Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

Front Cover
Grove Press, 1997 - 756 pages
Howard Hawks is the first major biography of one of Hollywood's greatest directors, a filmmaker of incomparable versatility whose body of work includes the landmark gangster film Scarface, screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, the Bogart-Bacall classics To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and aviation classics and Westerns like The Dawn Patrol and Rio Bravo. Sometime partner of the eccentric Howard Hughes, drinking buddy of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, an inveterate gambler and a notorious liar, Hawks was the most modern of the great masters and one of the first directors to declare his independence from the major studios. He played Svengali to Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and others, but Hawks's greatest creation may have been himself. As The Atlantic Monthly noted, "Todd McCarthy . . . has gone further than anyone else in sorting out the truths and lies of the life, the skills and the insight and the self-deceptions of the work." "A fluent biography of the great director, a frequently rotten guy but one whose artistic independence and standards of film morality never failed." -- The New York Times Book Review; "Hawks's life, until now rather an enigma, has been put into focus and made one with his art in Todd McCarthy's wise and funny Howard Hawks." -- The Wall Street Journal; "Excellent . . . a respectful, exhaustive, and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood's most versatile director." -- Newsweek.
 

Contents

Origins
18
Boy of Privilege
34
Rich Kid in Hollywood
48
Showtime
64
The Sound Barrier
97
A New Dawn
102
The Criminal Code
118
Tough Guys Hughes Hecht Hays and Scarface
122
Air Force
326
The BelAir Front
340
Not in the Script To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep
353
The Urge to Independence Red River
392
Slim Walks Money Talks
424
Skirting Trouble I Was a Male War Bride
442
An Old Boss A New Mate
461
The Fox at Fox Monkey Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
487

Back to Warners The Crowd Roars
156
Tiger Shark
163
Sidetracked at MGM Faulkner Thalberg and Today We Live
173
Viva Villa
188
Screwball Twentieth Century
197
Barbary Coast
206
Flying High Ceiling Zero
214
The Road to Glory
224
Include Me Out Come and Get It
231
Big Spender RKO Gimga Din and Bringing Up Baby
243
Only Angels
260
His Girl Friday
279
Slim Hemingway and An Outlaw
289
Sergeant York
301
Catching Fire
314
In the Land of the Pharaohs
504
Sojourn in Europe
532
Bravo
540
Fun in the Bush Hatari
563
A Fishy Story Mans Favorite Sport?
588
Fast Cars and Young Women
590
The Last Roundup
605
From Sand to Dust
620
Posterity
638
Filmography
646
Acknowledgments
669
Notes
672
Bibliography
688
Index
698
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