Wanger’s rival was another respected producer, this one with ties to the Selznick Agency that were hard to beat. Myron’s younger brother David O. Selznick had just separated from MGM and founded his own company, Selznick International Pictures. In his mid-thirties, DOS (the acronym by which he was widely known) was more inclined toward glossy films aimed at female audiences, often adapting middle-class literature with high-class craftsmanship. Wanger and DOS were both consummate salesmen of their films.
But from the moment he joined the competition for Hitchcock, DOS claimed the inside track. Besides being Myron’s brother, he was married to Irene Selznick, the daughter of MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer. DOS had connections with several studios, and close friendships with New York investors who facilitated his grandiose ambitions. By the spring of 1937, DOS had elbowed Wanger aside, declaring his intention to bring Hitchcock to Hollywood. But it would be fully two years before he succeeded.
Hitchcock’s financial predicament was more complicated than has been previously understood. He needed a high salary to offset the taxes he would have to pay to live and work as a nonresident alien in the United States. Selznick Agency memos estimated that the director could expect to pay at least $9,000 in U.S. taxes on a potential $50,000 annual income, or slightly more than $6,000 if he were to accept a $40,000 annual salary.
In England, Hitchcock was now making in the neighborhood of $35,000-$40,000 yearly. (When, for example, Balcon tried to sign Hitchcock to a contract with MGM-British, offering £15,000 annually, the offer was initially rejected purely on salary terms, which one Selznick memo dismissed as “ridiculously low.”) Still, it wasn’t dizzy money, especially by Hollywood standards, and if Hitchcock didn’t extract a substantial raise over his current wage, he would actually suffer a loss of income in Hollywood, after relocation expenses, American taxes, and British surcharges.
All the negotiations between Hitchcock and Hollywood were framed by two important considerations. The first was the salary issue. Hitchcock and the agency decided the minimum amount he could accept for directing one picture was $50,000. This was still less than was earned by other name directors in Hollywood, but Hitchcock was aware that he didn’t yet have the U.S. box-office record of, say, Frank Capra or Howard Hawks.
The trickier issue was that Hitchcock was determined not to abandon England for a single-picture deal. Otherwise he would have taken the MGM-British offer, with its built-in likelihood of a loan-out to MGM-Hollywood. He was practical enough to know that he would have to prove himself to an American producer by making at least one contract film. But Hitchcock the artist was anxious to ensure that any deal he made would preserve his ability to make Hitchcock originals.
Though he realized that he would be closely tied to his benefactor at first, what Hitchcock really wanted was two years of opportunity on American soil, and the freedom to work outside of his contract when an opportunity arose. From the first discussions with both Wanger and DOS, then, Hitchcock asked for a multipicture, multiyear agreement, with an escalating salary, to ensure that any temporary loss in income or professional standing would be offset by the long-term chance to prove himself.
He said he would accept $50,000 for the first year, but only if guaranteed $75,000 for a second. And from the start he insisted on his right to approve his assignments, or any loan-outs arranged by his producer.
Hitchcock was a canny negotiator. He understood that all these demands—the multipicture contract, the salary escalation, and the project-by-project veto privilege—made him a hard sell, so he took the lead in shaping the arguments on his own behalf, sweetening the proposition for potential buyers.
From the earliest negotiations he emphasized that his wife and creative partner, Alma, would work on all the Hitchcock films without taking any salary. He said he would toil beyond what was expected of the typical director and outside the normal time frame of involvement. He promised to steep himself in script development, scouting, and research, preparation in every category of preproduction, vowing to work without salary for up to eight weeks “previous to starting production,” in the words of one agency memo—no big sacrifice for Hitchcock, according to the memo, as he preferred “to work and write on his own stories” anyway.
This offer of free scriptwork actually may have backfired as a bargaining chip. Hitchcock didn’t yet appreciate that he was negotiating with a system where, as a matter of policy, scripts were developed not by directors, but under the firm control of producers.
