Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  It is unclear whether Charles Bennett, busy trying to reposition himself in Hollywood, learned what Hitchcock had told Sam Goldwyn about him—that he was primarily a constructionist. At least this remark, which Bennett’s agent—Myron Selznick—also wished he could expunge from the record, was made in private. Now the able scenarist of Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, and Young and Innocent read, between the lines of America’s most prestigious magazine, that the director did not think he was a truly “fine writer,” and that Mrs. Hitchcock, Joan Harrison, and sundry dialogue specialists were required to bolster Bennett’s scripts.

  A deeply dismayed Bennett wired Hitchcock: “APPARENTLY HARMLESS STATEMENT YOU MADE TO NEWSPAPERS WAS ACTUALLY NOT PLEASANT FOR ME … IN ALL INNOCENCE YOU NEARLY PUT YOUR FOOT IN IT FOR ME.

  Although Hitchcock swiftly wired an apology for the misunderstanding, the writer felt mortally wounded. Almost certainly the combination of what was said to Goldwyn and what appeared in the New Yorker torpedoed any likelihood that Bennett would write Hitchcock’s first American film.

  Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who were militant in support of writers, were doubly outraged—on Bennett’s behalf, but also their own. They, not Hitchcock, had “selected” The Lady Vanishes. Their initial script, which the director had praised, was written without any input from him. They regarded the article as self-aggrandizement at their expense.

  Even before the New Yorker hit newsstands, Hitchcock must have realized that the article overstepped some bounds, because he tried a preemptive maneuver. One day he and Gilliat were discussing the Jamaica Inn script at Cromwell Road, according to Gilliat, when Hitchcock mentioned with elaborate casualness that a forthcoming publicity profile of him in an American magazine cited him as claiming that he wrote “99.44 per cent” of all his scripts. Hitchcock assured Gilliat that “that doesn’t apply to people like you and Frank, who I regard as real writers.” That ham-handed compliment bothered Gilliat all the more.

  But Hitchcock himself gave a copy of the magazine to Gilliat, and no more was said for the time being. Controversy was stirred anew in December, however, when snippets were recycled in Viscount Castlerosse’s widely read column in the Sunday Express.

  The occasion was the opening of The Lady Vanishes. The new Hitchcock film had begun to collect rhapsodic reviews, and Gilliat couldn’t help but feel that critics were giving the director what he and Launder regarded as undue credit for their screenplay. Upset by the reviews and by Castlerosse’s exaggerations, Gilliat told Hitchcock, “I think you ought to cover us over that.” The director pleaded, “It’s not my fault.” Gilliat insisted, “I’m not saying it is your fault, but I’d be terribly grateful if you would correct it with regard to The Lady Vanishes.”

  But the director issued no public corrections, even after the recently formed Screen Writers Association wrote him a formal letter protesting the now widely published assertion that he was the closet writer of all the Hitchcock films. Launder sent him a caustic telegram: “I DON’T LIKE OUR 0.8 PER CENT BEING BELITTLED.” The director then tried to make light of the whole brouhaha, sending back a series of joking telegrams signed by his mother, pointing out the dubious origins of the statements and how his words had been widely distorted. Launder struck back with another barbed telegram, this one addressed to Emma Hitchcock, saying, “MY SON FRANK SAYS THAT HE WON’T PLAY WITH YOUR SON ALF ANY MORE BECAUSE HE’S A BIG BULLY WHO STEALS ALL THE MARBLES. SIGNED ETHEL LAUNDER.”

  Although he made jokes himself about being a “big bully,” Hitchcock detected the veiled reference to his weight, and the barb stung. According to Gilliat, Hitchcock was “very insulted,” and the issue was dropped with bad feelings all around. Hitchcock subsequently offered Gilliat a chance to come to Hollywood with him and write Rebecca, but Gilliat declined—partly, he said later, because he disliked the book, partly because he nursed a grudge. (In any event DOS said no to paying for some chap named Gilliat he’d never heard of.)

  In later interviews, Gilliat would consistently misrepresent this incident and blow it out of proportion, while disparaging Hitchcock as an odd, “very destructive character.” Bennett, who found it difficult to forgive Hitchcock, made similar comments. Because they both lived long lives and gave numerous interviews, they helped further the idea that the director thought all writers were cattle too—another persistent phantasm in the Hitchcock legacy.

