by Marc Eliot
However, career-arcing had nothing to do with Jimmy’s decision to go on dramatic TV. The real reason was far more complex, and had its roots in Jimmy’s 1950 precedent-shattering, profit-participation deal to make Winchester ’73. Thanks to Wasserman, it made Jimmy a millionaire, but, as all those who did business with Wasserman sooner or later learned, such monetary reward came with long, gripping tentacles.
Ever since purchasing what was left of Leland Hayward’s talent agency, Wasserman, along with Jules Stein, had had an eye on creating an agency that would not only handle the biggest talent in Hollywood, but produce films, and later TV shows and series for them. Prior to World War Two, when television was first set to burst onto the social conscience and popular culture of America, before Pearl Harbor forced what would be a seven-year delay in setting up and putting the networks into operation, Wasserman was a big believer in television. He always liked to tell people that when it came to TV, he was a true visionary, because he had bought one of the first two television sets sold in Southern California.4
Meanwhile, in the early fifties, the only aspect of show business that Reagan drew the line at was television, which he thought would forever prevent him from returning to the big screen, and which mostly came out of New York City, a town he particularly disliked. Almost everything on the tube came from there, including Westerns. CBS often used the rooftop of Grand Central Terminal to film running packs of horses.
This brought a lot of tension among the clashing studio heads of the two coasts, as Hollywood watched while a mass medium that had begun in the East before migrating to Hollywood seemed to be returning to its roots. The studio moguls went so far as to ban the broadcast of any of their movies by the big three TV networks (for this and other reasons, including competition and royalty discrepancies). The film studios, already in disarray, feared that television was going to destroy the industry by giving away entertainment for “free.”
Wasserman and Stein then had a brainstorm. Rather than fighting the inevitable, they decided that MCA could be a part of the new revolution in home entertainment by creating a TV subdivision, producing TV fare out of Hollywood to sell directly to the networks. Both coasts immediately took to the idea. The East was running out of train-station rooftops, while the West had acres of studio space going unused.
Ironically, the only people opposed to the idea were those who had the most to gain from it—the performers; more specifically, their unions. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) had, since its inception in the thirties, absolutely forbidden its members to work for any agent who also produced films. The conflict of interest was obvious. An agent wants to get the most for his client’s services; a producer wants to pay the least. This rule was rarely bent, and only by individual waiver after much lobbying for specific events the guild deemed reasonable.
Not to worry, Wasserman told Stein, he would appeal directly to the president of SAG, who at the time happened to be Ronald Reagan, who had stepped into the top position after the resignation of Robert Montgomery (he’d resigned when he became the part owner, or producer, of several of his own movies, thereby placing him in conflict with the very rules of the guild of which he was the head). Reagan, on the other hand, had no connection in any way to producing or ownership, and eagerly stepped into the position as the head of the guild that nobody with any real earnings potential and therefore inevitable studio/guild conflicts wanted.
When approached by Wasserman and Stein, Reagan was loath to turn them down, as these were the very men who had saved his hide. But he was also smart enough to know it was an extremely dangerous career move to go against SAG precedent and grant such a sweeping exemption.
After much consideration, Reagan came up with the idea of a necessary quid pro quo, that the guild would have to somehow benefit in a broad and sweeping way from any exemptive grants. Following several meetings with various guild officials and Wasserman’s people, the notion of residuals for actors was introduced.
For the longest time—until independent production contracts included participation clauses—actors were paid once for their performances on film, no matter how many times that film was played, anywhere around the world. The first of the new contracts was Cary Grant’s, with his two simultaneous, nonexclusive deals with Columbia and RKO in 1936, which opened the floodgates to profit participation. Residuals were meant to make this practice standard, so that any actor who appeared in any movie or TV show would be paid a set amount whenever that product was replayed, in theaters or on TV. The guild loved the idea; the studios hated it. While the debate over whether or not to grant residuals and how to dispense them dragged on, Reagan, through SAG, granted Wasserman’s MCA (and its TV subsidiary, Revue) a blanket waiver that allowed them to represent its roster of talent and to hire them to appear in programs Revue produced for TV, with residual payments for their work.
Following the granting of that waiver, Reagan’s career experienced one of the most incredible comebacks in the history of show business. Revue became a major player in fifties television, and Wasserman became the most powerful mogul in Hollywood. Revue’s General Electric Theater premiered February 1, 1953. A year later, Reagan was the host of the popular Sunday-night show, at a starting salary of $120,000 per episode, plus separate salaries for occasionally appearing in the episodes. To ensure the show remain a top ratings draw, Wasserman ordered his A-line stars to make special guest appearances in the half-hour episodes. The performers really had no choice. Refusing Wasserman meant risking his ire and potentially damaging their own careers.
