Hawks’s excuse for leaving the shoot of
Sergeant York
a day before finishing it was that he had a horse running in the Derby. Of course, he had no such thing. Scheduled to depart by train, he and Slim instead flew as far
as Kansas City, where Hawks insisted that they deplane and drive the rest of the way so that Slim could get a feel for the South, even though Slim could see that the real reason was that Hawks was airsick. They rented a car and, as so often happened, Hawks got lost, taking them on an inadvertent detour all the way to Cleveland before arriving in Louisville. Once they arrived, they found, also with
great difficulty, the less-than-imposing home of Hawks’s acquaintance “General” Miles, a hee-hawing, rotund, older southern gent who was hosting a number of guests for the weekend. Hawks’s behavior there, as witnessed by Slim, seems unique in his entire life: “Howard was a fellow whose most relaxed and carefree moments were fraught with a kind of Brooks Brothers button-down dignity. On meeting
him, you had the curious feeling that both of you were under water. But with the General, he emerged. Now he too was full of hearty laughter and rib-punching joviality. Howard was suddenly a stranger to me. It was the most complete metamorphosis I have ever seen in a human being.”
The day of revelry continued through a drunken picnic and finally to the main event at Churchill Downs, by which
time Slim was so fed up that she remained furious for the rest of the trip. The whole experience was, in fact, so disagreeable that she made a point of never returning to Kentucky
again. Hawks, however, became “horsier than ever,” to the point that he soon bought several racehorses, which, Slim said, “struck me as an excuse to justify his excessive gambling habit … which was so out of control
he would bet on his own horse.”
While Hawks was away, Feldman was busy lining up his new client’s next job and was in touch with Hawks about it nearly every day as Hawks and Slim pushed south to Nashville, Florida, and the Keys and then on to New Orleans, where they selected a vast number of Louisiana antiques for their future home. On June 4, the day after he and Slim arrived home, Hawks had
a meeting with Sam Goldwyn about his next picture. The result was a clever, congenial entertainment as sweet and relaxed as most of his comedies were brash and frantic, one that also contained the oddest professional group ever portrayed in a Hawks film.
Even before
Meet John Doe
and
Sergeant York
came out in 1941, Sam Goldwyn was chagrined at how all of Gary Cooper’s biggest hits were the ones
he made on loan to other studios rather than the five he had thus far made in-house. Determined to develop better material for his most valuable star, Goldwyn arranged to borrow one of the hottest writing teams in town, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, from Paramount. Unhappy over the way his work was being treated at Paramount, Wilder was chomping at the bit to launch his directing career but
agreed one last time to work strictly as a writer, persuaded by the staggering amount Goldwyn was willing to pay: $7,500 for the story, another $79,800 for the script. In addition, Wilder insisted on being allowed to observe every day of the shooting from beginning to end in preparation for graduating to the director’s chair himself, which he did the following year.
After rejecting everything
remotely appropriate for Cooper in Goldwyn’s development files, Wilder pulled out a fourteen-page story he had once put together with Thomas Monroe. “From A to Z” concerned a British linguistics professors named Professor Thrush who, at the age of ten, had written “a much spoken of thesis on ‘The Faults in Shakespeare’s English Grammar.’” Thrush found Babe singing in a 42nd Street burlesque house,
and the ensuing conflict between the rarefied academic environment and Babe’s bruising underworld acquaintances ended in “the triumph of science and knowledge over brute force, of intellect over iniquity, of Einstein over Capone.”
Through the late winter and early spring of 1941, while Cooper was in the middle of
Sergeant York
, Brackett and Wilder tore into the script, tailoring it for the star
by changing the leading character to a shy American
and fleshing out the wonderful roles of the seven older professors with whom the younger man would work in preparing a new encyclopedia. They even identified specific actors, including Walter Brennan, in the script.
