After Stannard, Charles Bennett was the next writer who had a decisive impact on Hitchcock’s work. Bennett had written the play on which Hitchcock’s first talkie, Blackmail, had been based, and he shared writing credits on the run of five movies—from The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 to Young and Innocent in 1937—that made Hitchcock synonymous with witty, picaresque spy thrillers. Theirs was an immensely productive relationship; Bennett and Joan Harrison were nominated for an Oscar for their work on the script for Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). But Bennett was bitter about the lack of praise Hitchcock afforded him over the years for what he says was the crucial part he played in creating the very thing that Ernest Lehman identified as “a Hitchcock picture.”
Writing in his memoirs, unpublished until 2014, Bennett accused his former partner of being “completely vain,” though he acknowledged that Hitchcock was “brilliant, very brilliant—as a director.” It rankled Bennett that Hitchcock had fostered an idea of himself as a creative antenna whose films flowed directly from his own imagination without passing through the filter of other creative artists. Bennett’s grievance also reminds us that the distinctive one-man brand of Hitchcock’s Hollywood heyday didn’t spring from the soil fully formed. Especially as a young director, he learned from the highly accomplished people he worked alongside, primarily Balcon, Stannard, and Bennett. “We were a writer-director partnership,” stated Bennett, “but his vanity could not credit me. He credited no one but himself.” As Herbert Coleman, one of Hitchcock’s most devoted employees, bluntly put it, “ ‘Thank you’ was not part of Hitch’s vocabulary.”
Hitchcock might have countered that this was all so much sour grapes. Bennett had a lacerating tongue and a sizable ego himself; “I’m not being conceited,” he wrote in his memoirs, “but I was awfully bloody good.” However, Bennett expresses sentiments voiced by many of Hitchcock’s other collaborators. So often the work would begin amiably, the writers overjoyed to be working with Hitchcock and beguiled by the free-roaming conversations that would commence their collaboration. Evan Hunter was unimpressed by Hollywood when he relocated there to write The Birds, but felt the “cheerful side is that working with Hitch is an exhilarating, thoroughly professional, New York style experience,” by which he meant perfecting the work for its own sake, rather than the commercial dividends that might follow. But once his draft was finished, Hunter balked when Hitchcock wrote him a lengthy letter explaining that “the script has also been read by a number of other people . . . probably not more than 8 or 9 in total.” Some of those were important figures working on the film, but others were writers such as Hitchcock’s friend Hume Cronyn, and V. S. Pritchett, whom Hitchcock would later task with refreshing portions of the script’s dialogue. There was nothing intentionally cruel in this, and unquestionably Hitchcock’s only goal was to improve the script. Yet he either failed to grasp—or simply didn’t care—that a writer was likely to take exception at having their work passed around like a bag of potato chips. Hunter felt as though each of those given the script had “stuck his finger in the concept and his foot in the whorehouse door.”
John Michael Hayes had similar frustrations. He was recruited by Hitchcock to write a script for Rear Window, based on the short story “It Had to Be Murder” by Cornell Woolrich and a treatment by Joshua Logan. Having mapped out the essential design of the film together—in which a man confined to his apartment with a broken leg begins to spy on his neighbors and sets out to prove that one of them is a murderer—Hitchcock left Hayes to get on with building character and crafting dialogue. Hayes couldn’t have been happier: “He essentially left you, the writer, alone to do your work . . . he didn’t bother you constantly for pages in order to summarily reject them,” as Hayes had experienced with other filmmakers. With the draft finished, Hitchcock came back on board to scrutinize the material, going through the whole thing shot by shot. To Hayes, it felt like a true partnership, each man lending his own talents in a thoroughly complementary fashion. They ended up with arguably the best script Hitchcock ever worked with: lean but layered, witty, clever, with a flawed but likable central character, and a gripping suspense story pulling us through from beginning to end. Rear Window was the first of four consecutive movies Hayes wrote for Hitchcock, the others being To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry (1955), and the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. All but The Trouble with Harry did terrific business at the box office, and each chimed with Hitchcock’s playful, urbane eccentricity.
