Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  On the first floor was the spacious, well-appointed sanctum of the head of the studio. On David O. Selznick’s desk was an omnipresent jar of cookies to alleviate his hypoglycemia; dangling from one wall was a photograph of his father, Lewis J. Selznick, whose fall from grace was never forgotten by his sons, and whose roller-coaster fortunes had even affected Hitchcock back in his Islington days. The Selznick executive advisers Daniel O’Shea (financial) and Henry Ginsberg (production) occupied adjacent niches. Hitchcock and Joan Harrison were assigned a comfortable suite with kitchen and bath in an outlying bungalow, where they resumed their work on the Rebecca script.

  Michael Hogan had moved to Hollywood ahead of the Hitchcocks to write Nurse Edith Cavell for producer Herbert Wilcox, and now Hitchcock paired him up with Philip MacDonald to complete a draft of Rebecca. A leading figure in detective fiction, the British MacDonald had lived in Hollywood since 1931; until this point his film credits were unexceptional, though notable among them were a number of installments for the Mr. Moto series starring Peter Lorre.*

  MacDonald was given the job of organizing the chain of suspense, while Hogan filled in with scene-by-scene ideas. On the page and in person both writers were witty, sophisticated personalities; they didn’t flaunt their egos, and they forged a deferential camaraderie with Hitchcock. Mrs. Hitchcock, the director’s uncompensated wife, joined with Joan Harrison and the newly hired hands to comprise five Hitchcocks collaborating on the script.

  Selznick, meanwhile, was so overwhelmed by Gone With the Wind that he gave little thought to Rebecca. The filming of the Civil War epic had begun on December 10, 1938, with the extravagant burning of Atlanta, and then consumed a record four months of photography; the final take—before retakes, that is—was recorded in April 1939, the month Hitchcock started work. Some seventeen writers and five directors had been deployed on Gone With the Wind. The unprecedented costs eventually soared above $4 million.

  Postproduction on Gone With the Wind, though, had just begun. The dubbing and looping, color values, optical effects, sound and musical scoring, editing, retakes and reediting—these were the producer’s real obsession, his chance to revel in eleventh-hour fine-tuning. A month into his contract, even Hitchcock was asked to ponder a reel of Gone With the Wind.

  “As I outlined on the evening of the 3rd of May,” he reported back, “I feel that the lack of suspense in this reel arises out of the fact that it is deficient in three main essentials.

  “(1) That the audience should be in possession of all the facts appertaining to Butler’s, Ashley’s, etc., efforts to get into the home which is surrounded by Union soldiers.

  “(2) That the audience should be shown surreptitious exchange of glances by the pseudo-drunken Butler and the character Melanie.

  “(3) That the end of the tension should be sufficiently marked as the Union soldiers depart with their apologies.

  “I suggest that these things can be remedied by the following method:

  “(a) To play the reel up to the commencement of the reading of David Copperfield and, instead of the LAP DISSOLVE to the pendulum, CUT AWAY to some location that has the house in sight and there show the desperate group of Butler, the wounded Ashley, etc. Establish that in the distance they can see that the house is surrounded; their bewilderment as to what manner they can pass the cordon; then, suddenly Butler has an idea. On this, we CUT BACK into the house and proceed with the reel until the family hear the arrival of the drunken group. Then, CUT outside to the drunks coming toward the house. Show Butler lift a sober eye in the midst of his mock inebriation, and from his eye-line show the military preparing to arrest their advance.

  “(b) Once inside the house it should be essential to see an exchange of meaning glances between Butler and Melanie in order that we know that she is in possession of the fact that they are only pretending to be drunk.

  “After the military has gone, there should be a slight movement, but Butler should hiss them to silence for a moment while he crosses to the window; and then, turning, give the all clear. From this tableau of arrested motion, the whole room-full break into feverish movement around Ashley, etc.”

  Hitchcock even supplied an ordered list of shots that might improve the sequence. Hal Kern, the editor of Gone With the Wind, digested his notes and reported to DOS that the Englishman “has a great mind and better picture ideas than anyone I have met in months.”* The producer could not help but be pleased by his new employee.

