I really don’t want to talk about this incident anymore. I’m sorry I brought it up. The details of sex are either vulgar, boring or repetitious.
Let’s talk about the air crashes that took place during the making of Hell’s Angels.
Three men were killed. Al Johnson was first, and then Clem Phillips. The third man wasn’t a pilot, he was a mechanic named Phil Jones. He was in that Gotha that Frank and I flew. Frank didn’t want to fly it that day – he probably had a hangover. So there was another pilot, Al Wilson, who went up with Jones, and they were running smoke pots to simulate a burning plane. They were supposed to go into a spin, bail out, and let the plane crash. Wilson bailed out at a thousand feet, but for some reason the mechanic didn’t. I was flying above them in a scout plane. I landed in the field next to the crash and tried to pull Jones out of the wreck. But there wasn’t much left of him. And he could never tell us why he didn’t bail out.
Those were the only deaths, but not the only crashes. The pilots themselves were calling it ‘The Suicide Club.’ I suppose the funniest crash, if you can call it funny when you’re facing death that way, was when Al Wilson bailed out over Hollywood. He was in a Fokker coming back to the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles was socked in with fog and he decided he was over the mountains to the north but he had no idea which way to go. He was scared to ease her down, so he bailed out. He didn’t know it, but he was right over Hollywood Boulevard, and the Fokker cracked up the backyard of a producer named Joe Schenk. Schenk and his wife, Norma Talmadge, the famous actress, were there, and some other people, and they had a hell of a scare because a plane doesn’t hit the ground like a creampuff.
The propeller hit Hollywood Boulevard and nearly took some woman’s head off. That was good publicity in one way and not so good in another. We had a fair amount of complaints. Al Wilson himself landed on some guy’s roof. He was a lucky son of a bitch, more than once.
A few years later, around 1931, I made another picture about flying. That was Sky Devil, with Spencer Tracy and William Boyd. We started looking for the guys who had flown in Hell’s Angels, and it turned out that eight or nine of them were dead. That’s not including the ones who were killed when we were shooting the picture. They’d all cracked up in just those few years. Lyn Hayes was dead, piled into a mountain somewhere. Ross Cook was dead, and Mory Johnson, Burt Lane, five or six others. All killed flying. It was a dangerous profession in those days – still is, only now you have to watch out for Arabs and hand grenades. But when I heard about this, I was very shaken up.
But it didn’t make you stop flying?
Nothing could have done that.
Did you think you had a charmed life?
I didn’t even think about it. I just kept flying. You read in the newspapers every day that thousands of people are killed in car accidents, but you don’t say to yourself, ‘I’ve got a charmed life, I’ll keep driving.’ You just keep driving because you need to get somewhere in your car. I needed to get somewhere in my plane. And I loved to fly. It was simple. Also, remember – I was young. A kid. I had many millions of dollars, but I was still a kid. If I was going to stop risking my life I would have stopped after I’d cracked up three or four times myself, but I didn’t. That never occurred to me.
I had one scene in Hell’s Angels where the Germans are forced by their commander to jump from their Zeppelin. The Zeppelin is being overtaken by the Allied planes, and in order to lighten the load the men have to jump. Being Krauts, and being ordered to jump by the captain, they jump. I shot that on the sound-stage, one of the few action scenes in that film that was shot indoors. We had a beautiful montage with a dark cloudy background. The men had to jump from the Zeppelin, down through the clouds. Of course we had a stack of mattresses on the bottom of the studio to catch them. That was one of the most dangerous scenes we shot. A lot of people thought the air stuff was the most dangerous, but this was worse, because the men had to land right on the mattresses, jumping from about forty feet, and those stunt pilots – guys who would do an Immelman or an outside loop without blinking an eye – were crapping in their pants. I shot that scene fifty or sixty times, because I wanted a certain effect.
Fifty or sixty times? Are you sure?
I’m not exaggerating. It took days. I drove people crazy. I finally got what I wanted in one sequence when the hat came off one of these Krauts’ heads as he jumped. You saw that hat spinning through the air, and it gave a special feeling to the scene.
Noah was standing around the lot, and he had seen some of the rushes. He was pissing and moaning because he was thinking, that’s our money going down the drain. Already he was thinking about it as our money. He told people that any one of these rushes was just as good as any other. ‘I can’t see what Howard is after.’ But I knew what I was after and when I saw that one sequence, with the hat spinning slowly through the air, I thought, that’s it.
After all this time, I consider Hell’s Angels to be the best picture I ever made. It took me three years and over two million feet of film, not to mention over four million prewar dollars, but it still holds up. I looked at it not so very long ago and the dogfights were still the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen on the screen in the way of aerial battles. We had good technical men in Hollywood even then, and they’re always the key people.
The acting, in retrospect, doesn’t measure up. I’d cast a Swedish actress called Greta Nissen in the female lead. She was one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, but she couldn’t speak English. When I decided to reshoot more than half the movie in sound, it was obvious that Greta had to go. Years later, by the way, they made a movie based on this situation –Singing in the Rain, with Gene Kelly. Nobody paid me a dime.
Arthur Landau, Greta Nissen’s agent, gave me a real sob story about her. I said, ‘What do you suggest I do?’
Arthur sighed. ‘If you’re going to dump Greta,’ he said, ‘the least you can do is take another girl from my stable.’
‘Who did you have in mind?’
‘You’ll love her. Her name is Jean Harlow.’
She’d been Harlean Carpenter until a few years before that, and in a few weeks she was the star of Hell’s Angels – her first leading role. It made her famous. She never wore a bra – that was the Harlow trademark.
Were you involved with her personally?
‘Involved’ is too strong a word. If you want to know whether or not I had an affair with her, the answer is yes. I went to bed with her because she was the star and I was the director and in those days it was one of those obligatory things to do. She came to my office one evening after the shoot and asked me to read some lines with her. I did that, of course, and the next thing I knew she was down on her knees, unbuttoning my fly to give me a blow job. I said, ‘Jean, this isn’t necessary. You’ve got the part.’ She answered something, but since she had her mouth full I couldn’t make out what she said. I just decided to relax and enjoy it.
Later, on a few occasions, we made love on the couch there, and at her house. I soon grew tired of her. She had an appeal to me, in a kind of overblown, sexy way, but after a while we had nothing to say to each other. And as an actress she was awful. I tried as hard as I could to get her to speak with just the semblance of an English accent. The others weren’t much good in that respect either, but at least occasionally they could do it. With Harlow it was totally impossible; I worked with her from midnight to dawn to get her to say ‘glass’ with an English a – to rhyme with ‘wash’ – because there’s a scene where she has to ask for a glass of champagne. And she finally got it right the sixteenth time, but when we got before the camera it came out ‘glaaas,’ like toity-toid street and toid avenoo.