According to Hayes, the problems began in April 1955 when he got the attention he deserved for the Rear Window screenplay, in the form of the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Hayes had never won an award before, and he showed it off the following day. Hitchcock’s only response was, “You know they make toilet bowls from the same material.”
Viewed on its own, a quip like that doesn’t seem much; ill-judged, perhaps, but not malicious. When clustered with other tales of Hitchcock’s apparent refusal or inability to praise those with whom he worked, a definite pattern emerges. According to Hayes, he was approached by the New York Times to write a piece about the experience of working with Hitchcock. Probably assuming that a self-promoter like Hitchcock wouldn’t object to having his praises sung in the pages of the Times, Hayes wrote the article, and as a courtesy showed it to Hitchcock before he submitted it. As Hayes told the story, Hitchcock was furious, tore up the article, and said, “Young man, you are hired to write for me and Paramount, not the New York Times.” Hayes had been unambiguously put in his place—“young man”—and reminded that no mere writer should consider himself a creative peer of Hitchcock’s; he was not a collaborator but an employee.
Such a dramatic response also makes one wonder whether Hitchcock’s main anxiety was to keep control of his mythology. In Britain, America, and elsewhere, he’d published articles under his name—though not always written by him—that shed light on his creative process in a way that enhanced his contributions and diminished those of his colleagues and collaborators, with the exception of Alma, whose contribution to the Hitchcock project he seemed to enjoy highlighting. To allow somebody to gain a public profile by detailing the ways in which they influenced his work was damaging not only to his ego but to his reputation. “He wasn’t for a moment willing to allow anyone to believe he couldn’t do it all on his own,” was Hayes’s ultimate judgment.
The Hayes-Hitchcock relationship imploded when—ironically, considering his complaint of Hitchcock’s inability to give “credit where credit was due”—Hayes took umbrage at Hitchcock handing a cowriting credit to the writer Angus MacPhail for The Man Who Knew Too Much, a script Hayes insisted should be credited to him alone. Hayes told an interviewer many years later that he had strayed too far from the path of Hitchcock for the master’s liking. “I had a viewpoint and a unique way of working . . . that was my downfall, because it was too recognized, and Hitch resented it.” Long-standing members of the Hitchcock team accused Hayes of wildly inflating his importance, and claimed it was his ego, not Hitchcock’s, that ended their association. Whatever the precise burden of blame, Hayes was cast out of the Hitchcock enterprise. At various points over the coming years when Hitchcock was in need of a writer to enliven a script, those around him recommended bringing Hayes back in from the cold; their talents and sensibilities had so complemented each other, a reunion made perfect sense. Hitchcock would never countenance it.
Hitchcock’s most celebrated films were not based on equally celebrated sources. In the 1930s, he adapted Seán O’Casey’s highly acclaimed Juno and the Paycock (1930), and The Skin Game (1931) by John Galsworthy (a Nobel Prize winner in 1932), but he felt he brought little to either play, constricted by the weight of their reputation. In their interviews, Truffaut asked Hitchcock whether he’d ever consider adapting Crime and Punishment. Unthinkable, said Hitchcock, as the novel was already considered a classic, implying that he preferred to work with obscure or mediocre literature that he could
elevate to the level of Hitchcock.
He did, however, make repeated efforts to recruit exalted authors to work on scripts with him. The most successful of these ventures was with Thornton Wilder, whom he hired for Shadow of a Doubt (1943), a troubling tale of American innocence shattered. Wilder had no particular interest in writing films but accepted the job as he was soon to depart for war service and was keen to earn some quick money for his family. For both men, it proved a richly satisfying project. Not long after starting the assignment, Wilder wrote his sister telling her how much fun he was having. “For hours Hitchcock and I with glowing eyes and excited laughter plot out how the information—the dreadful information—is gradually revealed to the audience and the characters.” He concluded the letter with a line that would have delighted Hitchcock: “There’s no satisfaction like giving satisfaction to your employer.”