  Meanwhile, Joan Harrison, whom Hitchcock was cultivating as a writer, earned her first on-screen credit as coscenarist with Sidney Gilliat on Jamaica Inn—a gesture intended to pave the way for her to launch her career in Hollywood. Alma Reville also worked on the script, receiving her now customary credit: “Continuity.”

  The postproduction of Jamaica Inn was left to Erich Pommer; Hitchcock certainly wasn’t sticking around for its release. Yet the film proved surprisingly successful with audiences, and even with critics—though more so in the United States, where Hitchcock was on a roll, than in England, where his departure for Hollywood left a sour taste with reviewers.

  As with Waltzes from Vienna, the experience of Jamaica Inn reminded Hitchcock that at heart he was a poet of the present day who got lost whenever he tried to muck about in a make-believe past. He vowed never to make another costume film, though it was a vow he usually forgot whenever a new costume story came along to tempt him.

  For the moment, Hitchcock was anxious to settle the question of his first American project. For a long time, David O. Selznick remained maddeningly undecided between the “Titanic” film or Rebecca … or a third tantalizing possibility that never quite formed on his lips. One bulletin from Selznick International had Hitchcock directing an adaptation of The Flashing Stream, a London play regarded as a likely vehicle for Carole Lombard. When Hitchcock cabled to ask what had happened to “Titanic,” DOS cabled back that he was postponing it, but that Hitchcock should not tell the press: DO NOT WANT TO GIVE IMPRESSION THAT WE HAVE RELAXED PLANS FOR TITANIC LEST SOMEONE ELSE BE ENCOURAGED GO AHEAD WITH IT.”

  Hitchcock had hoped to start work on the “Titanic” script as early as August, but Selznick’s vacillation forced him to tread water instead with exploratory research. As of September 21, Variety was still reporting Rebecca as Hitchcock’s second Selznick project, with “Titanic” probably the first; as late as November 2, Hitchcock was visiting the Board of Trade in London to assure skeptical officials (“they seem to think that if I recapture all the horror and violence of the situation it will stop people going on cruises”) that his “Titanic” picture would glorify British seamanship and heroism, and promote recent advances in lifesaving measures.

  By the time DOS decided conclusively on the first Selznick-Hitchcock production, it was mid-November—and the decision was Rebecca. Although Hitchcock might have been happier with “Titanic,” by then he was glad for any go-ahead. After Gilliat recused himself, and before filming on Jamaica Inn was complete, Hitchcock put the initial continuity in the hands of Alma and Joan Harrison; they were joined by Michael Hogan, a onetime actor with Granville Barker’s and Tyrone Guthrie’s troupes, who was married to actress Madge Saunders.

  Hogan was known for playing the father on The Buggins, the first, hugely popular “radio family” on English airwaves, and for collaborating with the show’s creator, Mabel Constanduros, on various radio and theater material. An actor attuned to dialogue and characterization, Hogan was the proverbial “extrovert who is prolific in ideas and situations” (in the words of Russell Maloney) whom Hitchcock liked to have as his sounding board. Hitchcock paid Hogan out of pocket at first, hoping to get the jump on Rebecca. Besides, the Hitchcocks liked the Hogans’ company; they all went out together to the theater and nightclubs.

  Hitchcock also tried to push ahead with the casting, since knowing the actors would help with writing the characters. He thought Maureen O’Hara, fresh in his mind from Jamaica Inn, might be the right young actress to play the new wife whose existence is overshadowed by the d
ead Rebecca. But DOS had never heard of O’Hara, and the producer cabled Hitchcock: MUCH TOO EARLY TO ADVISE CASTING.

  For Selznick it was much too early for anything; he was still completely absorbed with making a film out of Gone With the Wind. The costs of that production were ballooning out of sight, and the last thing DOS wanted to do was to siphon off money and energy to another film. Hitchcock, on the other hand, coasted to a finish on Jamaica Inn in late November, and expected to sail for America after the first of the year. He counted on drawing his salary from Selznick International beginning in January.

