Augusts in Africa
Page 22
As we passed the manyatta on the way back to camp, the bitch came rushing after us again with the pack at her heels. John braked and dropped a sandgrouse at her paws. She stopped barking and showing her teeth and nuzzled the bird suspiciously. Then with John and the pack watching, she soft-mouthed it like a well-bred retriever and took it off a little way to eat it. She did not bark at us again.
There was sandgrouse for dinner. The flesh was coarse and dark, somehow wilder and more authentic than the fat, grain-fed meat of some North American game. We ate epically. And after the epical John Fletcher poured the last of the burgundy into our glasses, we bade goodnight while bushbabies cried in the trees above us.
In my tent I kept the pressure lamp on to update my journal, ending the entry of September 22nd with, “Big fun on the Rombo!”
Extinguishing the lantern, I wandered toward the tall woodland of sleep, not realizing, yet, how “big fun” could imprint a life to be lived in ineffable longing—of a kind for which I would never want to discover the right, and certainly not the last, words.
The Most Expensive Safari in the World
Before …
ABOUT HIMSELF DIRECTOR John Ford once said, “My name is John Ford, and I make Westerns.” Another director with the stature of Ford and Hitchcock might have said, “My name is Howard Hawks, and I make movies.” And over 50 years ago the movie he made was Hatari!.
Even if you are not old enough to have seen Hatari! during its initial run in theaters in 1962, you certainly saw it on television. However or wherever you first saw it, if you were young and impressionable enough and had not yet been to Africa, and you did not decide right then that you were someday going to go, you were watching a far different movie than I.
On the unlikely chance that you never have seen Hatari!, it is about a multinational team, such as found only in the movies, of game catchers at work in Tanganyika. They operate out of a ranch owned by an orphaned young woman who is the object of both paternal and romantic attention. After one of the veterans is gored, a “new guy” has to pass initiation to join the team. Then a beautiful wildlife photographer, who was expected to be a man, arrives to plague and captivate the hero. In between the chase goes on, or rather in between the chases goes on the rest of the business. Finally, baby elephant wreak havoc on Arusha’s commercial district to a Henry Mancini score. None of which really matters because what Hatari! is all about is East African vistas, wild animals, action, and attitude. Whatever “plot” there may be is strictly in the service of portraying the movie’s characters as a band of professionals who revel in their own competency and both admire, depend upon, and are challenged by the competency of their teammates. In that way, what the movie’s all about is Howard Hawks.
An upper-class Midwesterner raised in Southern California, Hawks was an eclectic sportsman with a taste for hunting, fishing, yachting, tennis, golf, skiing, gambling, airplanes, fast horses, fast cars, and fast women. He flew with Howard Hughes; hunted, fished, and drank with his close friend and regular screenwriter William Faulkner; and hunted, fished, and drank some more with not-so-close friend Ernest Hemingway. (When Hemingway declined to write screenplays for him, Hawks claimed, according to Todd McCarthy’s biography, Howard Hawks, The Grey Fox of Hollywood, that he told Hemingway, “I’ll get Faulkner to do it; he can write better than you anyway.” On the other hand, Shelby Foote, author of The Civil War: A Narrative and a Faulkner friend, said, “One time Faulkner asked Howard Hawks, Am I a better bird-shot than Hemingway? Hawks said, No, you’re not, but my wife Slim’s better than either of you.”)
From the 1920s to 1970 Howard Hawks directed almost 50 movies in virtually every genre: Western, war, gangster, prison, detective, biography, musical, inspirational, aviation, motor racing, boxing, science fiction, and comedy, comedy, comedy—even Hawks’s darkest movies contained humor. His stars were never less than A-list and included Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Cary Grant, and Kirk Douglas. Hawks was hardly thought of as a “women’s” director; but his female stars from Joan Crawford to Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Angie Dickinson usually gave as good as they got in jousting with the male leads in his pictures. Even Hawks’s character actors, such as Edward G. Robinson, Boris Karloff, and Walter Brennan, were unsurpassable. And his body of work includes certifiable classics such as Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Red River, and Rio Bravo.
During a fallow period in the mid-1950s when for assorted reasons Hawks was unable to make a picture for four years, he had the idea of a film about big-game catchers in Africa, starring Gary Cooper. The inspirations for this movie were likely several.
