Bringing Up Baby: Bones, Balls, and Butterflies

Hawks, Grant, and Hepburn were all at professional and creative crossroads when they made Bringing Up Baby. Hepburn’s career was in a nosedive after her initial triumphs gave way to a series of flops. She had made her film debut as a full-blown lead, in 1932’s A Bill of Divorcement, then won a best actress Oscar for her third film, the following year’s Morning Glory, and was nominated in the same category two years later. Being embraced by the industry that quickly is almost unprecedented, and perhaps her early success made her a bigger target for backlash. By the midthirties, her stylized high-class persona was wearing thin with audiences, and her forays into different types of material fell flat.

She got mostly positive reviews. Otis Ferguson wrote in the New Republic that she was “triumphant in illogic and serene in the bounding brassy nerve possible only to the very, very well-bred.” Variety called her “invigorating.” However, audience response was erratic: the film did well in some cities, flopped in others. It was pulled from Radio City after just a week. The shoot ran long and went over budget, so RKO lost money on the unpredictable ticket sales. Hepburn took much of the blame, and ended up on the infamous “box office poison” list compiled by Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theater Owners Association. Hepburn was in good company on the list: Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Kay Francis were also labeled “poison.”

While Hepburn was going through a rough patch, Grant, having just become a big star with 1937’s The Awful Truth, was on the ascent. It had taken him a while to find his way, experimenting with different styles, gestures, accents. He was calculated about remaking himself, saying, “I invented an accent . . . The rest I stole from Noël Coward.” He made his screen debut the same year Hepburn did, but despite appearing in eight films in 1932 alone, he didn’t make much of an impression, as hard as that is to believe now. Mae West used him twice, in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (both 1933), as pretty-boy eye candy, but in those films he is almost amorphous and indistinct, lacking the sharp boundaries necessary for his eventual sui generis movie magic. That would finally arrive in 1935’s Sylvia Scarlett, directed by George Cukor. Playing opposite Hepburn, Grant is not the lead, but he steals the movie. Cukor himself said, “Sylvia Scarlett was the first time Cary felt the ground under his feet as an actor. He suddenly seemed liberated.”

David Huxley was a radical shift for Grant: he had never before played a workaholic, sexless nerd. Hawks told Grant to think of everyman silent film star Harold Lloyd, who often played a resourceful boy next door eager to do well, and Grant understood instantly, even adopting Lloyd’s signature thick glasses for the role. In David, Grant almost single-handedly created the prototype of the absentminded professor. His posture is ramrod-straight, arms hanging like inert logs as he runs after Hepburn in an anxious little trot, his steps tiny and filled with fear. The dam bursts when, clad in Susan’s negligee (three feathery poufs on each arm, like rings around a rogue planet), he bumps into her aunt, who demands to know why he is wearing those clothes. Grant explodes, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden,” leaping into the air on “gay,” his tall frame bent at the waist, arms outstretched. It is difficult to imagine another actor playing the moment the way Grant plays it, with that much freedom and a willingness to acknowledge the elephant of fluid sexuality in the room. There have been reams of commentary on that line, particularly because of the long-standing, well-founded speculation that Grant himself was on the gay side of the sexuality spectrum, rumors he was well aware of at the time. Whatever the truth may be about his personal life, the result is electrifying. Even in screwball, leading men didn’t, in general, go that crazy.

The screwball-comedy era had dawned in 1934 with the one-two punch of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night and Hawks’s own madcap Twentieth Century, a film that broadened the scope of his talent. Though Hawks worked in all genres—his second film had been a sex comedy about Adam and Eve, with cameos by dinosaurs, in a little foreshadowing—his main interest was the world of men. Many of his films show men working together to solve mechanical problems, bonding through camaraderie and cooperation. But his sense of humor was silly and cynical, and screwball would prove to be the perfect landscape in which to play out his fantasies of the battle of the sexes.

It would take a few years for Hawks to make a proper screwball follow-up to Twentieth Century. He worked a lot in the midthirties, but in retrospect, one senses that he was spinning his wheels. Samuel Goldwyn fired him in the middle of shooting Come and Get It (William Wyler stepped in to finish the film), and he spent a good deal of time developing Rudyard Kipling’s Gunga Din for the screen (George Stevens ended up directing the project). It was during this aimless time that Hawks came across a short story by Hagar Wilde in the RKO story department, with a note attached: “Hilariously funny, and the possibilities for further comedy complications are limitless.” Hawks agreed.

Wilde had some experience in show business, with a previous stint in Hollywood writing dialogue for The Age for Love for Howard Hughes in the early thirties. Hawks brought her back to adapt her story for the screen, with help from Dudley Nichols—an interesting choice, since he was known for dramas (he had recently won the Oscar for John Ford’s The Informer). Some of the dialogue is taken word for word from the source, but major changes were made. In the story, there is no brontosaurus and David is not a paleontologist. He and Susan are engaged, and Susan’s aunt is coded as a lesbian, living for years with an ex–opera singer named Drusilla. Nichols removed Drusilla and added the complications of Alice and the intercostal clavicle, all while maintaining Wilde’s dizzy tone.

In the many interviews Hawks gave later in life, he said he didn’t care about funny dialogue. Humor came from the situation. More specifically, the characters in his comedies don’t know they’re in a comedy. They think they’re in a tragedy. To David Huxley, losing the intercostal clavicle is a devastating disaster. To Susan, the thought of losing David throws her into a panic. “He’s the only man I’ve ever loved!” she sobs to her aunt. When David keeps getting up from the dinner table to follow the dog around, it’s hilarious not thanks to any verbal jokes but because of the logic underneath the absurd behavior.

“It may end in an embrace, but it is impossible to imagine David and Susan in a conventional domestic relationship.”

Bogdanovich asked Hawks if David “abandoned his scientific life” at the end. Hawks replied, “Well, let’s say he mixed it . . . He becomes more normal as the picture goes along, just by his association with the girl.” (It’s illuminating that, in Hawks’s view, Susan is the normal one.) Marriage barely exists in Hawks’s films, and when it does show up, it’s not exactly a blessing. Children are also nearly nonexistent, and the proverbial white picket fence is nowhere to be found in his capacious dreamspace. When David realizes Susan is the one for him, he exclaims, “I love you, I think!” The “I think” is classic Hawks. Bringing Up Baby may end in an embrace, but it is impossible to imagine David and Susan in a conventional domestic relationship.