Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy

devastated by the loss of Theda, Helen was brought to the limit by the birth of a fifth child, and second daughter, also named Helen, in 1906. After having borne so many children, she became “professionally ill,” in the opinion of a friend, and needed to find a way to recapture her health. Helen’s doctor advised her to leave Wisconsin, particularly during its brutal winters. Frankdidn’t have to work, so they spent the winter of 1906–07 in Pasadena, California, a town northeast of Los Angeles that had recently caught on as a popular destination for well-to-do families from the East and Midwest. Initially, the Hawkses returned to Wisconsin during the summer, but by 1910 they left Wisconsin behind for good. C.W., who took to wintering in Pasadena himself, said, “It was toodamn bad they didn’t know this before they built the house,” but they shortly rented it toC. B. Clark Jr., Theda’s brother, who later became mayor of Neenah. In 1912, Frank finally sold the house.
    In the early 1900s, the ranks were thinning in Goshen as well; Frank’s very successful uncle Joel P. Hawks died on April 8, 1905, at the age of eighty-three, while his aunt Sarah died a little morethan a year later, at eighty-two.
    As for old C. W. Howard, he finally sold, at great profit, his interest in what had become the Island Paper Company; retired from active work; made investments, such as one in a hotel across the river in Menasha; devoted considerable time to the Winnebago Humane Society and the Mason Lodge; traveled extensively in Europe with his wife; and gave his eldest grandsonwhatever he wanted. When Howard, barely old enough to drive legally, showed an interest in auto racing, C.W. bought him a Mercer race car. And just as he had indulged his daughter Bernice’s interest in flying, C.W. arranged for the teenage Howard to take flying lessons in California so that he could qualify as a pilot; Kenneth soon followed suit. Partly because of his family’s wealth, but evenmore because of the way his grandfather catered to his every whim from the earliest age, Howard was accustomed to getting what he wanted. C.W. always told him he was the best, that he could do anything, and why shouldn’t the boy believe him? Howard also learned the art of the tall tale from his grandfather: if you told it often enough with a straight face and didn’t permit contradiction, it becamepart of your personal lore, if not simply taken as the truth. America, at that time, was made for an adventurous young boy of privilege like Howard Hawks, and his family’s position gave him the means to take advantage of it. At the same time, every man on both sides of the family as far back as anyone could trace had been engaged in very traditional business; they had pioneered, worked hard, beengood farmers, fighters, cattlemen, millers, builders, and furniture makers. Except for C.W.’s amateur theatrics and Helen’s interest in music, no one in the family had ever shown the slightest inclination toward the arts, for branching away from the practical into the realm of the imagination.
    In the early-morning hours of Wednesday, January 5, 1916, the temperature in Neenah reached 12 degreesbelow zero, a record low for the winter. The west wind bit fiercely, but by that afternoon, as C. W. Howard walked to the Neenah Club downtown for a couple of drinks and some chat with the boys, the thermometer nosed slightly above zero. In the dark of the late afternoon, he boarded the 5:30 P.M . streetcar for the short trip easton Wisconsin Avenue. Euphemia had not been well of late, and C.W.went directly up to his wife’s bedroom to check on her. It was there that he suffered a stroke. He was semiconscious at first, with his right side paralyzed, but he “soon lapsed into a stupor from which he never emerged,” according to the front-page story in the next day’s
Neenah Daily Times
. “Death came quietly and without the least suffering according to those at his bedside.” C. W.