From the late twenties, he kept his name in the press in this way, sharing his expertise in articles for numerous publications, and entertaining journalists at his flat on Cromwell Road, west London, where he was in the habit of being interviewed in silk pajamas. He went so far as to establish Hitchcock Baker Productions Ltd., a company dedicated to curating his public image. In 1936 he published a five-part series of biographical articles in the popular British magazine Film Weekly titled “My Screen Memories,” as though he were a grand old man of the business, rather than a thirty-six-year-old on the rise. Yet readers were left in no doubt about the qualities Hitchcock most wanted to stress in those pieces: youthfulness, dynamism, and a sense of mission. The final installment ended with Hitchcock declaring that the nostalgia suggested by these articles was really not his thing: “my most interesting picture is always my next one. I have enjoyed delving into the past in these reminiscences. But the future is much more fascinating.”
As the fame of Hitchcock’s films spread, so did the celebrity of their director. In March 1939, he was invited to lecture a class at Columbia University on his specialist subject: the distinctive work of Alfred Hitchcock. Speaking in his unmistakable voice—“I have some notes here that are mixed up with a letter from my mother”—he caused ripples of laughter from his young audience as he glided his way through the life cycle of a Hitchcock movie, from conception to projection. It reminds one of how Wilde and Dickens constructed their profiles in America, as well as the recent lecture tour of Gertrude Stein, back home after many years in Europe, during which she wrapped the novelty of her work in the homespun eccentricity of her delivery, pitching herself somewhere between a modernist iconoclast and America’s favorite aunt. All three of those august names exploited their looks and demeanor, in concert with their singular voice, to establish themselves as a cultural presence. Hitchcock, as no filmmaker before him had done, followed in their footsteps.
When Hollywood success came his way in the 1940s, his agent—at first Myron Selznick, then Lew Wasserman, perhaps the most important commercial figure in the movies after World War II†—brokered what were essentially licensing deals, attaching the Hitchcock name to a variety of side projects and spin-offs, based around Hitchcock as the personification of his film work. There were books of suspense stories, supposedly compiled by Hitchcock, though his involvement was negligible. In 1947, Hitchcock put his name to an adaptation of Frances Iles’s novel Malice Aforethought for a proposed ABC radio series, The Alfred Hitchcock Show.‡ Though not picked up, the pilot contained the germ of what would become Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the instant popularity of which led to an Alfred Hitchcock magazine, further books for children and adults, and various other Hitchcock-branded ventures.
The television shows were produced by Norman Lloyd, who had appeared in Saboteur (1942) and Spellbound, and Joan Harrison, a Hitchcock protégé who had worked with him in a variety of roles between 1933 and 1941, before striking out on her own. They had Hitchcock’s complete trust and were allowed to take the lead in finding, developing, and producing the two dozen stories needed for each season. At various points Hitchcock would offer criticisms and suggestions, but generally he allowed the series to work not according to his diktats, but in his image, which, by the time the first season aired in 1955, was well established. Hitchcock’s television output is generally considered the destitute relation of the Hitchcock movies, with little of value to say about his work. Yet Alfred Hitchcock Presents—and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which followed it—distills the spirit in which his most successful collaborators approached their work, especially from the late 1940s onward. To Harrison and Lloyd, Hitchcock was also “Hitchcock,” not just a man but an entity, a totem pole, and a guiding spirit. Despite his infrequent involvement, his tastes, sensibilities, and personality loomed over every stage of the shows’ production. Speaking publicly about the series, Harrison channeled Hitchcock: “We don’t show much violence. . . . Our kind of murderer is polite. We like to suggest rather than show.” “Let ’em suffer,” she said, talking of the delightful pleasure of torturing an audience. “Let ’em become participants in the show and twist and turn with every twisting and turning.”
