CROQUET HISTORY: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

2000
published by Grove Press, New York City, New York, USA
written by Todd McCarthy
ISBN number 0802137407

Pages 398-400

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Shortly after the war ended, a new sport was taken up by the Hollywood elite: croquet. Commonly thought of in America as a children's pastime, the game, when pursued seriously, is as vicious as polo and second only to cricket in the length of time required to play. In addition, the necessity of a large, perfectly flat, immaculately manicured, and expertly measured grass playing field, as well as costly English equipment, restricts access to the privileged few, anointing it with further snob appeal in the file capital. The sport had long been popular in society and show-business circles in the East, with critic Alexander Woollcott as its "high priest" and other enthusiasts including Averell Harriman, Richard Rodgers, Vincent Astor, Moss Hart, Herbert Bayard Swope, and George S. Kaufman. It was Hart who was most responsible for bringing croquet west by introducing it to Darryl Zanuck. Soon [Howard] Hawks became one of its prime adherents as well, followed by such others as his brother Bill, Tyrone Power, Cesar Romero, Samuel Goldwyn, Gregory Ratoff, Otto Preminger, Andre Hakim, Joseph Cotten, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Louis Jourdan, who was the best player. William Powell, Slim [Aarons]' friend from the mid-1930s, was the official cheerleader of the Palm Spring club.

Because of the vast acreage of Hog Canyon, Hawk's compound was easily able to accommodate an impeccable regulation croquet lawn. Matches could easily last all day and sometimes continued well into the evening. While Hawks, Zanuck, and the other diehards feverishly pursued their new game, nonparticipants, including Slim, Robert Capa, Lew Wasserman, and Constance Bennett, would play ruthless poker inside.

Naturally, the East Coast veterans looked down on the Hollywood neophytes, and Zanuck took Moss Hart's joking put-downs as a slap in the face that demanded satisfaction. Thus was born the East-West croquet championship, which pitted Hart, Tyrone Power, and the agent Fefe Ferry for the East against Zanuck and Hawks for the West. The three matches were played on July 6-7, 1946, before some three hundred spectators seated in a gallery set up at Hawks' home. Special floodlights were installed to allow play to continue after dark, and the playoff was considered such an event that "Life" magazine covered it with a two-page spread highlighted by photographs taken by Jean Howard. Zanuck and Hawks won the first game, but, as Hart observed, "they became drunk with success and lost control very early" in the night game, then lost again the next day, giving the tiny winner's cup, present by Slim, to the East. Among those in the crowd on the first day was Howard Hughes, who the next afternoon would nearly die when he crashed his experimental XF-11 plane into two homes in Beverly Hills.

As Hart noted, croquet, when properly played, "is a fascinating adult game, requiring skill, stamina and iron nerves", and Hawks possessed those qualities in spades. Unlike the emotional and ill-mannered Zanuck, Hawks approached the contests with the calm precision of the engineer that he was, which took nothing away from the fearsome power with which he knocked opponents' balls away. The fad for croquet continued into the next decade, but it reached its peak at Hawks' home that weekend. Hawks received official recognition for his standing in the sport when he was inducted into the Newport, Rhode Island, Croquet Hall of Fame.

Later in July, the summer's other major social event at Hog Canyon took place: the wedding of director Jean Negulesco to Dusty Anderson. A wild-spirited Romanian whose prankishness and competitiveness made him good company for Zanuck, Negulesco was a quickly rising director at Warner Brothers and met Hawks socially through Feldman. He had Hawks' number, knowing full well that the director was "a preposterous, imaginative, and inspired liar", but thought it better just to grin and bear it than to challenge him. But he also admired Hawks tremendously, calling him the "Great White Father" and coming to him whenever he had a story problem. Negulesco was also crazy about Slim — "I considered her to be perfection", he admitted — and actually asked her to get to know Dusty Anderson and give him her opinion before he proposed marriage. Slim not only approved by threw the wedding, which took place in an idyllic spot at Hog Canyon on a little rise surrounded by trees, blooming flowers, and buzzing hummingbirds. Hawks stood in as best man, although he slipped away from the wedding celebration as quickly as possible to get a croquet game going.

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