Hitch also took great care to show no actual details of violence—you never see the knife touch the girl’s flesh, and the main reason Psycho was made in black-and-white was to avoid a wash of Technicolor blood. Despite which the sequence has been traumatic for many. There are those who swear that the film goes into colour at that point, or that you see the knife tearing the flesh, all of which is in their own imaginations. Hitch once got a sad letter from a parent asking advice. After seeing Les Diaboliques his daughter had refused to have a conventional bath. Now, after seeing Psycho, she refused to take a shower either. What should he do? Have her dry-cleaned, replied Hitch cheerfully. The one person clearly not traumatized by the shower scene was Alma. As usual, she was the last person Hitch showed the film to before shipping it out. After seeing it, her first comment was, ‘Hitch, you can’t ship it. Janet Leigh gulps after she is supposed to be dead in the shower.’ And sure enough she did—just in one or two frames, so little that no one else, shaken by the shock of the scene, had noticed.
Before things got to that stage, though, a number of other processes had to be gone through. And Hitch was, for him, amazingly indecisive and lacking in confidence. Perhaps because a major investment of his own money was involved, even though he had brought the whole film in for a mere $800,000, he was hard to satisfy. At one point, having put the rough cut together, he decided he didn’t like it, it wouldn’t work, began to talk about cutting it down to an hour and using it on television. Among those who thought he was crazy was Bernard Herrmann, who was composing the music for it. Hitch had planned on having the whole shower sequence silent except for the actual sounds of the water, the shower curtain and so on. Herrmann begged Hitch to try it with the music he had composed, and Hitch had to admit that he was right—the sequence was transformed and enhanced to an incredible degree, and his fears began to die away.
Even so, neither Hitch nor anyone else could have guessed the fantastic commercial success in store for the film. Hitch and Alma went off to Europe on holiday and were away when Psycho opened. The critical reception was mixed. Many of the critics were alienated by being required to see the film with an ordinary audience, and being refused admission if they arrived late (it was a rule Hitch had insisted on, that the movie had to be seen from beginning to end); others were shocked by the film’s violence and felt it was unworthy of its maker. His old friend Charles Bennett saw a preview in Hollywood and afterwards told Hitch he was a ‘sadistic sonofabitch’. Hitch mildly replied that he thought the film was funny, and feigned surprise when Bennett said that only made matters worse. But the public loved Psycho right from the start. On its first release it made some $15 million in the United States alone, and shortly after Hitch’s return Paramount presented him excitedly with a cheque for $2.5 million, far and away the largest amount they had ever paid an independent producer, as his personal share of the first quarter’s returns. It was a climax in his career. Now in his early sixties he was famous, more famous than ever before, and he was rich. He had made a string of masterpieces, one fast on the heels of another. The only problem was, where did he go from here?
Chapter Fourteen
Shortly after completing work on Psycho Joseph Stefano invited the Hitchcocks to a party. Nothing, one might think, very remarkable about that. Except that Stefano had been suitably terrorized, like most of Hitch’s short-term professional associates, by Hitch’s tales of the inefficiencies and solecisms committed by those who had invited him to drinks or dinner—people like the up-and-coming executive who had a waiter serve wine in a napkin when it was not even chilled. Hitch had so scared others, like Ernest Lehman, that they never dared invite him to their homes, no matter how well they knew him. And then he wondered why he was so seldom asked anywhere. But anyway, Stefano was made of sterner stuff, and though the party was to be a big, very mixed one such as he knew Hitch particularly disliked, he thought he might as well invite him all the same. To his surprise Hitch accepted; to his even greater surprise Hitch and Alma came early and, instead of making a token appearance, stayed all evening. Alma, as usual, darted round talking to everyone, and had a great time. Hitch found an equally characteristic solution. The main room of Stefano’s house was L-shaped, with a grand piano at the angle, the only place it would fit, and therefore in full view of the entrance. Here, in the bow of the piano, like Helen Morgan, Hitch placed himself and held court—more precisely, he stood there all evening, the first thing one saw on arrival, and little by little everyone circulated enough to speak to him.
