The two grew up very near each other, although too far separated in years for it to have mattered. He lied about his age later on, but Victor Fleming was born in Pasadena on February 23, 1883. His father, W. R. L. Fleming, of English stock, was an engineer in charge of installing Pasadena’s first water-supply system, but he died when his
son was four. Victor’s mother, the former Evelyn Hartman, who was Pennsylvania Dutch, remarried and
moved to Los Angeles. As an adult, the handsome, dark-haired Fleming always boasted that he had Cherokee blood, but there is no trace of this in his official lineage. For unknown reasons, Victor was separated and placed with Evelyn’s brother Edwin Hartman, who ran a ranch in San Dimas, a small rural
community immediately south of Glendora, where Frank Hawks would purchase his orange grove some twenty years later. A “holy terror” at school, Victor quit at fourteen and took a job at a Pasadena bicycle shop. The shop also had agency rights for one of the new cars then gaining popularity, the Oldsmobile, so the teenager quickly turned his attention to automobiles and got to know them inside
out. By the turn of the century, Victor Fleming was racing cars at fairground tracks; he rode as Charley Soules’s mechanic in the first Vanderbilt Cup race in Santa Monica. Fleming got to know Soules’s longtime partner, Barney Oldfield, and worked on Oldfield’s famous Blitzen & Peerless Green Dragon racer in addition to continuing to barnstorm on his own on the standard mile-long circular courses,
winning plenty of trophies in the process. In addition to having been in on the ground floor of automobile racing, Fleming was the 5,912th American to be certified with a pilot’s license, logging fourteen hundred hours in the air long before World War I began.
In Pasadena, Fleming had known a brash kid eight years his junior named Marshall (Mickey) Neilan, who likewise had lost his civil-engineer
father at a very young age. A carouser and a vagabond of sorts, Mickey Neilan came into films as D. W. Griffith’s chauffeur in 1911, and by the following spring he was acting in Westerns for the American Film Company (or Flying A) in Santa Barbara under director Allan Dwan. In 1912, Dwan bought one of the biggest and most luxurious cars then in existence, the Mitchell Six, which Neilan taught
him to drive, but one day it went on the blink. When none of the mechanics in Santa Barbara could fix it, Neilan remembered that Vic Fleming from Pasadena was working as a chauffeur and mechanic for a rich family in Montecito. With some difficulty, they found him at an estate up in the hills, and Fleming supposedly fixed the car, on which the timing was off, in ten minutes. Seeing some photographic
equipment in the garage and learning that Fleming was an amateur photographer, Dwan asked if Fleming could repair his old English Williamson camera. Fleming knew nothing about that brand, but after he noticed that the brass aperture plate was scratching the film, he solved the problem by replacing it with a steel plate. The conventional, but incorrect, version of what happened next is that Dwan
offered him a job; Dwan did not. Fleming, anxious for work in the fledgling industry, had to beg Flying A owner Samuel
S. Hutchinson for any kind of job. He began by developing negatives, then moved to the set by carrying film and helping with props, all this when he was nearly thirty years old. Impressed by his dedication, Dwan soon made him an assistant cameraman, and Fleming was, by 1916, around
the time he met Hawks, the cinematographer of the Douglas Fairbanks films Dwan was directing for producer D. W. Griffith at Triangle.
Fleming was the director of photography on the Fairbanks picture
In Again—Out Again
, directed by John Emerson, the husband of writer Anita Loos and the future director, not coincidentally, of the first screen version of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. Although Hawks
never verified it for certain, all the circumstantial evidence points to
In Again—Out Again
, which was a sensation when it was released in April 1917, as the first picture on which Howard Hawks worked. It would also seem that Victor Fleming, as the one person Hawks definitively knew in the film business at that point, was very likely responsible for bringing him in.
In Again—Out Again
was Fairbanks’s
first foray as a producer and his first film for Artcraft-Paramount. The most Hawks ever said about his motivation for entering the film business was, “I just wanted a job during summer vacation. Somebody I knew at Paramount got me one in the Prop Room.” He further explained that an emergency had arisen on the Fairbanks picture—the film needed a modern set built in a hurry at a time when the
studio’s sole official art director was away. Hawks, with his limited architectural training, volunteered his services—or perhaps was recommended by Fleming. Fairbanks liked the work as well as the young man who did it, which led to further employment at the studio.
