Quite taken with this stylish young beauty, Hawks took her out to dinner, always in the company of other people, two or three times in Paris. Although her limited English and his nonexistent French made communication difficult, Hawks found out that she was born in Clichy, just outside Paris, was raised by her maternal grandmother, had begun her working
life
at sixteen as a figure skater with the Bouglione Circus, and was rebaptized Chance by Ted Lapidus of Dior in the back of a taxi as they sped through the Place de la Concorde. At the time Hawks met her, Chance was on the verge of quitting modeling and launching a career as a photojournalist.
During the time they knew each other in Paris, Hawks did not come on to his elegant new friend. “He
was too scrupulous for that. Hawks,” Chance said, “was not the type of man to have affairs. Dee, from what I heard, did have affairs, but not Howard.” Chance felt Hawks was too much of a gentleman to provoke something tacky. “He liked women, lots of them, but one after the other, not all at the same time. At least that’s what I believe.”
By the fall of 1956, Hawks was living at the Hotel Prince
de Galles on Avenue Georges V, but with nothing clicking into place with projects in Europe, he began to feel it was time to return home. When he returned to California at year’s end, Hawks had been away for just short of four years, during which time he had made one film, sired a son, entered the seventh decade of his life, had a good deal of fun, spent quite a bit of money, become acquainted
with some of the French critics who would further promote his reputation over the next few years, and, toward the end, reassessed the kinds of movies he had been making recently and what he wanted to be doing.
The home front looked markedly different when Howard Hawks returned to Los Angeles after nearly four years in Europe. Humphrey Bogart had just died, and Hawks shocked Dee by refusing to visit Lauren Bacall to pay his respects. According to Dee, Hawks said, “They never had me while he was alive, why should I go now?” Now that Hog Canyon was no longer his, he took up residence for a short
time at the Westwood Manor apartment hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. The previous summer, his daughter Barbara, now twenty, had married Donald McCampbell, a gregarious, athletic man. Barbara was a theater arts major at UCLA before she went to work for the writers Bill Orr, Jack Warner’s son-in-law, and Hugh Benson at Warner Bros., while Don studied music before trying his hand at different fields.
Hawks hadn’t bothered to return for the wedding, but Barbara said, “Slim was wonderful to Don and me when we got married. She and Leland and Kitty were at my wedding, they invited us for dinner a lot.” Carrie Dane McCampbell, Hawks’s first blood grandchild, was born on May 30, 1957, her grandfather’s sixty-first birthday.
Kitty, now eleven, had not seen her father at all during his stay in Europe.
Peter Hawks, who was working as a district manager for TWA at the San Francisco Airport and hadn’t seen his adoptive father in years, already had three daughters, Jamin, Kate, and Celia. David, now twenty-seven, had been working as an engineer at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica since graduating from Princeton in 1952.
Professionally, Hawks was raring to go. His four-year layoff, he said, “sort
of gave me a fresh attitude,” and he was sure that the frustration built up over his several unrealized projects would be broken by his return. No sooner did he arrive than Feldman presented him with a tantalizing “adulterous comedy” that struck a particularly responsive chord in Hawks. The agent-producer had bought a play in Europe about a handsome rogue
whose ability to juggle a wife and mistress
becomes more difficult when he meets a beautiful young woman. Feldman hired I. A. L. Diamond, who had just begun his collaboration with Billy Wilder on
Love in the Afternoon
, to write the script. Hawks liked it very much and had Diamond rewrite the lead for Feldman’s client and their mutual friend, William Holden. Capucine, Feldman’s new twenty-three-year-old French amour, would play the wife,
Brigitte Bardot was proposed as the mistress, while it could be left to Hawks to make a new discovery for the girlfriend. The project, however, stalled while Holden, on location in Ceylon for
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, delayed making any future commitments, and Hawks’s attention soon turned elsewhere.
One thing that surprised and impressed Hawks upon his return to the States was television.
