Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Hugh Stewart had moved on, so Hitchcock found another young studio editor, Derek N. Twist. (He, too, would later become a prominent director and producer.)

  The casting was Hitchcockian all the way: The director chose Berlin-born Lucie Mannheim to play the exotic spy who attaches herself to Hannay during the ruckus and gunfire at the music hall, at the start of the film. Hannay scoffs at her tale of a secret network of foreign agents, until she is (rather implausibly) knifed by an assassin in his flat in the middle of the night. Hitchcock’s generation could appreciate the subtext: Mannheim had been a prominent actress-director in Germany, and playing a character bent on saving England was her first job since fleeing Hitler; The 39 Steps launched a second career for Mannheim in English film.

  Onetime matinee idol Godfrey Tearle, who had played Romeo in a silent film, was countercast as the sinister spy chief of The 39 Steps, who “can look like a hundred men” but cannot disguise the missing “top joint of his little finger.” Wylie Watson was the unerring Mr. Memory. John Laurie was cast as the Scottish crofter, while Peggy Ashcroft, appearing nightly as Juliet opposite John Gielgud in Gielgud’s production of Romeo and Juliet, accepted a rare screen role as the crofter’s wife. Hitchcock “attended all her major stage performances and admired her boundlessly,” according to her biographer, Garry O’Connor.

  All along Hitchcock had envisioned a certain actor as the embodiment of John Buchan’s gentleman adventurers. He had seen the handsome, magnetic Robert Donat onstage in Shaw’s Saint Joan, in which he played Dunois, and in James Bridie’s The Sleeping Clergyman, in which Donat famously acted a dual lead: a tubercular medical student and a doctor hero; and he had noticed the actor’s “queer combination of determination and uncertainty.” Recently, while under contract to Alexander Korda, Donat had made screen inroads in The Private Life of Henry VIII, which had been an unprecedented U.S. success for a British film, and then done well in Hollywood in The Count of Monte Cristo.

  After making arrangements with Korda and Donat, Hitchcock looked around for a leading lady who might rival Donat in the looks and charm departments. His first choice was Jane Baxter, a genteel German-born English actress who had just finished making The Constant Nymph. But Baxter had made a “verbal promise” to appear in a play whose production dates clashed with the film; so Hitchcock thought next of Madeleine Carroll.

  Carroll’s acting expertise had been questioned by some critics, but her cool blond beauty—Hitchcock, with his “precise sarcasm,” noted Ivor Montagu, described the actress’s appearance as “glossy”—had made her one of England’s top box-office attractions. The director had known her since the late 1920s, when Carroll was an up-and-comer playing smallish parts in lesser B.I.P. pictures, shot on the other side of the wall from Hitchcock’s major productions. In person, he knew Carroll to have “a great deal of joie de vivre,” in his words; she was amusing and unaffected. On-screen, though, her persona was icy, forbidding. When Carroll came in for a meeting, Hitchcock pointed out the discrepancy and gave her one of his favorite bits of acting advice: Be her natural self. (It was sensible advice, of course, but it often mystified actors: where was the acting in being yourself?)

  The first trap was laid. Donat and Carroll weren’t acquainted, and Hitchcock deliberately did not introduce them until the first day of photography in the studio, in the spring of 1935. Immediately after the two shook hands, Hitchcock handcuffed the two of them together for their scene on the moors—a brief, almost perfunctory scene, an odd choice for the first day of shooting. Then, after recording a few takes, Hitchcock announced that he’d lost the keys to the handcuffs. “I must find them,” he muttered—and left the stage. Minutes passed—hours, according to some accounts—before he returned.

  Handcuffs were a favorite Hitchcock prop—and had been added to Buchan’s story for the same reason they were added to Mrs. Belloc Lowndes’s. Freud was a hot topic at Cromwell Road, and Hitchcock counted on the sadomasochistic implications. The handcuffs “brought out all kinds of thoughts in [the audiences’] minds,” Hitchcock explained in one interview. “For example, how do they go to the toilet was one natural, obvious question. And the linking together is a kind of—I think it relates more to sex than anything else.”