When it came to selecting a director, Goldwyn had to admit that none of his contract directors had managed to show Cooper off to
maximum advantage. Since the whole project was being built around the actor, the producer reluctantly agreed that anyone Coop wanted was all right with him, even the dreaded Howard Hawks, who hadn’t set foot in his studio since the nasty split on
Come and Get It
five years before. In his favor, Hawks had subsequently proved himself as an ace comedy director with
Bringing Up Baby
and particularly
His Girl Friday
, so Goldwyn went along despite his private feeling that Hawks had “no character.” So if Hawks was responsible for nudging Cooper over the edge into committing to do
Sergeant York
, the actor might be said to have returned the favor on what became
Ball of Fire
. Not that Hawks needed much convincing. He found the screenplay outstanding, later commenting that “Brackett and Wilder were
superb
writers and they could make almost anything good.” Of course, Hawks had to find a way to somehow claim the material as his own, insisting that when the writers were stuck, he clarified everything for them by pointing out that their story was really
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, with Babe, now Sugar-puss, as Snow White and her gangster boyfriend as the evil queen. Wilder, however, pooh-poohed
Hawks’s credit grab.
Charles Feldman waited until the perfect moment—June 17, the day after the first preview of
Sergeant York
—to nail down Hawks’s $100,000 directing fee, “at which figure, Goldwyn promptly proceeded to faint”; this was the most Hawks had ever received for a single picture. Warner Bros. was simultaneously trying to arrange for Hawks to direct Orson Welles in its adaptation of
the George S. Kaufman–Moss Hart Broadway comedy smash
The Man Who Came to Dinner
, but Hawks was spoken for.
Once he was on
Ball of Fire
, Hawks’s first challenge was to cast the female lead, a problem exacerbated, as it had been on
His Girl Friday
, by several surprising rejections, but once again the final choice proved felicitous. Having just won an Oscar for her dramatic performance in
Kitty
Foyle
, Ginger Rogers, Goldwyn’s first choice, spurned the role of Sugarpuss O’Shea as too frivolous now that she had established herself as a serious actress. Carole Lombard disliked both the character and the story, and Harry Cohn refused Goldwyn’s request for Jean Arthur, whom Hawks did not want anyway, although the actress went public with her anger over being denied her chance at the part.
In late June, Hawks filmed tests with twenty-three-year-old
Betty Field, who had just scored in Lewis Milestone’s film
Of Mice and Men
, as well as with longtime second banana Lucille Ball. Cooper finally suggested his
Meet John Doe
costar, Barbara Stanwyck, whom everyone agreed would be ideal.
Production began on Monday, August 6, 1941, with a forty-eight-day shooting schedule. By Hawks’s standards—and
to Goldwyn’s delight—filming zipped along relatively efficiently. Hawks began each day by watching the previous day’s dailies and was usually on the set by 9:20
A.M
.; after a month, the company was only four and a half days behind schedule, with the slight delays due to rewriting and an eye inflammation that briefly put Cooper out of action. The septet of Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers, S. Z. “Cuddles”
Sakall, Tully Marshall, Leonid Kinsky, Richard Haydn, and Aubrey Mather were cast as the graying professors, and Hawks personally decided which of them should play which roles. Kinsky, who had known Hawks since appearing in a small part in
The Road to Glory
, said that the character actors “had a certain amount of freedom, we were able to suggest some things.” At the same time, the director persisted
in his shameless way of appropriating other people’s ideas as his own. “He never gave credit for anything,” Kinsky observed. “He rented people, the finest and the best, and then called what they did his own.… [Once] I told him, ‘We’re old-fashioned professors, and we’d sing the old university hymn “Gaudeamus igitur” after a few drinks. If we didn’t, there’d be something wrong with us.’ On the
set, after a few rehearsals, Howard stopped and said, ‘I have an idea: these men studied in Vienna. I think they’d sing “Gaudeamus igitur.” No old-fashioned professors’ group would spend an evening without singing that.’”
Other than what he borrowed from his collaborators, Kinsky found that Hawks had very few suggestions to offer in rehearsals, although “you felt that he was the boss of the whole
thing. He had the same talent, but in a different way, that Wyler had. He would just have you do it, then do it again, without explaining why. Gary Cooper was the easiest person in the world to work with. It was like working with a beautiful horse. So honest, so truthful.” On
Sergeant York
, Cooper had been concerned about capturing the simple, religious nature of a real-life figure, while on
Ball of Fire
, he complained to Hawks that some of his dialogue was too complicated and difficult to deliver. Nevertheless, their collaboration was once again the definition of congeniality.
