Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (7 page)

Howard Hawks was a thoroughly average student at Poly. His standard courses were English, arithmetic, geography, German, art training, manual arts, penmanship, music, and gymnasium; he later added French and substituted history for geography. Four grades—excellent,
good, medium and low—were given, and in his sixth-grade year, Howard received seventeen Ms, thirty Gs, and six Es. In the seventh grade, his grades dipped slightly; he got thirty Gs, twenty-four Ms, and no Es. In the eighth grade, his marks slipped further, with four Ls, including two in arithmetic, only two Es, in English and art training, twenty Gs, and twenty-three Ms. He scored
better in German than in French, did not excel at gym, was good in the reading section of his English classes.

School photos of Howard at the time—one of which shows him in a typical pose, holding a tennis racquet and slouching against a building—reveal him to be slim and on the short side compared to most of the other boys, always with a very serious, rather suspicious air that was accentuated
by his tight little mouth. Howard was not among the winners in the school’s tennis tournaments, nor was he among the many contributors to the year-book of Poly’s first eighth-grade graduating class in 1910. It is likely, however, that he participated in one of the local boys’ favorite sports: “coaster” racing, in which large but motorless race cars were piloted downhill on dirt roads in nearby
Altadena. Fifteen boys, including Chuck “Roughhouse” Hunt, the son of Myron Hunt by his first marriage, and five girls made up the class, and the inscription beside a portrait of a grim-looking fourteen-year-old boy in a double-breasted suit reads, “Howard Hawks—‘Our English descendent.’”

During the same period, three other Hawks kids were following right behind Howard. Despite being two years
younger, Kenneth entered Poly in the fifth grade in 1907, and after a rough start he made solid Gs. William, who was three years behind Kenneth, performed similarly well in school, getting Gs all around. Grace entered in 1907 and was by far the best student among the Hawks children, earning many Es and being singled out on her third-grade report card as “A fine worker.”

In May 1911, the most
horrible of tragedies hit the Hawks family, the first of three to befall the children of Frank and Helen Hawks. On May 4, Helen Bernice, their youngest child, then five years and four months old, ate a bad piece of fruit and suddenly died. The cause of death was officially listed as acute enteritis, but it seems likely that the fruit, described as “unripe” on her death certificate, was actually
somehow infected or poisoned. In accordance with her Christian Scientist beliefs, the girl’s devastated mother instructed the funeral director to cremate the remains, and the ashes were interred at Mt. View Cemetery two days later. Typically, the family kept its grief subdued and as controlled as possible, and what happened to Helen was rarely spoken about subsequently.

For his freshman, sophomore,
and first quarter of his junior years of high school, from September 1910 through December 1912, Howard went to the public Pasadena High; decades later, the facility evolved into Pasadena City College, which currently occupies the same site at Hill and Colorado. Freshman year, he earned “good” marks across the board in English, algebra, wood shop, freehand drawing, mechanical drawing, and gym,
though only a “medium” in French. Sophomore year, when the grading system was changed to percentages, he managed a ninety-one in mechanical drawing, an eighty-seven in English, an eighty-five in geometry, an eighty-three in shop, and a seventy-seven in French. During the first term of his junior year, he scored an excellent ninety-six in German, a split ninety/eighty-six in English, a ninety/eighty
in algebra, but a failing sixty in chemistry.

In late 1912, the family left Pasadena and moved east to live a much more rural life among Frank’s orange groves, at 352 North Los Robles in Glendora. The reasons for the abrupt change are unknown, although they could conceivably have had something to do with a desire to leave behind the house at 998 San Pasqual, where little Helen had died, or might
have been connected to either Grace or Helen’s health.

When the family moved, Howard transferred schools and finished his junior year, from January through June 1913, at Citrus Union High School in Glendora, in the boondocks compared to the quiet elegance and refinement of Pasadena. He did relatively well there, so that Frank and Helen, hoping to set their eldest son even more firmly on an Ivy
League course, decided to send Howard east for the most rigorous formal education available. It remains uncertain exactly how they got him into the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, the most prestigious prep school in the United States, although money may have played the decisive role in slipping a West
Coast boy with respectable but hardly distinguished grades into a school in which the
vast majority of the 572 students at that time were upper crusters from the northeastern states. Howard Hawks, at age seventeen, was accepted into Phillips Exeter but, inexplicably, only as a lower middleclassman, the equivalent of a sophomore, meaning he was two years older than most of the 165 other boys at his level and two years behind where he was supposed to be. After the long train trip
across the country, he arrived in time to start classes on September 15, 1913.