In 1954, the first year G.E. Theater was on as a weekly show (its second year of production; it had been biweekly), Wasserman ordered Joan Crawford, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Joseph Cotten, Jane Wyman, Fred Astaire—and Jimmy Stewart—to accept roles on the show. They all said yes without protest. Jimmy’s episode, “The Windmill,” was the highest-rated one of the season, and ensured Reagan’s show would be picked up the following fall.5
For his part, even though he had more or less been forced into it, shoved by Wasserman’s kid gloves, so to speak, Jimmy discovered he enjoyed doing TV very much—the speed, the efficiency, the disposability of it all, and the people associated with the new medium. In particular, he liked the show’s producer, William Frye, who was to become a lifelong friend. He considered making the one-time move a permanent career shift, and likely would have, if one of his favorite directors had not come knocking again, delivering the future in the form of a brand-new and, to Jimmy, irresistible screenplay.
The director was Alfred Hitchcock and the project was an intended American remake of the director’s 1934 Gaumont production of The Man Who Knew Too Much, produced by Michael Balcon, Hitchcock’s primary British producer. While the original version was received popularly, and made Hitchcock a brand name in America, he had been dissatisfied with the limitations the financially struggling studio had necessitated upon the production. He had always had it in the back of his mind to remake it, American-style, in color, wide screen, and with top-of-the-line American movie stars in the leading roles.6
In January 1955, riding the crest of the popularity of Rear Window, for which he had just been nominated by the Academy for Best Director, Hitchcock began to actively work on a new screenplay for The Man Who Knew Too Much, using Window’s writer John Michael Hayes, who had also been nominated.7 He wanted to expand the characters, and also to focus on what would become the middle of a three-part trilogy of fifties films, beginning with Rear Window, which would chronicle the joys—or more accurately, in Hitchcock’s world, the nightmares—of the rituals of romance, marriage, and loss. Having more or less dealt with the first aspect in Rear Window, Hitchcock wanted to keep the same actor for all three parts, while rotating the leading women. The idea was ingenious, the effect extraordinary.
He went to Wasserman to sign Jimmy, and immediately agreed to the same participation deal he had given the actor for the first film.
Finding a leading lady would prove far more difficu
lt. Hitchcock did not want to use any of his normal repertory of gorgeous ice blondes, because it would defeat the notion that he was trying to explore: what happens in a marriage when children serve as the vacuum for the heat, and the parents are no longer attracted to each other? The underbelly of all this fell into familiar Hitchcock-style Freudian turf; what happens when a wife turns into a mother? How do you continue to regard her as your lover? To explore this, Hitchcock needed an attractive American movie star whose heat was not readily apparent, whose sultriness could be sublimated into a maternal visage, and whose acting could complement the equally sexless meowing of Jimmy’s character, Dr. Ben McKenna. That actress was Doris Day. According to Day: “Hitchcock and I met accidentally at a party. Neither of us had a reputation for being partygoers, and I think we were both surprised to meet in that setting.” Hitchcock then complimented her on her performance in a little-known film, Stewart Heisler’s 1951 Storm Warning, a noirish melodrama about the Ku Klux Klan, no less, in which she played the sister of the heroine (Ginger Rogers). Taken aback but nonetheless impressed by his knowledge of the movie, she was unaware that Hitchcock was also a fan of her singing style. As it happened, singing was crucial to the role he was setting her up for.
That initial meeting between them took place late in 1951, just after Hitchcock’s spectacular return to form with Strangers on a Train. I Confess, Dial M for Murder, and Rear Window had all followed, in rapid succession, after which Hitchcock convinced his other favored fifties doppelgänger, Cary Grant, to come out of retirement to make To Catch a Thief. In that film, he cast Kelly, Jimmy’s lover in Rear Window a year earlier, as a character strikingly similar to Lisa, Frances Stevens, a young beauty chased by an older man. This time, in contrast to the confines of a Greenwich Village back alley, Hitchcock shot his film in the wide-open spaces of Monaco and southern France. The drabness of the former mise-en-scène was in profound contrast to the latter’s glamorous one that reflected the difference between how Hitchcock saw Jimmy in his marriage-bound world and Grant in his single, emotionally unattached one, and Kelly’s reaction to both men in them.8
The entire Hitchcock oeuvre is made up of these kinds of cinematic crossword puzzles, as his leading men get caught up in adventures aided and abetted by beautiful marriage-minded women, or get caught up with beautiful single and exciting women who then play crucial roles in saving the day before they kill the thrill with marriage. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dr. McKenna makes his wife give up her career as a singer (her own adventure) for the sake of their marriage (his). In effect he enslaves her to unwanted domesticity, yet it is her singing “Que Sera, Sera” at the climax of the plot that not merely saves the political day but also suggests the ultimate failure of their rigid prefeminist, anti-individualist marriage.9
The story centers around Dr. Ben McKenna, his wife and young son on vacation in Marrakech, Morocco. On a visit to a marketplace, they witness a murder, the dying man whispers something to McKenna, and shortly thereafter his boy is kidnapped, “inadvertently” involving McKenna in an international assassination plot scheduled to take place at the Royal Albert Hall. The assassination gang has kidnapped McKenna’s child to ensure the doctor’s silence.