Sabotage, renamed The Woman Alone, was just opening in New York, and Gaumont had booked a miniretrospective of The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and Secret Agent into revival houses. To publicize the films, Gaumont agreed to defray the costs for a trip to New York. The Selznick Agency urged the director to seize the moment.
As soon as Young and Innocent was finished, the Hitchcocks (including nine-year-old Pat) boarded the Queen Mary for America. They were accompanied by Joan Harrison.
The crossing took six days, but boat travel soothed Hitchcock. He happily lounged on deck, watching the waves and the passengers with equal pleasure. Whenever asked to define perfect happiness, Hitchcock answered: a blue sky without any clouds. “A clear horizon,” he told television host Tom Snyder in 1974, “not even a horizon with a tiny cloud bigger than a man’s fist.”
According to a subsequent account in Life, the Englishman astonished his fellow passengers “by reciting the ports of call and times of arrival and departure of all ships sighted at sea.”
One fellow passenger was the actor Cedric Hardwicke, whom the Hitchcocks had admired in West End plays (he was Churdles Ash in the original stage production of The Farmer’s Wife). Hardwicke’s friendship with the family was cemented on the voyage; Hitchcock later cast him in pivotal roles in Suspicion and Rope, and several times in Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Talking with François Truffaut years later, Hitchcock wondered aloud why he had waited so long to visit a country he had followed since boyhood, like a favorite sports team. “I was meeting Americans all the time and was completely familiar with the map of New York. I used to send away for train schedules—that was my hobby—and I knew many of the timetables by heart. Years before I ever came here, I could describe New York, tell you where the theaters and stores were located. When I had a conversation with Americans, they would ask, ‘When were you over here last?’ and I’d answer, ‘I’ve never been there at all.’”
Ostensibly the Hitchcock party was on vacation, as the director insisted in interviews. But anxious to settle on a new project, he, his wife, and Joan Harrison spent their spare time brainstorming stories. Hitchcock told the press they were working on a script called “False Witness,” intended for Young and Innocent star Nova Pilbeam, which involved “her con-man father and alibis.” If that didn’t work out, he had another film in mind, “based on a pet theme of his.” He said he’d nurtured “a long-felt desire to take a comic situation and suddenly switch to tragedy—to experiment on the effect of slapstick under fairly sane conditions.” He thought he might open a film “with a half-dozen Keystone cops crawling out of a tunnel, while a thug stands over the exit with a club and hits each one coming out. Wouldn’t it be interesting to show a close-up of the sixth cop with blood trickling down his face—comedy suddenly turned sober—and then cut to a picture of his family in agony over his misfortune?”
Of course the real reason for the trip was to further Hitchcock’s American ambitions. The Hitchcock party was met at the docks by Katherine “Kay” Brown, an eagle-eyed talent and literary agent who worked for David O. Selznick in New York. (Brown was the scout who first recommended Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic Gone with the Wind to Selznick.) While Hitchcock busied himself with interviews promoting The Woman Alone, arranged in advance by Gaumont’s U.S. publicity director, Albert Margolies, job interviews were set up by the Selznick Agency.
Hitchcock lost no time making an impression with David O. Selznick’s associates. The director a
nd his family spent a weekend on the beach at the East Hampton home of Kay Brown, who had a daughter Pat’s age; he lunched with John Hay “Jock” Whitney, scion of an old-line family—a sportsman, millionaire, and show business investor.
Both of these trusted Selznick advisers were won over by Hitchcock in person—a good thing, since DOS was stuck in California, preoccupied with plans to film the Margaret Mitchell novel, the most expensive production he had ever undertaken. But Selznick spoke with the director at least once—their first known personal contact. Walter Wanger, similarly preoccupied with one of his films in progress, also phoned Hitchcock.
But this first conversation with Selznick wasn’t quite what the director had hoped. DOS had been apprised of the MGM-British offer, and startled Hitchcock by recommending that he grab the MGM deal. If Hitchcock signed with MGM-British, he could still work with Selznick on a loan-out through MGM, with whom DOS had an ongoing relationship, while saving Selznick the risk and cost of bringing Hitchcock over entirely on his own. DOS seemed oblivious of Hitchcock’s own urgent needs and desires; there was no discussion of any specific project, or any attempt to negotiate.