  As co-conspirator Dickie Beville pretended to go searching for Hitchcock, the stars fidgeted, then grew flustered, then developed the very problem Hitchcock had imagined: how to go to the bathroom. They were annoyed with Hitchcock, but also with each other—and before long they were acting not unlike their characters.

  “There was nothing else to do, so we talked of our mutual friends, of our ambitions, and of film matters generally,” Donat later recalled. “Gradually our reserve thawed as we exchanged experiences. When Hitch saw that we were getting along famously, he extracted the ‘missing’ key from his waistcoat pocket, released us, and said, with a satisfied grin, ‘Now that you two know each other we can go ahead.’”

  More traps were laid. Carroll’s father was a distinguished professor of French at Birmingham University, and Hitchcock soon took to calling out, “Bring on the Birmingham tart!” The director was dead set on making every assault on her dignity he could, to prepare her for her on-screen indignities. “We deliberately wrote the script to include her undignified handcuff scene and being led out from under the waterfall looking like a drowned rat,” recalled Ivor Montagu.

  Adopting an attitude toward his actors that the story took toward their characters: it was a Hitchcock strategy rarely expounded upon; perhaps it was subconscious, but it was effective. Breaking down Pamela’s frosty armor was one way of getting Carroll to “be herself.” The handcuffs left her with some bruises; the jokes and sarcasm stung. But Carroll “took it all in grand spirit,” Donat recalled, and Hitchcock responded by building up her part on the set, so “it turned out to be considerably more important at the end than we had originally intended.”

  Hitchcock wasn’t often as tough on his leading men, and Donat was given a long leash. But the actor could be a bit of a clown, and during the crofter scenes Hitchcock had to apply the brakes rudely at one point when Donat and Peggy Ashcroft developed the giggles. After several attempts to restore order, the director exploded—smashing his fist into the bulb of a studio lamp. His violence startled them all, and they finished up soberly.

  The iron fist was always there, lurking in reserve. But for all that, the crofter interlude was especially well done, a harrowing tintype of a young farm wife living in domestic captivity. The last shot of Ashcroft, poised in the doorway to follow Donat as he flees, then turning back inside with palpable regret, is as heartbreaking a shot as ever filmed. Markedly different in tone from the rest of the high-spirited picture, the crofter section comes closest to achieving the director’s stated ambition for The 39 Steps as “a film of episodes”—a rapid succession of turnabouts, sudden changes of pace, each, in his words, “a little film unto itself.”

  The last shot of The 39 Steps is striking. It’s a particularly dense composition: backstage, as he lies dying, Mr. Memory delivers his last performance to the police, with chorus girls dancing and kicking onstage in the background (undoubtedly a process shot). Hannay and Pamela are viewed partially from behind, standing over the dying man. As the shot fades and the camera moves in close, they reach out to hold hands, Hannay’s handcuffs still dangling from his wrist. Hitchcock had originally envisioned a different final moment, with Hannay and Pamela heading off in a taxi after getting married. Hitchcock shot that scene, but at the last minute decided against it.

  There are people who insist that the two stars imitated their characters, falling in love during the filming. It’s a rumor that’s impossible to confirm at this remove—but Hitchcock enjoyed watching people fall in love on his watch, whether during one of his films or at one of his soirees. He was capable of matchmaking, or meddling brutally if he thought the pairing was wrong.

  On camera, though, Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll assuredly did fall in love. And The 39 St
eps, a hurtling suspense story at its core, also works as a perfectly pitched romance. To Carroll, who shone as never before in this film, the director often paid his highest compliment, telling interviewers “the first blonde who was a real Hitchcock type was Madeleine Carroll.” More than once he took “a great deal of credit” for launching her as a sex symbol.

  Donat, who spent his “happiest months in a film studio” on The 39 Steps, according to biographer J. C. Trewin, was also launched into a new stratosphere. He emerged from his Hitchcock experience anointed as a man of the people, “the British equivalent of a Clark Gable or a Ronald Colman playing in a purely national idiom,” according to C. A. Lejeune.