  When the producer informed him that he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on Rebecca until late February at the earliest, Hitchcock was incensed. That would mean weeks of idle, unsalaried time, but not enough time to squeeze in another film in either England or the United States. When he asked DOS to pinpoint a date, DOS wired him back: “SORRY CAN’T BE OFFICIAL OR DEFINITE.” After thinking it over, DOS said unhelpfully that he didn’t think he could focus on Rebecca “much before March or April.”

  With such vague noises from DOS, the director angrily insisted that Myron Selznick find him another quick job—immediately. Hitchcock sorely wanted to reduce his NONEARNING PERIOD BETWEEN JAMAICA INN AND COMMENCEMENT SELZNICK CONTRACT, according to the telegram he sent his agent in Hollywood.

  Other Hollywood producers, meanwhile, hovered in the wings. Arthur Hornblow Jr. at Paramount stepped up to offer Hitchcock a rock-solid March 1 start date on a studio-approved project. Hitchcock was inclined to say yes—but it turned out that he couldn’t say yes without DOS’s consent; furious to be pushed on a point of pride, Selznick insisted that he, and only he, would produce the first Hitchcock picture in America.

  What finally broke the logjam, and lit a fire under DOS, was not Hitchcock’s mounting pique, or the offers of other producers. It was the naming of Hitchcock as Best Director of 1938 in late December by the New York Film Critics. His latest film to reach America, The Lady Vanishes, struck the New York critics of that year—as it strikes most viewers today—as a total delight, as inventive a creation as any Hitchcock film to date.

  Alarmed that his open-ended agreement with the year’s Best Director might allow Hitchcock free rein to freelance for his rivals, the producer volunteered amended terms that would make Hitchcock exclusive to Selznick International for two pictures a year, one of which could be a loan-out—though only if circumstances were agreeable to both parties. Added value to Hitchcock came in the form of an increased annual (as opposed to per-picture) salary, which would kick in automatically in April regardless of any further postponements by Selznick. The built-in raises also improved on their previous agreement.

  Hitchcock consented to this very quickly, by telephone, and happily finalized his departure. With some awkwardness, he managed to extricate himself from the Jack Buchanan picture he had tentatively agreed to direct. For tax purposes his association with J. G. Saunders was liquidated, though Saunders would continue as his English accountant for the rest of his career. The director arranged to lease his flat on Cromwell Road and the cottage in Shamley Green. Furniture was placed in storage.

  Hitchcock had twiddled his thumbs for over two months. Now—sooner than DOS wanted him, but later than Hitchcock might have wished—he, his family, and Joan Harrison sailed from England on March 4, 1939. The bon voyage party that enlivens the beginning of Foreign Correspondent gives a hint of the scene: a crowd of friends, drinks and toasts, and the funny tender moment when his mother kissed him good-bye and wished him good luck.

  * Joe Beckett was British and Commonwealth Heavyweight Champion from 1919 to 1923. Billy Wells, British and Commonwealth Heavyweight Champion from 1911 to 1919, also acted small roles in films, sometimes billed as Bombardier Billy Wells, Incidentally, he is the man who bangs the gong at the beginning of all the Rank films.

  * A copy of the New Yorker floats by amid the other debris during the opening credits of Lifeboat. Once in Hollywood, Hitchcock would recruit several writers from the magazine’s masthead.

  * Young and Innocent was feebly retitled The Girl Was Young for the United States—and, as usual for Hitchcock, suffered cuts (often for censorship, but in this case, inexplicably as a means of reducing its running length). It would be interesting to know if Selznick saw the unfortunately truncated U.S. version, with the blindman’s buff scene at the children’s party deleted.

  * Of course the most famous and best-paid Hollywood directors did not volunteer information about their salaries.

  *

  * Edwin Greenwood, playing a pirate named Dandy, died prematurely shortly after the filming. Sidney Gilliat, in a later interview, didn’t hesitate to blame Greenwood’s death on Hitchcock. “Hitch could easily have sent him home, as you didn’t really see the individual characters in the middle of those rolling waves and wind machines; but Hitch went on shooting and poor Edwin went down with pneumonia and died shortly afterwards. I felt that could have been avoided and that Hitch was to blame for what happened.”