  At least through June, Gone With the Wind demanded Selznick’s unflagging attention. Hitchcock and his clique of writers were free to shape Rebecca.

  The casting began before the script was finished—in Hitchcock’s mind, at least.

  Indeed, just off the train on April 5, Hitchcock dashed off a cable to Robert Donat, urging him to consider the part of the aristocratic Englishman, Maxim de Winter (“his face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way,” wrote Daphne du Maurier), who cannot shake the curse of Rebecca. Aware that such a notion was premature and bound to offend David O. Selznick, who prided himself on his casting acumen, Dan Winkler sent the wire, but only under protest.

  Donat had just finished Goodbye, Mr. Chips, giving a performance that would eclipse Clark Gable’s in Gone With the Wind to win him the Best Actor Oscar for 1939. Yet DOS quickly scotched the idea of Donat, saying it would be impossible to get MGM-British to loan him to Hollywood—though he didn’t try very hard. Selznick’s preferred list included Walter Pidgeon, Leslie Howard, Melvyn Douglas, and William Powell. Among these names, only Powell, who specialized in gentlemanly comedy, intrigued Hitchcock Casting Powell as de Winter—that would really be casting against type. The English director had loved Powell in Libeled Lady, and met and liked the self-effacing star at one of Myron Selznick’s parties. Hitchcock was tempted by Powell, and his thoughts would return to him.

  Before leaving England, Hitchcock had said in interviews that the ideal leads would be Ronald Colman as de Winter and Nova Pilbeam as the second Mrs. de Winter. Colman was an actor DOS and Hitchcock could agree on—and another Myron Selznick client to boot. Hitchcock launched a concerted campaign to woo the mellow actor, whose debonair qualities had made him Hollywood’s romantic vision of an Englishman. Hitchcock made at least two visits to Colman’s home in May 1939. Although he was on pleasant terms with Colman—whose wife, Benita Hume, had played a tiny part in Easy Virtue and a more substantial one in Lord Camber’s Ladies—the actor refused to be pinned down. At first, Colman said, he relished the idea of starring in a Hitchcock film. But then he had second thoughts. He worried aloud about playing a wife killer, however sympathetic. In the end, Colman effectively demurred by signing for other roles in 1939, taking him off the roster of available leads for almost a year—longer than Hitchcock or Selznick could be expected to wait.

  The talk then turned to Laurence Olivier—the authoritative English actor, highly regarded for his interpretations of Shakespeare and the classics onstage, who had catapulted to stardom in Hollywood after his Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Though Powell was still in the running, Olivier gained the edge; in performance he was very much like de Winter—a riddle—and casting Olivier would also resolve a thorny issue for DOS, who wanted to keep Vivien Leigh, his Scarlett O’Hara, content during the long months of Gone With the Wind postproduction that he knew would last the summer and into the fall of 1939. Olivier and Leigh’s extramarital romance had fueled a scandal during Fire over England, and their love story was continuing, with “dirty weekends” away from the press as they sought divorces from their respectives.

  After Olivier signed on as de Winter, Leigh became the leading candidate for the second Mrs. de Winter, the nameless narrator of the book and film, who must solve the mystery of Rebecca’s demise and conquer her husband’s demons. A “raw ex-schoolgirl, red-elbowed and lanky-haired,” in du Maurier’s words, the second Mrs. de Winter is really the story’s central character. Almost desperate to claim the role opposite her future hus
band, Leigh agreed to audition for the part, with Olivier himself reading de Winter’s lines off-camera (a special consideration he didn’t afford to any of the other candidates). Leigh’s tests were a disaster, though, and according to David Thomson in Showman, DOS concurred with Hitchcock and director George Cukor, who helped with testing, that “she doesn’t seem at all right as to sincerity or age or innocence.”

  But who would be right in age and innocence? Hitchcock, early on, had voted with apparent sincerity for Nova Pilbeam, the English actress who had beguiled him in The Man Who Knew Too Much and Young and Innocent. Other accounts insist that the director, in private communications with DOS, questioned Pilbeam’s maturity, her ability to “handle in love scenes.” But to this day Pilbeam believes Hitchcock desired her for the part; he may even have disparaged her as a way of piquing Selznick’s interest. In the end, though, DOS said no to importing a nonentity.