Wherever he could, Hitchcock worked with the same people over and over, those who knew that working successfully on a Hitchcock production meant pouring one’s talents into a Hitchcockian mold, intuiting the vision of the man in charge. For a short time, the designer and illustrator Saul Bass was just such a contributor, designing the title sequences that beautifully augment Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho, as E. McKnight Kauffer’s had done on The Lodger decades earlier. Bass claimed that he’d done such a good job in storyboarding the shower scene in Psycho that Hitchcock allowed him to direct it, only to deny him his due credit once the scene gained its fame. Pretty much everybody connected with Psycho rejected Bass’s claim. “Alfred Hitchcock was right next to his camera for every one of those seventy-odd shots,” declared Janet Leigh, the woman on the other side of the lens. When asked why nobody else remembered the shoot as he did, Bass said that Hitchcock’s decision to hand him the reins was “spontaneous, not something he planned, discussed, or organized. At that time, nobody paid much attention.” More important, “Hitch was always there and his ‘presence’ naturally dominated the set. As far as everybody was concerned, including me, he was in charge whether he said ‘action’ or ‘cut’ or not.” Even in staking a claim to a headline piece of Hitchcock’s legacy, Bass did so by putting Hitchcock’s ineffable influence at the center of the story.
In the months he spent working on the screenplay for The Birds, Evan Hunter wrote excitedly to friends and family that Hitchcock planned on telling the world that the movie was a joint vision. “This is our picture, Evan,” Hitchcock had told him. “I want this to say ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS, written by Evan Hunter’ and that’s what we’re going to sell.” In reality, there was only one name that the public would associate with the picture, as Hunter discovered when he tried to tell his young son’s friend that he was the man who wrote the screenplay. “No, you didn’t,” said the little boy, eager to show that he wasn’t so dumb as to believe an obvious lie, “Alfred Hitchcock did.”
It is often assumed that, as is the case with Ingmar Bergman, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, and many other so-called auteurs, Hitchcock hammered out his own scripts. In fact, on only one of his films, The Ring, did he take sole writing credit, and even on this he had uncredited assistance from Eliot Stannard, one of the leading British screenwriters of the silent era. But with Hitchcock, the notion of authorship was slippery; when opportunity presented itself, he confirmed that though he may not have sweated over the dialogue within each scene, the creative credit was, morally, his. Sidney Gilliat, cowriter of The Lady Vanishes and Jamaica Inn (1939), was aggrieved when The New Yorker reported that all Hitchcock films are “about 99.44-percent Hitchcock.” Hitchcock swore that the figure quoted in the article had not come from him, but it does sound very much like the sort of thing he would have said. Years later, in a deposition regarding a copyright dispute over Rear Window (1954), Hitchcock told the court that in the writing of Hitchcock scripts, “I dictate the picture,” and that the Rear Window screenplay should therefore be regarded as “eighty percent Hitchcock,” despite it being officially adapted by John Michael Hayes from a Cornell Woolrich short story.
When it came to screenwriting, Hitchcock relied on the talents of others—though for most of his career, one of those talents had to be a capacity to digest and express what was called the “Hitchcock touch.” The “biggest trouble is to educate writers to work along my lines,” he once complained. Perhaps Samuel Taylor, screenwriter of Vertigo and Topaz (1969), put it best: “I can’t really say where Hitch’s input began or ended. When you worked with him on a film, you wrote a Hitchcock picture.”
Usually, the process started with a novel, a short story, or a play. What constituted a suitable source for a Hitchcock film is hard to defin
e. Sometimes it was a question of what was available, or what was urged on him by the studios, into which he tried his best to insert his vision. By the 1960s, at the height of his powers, the search for new movie material was an industrialized effort involving Alma, his secretaries, his agent, employees at his production company, and various people at Universal, all looking for some inarticulable mix of suspense, melodrama, and humor. Original scripts were sent in by both established and untried writers, and lists of promising talents were collated by his staff, tantalizing future generations with hypothetical Hitchcock collaborations with Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Gore Vidal, among many others.