One might have come out of the prominence at the time of the work of Ian Player, older brother of South African golfer Gary Player. When Ian Player joined the Natal Parks Board as a ranger in 1952, South Africa was disastrously embarked on an effort to eliminate almost all its species of large wild animals to protect livestock from disease; and by the time he got to the Umfolozi Game Reserve, 200,000 head of game had been killed off in the preceding six years. Only 300 white rhino survived, and Player understood that these animals needed to be dispersed to protect them from mass infection such as anthrax and from poaching. He started a famed translocation program labeled “Operation Rhino” which became the subject of documentaries and films, and Hawks watched 16mm footage of the capture routines for hours as he envisioned his movie project.
Another source was the death of the African-animal photographer Ylla. Born Camilla Koffler in Vienna to Hungarian parents, she took “Ylla” as her professional name and was widely regarded as the best wildlife photographer in the world when in 1955, while photographing the annual bullock-cart races in Bharatpur, India, she was thrown from the hood of the moving Jeep she was perched on and killed. This incident illustrated the inherent risk the game catchers faced as they sped after wild animals across the Tanganyikan plains, one warthog hole away from calamity; and Ylla is the acknowledged model for the female photographer in the movie. It would have to be assumed, though, that the primary inspiration for Hawks’s story idea was the pioneering wild-animal capturing work of the Kenyan Carr Hartley.
In the wake of World War II when the animals from so many European and Japanese zoos had been destroyed (and often consumed), Hartley became one of the most important providers of wildlife for restocking. This was all before such niceties as helicopters and darting; and Hartley’s hands-on approach, according to Brian Herne’s book, White Hunters, resulted in numerous lion maulings, rhino tossings, buffalo tramplings, and an oryx horn through his knee.
Hartley’s technique, described in a 1949 article in Sudan Wild Life and Sport about the capture of rare Northern white rhino, was to “put his foot on the accelerator” of his four-by-four Dodge Power Wagon and try to avoid the “tree stumps left by the wood-cutters collecting steamer fuel” as his “boys” stood in the back of the truck, “ready with nooses of three-quarter-inch hemp rope fixed into a notch on the end of a stout bamboo pole.” After “swerving precariously alongside” a galloping rhino cow and calf for several hundred yards, Hartley’s crew lassoed the calf and the seven men in the back of the truck held onto it as its mother spun around and threatened the truck with her 40-inch horn. Shouts and horn honking got the cow to jog off, and then everybody jumped onto the calf, and with “special shackles” tied up its hind legs, forelegs, and snout. A “stout pole was cut,” and the calf “was hoisted after some trouble onto the back of the lorry and driven back to Shambe” on the White Nile. And there you have the action sequences of Hatari! virtually shot for shot.
With the story idea for what was being called the “Africa project” in his head Hawks turned to one of his favorite screenwriters, Leigh Brackett, to come up with a script, or as near to one as Hawks ever shot, though in this case maybe less so. A prolific science-fiction writer, Brackett, who worked for Hawks on The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, would contribute to all of Hawks’s remain
ing films from Hatari! on and later wrote The Empire Strikes Back for George Lucas. Hawks, having discovered Brackett through the hard-boiled mystery novel No Good from a Corpse, appreciated the fact that Brackett wrote “like a man,” especially because Leigh was a woman.
At various stages the Africa project would be about two guys and a gal; two guys, one a drunk (à la Rio Bravo); two guys sharing an “ironic rivalry,” according to Brackett’s notes, quoted by McCarthy, over whom would outlive the other in their hazardous calling; a veteran hunter now reduced to camp stooge due to injuries; a penniless “sexy cherub” (Brackett’s description) who washes up in camp to the initial disgust of the love-singed tough-guy hero; a hard-drinking, hard-working deaf-mute woman (seriously); and a one-tusked rogue elephant that has to be hunted down by the hero, Moby Dick redux, after it kills a friend. (The sex-confusion angle of the photographer must have been informed by Brackett’s own experiences during her screenwriting career.) Ultimately Hawks realized that because of the unpredictable nature of what nature might do, there could be no predetermined plot, other than the basic idea of tracking a crew of game catchers through a hunting season; and by the time Hawks actually left for Africa all he really had on paper was some snappy patter.