Myron Selznick’s staff went to work massaging MGM and Selznick International, trying to connect and concretize the loan-out options. Though his discussions with Hollywood producers remained largely offstage, Gaumont publicist Al Margolies made sure that the rest of his Cook’s Tour of the East Coast was well documented by the press.
Typical tourist sightseeing was always on a Hitchcock itinerary, and the English visitors made a quick side trip to Washington, D.C., where they took a VIP tour of the U.S. capital. With little time to spare, they glimpsed the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, and other sites from the windows of a limousine, just like Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train, or the Soviet defectors in Topaz.
The English visitors also traveled to Saratoga Springs, New York, where Whitney took them to the races, a lifelong Hitchcock pastime. They gawked at the high-society spas and resorts with their rocking-chair porches. “I pointed them out to my wife,” Hitchcock later told a journalist, “and we stood and looked at them. If we have rocking chairs in England it is only as curiosities. But here you have them in real life as well as in the movies.”
Thinking ahead to Saboteur, they visited Rockefeller Center. With the eye toward authentic crime detail he would later put to use in The Wrong Man, Hitchcock dropped in on a police lineup and scrutinized the suspects.
He was coaxed by one journalist into visiting the theater where The 39 Steps was showing. Although the New York Times would report that he slept through his own masterpiece, the newsman who actually accompanied him, William Boehnel of the New York World-Telegram, insisted the director stood through the show, commenting only once, “and that was to complain because of the way a particular sequence he liked very much had been cut.” Afterward, outside the theater, Hitchcock was pleasantly surprised to encounter a swarm of film fans holding up glossy photos of him for his autograph.
While they were in New York, the Hitchcocks made the beaux-arts St. Regis on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street their headquarters. Hitchcock stayed in luxury hotels wherever he roamed, and in years to come he would adopt the St. Regis as his New York home away from home.
In his suite, between phone calls and interruptions, Hitchcock regaled the fourth estate. Mrs. Hitchcock (“a petite blonde, who doesn’t look as if she tipped the scales at more than 100,” according to one press account) flitted in and out on errands, while Pat (“a gracious little lass who curtsies prettily and says how-de-do”) was throwing a ball against a wall and trying to catch it on the bounce. Margolies ushered in the interviewers, including a man from the New York Times, Eileen Creelman of the New York Sun, and Janet White of Picture Parade. The director went on U.S. radio for the first time, interviewed by Radie Harris for Gertrude of Hollywood.
As canny as Hitchcock was with critics and journalists, he was learning the game in America. As open and comfortable as he was with the press, at times he could be too open, too comfortable—and end up hurting himself.
Up to this time, the American coverage of Hitchcock’s career had been scant, limited to a few interviews and brief items in New York and Los Angeles newspapers. His British coverage, of course, was far more expansive, but it had focused on his filmmaking techniques and the films themselves. England hadn’t yet developed the same appetite for celebrity gossip that prevailed with Hollywood personalities (though rarely, in truth, with directors).
It would have been unheard of in 1937 for the British press to dwell on a physical description of Hitchcock, or to sling gibes about his weight. But that quickly became the routine in America. The U.S. press was awed by his size, reported now at 250 pounds. Interviews often took place during dinner or drinks, and American reporters wrote down not only what he ate, but the jokes he made about his weight too. One paper described him as looking like “one of those jolly Sultans in an Esquire cartoon,” while even the staid New York Times found him “Falstaffian”—“a walking monument to the principle of uninhibited addiction to sack and capon, prime beef and flowing ale, and double helpings of ice cream.”