Given the time and effort dedicated to identifying it, Hitchcock could be remarkably dismissive about his source material. “I never read a book through if I am considering making a picture of it,” he asserted in 1937, lest “I get so saturated with the novel that I cannot discard easily what often must be discarded to make a real film and not a mere photographic reproduction of a book.” Hitchcock drove notoriously hard bargains when buying the rights to material, and frequently did so anonymously to avoid having to pay a penny more than he absolutely had to. In transcripts of his meetings with Ernest Lehman, the writer of his final completed picture, Family Plot (1976), Hitchcock made uncharitable remarks about the movie’s source material, The Rainbird Pattern, whose author, Victor Canning, was “a very lucky man” for having his work associated with the Hitchcock name. “These fellows,” grumbled Hitchcock, referring to the writers of his source material, “you know what happens—they re-release the book with our new title on it.”
The resentment is palpable, though one wonders at its derivation. Was it because Hitchcock felt exploited by those profiting from his work? Certainly he had form on that front: for years he silently fumed—not without reason—after learning that the mogul who brought him to Hollywood, David O. Selznick, made several times his own fee when Hitchcock was loaned to other studios. Or, perhaps what stung was the fear that it was he, not the writers, who was the dependent in these relationships.
Of course, the origins of Hitchcock’s stories shouldn’t lead anyone to doubt his talent or distinctiveness as a filmmaker. Indeed, his achievement in creating such a recognizable cinematic style is all the more impressive considering the discrete origins of his raw material, and that he had so many parties—actors, producers, audiences, critics—to navigate. There’s also the issue of time: between 1925 and 1960, he made forty-seven feature films, on a treadmill of development, production, postproduction, and publicity, not including any of his radio, television, or print endeavors. With that schedule, it would have been virtually impossible for Hitchcock not to have collaborated with a host of writers. At least part of the reason for his coolness toward source material was that he didn’t seek a book or a play to fall in love with, just something to heave the propeller of his imagination. That needn’t be a narrative, but a character, a situation, or simply a particularly arresting image.
North by Northwest began in just this way. Ernest Lehman, best known at the time for having written The King and I screenplay, had agreed to work with Hitchcock on adapting Hammond Innes’s novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare for MGM. Lehman was keen to work with Hitchcock but was stumped on how to turn the novel, much of which is set in an English court of law, into Hollywood entertainment. “The first scene was good: ‘ship found in a channel with nobody on board,’ ” Lehman recalled, but “that was the only good scene in the whole novel.” Still, he pushed those doubts to one side, persuaded by Hitchcock’s confidence that all the problems could be sorted.
Hitchcock had no hard-and-fast system when collaborating with a writer. Depending on the type of source material being adapted, the writers he could find, and the time available, the process could be tweaked. Usually, however, there was a crucial initial period during which Hitchcock and his writer would meet day after day to thrash out the story they wanted to tell and block its key scenes. Hitchcock believed the best way to solve a script problem was to allow oneself to stumble on it. Frequently, that meant abandoning the writer’s room for a pub, or cocktails at home, a restaurant, an expedition down the Thames, or a drive into the California countryside. “Certain writers want to work every hour of the day. . . . I’m not that way. I want to say, ‘Let’s lay off for several hours—let’s play.’ ”
It was in this circuitous way that work on The Wreck of the Mary Deare began. They convened daily for meandering discussions about any number of subjects, anything other than how to turn this uncinematic novel into box-office gold. Lehman began to worry that he would soon be left to bash out a two-hour movie script without the faintest idea of what would go in it. When he shared his concern, Hitchcock told him to relax: he would charm MGM into letting them get to work on something else altogether. They began afresh, working around a single idea: a chase finale across Mount Rushmore, a notion that Hitchcock had toyed with for some time. Six years earlier, the journalist Lawrence Greene reported that Hitchcock’s “unrealized ambition is to have Good contend with Evil in the shadow of Mount Rushmore.” With the working title In a Northwesterly Direction—and, for a time, The Man in Lincoln’s Nose—they pieced together an adventure story about a man who is mistaken for a spy and is forced to go on the run after being framed for murder, that took its protagonist from New York to South Dakota. Hitchcock pitched countless unconnected ideas. In one scene, he envisaged an Eskimo fishing in frozen waters, when a hand suddenly jabs through the ice. Another would track a car being built piece by piece on a production line, with a dead body rolling out of it at the end. “They were all wonderful,” said Lehman of Hitchcock’s torrent of ideas, “and I took them all down, and I never used most of them.”
