Howard Hawks | Bringing Up Baby / 1938

a connecticut safari

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde (screenplay), Howard Hawks (director) Bringing up Baby / 1938

 

Bringing up Baby—usually described as a “screwball” or “madcap” comedy—can easily be read by its audiences in several ways. On the one hand, it is a “traditional” comedy, a work in which—once the characters leave the city for the country—all hell breaks loose with a series of confusions, losses of identity and inversions of wealth and fate, after which order is returned or disorder is validated upon the characters’ return to civilization. 

     This film is also often read as the young hero’s (David) awakening from a sterile and dead world (he is a paleontologist about to be married to the obviously frigid Miss Swallow) to a confusing but exciting romance with Susan Peabody, heir to the Peabody fortune and, more importantly, a woman worthy of his love—a love which, when he recognizes the excitement of the experience, utterly and joyfully overturns his previous life, made readily apparent by the collapse of the dinosaur he has spent most of that life reconstructing. The incidents of interrupted golf games, dented car bumpers, torn tux and dress, and overturned crates of chickens, along with the appearance of not one, but two leopards (one, “Baby,” a gift to the elder Mrs. Peabody, the other a dangerous cat which has escaped from a local circus act) seem to all be but skits and props in the absurd series of events which represents David’s rite of passage from a near-dead scientist to a handsome sexual being. I think most viewers, if they bothered to analyze the complex shenanigans Hepburn and Grant undergo, presuming they might wish to interrupt their laughter to do so, would see it this way.

     I have always wondered, however, why, given the obvious sexual indeterminacy of several of his films (My Favorite Wife in particular), more hasn’t been made of Grant’s evident homosexuality early in his career.* Certainly, his writers and directors seemed to be inordinately interested in asserting it. Yes, David (Grant) is what today we might call a “nerd,” but he is also, quite clearly, without a clue as to the purpose of the opposite sex except as mother or secretary (the same position, incidentally, in which he begins North by Northwest much later in his career). His intended, Miss Swallow is not only a small little bird (in all respects) but also, if he marries her, something which he must “swallow,” like cod-liver oil (including all of the sexual connotations). No children for them, insists Miss Swallow, which we also immediately recognize as her saying “no sex,” a condition which David placidly accepts.

     On the golf course, we quickly perceive that David/Grant does not play like “one of the men,” but, having hoped to talk to Mrs. Peabody’s lawyer about a contribution to his museum (conversation is not accepted in the heat of competition), he falls instead into an argument with a young woman who has usurped (all sexual connotations included) his ball. He follows her to her car (actually his car, which she also “takes over”) and ends by being carried off by the woman. When he encounters her that evening—again when he is scheduled to dine with the men—even she quips that he is following her. But despite her determination that he is a subconsciously driven by love, we (or let us say, certain viewers) recognize that his attraction to her has less to do with a search for love than it does with the fact that her vitalism; her energy has utterly dominated him. Like children, they play at ripping away each other’s clothing. And Grant’s famous frontal embrace of Hepburn’s derriere has nothing at all to do with sex and everything to do with propriety. And then, once again, there’s the image of him following a woman, “clinging” to her, one might say.

      Of course, it is, symbolically speaking, a sexual act. It’s simply that David/Grant doesn’t recognize it as such. For, although completely attracted to “them” (after all, “they” define his every act), he is as terrified of women as he is of the feline, Baby. In short, David is what they used to call a “sissy boy,” a boy preferring the company of his mother or a woman who reminds him of a mother. For him, Susan is simply a more fascinating Miss Swallow.

      But Susan, far more of an intuitive psychologist than the Doctor of Psychology tangentially involved in this pot au feu, knows just what to do. Into the wilds of Connecticut they plunge, where similar to their previous childlike play with undressing each other, she steals his clothing and he dresses in hers—a bed coat ringed with a boa of feathers that is hard to imagine might even have belonged to Hepburn, but is perfect for Grant’s drag outing. Discovering the stranger in her home, Mrs. Peabody asks, “What’s his name?” and is told by Susan, “Bone” (all sexual puns and connotations included). When asked “Why is he dressed like that?” Grant/David utters what must be a cinematic first, “I’ve just gone gay!” For me, a gay man, there is a rush of shock and delight in that celluloid second, for it is clear that the character is not talking about a whimsical joy that has overtaken him, but that we are witnessing perhaps the first on-screen “coming out,” a self-avowal of the character’s homosexuality. Grant later admitted that he ad-libbed the line.

     Since Mr. Bone has lost his bone (all sexual associations included, in the plot it is the final missing bone of his magnificent dinosaur), Susan proposes a solution which has oft been proposed to “sissy boys” in order to turn them into men. Just ask Papa Hemingway. Predictably, they begin the ritual search for his virility, a kind of New England-ized “safari”—two leopards are, after all, on the loose! Horace Applegate, the great game hunter, tags along.

     We already know the result. This is a Hollywood film—and a romance to boot. Undergoing all the ritual tests in his name, Susan proceeds to make him over, baptizing him in the local creek, burning his socks, breaking his glasses, and, ultimately, assuring his imprisonment in the local jail where the film’s entire cast is accused of being someone other than who they really are. But Susan gets her leopard and her man, thus bringing her “baby” into glorious adulthood. He’s now become a man!

     Writing about this film, I recall my first encounter with it (I won’t describe it as a viewing). I was a young man who had escaped to New York City for the sexual release which in those days (1969) it provided. I went to the Thalia theater to see this film and inexplicably spent the entire time in miserable tears. Obviously, my mind was focused on other issues (I left New York soon thereafter)—or perhaps I was more focused on the movie than I knew, disappointed that by film’s end he had not yet found a way out of jungle in which he lost himself.

 

*Since I wrote this piece in 2000, a great deal more discussion has occurred about Grant’s sexuality, particularly in relationship to the photo spread of Grant and Raymond Scott at home looking more than a little domestic with one another. After the revelations in Scotty Bowers’ Full Service, moreover, a great many people became further convinced of their sexual involvement. But even today there are numerous seemingly official sources which argue that “we can never know” and “their living together was probably a relationship of two bachelors in their so-called Bachelor Hall.” Such pieces discuss the photo spread simply as a studio ploy to bring attention to younger readers, as if that somehow totally resolves those images suggesting what they appear to, their relationship as a couple.

     What is still seldom mentioned, moreover, was that before Scott, Grant lived with gay Hollywood fashion designer Ory-Kelly with whom he had a relationship at different times throughout the 1930s.

      The fact that later Grant married or lived with women, as did so many gay movie actors pressured into heterosexual relationships by their agents and studios, does not at all render his gay relationships as inconsequential. One would have to describe Grant as a bisexual who for many decades preferred sex with men. And, as his films reveal, he preferred at least until the 1950s to act in films that were coded with numerous gay references or, as I note in the essay previous to this, that diverted his attention away from the female lead with whom by film’s end Hollywood studios and the Motion Picture Production Code insisted that he must share a bed, or at least a matching bed.

 

A trattoria near the Pantheon, Rome, October 17, 2000

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2000).