For the rest of his life, Hitchcock spoke glowingly of Wilder and their working experience. He said that although many writers sneered at the work he did—Graham Greene among them, who publicly criticized Hitchcock’s films and turned down the opportunity to collaborate—Wilder never did. “He wasn’t like a big shot. . . . He allowed me to direct him and I was grateful for that,” said Hitchcock. In return, he treated Wilder as an equal. “My relationship with him was respectful, and this is the important part: He wasn’t treated like a hack movie writer, at all. He was treated as he should have been.” Inadvertently, Hitchcock was admitting that he didn’t necessarily afford the same courtesy to all his writers.
Wilder had approached his work with Hitchcock with little ego or expectation—the best, perhaps the only, way to happily write for Hitchcock. Though he was delighted with Wilder’s contribution, Hitchcock still recruited another writer once Wilder had departed, to give the script bounce and sparkle. This was frequent practice with Hitchcock; he employed writers as though they were specialist tradesmen renovating a house. Some were used as constructionists, some as writers of dialogue, others to give “polish” to a final draft. He tried where possible to keep them separate, too, so the only beam running the whole length of a writing project was himself. Wilder never regraded Shadow of a Doubt as a true collaboration; he was investing his energies into a Hitchcock project, and it was the entity of Hitchcock that he had to channel, rather than trying to put his stamp on the Hitchcock brand, as Hayes and Hunter had attempted to do.
Thornton Wilder giving satisfaction to his employer, 1942.
This was not the case with the next great American writer with whom Hitchcock worked: John Steinbeck. A few months after the United States entered World War II, Steinbeck wrote a lengthy outline for Hitchcock’s idea for a film set entirely on a lifeboat in the aftermath of a German torpedo attack.¶ Presumably, Hitchcock had hoped that Steinbeck would prove as compliant as Wilder. It was a serious miscalculation. Steinbeck’s story is an ideological tract in which each character personifies a different constituency within American society: the working-class characters are good, honest, and heroic, while the politician and the captain of industry are superficial, deceitful, and irresponsible. Joe, the story’s one black character, is inserted by Steinbeck with the laudable intention of defying racist assumptions—yet he is so thoroughly good and admirable, in a way that no real person could be, that he is less a character than a polemical device. There are other unmistakably Steinbeckian flourishes, such as when a traumatized woman attempts to revive her dead baby by holding the child to her exposed breast.
The political invective was of no interest to Hitchcock, and it’s unsurprising that the characters and their relationships were changed substantially by Hitchcock and screenwriter Jo Swerling. The congresswoman—Steinbeck’s symbol of cynical ambition—was turned into a writer, played in the film by Tallulah Bankhead, transforming the political into the cultural, which was always surer territory for Hitchcock. Steinbeck was infuriated with the changes and was particularly aggrieved at what became of Joe, although Hitchcock’s—admittedly dull—character is more believable than the one drafted by Steinbeck. More important, Steinbeck delivered a template that told far more than it showed, featuring relatively little that Hitchcock could film; thoughts occur inside the narrator’s head, or are carried within dialogue, offering little potential for the camera. Yet one wonders what Hitchcock expected. Steinbeck was not a screenwriter, was hardly famed for his amenability, and there was nothing in his past work that might be described as Hitchcockian. He was enraged by what he deemed to be Hitchcock’s haughty dismissal of his work, branding him one of many “incredible English middle class snobs who really and truly despise working people,” perhaps unaware of Hitchcock’s unspectacular origins.
There was similar rancor a few years later when Raymond Chandler was engaged to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, about a psychopath who drags an innocent man into his deranged double murder plot. One biography of Chandler describes Hitchcock as “hard to work with,” though the description given of their relationship puts Chandler in a much worse light. He refused to work at the studio but resented it whenever Hitchcock visited him at home, threatened by what he thought of as Hitchcock’s encroachment on his territory, physically and metaphorically. He was also frustrated by the open-ended conversations with which Hitchcock began their conferences and hit out in strikingly unkind ways. Chandler became “sarcastic and disagreeable,” in the words of his biographer, and balked at ideas that Hitchcock threw into the mix. As Hitchcock emerged from his car before one of their meetings, Chandler mocked him as a “fat bastard,” not caring that Hitchcock was within earshot. Chandler finished his draft, but said his sanity had been tested by working within Hitchcock’s idiom—“trying to make a dream look as if it really happened”—a task he considered a waste of time.