For Hawks at first, it was just summer work; he might more plausibly have found a job with an automotive shop or a construction
company, the latter a logical choice for someone who was training to be a mechanical engineer. He never claimed to have been a film fan that early in life, to have been dazzled as an impressionable youth by the allure of motion pictures or the recent achievements of D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, or anyone else. And he certainly didn’t need the money. It was even more unusual for a film studio to
employ a rich kid like Hawks in such a menial position than it was for an upper-class boy to take such a low-end job for the summer, for there was, as yet, very little glamour associated with an industry that still saw its members shunned from boardinghouses and apartment buildings, not to mention clubs, schools, and respectable institutions of all types. The vast majority of people entering the
film business at that time came from distinctly humble origins, and more than a few assumed new
names and rewrote their life stories. Allan Dwan compared Hollywood at that time to a circus, populated by “a pleasant gang of gypsy-like people.”
At that time, starting at the top meant working for either D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. De Mille; through recommendations from Fairbanks and Mary Pickford,
Hawks very quickly found himself working for the latter. Autocratic and a tough taskmaster even then, De Mille had come out to Hollywood from the East in 1914 and made his great breakthrough with
The Squaw Man
, the first legitimate feature-length American film; by 1916 he had already done more than anyone else to consolidate and promote the idea of Hollywood as a center for motion picture production.
In the two years since
The Squaw Man
, he had produced and directed an additional twenty-five pictures and was quickly developing his reputation as the greatest showman in the young industry.
Hawks never specified which De Mille picture he worked on during the summer of 1916; it could have been
Temptation
,
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
,
The Heart of Nora Flynn
,
Maria Rosa
,
The Dream Girl
, or
Joan the Woman
. Those who knew the cool, unflappable Hawks of later years would have trouble imagining him as a fumbling, inexperienced underling, but Hawks told Kevin Brownlow that on this early job he was hidden in an adobe house with the responsibility of lighting a flare when he heard a bugle blow once and putting it out when it blew twice. “Well, the first time I lit the flare it caught all
the other flares that were in there on fire and when a flare’s on fire it travels and I was running around thinking I was going to get burned up, but I’ll never forget all of the bugles blowing and blowing and I was saying, ‘Oh, shut up!’ I couldn’t put the flare out, I was trying to keep myself from being burned alive.”
Having failed in his attempt to transfer to Stanford University, the closest
thing to an Ivy League university on the West Coast, Hawks returned to Cornell in September 1916 for his junior year. But when the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Howard Hawks’s academic career effectively ended. The great majority of students, including Hawks, would soon be called up for military service, with the members of Hawks’s class plucked out of school with just a year
to go. What was done, in the end, was to graduate the servicemen of the class of 1918 in absentia. They received actual degrees, not honorary ones, even though they missed their entire senior years. This, then, is how Howard Hawks came to graduate from Cornell with a degree in mechanical engineering, despite his being far away when diplomas were handed out. But in the buccaneer days of the film
industry, formal education counted for nothing; the last thing a producer
or executive ever thought to ask a prospective director was where he went to college, since hardly anyone had. For Hawks, the prep school and Ivy League credentials, however undistinguished in achievement, gave him a certain aura, a polish that few others in his profession at that time possessed, which set him apart from
the crowd in an impressive way. They also added, like medals, to his intimidation quotient, his forbidding talent to convince others, particularly those of more humble origins—that is, his bosses—that he just naturally knew more than they did, that he was smarter, more refined, and in every way more capable. This was an important key to his ability to so consistently get his way throughout the main
part of his career.
Apparently, Hawks took the opportunity of the country’s declaring war to leave Cornell at once, before being called up for service, for in April 1917 he was back in California working for De Mille.
