He arrived in a terrible state. He had the jitters, because the reels ran about twenty minutes. At the Geary they were halfway through the first reel, and without the third, the premiere couldn’t go on.
But I said, ‘Something’s wrong, Walter, and I want to make a cut.’
‘Howard, you can’t make a cut up here. You have no equipment, and I’ve got to bring that reel back to the theatre within fifteen minutes.’
I’ve learned in my life not to let other people’s panics panic me. I said calmly, ‘Take it out of the can, Walter, and give it to me.’
‘You don’t have any film rods,’ he said. ‘You have no cutting equipment – and how are you going to hear the sound track?’
All my life I’ve improvised, right up to now, when I put my own leaded glass screen in front of the TV set to cut out the gamma rays.
So I ran the film over a fountain pen – you have to have something to run it over in order to count the frames – and while I was doing it I had the musical score in my head. I’ve told you that as a child I played the saxophone and the ukulele. I hummed the music, and I moved the film, and I found the exact spot where I wanted to make a cut and where I didn’t want any music in the background. I wanted that silence to create a certain effect, a mood which you can get sometimes by silence. I’ve thought a great deal about the nature of silence. As I’ve grown older, silence has become much more precious to me – in fact, there are times when I am grateful for my deafness.
Walter had been sensible enough to bring a splicer. I cut twelve feet of film and he ran back to the Geary Theatre carrying Reel Three. Of course, it’s an art in itself, to cut twelve feet out of a finished film. But what astonished Walter was that I’d been able to cut the twelve feet of film and there was no awkward jump in the sound track, because I had it in my head and I knew that we moved from a C sharp to another C sharp chord.
He came to me next day and said, ‘Howard, that was an absolutely perfect cut.’ He was impressed. Deep down I was a little impressed too, but I just said, ‘Sure, Walter. What did you expect?’
Julie Furthman wrote the screenplay, but I wrote a good part of it too, and Joe Breen, the front man for the Hays Office, also made some contributions. This is hardly believable, but so help me, it’s true. There’s a scene in the movie where Jane Russell, Doc Holliday’s girlfriend, climbs into bed with Jack Buetel, who played Billy the Kid. Billy’s been wounded and has to be kept warm.
Walter Huston, who played Doc Holliday, comes back and finds them in the sack. Doc is pretty annoyed at this hanky-panky and threatens to gun Billy down. And Billy, who had loaned Doc his horse, reminds him of the fact, and says, ‘A fair exchange is no robbery.’ That was Julie Furthman’s line and I didn’t think it was clear, just a touch too highbrow, and I changed it to, ‘You borrowed my horse, so I borrowed your girl.’
That made Joe Breen’s hair stand on end. He’d already seen the rough-cut of the picture and he was yelling about the showing of Jane’s tits and the fact that everybody was climbing into bed with everyone else. It all boiled down finally to covering Jane’s cleavage here and there and eliminating that one line, ‘You borrowed my horse, so I borrowed your girl.’
I said in disgust, ‘Okay, Mr. Breen, you want to change it, go ahead. Just give me another line in its place.’
He said, ‘Well, how about “tit for tat”?’
I couldn’t believe my ears, but I very grudgingly said, ‘Okay.’ When this got back to Will Hays, Breen’s boss, his hair stood on end. Finally he said, ‘Look, Hughes, you cut that one line out, “tit for tat,” and put in something else, and we’ll give the film the production seal.’
I said, ‘How about, “You borrowed my horse, I borrowed your girl”?’ – which of course was my original line.
Will Hays said, ‘Yes, anything, I’m sick of this argument, I’m getting ulcers.’ And that’s how it stood at the end.
That was the first time I used Russell Birdwell as publicity agent. I knew that this picture needed a tremendous publicity campaign and Bird, which is what we called him, had been the publicity man for Gone with the Wind. I didn’t know him personally, but in those days when I wanted to meet a man I didn’t necessarily call him on the telephone and say, ‘I’d like to meet you. Please come over.’ I liked to meet people in more subtle ways.
I arranged to be out one night with Norma Shearer and I knew that Russell Birdwell would be at a certain night club. So I sat down with Norma and Myron Selznick at a table and listened to Birdwell talk to them. I didn’t say a word and he didn’t know who I was. He must have thought I was just another hanger-on, because by then I wasn’t paying attention to the way I dressed – I would wear a shirt until the collar frayed, socks till they’d stand up by themselves and walk out of the room. If people didn’t like the smell of my feet, they could go somewhere else and smell some other millionaire’s feet.
I hired Bird because Jane was unknown. Some agent had given me a photograph of her – she was nobody, not even an actress. She was a receptionist for some dentist out in the San Fernando Valley. She wanted to be an actress, but so did everybody in Hollywood. She had great cleavage, that was her principal asset.
I never gave screen tests – I didn’t believe in them. I wanted one thing: a still photograph with no makeup, because if a woman has got It, and you know what I mean by It, that certain star quality will come through. A woman in the morning, after you’ve spent the night with her and all the makeup has worn off, if she’s not beautiful then, you don’t want to have anything to do with her. Take my advice – that’s the acid test. And that was my method to find out whether or not these girls had It.
However, I did not spend the night with Jane Russell, I can assure you of that, even though she made it known to me that she was willing. I tend to favor a more slender woman. And at that time I was prettily heavily involved with Ava Gardner. You couldn’t exactly call Ava slender, but her proportions were a great deal more pleasing to my eye than Jane Russell’s. Ava was young then – she hadn’t bloomed yet. At the time I was seeing her, she couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. It was just at the beginning of her career. But kid or not, slender or not, Ava was tough and she packed a mean wallop. She slugged me once with a bronze statue. I’m lucky to be here talking about it, and Ava’s lucky she isn’t behind bars for manslaughter.
It was around 1942, when she was getting a divorce from Mickey Rooney. Ava and I had been seeing one another off and on when she was breaking up with Rooney. But when I went with a woman, she went with me only, and I wasn’t about to share her with somebody else – I’d had my fill of that in the past and I knew the risks involved. Ava is a hell of a woman, probably one of the most attractive women I’ve ever known. Sexual as hell. And certainly sexual enough for Mickey, because he screwed her from time to time at her place when I wasn’t there. He was a little guy but they say he was hung like a donkey. That’s not true of me, not at all.
I have ways to learn things, and once I found out this was happening, I confronted Ava with it and gave her a piece of my mind. In fact, I lost my temper and threatened to slap her across the chops.
But I reckoned without that gypsy temperament. I was on my way out, and she picked up a bronze statuette and let me have it behind the ear. I hit the carpet and was out like a light. They told me later she was leaning over me with blood in her eye, ready to plant that bronze statuette six inches into my skull, when her maid heard the yelling and stopped her. That would have polished me off for good. The colored maid saved my life.