  The auditions went on and on, through May and June. The process was a test of wills, but there was also genuine, torturous indecision. Hitchcock and DOS screened footage of top-tier leading ladies such as Margaret Sullavan and Loretta Young, as well as long shots like costume-drama blonde Anita Louise, and even sixteen-year-old Anne Baxter.

  Hitchcock had a monumental tolerance for sitting through screen tests. He would call for them less often in Hollywood, where they were more of a producer’s tool, and he preferred to meet with people informally rather than test them himself. But without the constant West End theatergoing that had stimulated his casting ideas in England, he was obliged to rely on tests; and he prided himself on an archival memory for all those he watched.

  But Selznick was more addicted to screen tests; in truth, the producer cared far more about casting than the English director, who preferred to get it over with. “I think he [DOS] really was trying to repeat the same publicity stunt he pulled in the search for Scarlett O’Hara,” Hitchcock said later. “He talked all the big stars in town into doing tests for Rebecca. I found it a little embarrassing, myself, testing women whom I knew in advance were unsuitable for the part.”

  Cukor and another American director, John Cromwell, both long accustomed to the Selznick routine, conducted some of the auditions. Watching test after test, Hitchcock’s mood soured, and his comments, especially about the more incongruous possibilities, could be caustic. Jean Muir, who never had good luck in Hollywood, he described as “too big and sugary,” while the unknown Audrey Reynolds was deemed “excellent for Rebecca who doesn’t appear.”

  Gradually, he divined the producer’s favorite: Joan Fontaine. In June 1938, at a dinner party at Charlie Chaplin’s, DOS had found himself seated across the table from the delicate blond ingenue. This “owl of a man,” in Fontaine’s words, sat up straight when the actress mentioned that she’d just read a thoroughly gripping novel called Rebecca. The producer introduced himself, and confessed that he’d just bought the film rights—would Fontaine like to test for the lead?

  It’s easy to chuckle at this implausible fairy tale—after all, Fontaine was the dinner date of George Cukor, a Machiavellian insider. The important thing is that the producer was smitten. A coquettish creature, not quite twenty-one, Fontaine was born in Tokyo to English parents; her older sister Olivia de Havilland—their feud was one of the liveliest in Hollywood—was better established, including her role in Gone With the Wind. Up to this point Fontaine was best known for a few quietly memorable roles, fumbling with charming ineptitude as Fred Astaire’s dance partner in A Damsel in Distress, keeping the home fires burning in Gunga Din. “Olivia de Havilland’s kid sister” hadn’t yet emerged as every Lothario’s vision of an English lady who could chill any man with frosty words, but whose expression hinted at naughtiness in the bedroom.

  Although it seemed obvious to everyone that DOS had fallen in love with Fontaine—from the end of June 1938 into early 1939, David Thomson says, the producer contrived to see her on almost a daily basis—their love supposedly remained platonic. And because she was more of a young cutie than the kind of major star Selznick had in mind for Rebecca, the producer dithered about signing her for the part.

  Hitchcock dithered too. After directing Fontaine’s first audition, John Cromwell announced that the search was over. Later, Hitchcock would insist that he had agreed with Cromwell, but at the time he was noncommittal. Selznick’s obvious crush on Fontaine made him nervous. Hitchcock “observed how much the gestation of Rebecca in David’s mind had had to do with his feelings for Joan Fontaine,” Thomson wrote.

  After reviewing Fontaine’s test footage, Selznick adviser Jock Whitney said he wasn’t convinced she should play the part—which carried weight with DOS. Nor was Alma Reville won over—which carried weight with her husband. Mrs. Hitchcock found Fontaine’s manner “coy and simpering,” her voice “extremely irritating.” In the end, though, the final decision was up to DOS; after a while the testing ceased, and everyone waited.

  Although Selznick had warned Hitchcock to stay faithful to Daphne du Maurier’s book, it is doubtful whether the producer himself had read more than a synopsis of the novel by the summer of 1939. Honor thy expensive source: it was a routine commandment for the producer—but an ironic one for Hitchcock, who already had the reputation of waving his wand over books and making them disappear.