The small town of Exeter, founded by English settlers in 1638, lies ten miles from the Atlantic Ocean about midway along the short stretch of New Hampshire that separates coastal Massachusetts and Maine. The trip to New England marked Howard’s first visit to the area his earliest American ancestors lived in, although
family and sentimental ties meant little to him then or later. Opened in 1783, Phillips Exeter had long been the most elite of secondary schools; among its alumni at the time were eight senators, twenty state representatives, twelve state governors, one associate justice of the Supreme Court, and hundreds of other successful men of academia, the law, medicine, and religion. The most famous graduate
was Daniel Webster. The school prided itself on its adherence to fairness and democratic dealings with all students but insisted “first of all on honest labor. The day’s work must be done. Every boy, high or low, rich or poor, must show actual performance. Not to learn one’s lesson is a breach of trust.”

Although at least half the boys lived in private lodgings off campus, Hawks took student
facilities in large Webster Hall, a classical four-story, redbrick building in which he shared room 28 with a senior, Horace Alonzo Quimby, of Springfield, Massachusetts. All the evidence suggests that Hawks in no way entered into the spirit of life at Phillips Exeter, certainly not academically and not even in the expected extracurricular activities. Attendance at chapel was required of all students,
and Hawks, as one of only three registered Christian Scientists at the entire school, was assigned to the menial position of church monitor for the Christian Science contingent. He automatically became a member of the California Club, of which there were just nine others. He also joined the Assembly Club, which was in charge of arranging social events and inviting outside speakers. Although Phillips
Exeter had become very athletically oriented over the previous decade and boasted first-rate sports fields and facilities, Hawks went out for no sports teams. He did, however, keep a meticulously assembled scrapbook into
which he pasted local newspaper articles highlighting the exploits of all the prep school and Ivy League sports teams.

His academic record was grim. In the highly competitive
and demanding scholastic environment of Phillips Exeter, Howard Hawks, never a notable student, simply couldn’t cut it. The academic year was divided into three terms; in the first of them, Hawks received Cs in mechanical drawing and physics; Ds in math, German, and history; and no grade at all in physical training. During Christmas break, Howard forwent the long trip back to California and, instead,
stayed with a family in Brookline, Massachusetts. As the many ticket stubs and playbills obsessively pasted into his scrapbook attest, the young man attended nearly every theatrical production playing in Boston that season. Returning for the winter term in January, he managed a B in mechanical drawing, got Cs in physics and physical training, but earned Es in German and history. Such marks, indicative
of a near-total failure to live up to his potential or to apply himself, were fatal at an institution with the standards of Phillips Exeter, and Hawks did not return for a third term to finish the year there. The school was designed for “the boy of good ability, good character, and earnest purpose,” and not for “the careless, thoughtless, unambitious boy, who burdens so many schools with
his deadening lethargy and lack of worthy ambition.” In the view of the administrators, there was no question to which group Howard Hawks belonged.

With his tail between his legs, Howard returned during Easter break to Glendora, where the family was still living and where Kenneth, two years younger than Howard, was in his junior year—officially one class year ahead of his older brother. Through
some clever card shuffling, it was arranged for Howard to reenroll in Pasadena High in April 1914 as a senior. Back on home turf, his performance improved immeasurably. He excelled in trigonometry, with a ninety-five, and did reasonably well in physics, with an eighty-five. On his official school records, Fs and Os in German and American history are strangely written over with eighties in both
subjects. The meaning of this is unclear, but Howard, in any event, did not graduate with the rest of the students in June. He was forced to take summer school, in which he got a ninety in American history and an eighty-five in German, and he finally graduated on July 31. Conveniently, in May the family had moved back to Pasadena, where William and Grace reentered the Polytechnic School.