Interviewed by Peter Bogdonavich in 1962, the year Hatari! premiered, Hawks explained the improvisational aspects of the movie by saying:
Well, you can’t sit in an office and write what a rhino or other animal is going to do [at least not in the days ante-CGI; but what would be the possible point of making a move like Hatari! in a computer?—note mine]. From the time we saw one of them to the time we either caught it or failed to, it wouldn’t be more than four minutes. So we had to make up scenes in an awful hurry; we couldn’t write them … We were lucky enough to catch every kind of animal in Africa—everything we’d hoped for—usually if you get one-third you’re lucky.
As a title for what was nothing more than a sheaf of pages, some 30 possibilities were considered with Untamed, Africa Roars, Bring ’Em Back Alive, and Hawks’s favorite, Tanganyika, among them. It was the studio, Paramount, that anointed Hatari!, Swahili for “danger” or “peril,” feeling it would appeal to the youth market (much in the news at the time, the national-independence movements in East Africa were identified by the Swahili word for “freedom” or “independence,” uhuru, which hatari vaguely echoed). Then there was the location. Kenya was the first pick, but the British colony had passed new laws that prohibited the kind of high-speed motorized Hartley-esque animal capture Hawks wanted to depict in the film, so Hatari!’s setting was transferred to Tanganyika.
For the cast, Hawks’s initial choice, Cooper, bowed out over the issue of script approval (Script? We don’t need no estinkin’ script!). In retrospect, the choice of John Wayne for the role of the head game catcher Sean Mercer (with its ring of a soldier of fortune) seems foreordained (although it took $750,000 and a promise of 10 percent of the grosses after the first $7 million in revenues to get the Duke to ink a deal—Hawks, of course, had given Wayne at age 40 his first genuine job of acting as “Thomas Dunson” in 1948’s Red River, a performance that surprised even Wayne’s mentor John Ford). Hawks then wanted Clark Gable to star opposite Wayne, but Gable died before shooting could begin.
After that the French star Yves Montand, Peter Ustinov, Peter Sellers, Leo McKern (Australian-British actor later famous as “Rumpole of the Bailey” who turned down a part because he reportedly “abhorred” the Nixon-backing Wayne’s politics), Art Carney (“Hey, Ralphie-boy!”), Patrick McGoohan (The Prisoner), Stella Stevens, and Claudia Cardinale (Italian actress who starred in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West) were all looked at. Those making the final cut were German actor Hardy Krüger (unforgettable afterward as the “airplane” designer in Flight of the Phoenix) who played Mercer’s umlauted lieutenant “Kurt Müller”; the “much-perfumed,” according to one professional hunter on the set, Italian actress Elsa Martinelli as the Ylla-esque photographer “Anna Maria ‘Dallas’ D’Allesandro”; comedian and Academy Award winner Red Buttons as the ex-pat New York cab driver “Pockets” (Buttons/Pockets’s real name, Aaron Chwatt); Gérard Blain as “Charles ‘Chips’ Maurey” (touted as the “French James Dean,” Blain was so short he made the five-foot-eight Rebel Without a Cause look like an NBA center; to give him the gravitas of an actual big-game hunter, Hawks dressed him in black “to cut a stronger profile” [McCarthy]; when he showed up for his first scene, Martinelli’s impression was that “he looked like he stepped out of a Fritz Lang movie”); Bruce Cabot as “Little Wolf” or ‘the Indian’” (born, it seems, one Etienne Pelissier Jacques de Bujac, no less, his star power peaked early on in King Kong; and he made do in later years on the strength of being a Wayne crony); Michèle Giradon as the ingenue “Brandy de la Court” (the French actress deflected the aggressive advances of Hawks, more than twice her age, and had her part sliced wafer thin; she achieved little subsequent success and would die at 36 of an overdose of sleeping pills); and Valentin de Vargas (née Albert C. Schubert) as “Luis Francisco Garcia Lopez” (previously one of “Calvera’s” pistoleros in The Magnificent Seven). And so to Africa.
