Hawks on Hawks

22. The Hawksian Woman

120 22 The Hawksianwoman I’ve been accused of promoting Women’s Lib, and I’ve denied it, emphatically . It just happens that kind of a woman is attractive to me. I merely am doing somebody that I like. And I’ve seen so many pictures where the hero gets in the moonlight and says silly things to a girl, I’d reverse it and let the girl do the chasing around, you know, and it works out pretty well. Anyway, I know that a little better than I do that other stuff. I’d much rather work with a character like that than with some little Puritan violet. I think that it’s pretty apparent the kind of people that we like, that you see on the screen. I like Carole Lombard, I like Rita Hayworth, I like Angie Dickinson. I could keep on naming dozens of them. They’re the kind of stars that people like. As long as the people like those characters, I’m going to keep on doing them. Which of the women in your films was your personal favorite? I don’t think there’s any doubt that Frances Farmer was the best actress I ever worked with. She was in Come and Get It. She was just a kid who came in to audition for another part. I said, “You ought to play the lead,” and she said, “Let me do it.” So I paid off the star that Goldwyn had signed and put this kid in, and I thought she did an amazing piece of work. She was probably one of the cleanest, simplest, hardest-working persons I ever knew. She came a couple of times to my boat wearing her sweatshirt and her dungarees and carrying a toothbrush in her pocket. She had no phoniness about her at all. She studied under a very fine teacher in Washington. When I told her the part I said, “I want to make a test.” She played the mother and daughter roles in the picture, and she tried to do the mother by make-up, you know, things like that, and she failed. She was one of the first persons to see it. She said, “Does that mean I’m out?” And I said, “Hell, no, you’ve got the part. I’ll meet you tonight about eight o’clock. Where do you live?” And she told me. I said, “I can’t The Hawksian woman 121 find that; I’ll meet you up on such-and-such a corner.” We went to all kinds of beer joints, little places around town, looking for a woman of her type. We finally found a marvelous one, and I said, “Now, you do something . You come in here every night for two weeks. You get picked up; what’ll probably happen is some guy will try to feel your leg. You’re a strong girl; you can handle yourself. Whoever does it, talk to him, be that woman, with her mannerisms and everything. And then we’ll make a test.” She was just fabulous. She was a blonde, a natural, but she just used a dark wig; that’s all she put on. No change in make-up, just her face changed. Her whole attitude changed, her whole method of talking. And she just really . . . the very first day I remember her working with Eddie Arnold, who was a real old trouper, and she said, “If you’d only speak that line a little quicker I could keep this thing going.” And he looked at her, and he spoke it quicker, and the scene was better. He said, “Hey, look, she’s pretty good.” I said, “She’s so good that you’d better get right to work or she’s going to take it and walk off with it.” If it hadn’t been for Frances Farmer (“the best actress I ever worked with”) in Come and Get It, a dual role. This is one of the earlier scenes; she later plays her own daughter, a more reserved character than this one, whom Hawks calls “a lusty wench”; in this shot, Walter Brennan is left of Farmer and Edward Arnold is right of her. Hawks on Hawks 122 personal things that happened to her [she was incarcerated in a mental hospital and was given a lobotomy], she’d have gone on and been...