Even
more mysterious than Hawks’s acceptance at Phillips Exeter is precisely what induced Cornell University, one of the leading schools of
the Ivy League, to admit a young man with Hawks’s thoroughly haphazard and unpromising academic record; Hawks did not even apply to the university until August, a month before classes began. Once again, it can only have been his family’s social position in a well-to-do
community, financial considerations, and, possibly but untraceably, his parents’ connections to old friends with influence back East; Helen, after all, had attended Wells College, the pioneering women’s school in central New York, and might well have been able to pull the right strings to have her son taken by Cornell, located in Ithaca, only twenty-five miles away.

In September 1914, Hawks entered
Cornell at age eighteen as a mechanical engineering major. Unfortunately, all school academic records for the period Hawks was a student have been destroyed, so his grades and athletic affiliations are unavailable; but all indications point to an indifferent academic career there. In his freshman and sophomore years, he was a member of the Exeter Club, although he had not graduated from that
school, and he eventually joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The secretary of Hawks’s graduating class, Ray S. Ashbury, reported that Hawks was referred to as Howie by his buddies, and remembered that the Californian spent much of his time shooting craps in Ithaca rather than studying. Little will ever be known about Hawks’s college career, but it seems clear that Hawks acquired more of
a taste for gambling and liquor during his college days than he did for higher learning. It also appears that Hawks traveled to New York City on occasion and attended the theater, for he was conversant with the playwrights and some actors of the period. He also read a great deal, mostly popular American and English fiction, which came in handy a few years later when he went to work in the scenario
department at Paramount. Nothing Hawks ever said suggests that his college years were decisive to him in any way, except for what he did during his summer vacations.

Around this time, shortly before his death, C. W. Howard bought his grandson a Mercer racing car, and the teenager was able to start tinkering with it and racing it, in an occasional, amateur fashion, in California. Auto racing in
those days was a rough-and-tumble affair done on dirt tracks in machines that were far from precise in their handling or reliable in performance. The cars kicked up enormous amounts of dirt that made visibility almost nonexistent for the drivers behind them, and if it had rained, the resulting mud made conditions even more dangerous. As Hawks testified, “It wasn’t very polite racing.” For Hawks,
it was rich boy’s fun, a form of sport slumming against young men who were mostly grease monkeys, not
Ivy Leaguers. But one of these former auto mechanics, who several years earlier had been an actual barnstorming race-car driver in the days when the fatality rate for professional drivers was about fifty percent, soon became his best friend and a deep influence on his life. This was Victor Fleming,
and the way Hawks described their first encounter is not only incredibly self-serving, with him coming out on top, as usual, but has the feel of a scene from a film that either of them could have made. As Hawks told it, they were driving against each other in a race, and “I put him through a fence and wrecked his car. I won the race and saw him coming: I thought I was gonna have a fight with
him. Instead of that, he came up with a grin and he said, ‘That was pretty good, but don’t ever try it again, because I’ll just run into you.’”

True, false, or merely exaggerated, the story sets the tone for an enduring friendship that had a strongly competitive edge but that the men never allowed to become endangered by personal or professional jealousy, despite repeated opportunities over the
years. Thirteen years older than Hawks and in his early thirties when they met, Fleming long served as an unacknowledged role model for Hawks. Everything Hawks considered himself or was ever known as—film director, macho sportsman, ladies’ man, auto racer, flier, tough guy—Fleming did first and, with the exception of directing, better, although many of their contemporaries would have differed even
on that point. Fleming was the real thing, the genuine article. Tall, physically powerful, and described by one woman as “a composite between an internal combustion engine hitting on all twelve and a bear cub,” Fleming was also deeply, compulsively emotional in a way that Hawks never was, a man who agonized over work, often got himself into binds, and repeatedly pushed himself to the brink, and
whose serious drinking, recurring ulcers, and other physical ailments were a direct result of his complicated, demanding, tumultuous life. If Hawks kept all his tension and anxiety wound up tight inside, Fleming let it all out. And if there was a real-life inspiration for the prototypical “love story between two men” that Hawks kept returning to as his ideal subject, beginning with
A Girl in Every
Port
, it was his own relationship with Victor Fleming.