When he had left at the beginning of 1953, TV was mostly variety, comedy, and game shows supplemented by a measure of serious live drama. Now, prime time was dominated by filmed series, and it can’t have escaped Hawks’s attention that fully a third of them were Westerns, including the number-one show,
Gunsmoke
, starring his embarrassed “Thing,” James Arness. Lots of good actors, both veterans
and young, good-looking kids, were now appearing on television, and Hawks watched a lot of it to bring himself up-to-date. In fact, Westerns seemed so commonplace and unexceptional in 1958 that Jack Warner yawned when Hawks told him he wanted to do a Western for his return to the screen. The director told a journalist at the time, “I got bored and decided I might as well be doing what I know best.”
Although highly identified with the genre because of the success of
Red River
and his general demeanor, Hawks had only made two Westerns in his career to date; of the six films still ahead of him, however, half would be Westerns.
Famously,
Rio Bravo
was born out of Hawks’s visceral abhorrence of Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman’s highly acclaimed 1952 hit,
High Noon
(for which Hawks’s friends
Gary Cooper and Dimitri Tiomkin won Oscars), a simple tale of a middle-aged small-town sheriff who asks for help from the local citizenry when faced with the return of some revenge-minded criminals. The picture was also seen as a liberal political allegory for the McCarthy era (surprising, given the highly conservative Cooper’s involvement), in which normal people are shown as being easily cowed and
afraid to take action against intimidating tyrants. Hawks’s objections were not aesthetic but deeply personal and, one could even say, ideological; the film ran counter to everything he believed in. As he put it, “I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for
help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him.” He decided to “do just
the opposite, and take a real professional viewpoint: As Wayne says when he’s offered help, ‘If they’re really good, I’ll take them. If not, I’ll just have to take care of them.’ We did everything that way, the exact opposite of what annoyed me in
High Noon
and it worked, and people liked it.”
Hawks was to have similar objections to another film, Delmer Daves’s
3:10 to Yuma
, based on a story
by Elmore Leonard, when it came out in August. In that one, as Hawks remembered it, “the sheriff caught a prisoner, and the prisoner taunted him and made him perspire and worry and everything by saying, ‘Wait till my friends catch up with you.’ And I said, ‘That’s a lot of nonsense, the sheriff would say, ‘You better hope your friends
don’t
catch up with you, ’cause you’ll be the first man to
die.’” Though Hawks’s interpretation is off (the “sheriff” he spoke of was actually just an impoverished rancher, not a professional),
Rio Bravo
arose from Hawks’s reaction
against
aspects of two popular Westerns of the period, which made it easy for him to create certain key scenes by just taking scenes he disliked and turning their attitudes upside down or inside out.
As it happened, John Wayne
also hated
High Noon
, and the idea of working together again after more than a decade appealed enormously to both Hawks and the star; whatever animosity Wayne may have harbored over having had to sue Hawks to receive his full payment from their previous film had long since subsided. There was no actor in Hollywood busier or more popular than Wayne, but he had recently been in a bit of a slump;
he hadn’t appeared in a Western since Ford’s
The Searchers
in 1956, and his four films in the interim had not measured up to the star’s usual commercial standards. So perhaps a good Western was what both actor and director needed.
To write the script, Hawks turned to the two writers who, aside from Faulkner, he liked the best and trusted the most, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, although he
had worked with neither since
The Big Sleep
some twelve years before. Furthman, now seventy, had grown more cantankerous and disagreeable than ever and hadn’t worked much since the early 1950s. For her part, Brackett had left Hollywood entirely, marrying the pioneer science-fiction writer Edmond Hamilton and moving to Kinsman, Ohio, where she turned out many sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery stories
and novels, including the highly regarded
The Sword of Rhiannon
and
The Long Tomorrow
. When she returned in July 1957, taking an apartment above the beach at Ocean Avenue and Wilshire in Santa Monica, it was only because it was Hawks who asked. Even though they were credited together, along
with Faulkner, on the script to
The Big Sleep
, Brackett had never met Furthman. Fortunately, she said, “We
got on famously.” The writing responsibilities were divided up, but not as they had been with Faulkner on
The Big Sleep
. On what was initially entitled
El Paso Red
and then briefly called
Bull by the Tail
, the two writers would huddle with Hawks for hours as the director offered up his ideas. As Brackett explained the process, “I was used to writing by myself, alone with my typewriter in a little
room. Jules Furthman, on the other hand, just hated to put anything down on paper. So, in story conferences with Howard Hawks, Jules did most of the ball-carrying. He and Mr. Hawks would talk the scenes out, and I’d contribute as much as I could.… Basically, though, I would put down on paper the scenes that Mr. Hawks and Furthman had talked out, shape them, reshape them if necessary, and put them
together, adding a few things of my own in the process.” The two writers’ pay scales were outrageously disproportionate: Furthman received $2,500 a week, while Brackett, who did the lion’s share of the actual writing, got only $600 weekly.