The main camp and set was established 75 miles west of Arusha on a property called Momella Farm near Lake Manyara in northern Tanganyika with a motor pool of 40 Willys Jeeps (provided, like the Nikon camera equipment, by the company for “promotional consideration”), a garageful of mechanics, and a menagerie of trained animals under the supervision of South African game catcher Willy de Beer. The cast stayed in the Lake Manyara Lodge while the crew remained under canvas at Momella, the area illuminated at night by generator-powered floodlights to discourage animals from venturing in. Nonetheless, as Buttons and Wayne played cards outside one evening, a leopard came out of the bush and was stalking toward them. “See what he wants,” is all Wayne said when Buttons mentioned the advancing predator. Wayne apparently remained equally nonplussed when called upon to shoot a charging elephant, driven to him like a grouse on a moor.
While the other actors were asking, Where the hell’s the script?, Wayne after the ordeal of producing, directing, and starring in the great patriotic gas balloon The Alamo, was approaching the entire film as a holiday. And so was Hawks, who slipped out early every morning for a spot of hunting—hoping, but failing, to take a leopard (should have gotten into that card game)—and returning in time for each day’s scheduled shoot with his shoes improbably shined.
From October through December 1960 before the rains, the crew got footage of the animal chases and captures; and the wildlife called the shots on what kind of footage they got: Of 16 rhino pursued, according to Hawks, only four were caught. Buffalo, giraffe, wildebeest, hartebeest, and elephant were chased, depending on what the game spotters located. Zebras proved the toughest, knowing instinctively to head for the broken rock where the Jeeps could not follow. In fact, the wild animals seldom did anything the film company wanted, when the film company wanted them to do it, if ever. (When elephant and hyenas wouldn’t “speak” on cue, a PH who could imitate the sounds was brought in to dub them.)
Acting doubles were seldom used for the cast during the chase scenes, despite the fact that even Wayne was scared silly (in the best of ways) as he careened across the dusty corrugated plains, strapped into the catcher’s seat on the truck fender by a single belt. Yet Wayne lassoed game himself (“there was no doubling at all”—Hawks), although Hawks refused to let him rope rhino despite the Duke’s entreaties. Wayne said he never had as much fun on any other movie, and all the other actors agreed. And the professional hunters, behind the scenes, and sometimes in them, were having fun and excitement of their own.
On what Hawks called the most expensive safari in the world (the movie cost a for-then steep $6.5 million to make, and grossed $14 million), he had an A-list of professional hunters to compliment his list of actors. The venerable Ker & Downey was the principal outfitter, and the veteran PHs included Eric Rundgren (who was cast in the movie),
John Kingsley-Heath, Bill Ryan, John Fletcher, Sten Cedergren, and many others needed to keep film rolling and stars happy. And they all have memories.
In his memoir, The Adventurous Life of a Vagabond Hunter, the late Cedergren remembered sharing “three fingers”—three Duke-sized fingers—of whisky with Wayne, which knocked him on his butt; and he also cherished some rather discreet recollections of Elsa Martinelli, perfume and all.
The also-late John Kingsley-Heath may have had the most adventures to remember. In his book Hunting the Dangerous Game of Africa, Kingsley-Heath, with whom Wayne hunted privately during the shoot, recalled how the payment of many thousands of pounds to various parks officials allowed the production team to get away with some rather dubious activities with regard to wildlife.
To get a shot of lions under a tree, Kingsley-Heath, et al., dragged a dead zebra through Serengeti National Park behind a car to draw a pride to its “mark.” In Lake Manyara National Park, hunters, gunbearers, and trackers used small explosives to try to herd elephant through a safari camp for a shot of them trampling the tents. But the elephant always balked at the sight of the tents, and so Kingsley-Heath hit upon the expedient of fabricating shrunken tents and camp equipment and using 11 small tame elephant technical-advisor de Beer had on hand. Kept from food for a day, the elephant, as the cameras turned, stampeded enthusiastically through the mock camp as de Beer stood on the far side, rattling a pail of cabbage.
There was tragedy surrounding Hatari! Carr Hartley’s one-time sister-in-law Diana, who went into competition with him as an animal catcher, delivered two cheetah to the set and learned that a “tame” lion she was familiar with was in one of the enclosures. She went in to greet it; and the lion almost immediately reared up and bit her chin, throat, and chest, mauling her to death (so much for heartwarming “animal reunions,” to use the title of a reputedly legitimate nature documentary). Three native Africans were also killed during the shooting, and de Beer got chewed on by a juvenile leopard in his care.