After completing the added scenes for
Twentieth Century
in April 1934, Hawks went fourteen months without shooting any film, the longest such period since his unwanted unemployment in 1929 after being fired from Fox. This time it was different, however. His marriage was stagnant, but because of Athole’s precarious mental condition, his concern for her, and his loyalty to the
Shearer-Thalberg family, he felt constrained from doing anything about it. He was always open to little flings, but he knew that discovery of them could set Athole off into one of her deep depressions. Leading a bachelor’s life was easier for him in New York, where his activities couldn’t be monitored and keeping company with fellow carousers Hecht and MacArthur always guaranteed the presence of
showgirls, aspiring actresses, and models. He spent whatever time he could there, and the five months—on and off—he was in New York, through the fall of 1934 and the following spring, represented the longest stretch of time he was to spend outside Los Angeles until after World War II.
This sabbatical was only possible, however, because of the collapse of a huge film project. After his quick,
low-budget job for Columbia, Hawks started plotting his first true epic. Based on a 1926 historical novel by Blaise Cendrars,
Sutter’s Gold
had been one of the projects undertaken by Sergei Eisenstein at Paramount during his ill-fated Hollywood sojourn of 1930. Although Westerns and pioneer stories had cooled off as a genre since
Cimarron
won the Oscar in 1931, Hawks became very keen on making
this expansive tale about the Gold Rush. Looking for a way to do so, he found a receptive ear at Universal, one of only two studios where he had never worked in any capacity (the other was RKO), and he made a lucrative deal for what was certain to be a costly picture. Setting up offices in his own bungalow on the San Fernando Valley lot, he hired a new secretary, a beautiful, slim, divorced twenty-eight-year-old
Mississippian named Meta Doherty Carpenter, who would work with him as secretary, and then script
girl, with interruptions, for the next twenty-five years. She was put in charge of arranging his files and moving them from studio to studio, helping Athole at home, paying bills, and driving Peter and David back and forth to their grandparents’ in Pasadena on weekends. To her distaste, she also became
more involved with her boss’s extracurricular activities than she cared to, handling Hawks’s relations with any number of unsavory bookies, warding off the gambling-world types to whom Hawks owed money, and organizing the care and movements of Hawks’s racehorses.
To work up a script on
Sutter’s Gold
, Hawks called again upon Faulkner. Having earned himself some novel-writing time after his months
of hard labor at MGM, Faulkner had begun writing one of his most ambitious and demanding works,
Absalom, Absalom!
but had become stuck and was willing to return to Hollywood for what Hawks swore would be a brief stay. Faulkner spent a month in Hollywood beginning in late June, turning out a full 108-page scene treatment of
Sutter’s Gold
before returning to Oxford. This lengthy treatment was enormously
detailed and so dramatically unwieldy as to be impossible to film. Faulkner continued to do some work on it after returning to Mississippi, but Hawks brought in John Barrymore’s close friend, the former newspaperman Gene Fowler, to help chisel it into a script. However, when Universal, one of the cheapest studios in town, announced that they weren’t prepared to spend more than $750,000 on
the film, Hawks threw up his hands and walked away from it, knowing that such a logistically complex production would require a good deal more than that.
With nothing immediately in the offing, Hawks readily accepted an urgent plea from Hecht and MacArthur that he come East to help guide them in their latest project: producing and directing their own films at Astoria Studios in Queens. Determined
to show up the philistines in Hollywood by making high-quality and commercial pictures on which the writers, of all people, were in control, Hecht and MacArthur cut a deal to produce four pictures for Paramount. At the time, Walter Wanger was in charge of the studio’s Queens facilities, where many memorable early sound pictures—including the first Marx Brothers films and some Lubitsch classics—had
been made but which were now less frequently used. Two men Hawks knew well,
Scarface
cameraman Lee Garmes and Arthur Rosson, had already signed up to help the writers with their dream undertaking, which was designed to demonstrate that good, professional-looking pictures could be made at much lower costs than the norm. To this end, Hecht and MacArthur took no fee for writing, producing, and directing
in the expectation of receiving a healthy slice of profits, and stage actors were engaged
for far less than Hollywood stars received. Their first production,
Crime Without Passion
, starring Claude Rains, was budgeted at only $150,000. Hawks had no artistic input on the film at all but was happy to help out his good friends and valued collaborators. “I came to New York and helped them get started.
