A bemused Hawks said, “Oh yeah.”
“Jesus Christ! All the time? How do you stand it?” Ford asked, grinning over at Bogdanovich.
Ford’s ornery reticence and Hawks’s compulsion to embellish the facts of any story he told-these were the stock poses of Hollywood’s greatest artists as late as two decades ago. They may have stood in the front rank of 20th-century filmmakers, but any notion that they were artists was never mentioned polite company. In Who the Devil Made It (849 pages. Knopf. $39.95), Bogdamovich’s absorbing new collection of interviews with 16 great film directors, he asks Hawks if he ever thought of moviemaking as art. When Hawks said no, Bogdanovieh asked him what he did think it was. “Business,” Hawks replied. “Fun.”
The further you read in Bogdanovich’s book, the more tempting it becomes to think of the period roughly from the beginning of the Depression until sometime in the mid-’50s as America’s greatest cultural inning. Jazz entered the mainstream. Tin Pan Alley was in its heyday. Hemingway, Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler all had best sellers. And in Hollywood itself, all these artists rubbed shoulders. Faulkner co-wrote the screenplays for the film versions of Chandler’s “The BigSleep” and Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not,” both directed by his friend Hawks. And every day that songwriter Hoagy Carmichael was scheduled to perform on the set of “To Have and Have Not,” Faulkner made a point of showing up to watch. But nobody else made a fuss about these people. In 1944 Faulkner was just a financially strapped writer out in Hollywood for some easy dough. Carmichael was just a pop songwriter. Hawks was a director who knew how to make movies that made money. Nobody called anybody else an artist. Why jinx a good thing?
Two excellent new biographies supply a beautiful joint portrait of the ethos of that era. Todd McCarthy’s Howard Hawks (756 pages. Grove Press. $35) is a respectful, exhaustive and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood’s most versatile director (it still strains credulity to think that the same man made “His Girl Friday,” “Red River” and “Scarface”). Tom Hiney’s Raymond Chandiet (310 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $26) offers an equally discerning portrait of the creator of Philip Marlowe, the archetypal American private eye. Superficially they were polar opposites. Hawks was a womanizing fashion plate. Chandler was a recluse married to a woman 20 years his senior. Hawks was a rich preppy from Pasadena. Chandler was a product of English public schools who never got over it. But both were alcoholic loners, and artistically, they were joined at the hip.
Hawks and Chandler hated pretension and admired people who did things well. “There’s a certain pride among people who’re good,” Hawks told Bogdanovich. “The primary thing is to do a really good job.” He could have been talking about Chandler or himself. And if there’s something a little weird about making a religion out of professional is m, all that talk about getting the job done left no room to talk about anything else in their books and movies-no affirmations of life or discussions of the Big Picture. That’s what’s kept Hawks’s movies and Chandler’s books so fresh. It also made them mysterious-what are these funny yet fatalistic works of art, and who were the slumming geniuses who made them? Director Billy Wilder says that “the two people I’ve been connected with who everyone is most interested in are Marilyn Monroe and Raymond Chandler.” As Wilder’s own creation Norma Desmond might say, “There were celebrities in those days.”
