial arts; this marked the beginning of Howard’s lifelong hobby of wood and metal crafting. The average class size was sixteen students, and the school prided itself on the special attention given
to the children, who advanced to the next level in each class not according to the calendar but by virtue of their success in the current grade.