  In early June the director turned over a lengthy treatment of Rebecca, and the document “shocked” DOS “beyond words.” Hitchcock and his writers had dared to tinker with du Maurier, introducing all kinds of new elements: from flashbacks depicting Rebecca, to an opening showing de Winter on a ship smoking a cigar and making his fellow passengers cigar-and seasick. The director had added a suspenseful car ride along a high rim, along with a host of comic incidents, and “well-observed moments of English domestic life,” according to Leonard Leff in Hitchcock and Selznick.

  Not too shocked to dictate a lengthy memo, DOS expounded on “the filmmaker’s responsibility to a popular novel.” The producer not only admonished Hitchcock—“We bought Rebecca and we intend to make Rebecca”—but, even more remarkably, also wrote to du Maurier behind Hitchcock’s back, reassuring the novelist that he had “thrown out the complete treatment,” and that he intended to force Hitchcock to film “the book and not some botched-up semi-original such as was done with Jamaica Inn.”

  DOS hated Hitchcock’s comic additions, and targeted them all for deletion—particularly the Hitchcockian seasickness, which the producer judged “cheap beyond words.” Selznick films were solemn entertainment, and the du Maurier novel certainly was humorless. Too bad that a Hitchcock film characteristically mingled light with darkness.

  Also targeted for deletion were the flashbacks. It was a little awkward that the whole novel was a flashback, from the opening line—“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again”—forward. And there was no way around de Winter’s account of Rebecca’s death, which had to be some kind of flashback, didn’t it? But Selznick didn’t care for flashbacks, and he hated the ones Hitchcock had devised—especially those portraying Rebecca, who never makes an appearance in the book.

  Worst of all, Hitchcock had tried to make the second Mrs. de Winter bright and amusing—a spunkier character, less of a victim. DOS insisted that Hitchcock return to the tone of the book, however, and carry over all of “the little feminine things which are so recognizable and which make every woman say, ‘I know just how she feels … I know just what she’s going through’ … etc.” As for de Winter, Selznick thought the character earmarked for Laurence Olivier as yet possessed “no charm, no mystery and no romance.”

  The conventional wisdom, relying largely on the voluminous memoranda in the Selznick archives, holds that the producer’s intervention immensely improved the film of Rebecca. David Thomson argues that the initial Hitchcock script was “crass and vulgar—Hitchcock was not a good reader, and he did not always grasp the depths of Daphne du Maurier’s writing.” Leonard Leff conversely notes that the director was a “voracious reader,” and one, moreover, who
was worried about the static quality of the novel.

  Bad reader, or voracious one? Hitchcock was a keen reader for his own needs, and in truth the treatment was relatively faithful to du Maurier. His innovations were arguable but modest. The comedy, the shipboard and car-ride scenes, the English ambience, the newly plucky leading lady’s part were characteristic Hitchcock touches he might have been expected to bring to any film.

  But the Englishman was on trial in Hollywood, and he knew how and when to bend to producers. The five Hitchcocks went back to work, freshly aware of the dangers of deviating blatantly from the du Maurier original.

  They produced a one-hundred-page draft by late June. Again DOS responded with detailed criticism, and again a new draft was crafted to his specifications. Once again the producer ordered reinstatement of original du Maurier elements: the second Mrs. de Winter had to be even more girlish, more of a nail-biting bumbler. Another draft emerged by the end of July, followed by more DOS memos; only then was Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Robert Sherwood hired for the final revision—the first of several writers Hitchcock drew from the famed Algonquin Round Table and the corridors of his beloved New Yorker.

  Taking a break from Gone With the Wind, DOS now freed himself up for regular script conferences with Hitchcock and Sherwood (and the omnipresent Joan Harrison). On sunny days, they convened aboard his yacht; at nights—for the producer loved to work long past midnight—they met at Selznick’s house. “Naturally Selznick dominated the scene—pacing up and down, apparently oblivious to those around him who were nodding off,” remembered Hitchcock, “and he did not even notice that the long, lanky Mr. Sherwood, having imbibed somewhat, was trying unsuccessfully to sail a small boat in the swimming pool. By dawn, of course, nothing much had been accomplished, but that was the producer’s way.”