It was an unusually expansive moment. In general Hitch, who had always kept himself to himself in Hollywood, dedicated to his work and his family, was becoming increasingly isolated from the world around him. Professionally, he liked to be surrounded by people he knew and had worked with—new people brought risks and uncertainties, and there were those in the world who might not understand or share Hitch’s hatred of confrontations. By now he had assembled his own little group, which included his cinematographer Robert Burks, his camera operator Leonard J. South, his television cameraman John L. Russell, his editor George Tomasini, his composer Bernard Herrmann, his personal assistant Peggy Robertson, his costume designer Edith Head, and a number of actors with whom he felt thoroughly at home. Inevitably the actors changed depending on the nature of the project and on various outside factors—Grace Kelly had married and retired; Hitch was not to work again with Cary Grant or James Stewart—and he seemed to have a high wastage rate of writers, but in general he was surrounded by a charmed circle of the tried and true. Within it he was able to command extraordinary personal loyalty and understanding; he did not have to worry too much about the world outside.
Which is just as well. For Hitch, by his own admission as well as the observation of others, is and always has been a frightened man: frightened of the police and authority, frightened of other people, frightened of his professional and financial position, frightened of his own emotions. His ivory tower has been built as a necessary protection for himself. Even so he has retained his sense of terror, beleaguered within it. When pressed from the outside to do this or that in his films, especially to cast in a certain way, he has always had the greatest difficulty in saying no, and has had to find all kinds of devious ways of doing it—if he succeeded in doing it at all. Often the people he worked with have asked him what he is frightened of, what can ‘they’ do to one in his position. His answer is always a variation of ‘You don’t know. They can do terrible things.’ The most terrible being, presumably, that they could somehow stop him working.
Joseph Stefano has another image of Hitch—the perfect symbolic image of a frightened man. One day during the shooting of Psycho Hitch asked Stefano, who lived not far away from him, for a lift home. Or, more precisely, to the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was directly on Stefano’s route—from there he could get a cab home to Bel Air. Stefano remonstrated that it was hardly out of his way to run Hitch right home, only maybe another ten minutes, but Hitch would not hear of it. So they drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and as they approached there was a cab waiting at the taxi rank outside. Stefano dropped Hitch at the front, and as he pulled away he noticed that the cab had been taken and gone before Hitch could get to it. And there, in the rear-view mirror, he saw a picture of complete terror. Alfred Hitchcock standing on a corner, looking for a cab. Evidently this was the sort of thing that just did not happen to him, ever. And now it had he looked totally lost, like a child who has mislaid his parents and does not know what to do to find them again. Stefano was so worried and guilty he drove round the block to make sure Hitch was all right and if necessary to insist on driving him home. Fortunately, when he arrived back Hitch had gone—that crisis was over. But his life was full of little crises, bouts of neurotic anxiety, irrational (or sometimes admittedly not so irrational) fears, which life and experience and success did little or nothing to abate.
And yet a long-time associate observes, completely without irony, that Hitch’s great quality is his almost total
satisfaction with himself. He is an intensely complicated person, but he never seems to have looked for the answer to his own conundrum. One can no more imagine his turning to psychoanalysis, at any stage in his life, than flying: quite correctly he supposes that he does not need it. Even his little self-explanatory anecdotes, like the one about his being locked up in a police cell at the age of six or so, often seem to have been suggested to him as revealing by other people: he has read commentaries on them, and now presents them like a visiting card, without any inner conviction that the explanations they offer are true, or that, if true, they really matter. He chooses to believe that he is incapable of anger, and so, as far as he is concerned, he is—he does not care or bother to examine himself further and find out what happens to the angry impulses he largely suppresses. Throughout his life he has been a model of sexual rectitude, and he is absolutely not interested in what effect, if any, his less avowable impulses may have subconsciously on his behaviour—his tendency, say, to be in certain cases unreasonably possessive and domineering. Indeed, the whole fantasy aspect of his life seems to be beautifully, totally taken care of by film, to the extent that he hardly needs any other outlet.