Kinsky found Barbara Stanwyck “professional but cold” and recalled that she never became a part of the collegial camaraderie that developed
among the men in the cast. But Stanwyck’s professionalism suited Hawks
just fine, as he enjoyed working with her enormously and always ranked her among the best actresses with whom he ever worked. The feeling was not entirely reciprocated, however. Stanwyck confided that while she thought Hawks did a competent job, she felt the picture lacked a certain spark of inspiration, and she secretly regretted that Billy Wilder, present at all times on the set, hadn’t directed
it instead.
Fresh off
Citizen Kane
, Gregg Toland had deeply explored the possibilities of deep-focus cinematography since working for Hawks on
The Road to Glory
and
Come And Get It
. Hawks, whose films were conventionally well-photographed without being innovative visually, found the technique suitable “when you didn’t give a damn what the people looked like, as with the old professors. The harsher
the lighting, the better they looked.” The director thought deep focus “was only good with a group like that, because they worked as one person—I always thought of them as one actor. ‘The professor’ meant all of them—I seldom singled one out.… Anyway, it was kind of a stylized thing, and you had to adapt your style to it. I never tried for depth of focus on a picture where it would intrude.”
Hawks was impressed with Toland’s solution to one photographic dilemma. Cooper was to enter a dark room where Stanwyck was in bed. Hawks wanted only her eyes to show but didn’t know how to avoid revealing her face as well. Toland’s answer: Have Stanwyck do the scene in blackface.
To shoot the location footage, Arthur Rosson took a second-unit crew to New York City and worked all over town, including
at Yankee Stadium during the World Series. After the film had been shooting for two months, it was nine and a half days behind its original forty-eight-day schedule. Due to the rewrites, however, shortly before the end Goldwyn officially extended the schedule to fifty-eight days. But with shooting rolling into mid-October, the real pressure to finish was coming not from Goldwyn but from Cooper,
Stanwyck, and Hawks. They were all invited by Ernest Hemingway to join him in Sun Valley for a hunting vacation, and this just couldn’t wait. Hawks responded, as he sometimes managed to do, by knocking off a hefty six and a half pages of script in one day, then pushing ahead without delay to the final major sequence, Sugarpuss’s performance of “Drum Boogie.” (Benny Goodman singer Martha Tilton
dubbed Stanwyck’s vocals, and bandleader Gene Krupa improvised the variation, “Match Boogie,” played with a pair of matches on a matchbox, which Hawks liked and threw into the film.) The picture wrapped on October 16, officially one day ahead of schedule, with a final budget of $1,152,538, including 15 percent for overhead and
contingencies. Cooper outearned even Hawks, taking home $150,000, while
Stanwyck received $68,333, markedly less than the writers.
Once again, Hawks, with more interesting places to go and people to see, left final editing and postproduction work to studio hands. Rushing the picture to completion so as to ride on the coattails of
Sergeant York
’s immense success, Goldwyn scheduled the first sneak preview for the first week of November but suffered an unusual embarrassment
in the process. By gentleman’s agreement, the Hollywood trade press did not review new films at sneak previews as long as the screenings were held sufficiently outside of Los Angeles. The suburb of Glendale, however, was considered fair game, so when
Variety
got wind that
Ball of Fire
would be snuck at that town’s Alexandria Theater, the critic Bill Brogdon was dispatched to the event. But once
Goldwyn discovered that Brogdon was present, he refused to proceed with the showing. According to the
New York Post
, “a riot broke out,” with people demanding that Brogdon be thrown out on the street. Goldwyn ended up taking the print and his guests to a theater in Pasadena.
Goldwyn was then distributing his pictures through RKO, and the company made it their first release of 1942. The film enjoyed
an excellent three-week run at Radio City Music Hall beginning January 15 and did exceedingly good business everywhere, generating $2,200,000 in rentals to rank as the year’s twenty-fifth biggest box-office attraction.
Ball of Fire
doesn’t rate with Hawks’s best comedies of the period,
Bringing Up Baby
and
His Girl Friday
, although it remains utterly charming for the brash cleverness of the dialogue,
the heartwarming geniality of the professors, and the expert comic playing of Cooper and Stanwyck. At 111 minutes, it runs too long, and Hawks was not able to pace it at the same speed as his previous comedies, albeit for good reason. The film “was about pedantic people,” Hawks pointed out. “When you’ve got professors saying lines, they can’t speak ‘em like crime reporters.” He added, “It
didn’t have the same reality as the other comedies, and we couldn’t make it go with the same speed.”