When they began to feel comfortable I got out of there and they finished it. I didn’t direct the picture, I just told them what I would do.” Their next collaboration would come sooner than they expected.
Hawks had known Samuel Goldwyn for many years but never worked for him, rightly suspecting that Goldwyn was one of those producers, like Selznick and Thalberg, who so thoroughly dominated their
productions that the director was more like a go-between. However, when Goldwyn offered him sixty thousand dollars, more than he had ever received to direct a film and more than double his last salary, on
Twentieth Century
, Hawks could scarcely refuse.
Goldwyn had been trying to get a film called
Barbary Coast
off the ground for more than a year before Hawks became involved. In 1933, the producer
had bought a book called
The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld
, published that year by Knopf and written by Herbert Asbury, the author of
The Gangs of New York
. Between June 1933 and October 1934, when Hawks signed on, Goldwyn spent nearly eighty thousand dollars having no fewer than eleven different synopses, outlines, treatments, original stories, and full scripts
prepared by such estimable writers as Frances Marion, Marcus Goodrich, Joel Sayre, Kenyon Nicholson, Dwight Taylor, Nathanael West and Oliver H. P. Garrett. The assignment facing all of them, finding a strong approach to telling the story of San Francisco’s wild birth pangs during the Gold Rush of 1849, became a much greater challenge when, after Goldwyn bought the book, Will Hays introduced
much stricter censorship and morality guidelines, severely limiting the licentiousness that could be presented in what needed to be a bawdy tale. The producer sent an early draft to Gloria Swanson to gauge her interest and at one point announced that the project would star Gary Cooper and Anna Sten. Goldwyn could think of no director who would have been more at home during those days than “Wild Bill”
Wellman, so he was enlisted. He couldn’t figure out what to do with the project either, but he ended up earning $39,000 before he was replaced.
By the time Hawks came aboard in October 1934, Goldwyn had signed Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea to long-term contracts and had decided to star them together in the picture. Hawks’s original notion was to pattern
Barbary Coast
after Sternberg’s
Morocco
, one of his favorite films and one
of Jules Furthman’s best stories. That idea survives in the finished film mainly in the opening sequence, in which a mysterious blonde (Hopkins) arrives at night by boat in an exotic port and is treated solicitously by an older gentleman. Similarly, but only in general ways that resemble countless other stories as well, she takes up employment in a nightclub
and must ultimately sacrifice the material wealth she enjoys as the mistress of an older man for the love of a handsome younger one. But with Furthman tied up at MGM on
Mutiny on the Bounty
, Hawks proceeded through the winter with writers Nat J. Ferber and Oliver H. P. Garrett, getting nowhere.
By March, Hawks suspected that Hecht and MacArthur could be approached about writing the script. Except
for a successful New York run,
Crime Without Passion
had flopped, as had their second Astoria effort,
Once in a Blue Moon
. With their third,
The Scoundrel
, starring Noël Coward, finished but not yet open, the pair were ready to help themselves to forty thousand dollars of Sam Goldwyn’s money, despite their lingering feeling of having been hoodwinked financially by the producer on
The Unholy Garden
. Even though Hawks’s presence was the deciding factor in their agreeing to do it, they weren’t above pulling a fast one on him, as Hawks realized when he had lunch with the writers’ agent, Leland Hayward, at the “21” Club shortly thereafter. Hayward went on and on about how he had just sold the same story by the writers for the third time until Hawks asked if the story was about a man named Chamalis.
It was indeed, and Hawks knew he’d been had, turning him sour on a story he hadn’t been terribly fond of in the first place. “Every once in awhile they’d get into a story like this—a prostitute and a poet—and then they’d go kind of bad,” he theorized. “The poet quoted poetry, and Miriam Hopkins was the evil woman from the Barbary Coast, and it all got out of hand. But Goldwyn liked it. I
didn’t, and I was stuck.”