This means, of course, that he, and his profession, have to be more than ever shielded and protected, and fear of things going wrong through some outside force never leaves him. After the tremendous, unexpected success oí Psycho he was in a stronger position than ever before—which he proceeded to consolidate by moving his centre of operations yet again, ultimately to Universal, which belonged to MCA, his agents until 1962 when they had to give up their agency interests, and headed by one of his very few close friends, Lew Wasserman. Before that happened, though, he did consider various other possibilities. For one thing, he was suddenly finding it difficult to decide on a project to follow up Psycho. No Bail for the Judge was still in his plans, despite the defection of Ernest Lehman from writing the script, but it was put off for Psycho, then put off again for two more properties to be developed first, Village of Stars and Trap for a Solitary Man, then finally, quietly dropped, as no satisfactory script could be got out of it. The other two projects also came to nothing. Village of Stars, which he was going to make for Paramount, was about the plight of a pilot with a bomb designed to detonate below a certain altitude when the defusing device fails to work; Trap for a Solitary Man, which was to have been for Twentieth Century-Fox, started as a successful stage thriller by Robert Thomas about a man whose wife disappears and then apparently reappears, except that only he insists she is not the right woman at all. Both straightforward thriller subjects, neither able to be scripted to Hitch’s entire satisfaction, probably because they were so straightforward and mechanical. After Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho he needed to do something different, something more.
More interesting seemed to be an idea which came to Ernest Lehman at this time. Disneyland had been open for four or five years, and was receiving an enormous amount of publicity. One day Lehman visited it, and the bank hold-up they were staging then had somehow fused with another idea he had, that of a man blind from birth who is given sight by some sort of eye transplant only to discover that the donor, supposedly killed in an accident, was really murdered and has transmitted to him through his eyes a visual memory of the murderer. Perhaps while visiting Disneyland the hero (call him Jimmy Stewart for the sake of argument) finds himself ‘recognizing’ someone he could never have seen, then have a recollection set off by the fake gun fight. Perhaps the whole movie could be made in Disneyland. Hitchcock in Disneyland! Hitch was at this time in Copenhagen with Alma on their post-Psycho holiday, but Lehman told Peggy Robertson, she was excited enough to tell Hitch about it on the phone, and Hitch was sufficiently excited to talk to Lehman himself. When Hitch got back he and Lehman began working on the idea as they had worked on North by Northwest, and for a while everything went swimmingly. Then something appeared in the trade papers about the project, Walt Disney read it, and promptly made a statement that in no circumstances would Hitchcock, maker of that disgusting movie Psycho, be allowed to shoot a foot of film in Disneyland. Hitch and Lehman began to change things around again, this time placing the action on a round-the-world cruise (Hitch had a sudden, disconnected vision of a chase in Carcassonne), but turn it as they might, they never seemed able to lick the problem of too many coincidences, or find a natural-seeming way of getting all the characters in the right place at the right time.
Hitch’s next project took up even more of his time, to no satisfactory outcome. For almost a year he worked with various writers on a story entitled Frenzy—no connection with the film of that name which he made ten years later except that both of them concern psychotic killers of young women. The initiation of the project brought about a curious reunion. Hitch had scarcely seen the British playwright Benn Levy since 1932, when they had had their falling-out over Lord Camber’s Ladies. Now, thirty years later, he invited Levy out to work on this new script. Hitch himself went to New York and spent three months researching locations: there was to be a murder in Central Park, another action scene in Shay Stadium (where Hitch undertook, improbably, to explain the mechanics of baseball to Peggy Robertson), and a pursuit across the mothball fleet. Somehow the action seemed to keep coming back always to water in one form or another. ‘Don’t you think there’s rather a lot of water in this story?’ Hitch asked Levy at one point. Levy said he should use his old principle of making a virtue of necessity: emphasize it and call the film Waters of Forgetfulness or something of the sort. After Levy had spent several months in America working on the script, he returned to Britain, and Hitch proceeded to go through a lot of other writers, bizarrely assorted, including Howard Fast and Hugh Wheeler. But though there were great sequences in the story as worked out, they just could not get over the ‘third act’ problem—however it was developed, it always ended in the cliché of the policewoman decoy to capture the killer. ‘No, no,’ said Hitch, ‘that’s the way they do it in the movies!’ There seemed no more to be said, and the project was shelved, like the other four.