  Even John Buchan was pleased. Appearing as a guest of honor at a banquet following the London premiere, the author publicly declared the Hitchcock film superior to his own book. The admiration was mutual: Buchan (Canada’s newly appointed governor-general) and Hitchcock became occasional lunch partners, and for the next forty years the film director would flirt with adapting another Buchan novel.

  When The 39 Steps was released, audiences flocked to see the new Hitchcock film. Critics hailed it—first in England, then in America (“one of the fascinating pictures of the year,” Andre Sennwald rhapsodized in the New York Times)—as Hitchcock’s best, most entertaining to date.

  The interest from Hollywood was still percolating. Although Hitchcock continued to stay in touch with the Joyce-Selznick Agency (Donat was one of their clients), some job opportunities were rejected by Gaumont before he ever heard about them. American offers were “skillfully parried by [Michael] Balcon,” wrote John Russell Taylor, “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.”

  He still wasn’t making dizzy money, but by 1935 the Gaumont contract had made Hitchcock prosperous. He had begun to accumulate an art collection, and maintained two homes. Cromwell Road was the home office, where Mrs. Hitchcock continued as her husband’s closest collaborator and severest critic—the only critic, he liked to say, whose opinion he feared. Shamley Green was where friends and the extended family congregated on weekends—Hitchcock’s mother, but often his brother and sister too.

  Viewed by all as a well-mannered but precocious child, Pat Hitchcock turned seven the year The 39 Steps was produced; after finishing preschool, she began classes at Mayfield, a Catholic boarding school. With Pat in school, Mrs. Hitchcock could immerse herself more in her husband’s films, although she no longer kept hours at the studio as before.

  Between films there was always time set aside for rest and travel, regularly to Paris and the south of France, and often to Italy. After The 39 Steps the family made a trip to Rome, where, among other things, Hitchcock had arranged a private audience with the pope. The immediate family was often accompanied on vacations by Hitchcock’s mother, and sometimes by his favorite relatives, Nellie and Teresa. Another frequent guest was Joan Harrison, by now the director’s amanuensis and increasingly accepted as part of the family.

  More than one close associate observed that Hitchcock preferred the company of women. Women surrounded him, assisted and insulated him professionally.

  One difference between Hitchcock and so many other directors was that he was a staunch family man—a facet of his character that belies the image of a man obsessed with murder and evil. A surprising number of his films, especially in the first half of his career, were in one sense about true love, and protecting one’s marriage and family.

  Another difference is that directors in this era were so often notorious for exacting a form of droit du seigneur with actresses. Not Hitchcock: though there are gaps and ambiguities in his record. He was sometimes capable of questionable behavior.

  At parties, if Alma was not there and he had drunk too much, he was capable of pawing a woman or grabbing at her behind. One of his tricks was to kiss a woman hello or good-bye, then surprise her by thrusting his tongue inside her mouth. He wasn’t immune to crushes on young actresses, though never famous ones. Now and then he would escort a crush around the studio in fatherly fashion, waiting and watching—eternally waiting and watching.

  There is no evidence Hitchcock ever engaged in a full-fledged affair. And certainly any fantasy of his promiscuity is suspect, given the fact that he was sexually impotent.

  Before Masters and Johnson’s groundbreaking Human Sexual Response in 1966, impotence—or “phallic fallacy,” as they dubbed it—was a little-understood condition. Today its various causes, psychological and physical, are better known. Impotence can be triggered by a variety of circumstances, from poor circulation to alcoholic intake. Masters and Johnson were also careful to cite the possible “monotony of a repetitious sexual relationship” and “preoccupation with career or economic pursuits.”

  Any combination of these possibilities is applicable to Hitchcock—especially his weight, which was aggravated by excessive eating and drinking. In his era impotence, usually a source of major embarrassment, was not widely diagnosed or discussed.

