Read Online Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy - Free Book Online Page B

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 ofa 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 scenariodepartment 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 inthose 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, notIvy 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 withhim. 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 theyears. 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 evenon 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, andwhose 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 EveryPort
, it was his own relationship with Victor Fleming.
    The two grew up very