The press was delighted at what good company Hitchcock proved to be—and how infinitely “quotable” he was. In this first round of American interviews, it’s palpably clear that a star was being born. He held forth not only on film, but on anything that came up. His trip coincided with the heavyweight championship bout between American Joe Louis and Tommy Farr, the Welsh coal miner who was the British Isles underdog. Farr battled hard for the full fifteen rounds but ended up losing the decision, which many considered unfair. It’s unclear whether the director of The Ring took in the bout in person, or listened on the radio, but Hitchcock could extemporize. “Before last Monday night [the day of the fight],” according to one newspaper, “Mr. Hitchcock didn’t think much of Farr’s chances. ‘Just popped up out of nowhere,’ he said. After Monday he didn’t think so much of our Brown Bomber, but Farr had gone up a couple of notches with him.”*
Speaking of boxers, Hitchcock mentioned that former British and Commonwealth Heavyweight Champion Joe Beckett, “whom somebody in the room ungraciously referred to as the Human Pancake,” was running a pub somewhere, and that Bombardier Billy Wells, another former champ (“Strawdin’ry man, Billy. Great style, but no guts. Knock a fellow silly and then stand back as if to say, ‘My, My! Look what I’ve done!’”), had performed fight scenes in The Ring.
The “21” Club on West Fifty-second, where the rich mingled with the literati, was the place to dine—and Hitchcock moved in, giving interviews. Dining there with columnist H. Allen Smith of the New York Herald-Tribune, Hitchcock was reported to have eaten three of the club’s famous steaks, followed by three of its famous vanilla ice cream desserts, followed by a pot of its justly unfamous English tea. (Afterward, Hitchcock said he was sorely tempted to fling the teapot to the floor, as was his wont back in England.) Instead, the director puffed upstairs three flights to examine the choice meat cuts hanging in “21”’s cooler.
Smith’s interviews could be fanciful; a screwball newspaperman known for his practical jokes, he once “kidnapped” Albert Einstein to keep him away from a dinner in his honor; and his popularity as a humorist would soon rival that of his friends James Thurber and Robert Benchley. But he presented this superb performance with a straight face, and so did Hitchcock.
It was hardly negative publicity; still, it was the first whiff of a Hitchcock caricature that would soon become the director’s public face, for better and for worse. And heading home on the Georgic in the first week of September, Hitchcock felt disheartened. The talks with Hollywood producers had proved inconclusive, and the “fat” articles had wounded his vanity. The Hollywood Reporter, quoting London sources, reported that Hitchcock returned “rather disconcerted” that “the American press boosted him as an expert on food instead of Britain’s ace director.”
“Learning from experience” could
have been a motto for Hitchcock, though, and in time he would take the American fascination with his looks and personality and turn it to tremendous professional advantage. In time this puckish figure, a genial curiosity to the American press in 1937, would become the most interviewed, most profiled, and most written about and analyzed Hollywood director of all time.
For the moment, he was still a foreigner looking for an American home. The Selznick Agency tried once more to talk him into signing with Balcon and MGM-British as a surefire entree to Hollywood via David O. Selznick. All of Hitchcock’s instincts told him to decline. Balcon “was very possessive of me,” the director told François Truffaut, “and that’s why he was very angry, later on when I left for Hollywood.” But Myron Selznick succeeded in at least one crucial respect: he had convinced Hitchcock of his diligence. At last, the English director signed the papers to become an official client of the American agency.
Alfred Hitchcock was by any measure a self-made man. But even he had happy accidents that lifted him up at critical junctures in his career. Michael Balcon appointing him director of The Pleasure Garden was one such fortuitous event, if that anecdote is to be believed. The Lady Vanishes was another.
The Lady Vanishes was based on the 1936 suspense novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, a contemporary Welsh author who specialized in mysteries featuring endangered heroines. Producer Ted Black had bought the screen rights and commissioned a script in 1936. Second-unit photography actually started under an American director, Roy William Neill, in August of that year, with a few exteriors in Yugoslavia, but the filming encountered problems and the production was temporarily shelved.
The novel concerns an English socialite who takes a European holiday and is befriended by an elderly English governess during a long train journey. The governess disappears in the middle of the train trip, but not a single passenger will admit to having laid eyes on her. The socialite suspects a conspiracy, or foul play. When no one listens to her, and the facts prove elusive, she begins to doubt her own sanity.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 29