Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock

by John Russell Taylor

  Many different experiences contributed to the final version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Hitch’s fascination with music hall and the scrubbier kind of English theatre comes out vividly in the framing sequences involving ‘Mr. Memory’, the stage memory man who is used as the means of communicating whatever it is that the spies want communicated. This character was based on an actual music-hall performer called Datas, whom Hitch had seen many times: his speciality was being able to answer almost any question thrown at him about statistics and records. Hitch’s own addition is the touch of obsession, the strong sense of professional duty which drives him to answer a question, any question, if he knows the answer, even if doing so may have fatal consequences for him. And the look and feel of the music hall, the chorines’ legs impassively stepping in the background as the memory man dies, the audience’s reactions, impressed or dismissive, are rendered with an instant sharpness which must come from loving, unsentimental observation.

  When the filming was completed everyone, including Hitch and Michael Balcon, was very pleased with the result—indeed Hitch still says he puts The Thirty-Nine Steps among his own favourites. At the last moment Hitch decided to pare the film down even more, by eliminating the final sequence he had shot—one between Donat and Madeleine Carroll in a cab after they leave the theatre, in which he whimsically explains to her that they are in fact married, since by Scottish law you can be married by declaration, stating yourselves, as they had at the inn, to be man and wife in front of witnesses. This idea tickled Hitch, but he felt it muddled the clear lines of the film’s end. That removed, the film was ready for showing, and Balcon left for America with a print to finalize American distribution.

  At which point, unbelievably, C. M. Woolf struck again. This time he informed Hitch and Ivor Montagu that their contracts were to be terminated after the next film—or before, if they refused the assignment he offered them. And what he offered was, of all things, a musical life of Leslie Stuart, the composer of Florodora. By this time Hitch was unable to take the whole matter seriously: if he could not continue at Gaumont-British he could virtually write his own ticket anywhere else, and he was for leaving right away. But Montagu suggested they make a slight show of working on the Florodora story until Balcon got back, and sure enough as soon as he returned he quashed the whole thing and matters returned to normal; Woolf did not like Hitch or his films, but given that they were the biggest box office the company had, he just had to lump them. In any case, once The Thirty-Nine Steps was released in 1936, the question was really out of his hands. The film had a sensational success in the States as well as in Britain, and Hitch was truly an international figure. Offers began to come in from Hollywood for Hitch, some which he never even heard of, as they were suppressed or rejected out of hand by Gaumont-British, while others were skilfully parried by Balcon, who felt understandably possessive about his protégé and liked to give the impression that he was in fact Hitchcock’s agent as well as producer and friend, all to keep him in Britain.

  Not that Hitch was as yet seriously considering uprooting. Professionally, things were going ever better for him in Britain, where he could enjoy the situation of being a big fish in a little pond. And personally he had arranged a very comfortable, agreeable life for himself. He had gathered round him a group of regular collaborators who were also friends. Living in London he could indulge one of his great passions, theatregoing, to his heart’s content, while for the other, fine food and drink, the Continent was close at hand. His family also was in easy reach. He had resettled his mother in a flat near his own, in Kensington, and would send his chauffeur-driven car over with fruit and flowers for her. He remained in close touch also with his brother, and Pat used to love going and staying the night over his fish shop in South London, while they continued to see a lot of his two favourite cousins, Mary and Teresa, the artistic ones, in Golders Green. During the week he stayed in London, and at week-ends went down regularly to Shamley Green; at Christmas time he and Alma, and now Pat, made whenever possible the sentimental journey to the Palace Hotel at St. Moritz, and he contrived ingeniously to do most of the serious work of scripting films either amid home comforts, sitting round the table in Cromwell Road with Alma and his writers, or on vacation-like working trips abroad. Pat was now eight, and made the transition from a private school run by nuns in Cavendish Square to Mayfield, a leading Catholic boarding school for girls (there was some talk of sending her to Roedean, but a friend talked Hitch out of that). Curious that he, who had so hated being at boarding school himself, should have sent his only child to one, but in those days it was just what one did, and so he did it, though he and Alma continued to spend as much time with Pat as they possibly could, even in term time. And though she hated many things about the school, at least she took immediately to the dramatics, playing leading roles in two fairy plays, Rumpelstiltskin and The Little King Who Never Grew Up, in her first year. From then on Pat never had much doubt on at least one matter: when she grew up, she wanted to be an actress.