The first written document pertaining to the film, dated August 3, 1957, a thirteen-page incomplete treatment, has virtually nothing to do with
Rio Bravo
as
it ultimately emerged but bears every resemblance to a Western remake of
To Have and Have Not
. From this short sketch began the real work. Clicking now, Hawks, Brackett, and Furthman came up with a new story line in August and finished a preliminary draft before the end of September. They then went through it again, fleshing out characters, adding and strengthening scenes, and sharpening dialogue,
until a 123-page first draft, signed by Brackett alone, was completed on November 13. In terms of the basic dramatic situation, centering on the efforts of a sheriff and his motley crew to hold a man prisoner in their small jail while under siege by an outlaw gang, the script was quite well along at this stage. The relationship of Sheriff John T. Chance, named after the beautiful French model
Hawks had on his mind, and a gambler woman called Feathers, the name of the female lead in Sternberg’s
Underworld
, was all there. But the central male relationship was very different from what finally ended up on-screen. The second lead here was a man named Jim Ryan, a hired gun whom the sheriff, initially wary, finally takes on. Ryan resembled a combination of the eventual Dude and Colorado characters;
at the same time, in the way he makes those around him uncertain of his sympathies because of his tendency to go where the money is, Ryan recalls Bogart’s Harry Morgan and prefigures John Wayne’s Cole Thornton in
El Dorado
. As Hawks explained, “When we came to a certain place in
Rio Bravo
, we had our choice
between going in this direction and going in that direction. But we made notes to remember,
because we said, ‘This is so good we can use it sometime.’ We ended up with enough good notes to make another movie, so we made another movie.” The final shootout, including the throwing of dynamite into the barn where Burdette’s men are hiding, exists in this early version, although there is no exchange of prisoners by the two sides beforehand.
The dynamite lobbing was a bit of business that
appeared in
Gunga Din
, so it is possible that Hawks, perhaps unconsciously, was stealing from himself. Officially, however, the idea came from Hawks’s daughter Barbara, accounting for the on-screen story credit to B. H. McCampbell. As Barbara put it, her father “came back from Europe with a basic idea for a Western, but he didn’t know how to resolve the story, to get them all out of jail.” Barbara
said she and Don worked out a long story with numerous situations for the characters to confront, but the Warner Bros. legal department never saw the “original McCampbell material,” and the credit was based on an “unpublished story” without documentation.
The screenplay’s last major transformation took place in December and January. In a script dated January 28, 1958, the Jim Ryan character has
been jettisoned and replaced by Chance’s broken-down former deputy Dude and Wheeler’s hired hand, a young fast gun named Colorado who, in his mercenary ways, recalls John Ireland’s Cherry Valance in
Red River
. Dude is described as “a small man, almost frail-looking,” and was derived, as Feathers was, from Hawks’s and Furthman’s recollections of
Underworld
, in which the leading character helps
to reform his drunken best friend. The opening scene is very different, with Dude, already a deputy, warning cattleman Wheeler about the danger represented by Burdette. The celebrated initial scene of a man in the saloon throwing a silver dollar into a spittoon to humiliate Dude, spurring Chance’s defense of his pathetic friend, was written only at the moment of shooting in June (and was also lifted
from
Underworld
). What’s more, the famous low-angle shot of Chance looking down at a groveling Dude, plus the camera tilt that underlines the connection between the men, were indicated in the script, although it is impossible to know who was behind this rare insertion of camera instructions in a Hawks screenplay. A final draft was worked on through February to modify and refine certain elements,
but Hawks was so pleased with the January version that he submitted it to the MPAA, which objected to the “excessive number of specified individualized killings” and the clear indication of “a sex affair” between Chance and Feathers. In response, Hawks promised to downplay the killings by cutting away and not dwelling on them and proposed
ending the most direct romantic scene “on a comic note”
rather than with an implication that sex was to follow.