  Right around the time that Masters and Johnson published their study—the sort of book Hitchcock might have sought out in advance, in galleys—he began to drop public hints to interviewers about his impotence. He confided to more than one person around the time of The Birds that he had long been “chaste.” He liked to say he’d only ever had sex once, to conceive Pat—and that he found the mechanics unpleasant. “I was so fat I had to conceive my daughter with a fountain pen!” was a joke he was fond of making, even in front of Alma.

  “I know that Hitch was functionally impotent,” said writer Jay Presson Allen, who became close to him on Marnie, “because of everything he said to me. I don’t think it bothered him that much. I think he used it in his work. Everything was channeled into the work.”

  When François Truffaut asked Hitchcock why his love scenes were so charged with intimacy and passion, the director brushed off the question. “I don’t get any particular kick out of doing that sort of scene myself,” he replied. “I’m a celibate, you know. I’m not against it, but I just don’t think about it very much.”

  “Yes, but your pictures are full of it,” Truffaut persisted.

  “Maybe that’s the outlet, eh?”

  Chaste and celibate were code words, adding a poignant subtext to all those voyeuristic men peering through binoculars and windows and keyholes in his films. Hitchcock wouldn’t have been the first director with a seemingly happy marriage to chase after the occasional fling. But he felt himself to be odd-looking, and probably irretrievably impotent. The circumstances had to be perfect, as circumstances rarely are. He wasn’t a chaser; he was a watcher and a waiter.

  At least once, in the 1930s, he was fortunate in the circumstances. It was after a holiday gathering at Cromwell Road—as likely as not, just after The 39 Steps. After small gifts were handed round, the inebriated guests piled into taxis to head off to another party. Mrs. Hitchcock was tired and stayed home, while the director chanced to sit snugly next to a young actress, whose gift had been a toy tin trumpet. They handed the trumpet back and forth, trying to get a squawk out of it, but Hitchcock, red-faced and squirting laughter, couldn’t deliver. The actress said it was very simple; it was like a proper blow job. And how does one perform a proper blow job? the innocent inquired, laughing harder. Upon which the actress got down on her knees and demonstrated.

  Only a few believed this anecdote, which Hitchcock saved for private on rare occasions, although it may have inspired the oft-stated public version: “An English girl, looking like a schoolteacher, is apt to get into cab with you and, to your surprise, she’ll probably pull a man’s pants open.” Only a few believed a similar tale, later, involving Ingrid Bergman. But as his many published interviews demonstrate, Hitchcock was a relatively truthful man—sometimes an exaggerator, rarely a liar. And so even this story may very possibly be true.

  Nearly all of The 39 Steps was shot with
in the confines of Lime Grove. One exception is the scene where Hannay escapes his pursuers by leaping out of a train speeding along what English audiences would have recognized as the main northeast rail line, stretching over the mile-and-a-half-long Forth Bridge, just north of Edinburgh. The day or two of location filming that scene required was all the budget could afford.

  The Gaumont years were not luxurious, but undoubtedly they were Hitchcock’s happiest in a studio. Lime Grove hummed like a college campus with the brightest students and youngest professors. And the work was Hitchcock’s oxygen—he was always starting up his next film while finishing another. By the time The 39 Steps was showing in theaters, the script of his next project, Secret Agent, had made it through several false starts, and was nearly ready to go.

  On the surface, the new film—based on a series of related Somerset Maugham short stories published as a book—was a third consecutive spy-saboteur story for Hitchcock. But the new one would take audiences down a different road. Success and stability in the director’s life had a way of driving him toward darkness and depth in his films.

  “The Traitor” and “The Hairless Mexican” were among the stories collected in Maugham’s Ashenden, or The British Agent. Gaumont owned the rights to the book and also to an Ashenden play written by Daily Telegraph critic Campbell Dixon.

  Again, Hitchcock would use the stories mainly as a springboard. He and Charles Bennett—still his chief constructionist—borrowed their two principal characters (Ashenden and the “hairless Mexican”), a locale (Switzerland, conveniently one of Hitchcock’s favorite places), and the premise of “The Hairless Mexican” (that Ashenden, assigned to assassinate a foreign agent, kills the wrong man). Little else came directly from Maugham.