Nonetheless, comfortably away from the problems of home and with more young women available than he could possibly handle, Hawks stayed in New York for months, living in a suite at the Waldorf Towers while Meta Carpenter, whom he had brought along, stayed at the St. Moritz. Her living room became the place where weekdays, Hawks, Hecht, and MacArthur would work on the
script, with MacArthur on the floor or the couch, Hecht up and down dictating, and Hawks, either reclining in a chair or walking around with his hands in his back pockets, interjecting and spinning off on the team’s ideas. “Howard would nod, say a few things, but was best at pointing them in the right direction,” Carpenter remembered. “He always had a good idea of where the story was headed.” Weekends
were often spent in
Nyack, where further script dictation would be intermingled with showfolk play, and Carpenter remembered one startling incident. The doorbell rang, and Hawks went to open the door. It turned out to be Tallulah Bankhead, and the moment she saw Hawks, she growled, “Damn you,” and hit Hawks hard on the head. There were six raised eyebrows in the room, but nobody asked any questions
about what might have happened between Hawks and the notoriously promiscuous actress.
By April they were well into the script. Hecht and MacArthur’s Chamalis character was not entirely unlike Tony Camonte, a crude, unattractive thug whose law is the only law and whose illegal activities thrive in the anarchic atmosphere his rule-by-terror creates. In order to win the favors of the beautiful new
arrival, whose fiancé he murdered in a gambling dispute, Chamalis gives her a lucrative job running the fixed roulette table, where returning prospectors are routinely cheated out of all their gold, then shot if they protest. Hecht and MacArthur can also easily be spotted in the character of the crusading newspaper publisher, Colonel Marcus Aurelius Cobb (political crusaders being otherwise entirely
absent from Hawks’s work), whose killing sparks the rise of the moralistic vigilantes and the downfall of Chamalis.
After
Scarface
and even
Viva Villa!
, Hawks had good reason to believe that joining forces once again with Hecht, on a subject with an outsized, violent man at the center of a turbulent, colorful world full of action, stood a strong chance of succeeding. In fact, it did extraordinarily
well at the box office and was Hawks’s biggest hit since
The Dawn Patrol
. But it was far from being this creative team’s most copacetic collaboration. In mid-April Hawks wrote a rare letter, to Goldwyn literary assistant Merrit Hurlburd. He stressed that his idea all along was “that the Barbary Coast, being an unusual background, should have a story that could only happen here.” It was also Hawks’s
idea that the strongest drama and suspense would derive from the two young lovers being in constant danger of death because of Chamalis’s power. Again, this element only made it into the finished film in the final reel or so. Although he felt that they were writing under “a great deal of pressure and great haste,” Hawks nevertheless claimed to be “really happy about it.” He was ready to come
home, however. “I’m so sick of New York and rotten weather, I’ll do anything to hurry getting out of here.”
Athole visited New York once during her husband’s long stay, leaving the kids at home with their grandparents, and the separation actually did the marriage some short-term good. Despite Howard’s general obliviousness
to her needs and problems, Athole still loved him and desperately wanted
to keep the family together. After the long absence, Hawks was happy just to get home.
Hawks and his writers ran through five complete drafts of the script in New York, and now Goldwyn was itching to get rolling. Allotted a $762,315 budget and a thirty-seven-day shooting schedule, Hawks had limited say in the casting. To join Hopkins and McCrea, Goldwyn borrowed Edward G. Robinson from Warner
Bros. to play Chamalis—like his Mike Mascarenas in
Tiger Shark
for Hawks, another embittered man who loses a woman to a younger guy. Hawks had intended Adolph Menjou to play the newspaperman who solicits Hopkins on the boat, functionally the same role he had filled in
Morocco
, but Goldwyn imposed the pompous Frank Craven. David Niven got his screen start here in the tiny role of a Cockney sailor
who crashes through a bordello window into the mud, but the highlight for Hawks was his discovery of Walter Brennan. Only forty but looking a good deal older, Brennan was an unknown playing bits and extra parts until a production man brought him to Hawks’s attention. Hawks burst out laughing at the sight of the gangly actor in costume, whereupon Brennan asked him how he wanted him to do his test:
“With or without?” “With or without what?” Hawks asked. “Teeth,” Brennan replied. Hawks told him to keep his dentures off, and the part of the wharf rat Old Atrocity, scheduled as a three-day role, kept being expanded until Brennan worked for six weeks and made a name for himself. He won an Oscar on his next Hawks picture,
Come and Get It
, and the actor and director eventually did six films together.