The plot is patently ridiculous—the best way to silence McKenna, of course, is simply to kill him. The details of the assassination are never disclosed, reducing the entire murder scenario to the familiar “MacGuffin,” the meaningless points and objects of the plot that Hitchcock’s movies are hung on (the radiation dust in Notorious, the jewels in To Catch a Thief, the entire Raymond Burr subplot in Rear Window, etc).10 What does count, and mightily, is how the endangerment of the McKennas’ son brings to the surface the suppressed but very real absence of his parents’ passion for each other, and in doing so reveals the dormant, inner strength of Mrs. McKenna—a mother’s indomitable spirit—strong enough to rescue her boy and prevent the assassination. The real tragedy in the film is not the attempted assassination and kidnapping, but the realization of the death of love. The climactic, and in many ways primal, scream, as Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto astutely points out, not only prevents the assassination but, with the force and fury of all that has been churning inside of Mrs. McKenna, “interrupts the harmony and order of the concert…the inevitable result of the clash of external and internal forces.” In this light, it is possible to see Ben and Jo McKenna as the projected nightmare of Jeffries’s fears of what marriage to Lisa will do to their relationship and their lives.
Day, not used to the distant silences used by Hitchcock as a way of nonverbal consent for his actors’ performances—he was not of the school that showed actors how to play a scene, but of the one that assumed they were skilled workers who knew how to do what was expected of them—early on wanted to quit the film, but was talked out of it by Jimmy, who took great pains to convince her she was doing really well in her portrayal of his screen wife. Day: “The first time I saw Hitchcock on The Man Who Knew Too Much I was with [costume designer] Edith Head, talking about my costumes. Hitchcock came in, wanting to see the sketches and discuss them. On that day he threw some of them out and was very precise about exactly what he wanted for my wardrobe.” It was a meeting that caused her a lot of turmoil because of Hitchcock’s distance, what she took as his uncaring attitude, apparently more interested in what she wore than how she performed.
“[Hitchcock] was very generous and lavish at the hotel dining room, ordering food from Paris and London, and insisting on the right wines for each course, but when we were shooting the exterior scenes in Africa I began to become very upset. He never said anything to me, before or during or after a scene, and so I thought I was displeasing him and I was crushed…. I told my husband it was obvious I should try to get out of the picture…. Hitchcock was astonished! He said it was quite the reverse, that he thought I was just doing everything right—and that if I hadn’t been doing everything right he would have told me.”
At Hitchcock’s urging, Jimmy took over the job of reassuring the actress that she was doing a terrific job. “In the beginning,” he said later, “it certainly threw Doris for a loop. She surprised a lot of people with her acting in The Man Who Knew Too Much, but she didn’t surprise Hitchcock, who knew what to expect from her. A singer’s talent for phrasing, the ability to put heart in a piece of music, is not too far removed from acting, in which the aim is to give life and believability to what’s on paper…”
“Hitch believed you were hired to do your job. You were expected to know your lines and carry your part. In Marrakech in Morocco I could see Hitch in the square amid complete confusion with all those extras in 110 degrees heat, in a blue suit and tie, sitting in a chair, waiting for the cameraman to get ready. Everything quieted down, and people did what they had to do. He then said, ‘Let’s move over here now.’ You know, I really don’t think he cared much for the spoken word. He was interested in getting those ‘pieces of time’ and he just used the words as little as possible. For example, the scene in Albert Hall. You remember the last part with the cymbal. The assassin was going to kill this man while the London Symphony is playing. During all this I’m charging up the stairs trying to tell Doris Day what’s happened to our kidnapped child. It was a long speech, and I had done it a couple of times. I had memorized about three pages of dialogue. Well, Hitch came up to me and said, ‘You’re talking so much, I’m unable to enjoy the London Symphony. Why don’t you just not say anything? Try to hold Doris and whisper something.’ Well, the audience was way ahead of the people we were playing in the film anyway. Hitch didn’t want words to get in the way. Words have their place, but you have to know when to use them.”
The film, a difficult shoot in the oppressive heat and with an unrelenting schedule, tension between Day and Hitchcock, and a forty-seven-year-old Stewart huffing and puffing to keep up with all the physical action of the filming, finally wrapped on August 24, 1955.
The Man Who Knew Too Much opened nearly a full year later in New York City’s Paramount
Theater, in May 1956, due to the studio’s desire to space out what had become a deluge of Hitchcock product. Although the critics were not blown away by it, many comparing it unfavorably to the original, much of what praise there was for the film went to its two leads. Variety singled out Jimmy for “ably carrying out his title duties,” while The Nation said that “James Stewart and Doris Day, faultlessly groomed and as smooth as marbles, earn their high pay with perfect studio performances.”11
The film wound up eighteenth of the year’s highest-grossing films.12