  In many respects Hitch’s life was carefully insulated during these years. Family apart, he hardly knew anybody who was not somehow involved in show business, film or theatre. He carefully avoided getting involved in anything connected with politics—he even refused, much to the left-wing Ivor Montagu’s disappointment, to become president of the screen technicians’ union, the A.C.T.T., when in 1936 they decided to put their house in order and become a force to reckon with in the industry, and wanted someone of Hitch’s eminence to lend his support in a prominent way. Maybe Hitch was afraid to be identified with a faction which was widely regarded as trouble-making; but more likely he simply felt that this was outside his field of interest and a waste of his time and energies, which could more profitably, for him and everyone else, be turned to the business of actually making films.

  By now Hitch had worked out a perfect routine for scripting his films. After selecting a property, he and Charles Bennett and Alma would reduce it to a bald half-page outline. Then they would start to ask the necessary questions: what are these people; what is their station in life; what do they work at; how do they act at home? From there they would progress to a 60- or 70-page outline which plotted the action scene by scene, but in terms of visual story-telling, with no dialogue. Then, when that was perfected, one or more other writers would be called in to write the dialogue. So when he was ready to start shooting Hitch would have a complete, detailed script, broken down shot by shot and all drawn out in composition sketches, story-board style, by Hitch himself. After which, further modifications during and after shooting were negligible—sometimes removal of a scene, like the final cut in The Thirty-Nine Steps, sometimes the addition of some happy last-minute inspiration. The regular writing associates at this time were Charles Bennett, Alma and Ivor Montagu (Montagu figures in the credits only as co-producer, but did by general consent play an important part at the scenario stage); dialogue writers included novelists like Ian Hay and Helen Simpson and dramatists like Gerald Savory, but they tended to be transients, in accord with Hitch’s feeling that the dialogue was relatively unimportant.

  There was also, during the preparation of The Thirty-Nine Steps, a new addition to the team, who was to become one of Hitch’s closest and longest-lasting associates. He advertised for a secretary, and among the applicants came a trim, blondly beautiful Cambridge graduate called Joan Harrison. She was wearing a hat because her mother had told her she should, to be interviewed by an important personage. But after a few moments Hitch asked her very politely if she would mind taking her hat off. She did, they talked, and in half an hour the job was hers. For the time being, her job was mainly to sit in on the script sessions and take notes, as well as take care of Hitch’s day-to-day correspondence. But she rapidly got some insight into what working with Hitch could be like when one day he suggested that to clear the cobwebs away they take a boat trip, and she and Charles Bennett turned up to discover that Hitch had hired for the day a 250-place Thames steamer, in wh
ich they grandly steamed out to sea and back, just the three of them, while they worked on the script of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Being, obviously, a bright girl, she rapidly began to take a more active part in things, encouraged by Hitch to contribute suggestions to the scripts and capably taking over responsibility for making his professional life run smoothly. She and Alma also became close friends, and she was soon very much one of the family, at home, in the studio, and frequently on their holidays abroad. With Young and Innocent in 1937 she was promoted to script collaborator, and in 1939 she went along with them to Hollywood, to begin a spectacular career of her own, sometimes with, sometimes without Hitch. Today she is married to the novelist Eric Ambler and they remain among the Hitchcocks’ closest friends in the world.