Hitchcock performing for the camera, 1942.
When constructing a script from their jumble of scenes, Lehman “tried to develop a Hitchcock frame of mind. I became like Hitchcock, and I tried to think like him.” His aim was to achieve the Platonic ideal of a Hitchcock film, adventurous, suspenseful, witty; “a Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” Lehman told the press that his script had been written not for Cary Grant, but for another “very special kind of star—the director, Mr. Hitchcock.”
Even so, Lehman came to resent that his part in one of Hollywood’s greatest movies had, in his view, been obliterated by the legend of Hitchcock’s lone genius. Before his death in 2005, he made something of a habit of upbraiding those whom he felt hadn’t given him his due. He told an interviewer in 1999, forty years after the film was released, that he was in the midst of “writing a bitter letter to Peter Bogdanovich for writing a paean of praise to North by Northwest . . . and mentioning everybody connected with the picture, except me.”
Beyond what Lehman and Hitchcock remembered, there is no detailed record of those scripting sessions. But, seventeen years later, when the pair worked on Family Plot, Hitchcock recorded their conversations; the transcripts are a privileged insight into a collaboration between two legends§ of mid-century Hollywood. The project wasn’t as happy or successful as North by Northwest had been, but the basic dynamics that defined their relationship are on display: Lehman constantly trying to hold the structure of the film in his head as they move from one scene to the next; Hitchcock firing out thoughts as they come to him, enjoying the occasional digression into Watergate, or some other bit of news or gossip. Images frequently flash into his mind: a sniper’s bullet smashing into a gravestone; a man dressed as a woman entering a San Francisco nightclub; a character on the run, clinging to the roof of a moving train. At one point, he muses that perhaps they should read The Taking of Pelham One Two Three to see whether anything could be pilfered from it. “My God, how can we,” protests Lehman at the prospect of stealing from a fellow writer, “it’s still on the bestseller lists.” Hitchcock was unfazed. To him, almost all ideas, no matter their origin, would become Hitchcockian when placed before the eye of his camera.
It was Lehman’s job to wrangle Hitchcock’s parade of u
nconnected scenes into some coherent narrative shape. The same was true for most of the writers Hitchcock worked with. To concede this is not to minimize the achievements of those writers; writing in the voice and style of another person is a rare and valuable skill. Charles Barr, a chief authority on Hitchcock’s early career, dug into the work of Eliot Stannard, the writer who took official writing credit on seven of Hitchcock’s first nine films. Barr analyzed Writing Screen Plays, Stannard’s slim how-to guide in which he identifies the chief problem with silent-era screenwriting in Britain: “too many scripts are a series of exciting incidents and nothing else; melodramatic, improbable and often impossible situations followed each other in bewildering rapidity, but I sought in vain for any central motive or theme.” As Barr points out, that sounds much like the experience of every writer who ever worked on a Hitchcock script. In 1986, sixty-six years after Stannard’s book was published, Samuel Taylor said Hitchcock was “the master of the situation, the master of the vignette, the master of the small moment. He always knew what he wanted to do with those. He did not have so much of an overall view of the story he was going to tell . . . it was like a mosaic. . . . Now, if he didn’t have a good writer, there were going to be pieces missing.”
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 8