On their third date, she accompanied him to the Bendix Air Races, an airplane race from California to New York that started at 4 a.m. at the Burbank Airport. "I was sitting on top of a station wagon in order to have a better view of the departing planes," she recalled later. "I said something that made Howard laugh. He was standing below me holding on to the luggage rack. He looked up at me and said, 'You're the most remarkable thing I've ever seen. You're going to marry me.' I said: 'Well, we'll see. But thanks anyway."'
A follow-up to
this post yesterday on Howard Hawks. It's the story of Howard and
Slim (Hawks's second wife, Nancy Raye Gross). In the post I was linking to
Sheila writes:
Now I have no idea if the 2 of them had a good marriage, or what... but she was his ideal.
She was. And the marriage wasn't all as good as the paragraph above.