Hitchcock had Czenzi Ormonde do a complete redraft. Ormonde recalled that in their first meeting, Hitchcock made a performance of holding his nose while dropping Chandler’s script in the trash. When he saw the finished film sometime later, Chandler was dismayed—and perhaps hurt that so little of his work had made it on screen. He thought the script consisted of “a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters,” and substandard dialogue. He also made a dig at Hitchcock for being a filmmaker who believes “camera angles, stage business, and interesting bits of byplay will make up for any amount of implausibility in a basic story.” He wasn’t the first or last writer to complain that Hitchcock lacked interest in character and narrative coherence, but this is too much. What he dismissed as visual gimmickry is the substance of Hitchcock’s skill as a visual artist whose primary objective was to express atmosphere and emotion through the gaze of a camera. Criticizing him on those grounds is rather like accusing Sergei Prokofiev of destroying the poetry of Romeo and Juliet because he removed all the words and replaced them with music.
In the end, Chandler concluded that it was pointless for any writer to work with Hitchcock, as “there must be nothing in a Hitchcock picture which Hitchcock himself might not have written.” In truth, a Hitchcock picture couldn’t be all Hitchcock; without collaborators, writers especially, his films wouldn’t have been made. But during his peak years between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s, Hitchcock was irrefutably the heliotropic force on any Hitchcock project, the source of its energy and the light to which all things grew. So clear on this issue was Hitchcock that he had no compunction assuming credit for the work of others. When he spoke to Truffaut about Vertigo, Hitchcock claimed that he had to battle studio executives to allow him to reveal to the audience the film’s dramatic plot twist—that Madeleine and Judy (played by Kim Novak) are the same person—long before James Stewart’s character learns the truth. It sounded plausible; after all, allowing the audience to stay a step ahead of the characters was Hitchcock’s definition of suspense. However, in postproduction Hitchcock had been strongly against revealing the twist so early, and was persuaded into it by his associate producer and Paramount executives. It might be that in the five years between cutting Verti
go and talking to Truffaut, the memory had become blurred in his mind. Or, perhaps he felt entitled, compelled even, to take possession of the decision that fitted so snugly into his mythology and his need to be at the center of all things, lest he be eclipsed by a satellite in his orbit.
The auteur theory was exceptionally influential in shaping the way Hitchcock was perceived through the sixties and seventies, solidifying his reputation as a film artist. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art held a Hitchcock retrospective, followed by the first English-language books about his work. The new appreciation seemed to affect Hitchcock’s filmmaking, too. In November 1964, he reached out to Vladimir Nabokov, as deified for his prose style as Hitchcock was for his cinematic technique. Hitchcock floated two embryonic ideas. The first was about the wife of a Cold War defector, along the lines of what would become his next movie, Torn Curtain. As he explained to Nabokov, “the type of story I’m looking for is an emotional, psychological one, expressed in terms of action and movement and, naturally, one that would give me the opportunity to indulge in the customary Hitchcock suspense.” The second idea was one he had played with for a long while and attempted with other writers: a story about a teenage girl who realizes that the hotel run by her family is a front for an organized-crime operation. “As I indicated to you on the telephone, screenplay writers are not the type of people to take such ideas as these and develop them into responsible story material. They are usually people who adapt other people’s work. That is why I am by-passing them and coming direct to you—a story-teller.” Intrigued by the second idea, Nabokov replied that he was sure he’d be able to rustle up a fine screenplay—though, naturally, he’d require absolute freedom to take the story where he pleased. That was a warning of jagged rocks ahead. Demands on both men’s time meant the collaboration never happened, but if it had, one wonders whether it would have stood a chance of avoiding the acrimony that befell the Steinbeck and Chandler projects.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 9