On a more personal level, Hitch was also active, though to little ultimate effect, in the years following Psycho. The television series was still going strong, and for the one season, 1961-2, it expanded from half an hour to an hour’s length, and was retitled The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. By this time, though, his connection with it was largely formal. After Psycho he directed three half-hours and one hour show, the last featuring, some way down the cast list, one of his new discoveries, Claire Griswold. His disappointing experience with trying to turn Vera Miles into a Hitchcock woman had not deterred him. In the early 1960s he put three young women in succession under personal contract. The first was Joanna Moore, a pretty girl but an improbable choice anyway, one would think. Certainly no one could have been less co-operative in the required making-over process: she did not like the clothes, she did not like the hair styles, and she did not seem to like anyone she came into contact with at the studio. Finally, Hitch gave up, and instead contracted Claire Griswold—largely it would seem because after putting her through the grooming process and shooting extensive tests of her in scenes from To Catch a Thief and others of his movies, he did not like to disappoint her. Not, probably, that she would have been very disappointed: she seemed to have little professional ambition, and was quite content being what she was, Mrs. Sydney Pollack.
The third actress put under contract worked out a lot better. Early in 1962 Hitch and Alma were watching television and were much struck by the cool elegance and style of one of the models in a commercial. What particularly drew Hitch’s attention in what he saw was one reaction: the commercial was for a dietary drink called Sego, and in it the girl was required to turn and respond when an eight-year-old boy whistled at her in the street. Inquiry established that she was an aspiring New York actress called Tippi Hedren (or ‘Tippi’, with single quotes, as Hitch was to insist she always be billed). Through MCA she was contacted—she turned out to have moved recently to Los Ang
eles—and she was asked to come round to the agents with any photographs and film she had of herself. Her first appointment was on Friday the thirteenth. No one told her who exactly was interested, though the office was full of pictures of Hitchcock. On the Monday she went back and was shunted from person to person, still with no information. On the Tuesday she met another agent, Herman Citron, who told her that the producer interested in her was Alfred Hitchcock, and that he wanted to put her under a personal contract. If she and her agent were agreeable to the terms of the contract they would go over and meet him. The contract was more than fair, and was accepted at once. What a considerate way, Tippi Hedren thought, to approach the matter: if she had known it was Hitch, she would have been terribly nervous and over-eager to say and do the right thing, while as it was she had no way of knowing whether anything of any importance depended on this series of apparently routine interviews, so she could just comfortably be herself, without exaggerated hopes or fears.
When they did finally meet, Hitch and Tippi did not talk at all about films—they talked about travel, about food, about clothes, almost everything but. She found him very charming and easy to get along with. He brought in Edith Head immediately to design a wardrobe for her, and then they went into making three days of colour tests—scenes from To Catch a Thief, Notorious, Rebecca—some of which had to be destroyed right away after screening, as Hitch did not have the rights to the material. Martin Balsam was flown in specially from New York to act with her, and no expense was spared to have everything just right. No particular property was mentioned for her debut, and it came as a complete surprise when, a few weeks later, Hitch and Alma invited her to dinner at Chasens’. There at her place was a small package, beautifully wrapped, which contained a pin of three seagulls in flight, made of gold and seed pearls, and Hitch said, ‘We want you to play Melanie in The Birds.’
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 31