  PART 3

  HOLLYWOOD

  FEAR AND DESIRE

  EIGHT

  1939–1941

  This time, as Hitchcock crossed the Atlantic for good, there were clouds on the horizon that he couldn’t ignore. War clouds. Professional clouds. He was on the verge of forty, of middle age; and now, halfway through his life and career, he had to start over in a country that still felt alien to him.

  The Lost Legion of British film industry exiles had filled Hollywood with actors and actresses who made cozy salaries playing European types in American films. A small group of British-accented actors even became stars. But few Englishmen before Hitchcock had managed to carry successful directing careers to the Hollywood system.

  And Hitchcock would discover early that films about murderers were considered another lowbrow specialty in Hollywood—partly because “in America,” as he observed in interviews, “crime literature is second-class literature.”

  He moved to Hollywood, he said later, fully realizing that he was “a minor figure in a vast film industry made up of entrepreneurs who headed the studios.” It was a system dominated by producers, not directors, and by the stars under studio contract who reigned at the box office. The studios supervised the writers and scripts; they calibrated the glamour of their leading ladies; they designed the “look” of their productions. Directors weren’t expected to second-guess production designers or cameramen. They weren’t expected to think like writers or editors.

  When Hitchcock, a quintessential Englishman, came to Hollywood, he was entering an industry that was quintessentially American. On the boat to the United States, as he tried to relax, he must have wondered if he was doing the right thing. If he had stayed home, he knew, he would easily have reigned for years as the greatest filmmaker in all of England.

  His welcome was orchestrated by Selznick International and Albert Margolies, who was now retained personally by the director to handle his East Coast publicity. A guest lecture was arranged at the Yale School of Drama, where Hitchcock reportedly impressed the students with his knowledge of English theater; in another event at Columbia, he addressed a class on the “History of Motion Pictures.”

  Presiding over a press dinner at “21,” over champagne and steaks Hitchcock was asked to name his ten favorite films. The list, which readers were assured he “thoughtfully selected,” included two Cecil B. De Mille films. De Mille’s Saturday Night, a 1923 feature starring Leatrice Joy, he ranked his overall favorite. It was followed by The Isle of Lost Ships (Maurice Tourneur, 1923); Scaramouche (Rex Ingram, 1923); Forbidden Fruit (De Mille, 1921); Sentimental Tommy (the 1921 version of James Barrie’s novel, directed by John S. Robertson); The Enchanted Cottage (the 1924 version of Arthur Wing Piñero’s romantic drama, also directed by Robertson); E. A. Dupont’s Variety (1925); Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928); Charles Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925); and the depression-era drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). All bu
t the last title—a socially conscious wronged-man story, which Hitchcock liked enough to praise again in the New York Times ten years later—were silent pictures, made before 1928.

  The Hitchcocks took time for a ten-day visit to Florida and the Caribbean, leaving New York by train on March 16, and flying from Miami to Havana, then at the height of its mystique as a hot spot for international high society. Wherever he went his films were bound to follow, and Hitchcock would include nods to Cuba as a fascist haven in Saboteur and Notorious, and make Castro-era political intrigue a centerpiece of Topaz.

  The director and his family returned to New York via rail on March 27, and departed for California four days later. They passed through Chicago, then crossed Middle America to arrive at the Pasadena depot on April 5. Myron Selznick was among the official greeters, though after a round of pleasantries they were turned over to Dan Winkler.

  The Selznick Agency had leased for the family a three-bedroom apartment in the Wilshire Palms on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, a new high-rise with a view of the mountains and ocean. The Selznick International studio was only ten minutes away by car. Joan Harrison was installed in a suitable apartment in the same building.

  Although Hitchcock later insisted he “wasn’t in the least interested in Hollywood as a place,” he eagerly settled in. Eight-millimeter home movies, which he shot from the open seat of a convertible as they toured the city, capture the English family’s exultant mood.

  “The only thing I cared about was to get into a studio to work,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut, and by Monday, April 10, he was rested and anxious. On that day he reported to the Selznick International lot on Washington Boulevard in Culver City, a mile east of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. There stood a white colonnaded mansion modeled after Mount Vernon and erected by Thomas Ince during the silent era, now owned by RKO and leased to Selznick, for whom it served as both headquarters and distinctive logo. To the rear of the main building sprawled eight sound-stages and a forty-acre back lot, with vegetation that could be artfully disguised as any exterior in the world.