The Little American
was a big World War I romance in which Mary Pickford played an American girl whose two suitors, a German and a Frenchman, must return in 1914 to fight on opposite
sides in the conflict. Surviving the sinking of the
Lusitania
on her way to Europe, Mary ends up in a château with the German when the French bombard it, which is where Hawks came in. Hawks was working props in the violent scene in which the château is demolished and, as he told Brownlow, “they had canvas all over the set and about six pails of flashlight powder that was supposed to go off. Well,
nobody told me and I was up the top and when it went off I was supposed to drop a lot of cement and things. But all I got was all the fumes from six pails of flashlight powder, and I couldn’t breathe and instead of cement coming down, I fell down in the middle of the table in the middle of the scene. And when he [De Mille] saw who it was he just shook his head”—no doubt remembering the lad’s faux
pas with the flares the year before. On this picture, which was in production between April 13 and May 22, 1917, Hawks became friendly with the eighteen-year-old Chinese-American slate boy, Jimmy Wong Howe, who was just entering the business.
Hawks claimed he and De Mille liked each other and always got along well, although he also paid him a backhanded compliment, saying that whatever approach
De Mille would take as a director “I would work exactly the opposite, and do quite well doing it. If I tried to tell people to do some of the things he did, I’d laugh while I was trying to tell ‘em. But he made it work. I learned an awful lot because I did the opposite.” He also made the far-fetched claim that once, when the famous De Mille temper was unleashed in Hawks’s direction, the lowly assistant
prop boy promptly “got him by the front of the coat,” said he didn’t like to be talked to that way,
and promised to slug him if he ever did it again. In this fairy tale, which is identical to similar stories of how Hawks later manhandled Louis B. Mayer, Humphrey Bogart, and other tough guys, De Mille immediately apologized.
The Little American
was well received upon its release in July 1917,
and Hawks is known to have worked on two additional pictures before entering the armed forces, one of which gave him his chance to direct for the first time. In 1916, Mickey Neilan largely quit acting to take up directing full-time. Having appeared opposite Mary Pickford in numerous pictures, he became one of her most trusted collaborators. All the same he grew even more devil-may-care with success,
and while directing
The Little Princess
, an adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s famous children’s book, starring Pickford, Neilan went off on a drunk and simply didn’t show up one day. The way Hawks told it, when Pickford despaired of doing any shooting that day, Hawks said, “‘Why don’t we make some scenes?’ She said, ‘Can you do it?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ I made some, and she liked it very
much.”
What Hawks and Pickford’s regular cinematographer, Charles Rosher, did were some trick shots, amusing double exposures that were basically in-camera special effects. The principle was that a shot could be taken of someone, for example, sitting in a chair, whereupon the film was carefully wound back to the same starting place and then run through the camera again, only this time showing
the person getting up from the chair and walking across the room, which would effectively convey a dream or fantasy. Pickford said she wanted a scene in which she would, in effect, follow herself into a room, so Hawks and Rosher filmed her once in the room, rewound the film, and then took a shot of her entering the room. “And it happened that they matched,” Hawks said. “The cameraman was just sweating
because he said it’s only one chance in ten that it’ll match.” They also executed a crude but charming stop-motion scene, the live-action equivalent of animation, in which they rigged a doll so that, by filming it one frame at a time in slightly different positions, it could be made to look as though it was moving of its own accord. These scenes, which rested entirely on cute little tricks,
represented Howard Hawks’s directorial debut. After
The Little Princess
, Hawks worked on one more Neilan feature,
Amarilly of Clothesline Alley
, one of Mary Pickford’s less celebrated outings, in which she played a lower-class girl who comes close to being snatched up by a gilded youth but eventually realizes that happiness for her rests with one of her own.
In addition to becoming good friends
with Mickey Neilan, Hawks learned a great deal from the boisterous, irreverent Irishman that was pertinent
to his own work later on. “Neilan had a great sense of humor,” Hawks noted. “He had a very opposite sense … he could get fun out of odd, quick little things, he could get fun out of stress and duress. And he taught me how to do it.” It was the cue he got from Neilan that inspired Hawks to
always look for a different way of doing something; to try to make any story a comedy if possible; to reverse a situation from what an audience expected; to realize the comic potential in frustration, hazard, and embarrassment; to cast, perhaps, a woman in a man’s part; and to maximize the potential of intimacy and compression instead of going, à la De Mille, for broad strokes and general effects.
Hawks would work with Neilan again numerous times before beginning his directing career, and Neilan’s impact was so strong that he remained a conscious influence on Hawks as late as the 1960s, in
Red Line 7000
and
El Dorado
.