  But now it was time to get on with the next assignment and build on the success of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Hitch was looking round for a property, when one was wished on him by Michael Balcon. He was not exactly forced to do it, but from every point of view it would be politic, and Hitch, nothing if not realistic, saw definite possibilities in the subject, so he agreed. The thing was, critics then as now have to be propitiated from time to time—not exactly paid off, but made to feel good. Hitch himself had early tumbled to this: when he was by no means highly paid he had devoted a large part of his salary to keeping up his cordial relations with critics and film journalists, feeding them and looking after them and talking over his projects with them, so that they could become excited and feel a part of the film long before they ever saw it. One or two of the critics he became personally friendly with, notably Caroline Lejeune of the Observer, who was an occasional guest in Cromwell Road and was made comfortably aware that her views on his films made no difference to their relationship—on one occasion she rather shamefacedly remarked, ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t very kind to you last Sunday,’ to which Hitch cheerfully replied, ‘Well, I do my job and you do yours—that’s what we’re both paid for.’ Though he would never have dreamed of paying for a good review—it was not impossible, with some of the less reputable of the critical fraternity, and certainly not unknown—Hitch did believe in keeping on the right side of the press.

  In the case of The Secret Agent, as the new project came to be called, what had happened was that Campbell Dixon, the film critic of the Daily Telegraph, had written a play based on ‘The Hairless Mexican’, one of Somerset Maugham’s stories about a secret agent called Ashenden (which, in turn, were inspired by Maugham’s own experiences in the secret service during the First World War). Balcon had thought it sensible, and not too suspect, to buy the rights of the play and commission Dixon to write a brief film scenario derived from it. And this was what he now wanted Hitch and Ivor Montagu to use in their next film. Montagu was very uncomfortable about this—it reminded him of his unfortunate experiences working with Eisenstein in Hollywood, when they had been shunted by studio politics from one property to another and never managed to bring any of them to fruition. But this time Hitch talked sense to him: once they got started elaborating the script, they could throw Dixon’s outline out of the window and no one would notice or care—and at least Dixon could play, if he so wished, the one-upmanship game of telling people, ‘Oh, I’m working on the new Hitchcock film, you know.’

  What Montagu specifically did not like was the basic idea of the script—that an agent has to kill the wrong man and then go right on to kill the right man next. He felt the audience’s sympathies would not stand the strain of this, and therefore that the second killing had to be accidental and even the first killing should not be done by the agent’s own hand, even if he had some over-all responsibility for it. Also, Montagu thought he saw in the story a chance to convey some kind of political message disguised as entertainment—something about the folly of power politics, and the responsibilities of the individual. He now admits that he was wrong here, in that he was trying to go against the grain of Hitch’s totally apolitical temperament, and that these undertones do confuse what should be the clear thriller outline of the plot. Hitch, more practically, looked from the outset for ideas that would keep the film lively from scene to scene, those famous Hitchcock touches. The first questions he asked were ‘Where does it take place? Switzerland. Right. What do they have in Switzerland?’ The answer was mountains, lakes, chocolate and village dances, so each of these should be worked into the screen-play and made to play a positive role.

  With these notions in mind Hitch and Charles Bennett began to hammer out a scenario. They went back to the original Maugham story and another in the Ashenden series, ‘The Traitor’, for their central intrigue, and added the love interest which Campbell Dixon had devised for his play. Hitch decreed that the Alps were there in order that someone should fall into a crevasse, and the chocolate factories were there so that one could be used as an innocent-seeming cover for the crooks’ headquarters. But despite many work sessions round the table in Cromwell Road, somehow the whole thing just would not jell. Finally in desperation Bennett was sent off to sketch out the entire treatment overnight, and the following morning he and Hitch flew out to Switzerland. There they went first to pick up Ivor Montagu at Kandersteh, where he was holidaying, then the three of them drove on into the Lauterbrunnen valley and stayed there, talking the story over day and night, until somehow they worked out what they should do with it. From here Bennett went home and Hitch took a quick trip into the Balkans, mainly to research himself the background for the final train journey in the draft script. He was mistrustful of the over-characterful costuming usual in those days for films set in exotic locations, remembering a classic Punch cartoon which compared different nationalities as we expect them to be (all in picturesque local costumes) and how they really are (all indistinguishable in standard modern clothes). And sure enough, he found in the Balkans that everyone dressed either completely conventionally or half-and-half, partly native, partly pure chain-store.

  Back in England he set about the serious business of finalizing the script, casting and shooting the film. To keep up the American interest established with The Thirty-Nine Steps, he used two Hollywood stars, Madeleine Carroll again and Robert Young, who normally played romantic and light comedy roles, as the villain of the piece. For the picturesque Mexican ‘general’ who rather unreliably helps the hero in his task, Hitch again called on Peter Lorre. And for the hero, Ashenden, he looked, as so often in his British period, towards the London theatre and hit on John Gielgud. Gielgud at this time had been having enormous success in Shakespeare, particularly with his Hamlet and in a famous production of Romeo and Juliet in which he and Laurence Olivier alternated Romeo and Mercutio to Peggy Ashcroft’s Juliet. He had made one or two films before, including a silent film, Daniel, in which he could not resist the bizarre proposition of playing a role written for Sarah Bernhardt, and Victor Saville’s version of The Good Companions, which had made Jessie Matthews into a star but had not done so much for him. Consequently, he was not too keen on The Secret Agent, but Hitch seduced him into it by persuading him it was a sort of modern-day Hamlet about a man who could not make up his mind to carry out what he believed to be his duty.

  If those possibilities were in the story as Hitch told it to him, Gielgud felt disappointedly that the script did not live up to them—it was just another thriller. However, even just another thriller, if it happened to be a Hitchcock thriller, could not be that bad, and he set to with a will. He persuaded Hitch to cast Lady Tree, the widow of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and a couple of other actors he had just been working with on stage in small roles, and he found old familiar faces at the studio in the shape of Ivor Montagu and the writer Angus McPhail, with both of whom he had been at school. But in general he became increasingly uncomfortable. Hitch was amiable but distant with him, and he felt that Hitch could have little confidence in him as a leading man if he had to fill out the cast with other stars like Madeleine Carroll, Robert Young and Peter Lorre—worries which Hitch did little or nothing to dispel.

  Gielgud was also disturbed tha
t his character, whose motivation seemed in principle the most interesting and complex, had been reduced to little more than a cipher; he was frightened of Madeleine Carroll, whom Hitch obviously adored and tended, he felt, to favour in the shooting; he was unnerved by Peter Lorre’s cunning scene-stealing, not to mention his unpredictable absences hiding somewhere in the studio rafters to inject himself with the morphine to which he had become addicted. In short, the shooting was a nightmare for him, and he was glad to escape back to the relative calm and sanity of the theatre. All the same, he ended with a grudging respect, and even affection, for Hitch, recognizing that he was an artist with an obsession—he was going to make his films in his own way, to his own standards, and even though he was always open to suggestion and positively welcomed improvisation, finally he used everything for his own purposes and did not leave much room for anyone else’s creative satisfaction. Which was no doubt right for him and right for the films—they were, after all, first, last and always Hitchcock films—but could be dismaying for others involved.

  Hitch himself was reasonably happy about the film. He liked what they had finally done with the given subject, and he had enjoyed a lot of the more fanciful details. But he still felt that something was wrong, though he could not quite put his finger on what it was. At the first preview the film aroused some incomprehension and hostility, mainly it seemed on account of a fancy device Hitch and Ivor Montagu had thought up to dramatize the train wreck at the end. To give a feeling of the complete, rending break this represented in the characters’ lives, they had commissioned the abstract film-maker Len Lye to make a brief insert of coloured film which would look just as though the film itself had caught fire in the projector, shrivelled up and broken. The first audience thought this had actually happened, even though the film went on again as normal almost immediately, and the front office felt there was a danger of panic in the cinemas, so out it had to come. Montagu was for making a stand, but Hitch cut the offending passage without demur—he had liked the idea, but it did anyway look a little self-conscious and distracting, he thought, and he was willing to bow to pressure.