Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Although the producer’s goal was to adhere to the book, not every issue—Rebecca’s mysterious fate, for example—could be resolved thus. In the novel, for example, it is revealed that de Winter shot Rebecca after she goaded him with the possibility that she might be pregnant with another man’s child. DOS knew better than Hitchcock that crime always met with punishment in Hollywood. If de Winter killed Rebecca (and there was no book or film if he didn’t), then he had to be punished. Otherwise, Rebecca could never hope to be passed by the Production Code, the clearinghouse of Hollywood censorship.

  Not until the last possible script stage did they hit on the solution: In the film it would be explained that Rebecca, secretly ill with a deep-rooted cancer, has died accidentally. She lies about her pregnancy by another man in order to provoke de Winter, who causes her to fall and strike her head on a heavy piece of ship’s tackle. (“I suppose I struck her … she stumbled and fell.”) Sherwood wrote the dialogue, but Hitchcock saw an opportunity to employ a characteristic visual device, which enabled him to avoid the flashback imagery. As de Winter confesses, the camera tells its own story, moving from object to object in the room—tea table, divan, cigarette stubs—hinting at certain details, but forcing the audience to fill in with its imagination.

  By the end of summer the script was finished, except for the nit-picking. Although Sherwood, the first and most important writer’s name on the screen, was undoubtedly the highest paid, the yeoman’s work had been done by everybody else. The producer’s main contribution was to restore the book’s precise dialogue whenever possible. Hitchcock, for his part, had long since accepted that few of his personal story ideas would make the cut in this, this first American film. He took consolation in his many small triumphs “off the page”: intimations brought out in the direction, visual flourishes he could indulge without compromising Selznick’s mandate to follow du Maurier to the letter.

  One scene that was carried over from the book was ingeniously transformed in the filming. In this scene the second Mrs. de Winter tells her husband that she has broken a precious china cupid, hiding the shards of the figurine in a desk drawer out of fear of the imposing housekeeper Mrs. Danvers. Mrs. Danvers is summoned and given an awkward explanation; de Winter snipes at his wife for her timidity.

  DOS had insisted on preserving du Maurier’s dialogue. But Hitchcock made a change in the staging, which scarcely affected the lines. The director, who had lately inaugurated his new life in America with his own home movies, has de Winter and his wife similarly occupied with 8 mm footage. As the scene begins, the pair are gazing at movies of their honeymoon, projected on a far wall. De Winter and his wife sit in the foreground, their faces strobed with light. Their enjoyment is interrupted by Mrs. Danvers, and the projector is shut off while Mrs. De Winter awkwardly explains about the figurine. After Mrs. Danvers departs, de Winter snaps at his wife, then apologizes brusquely, and restarts the projector. But the lingering tension in the room now contrasts with the carefree mood of the couple in the home movies.

  In desperation, Mrs. de Winter asks if her husband is happy. “Happiness is something I know nothing about,” he replies coldly (a du Maurier line). “Oh look,” he adds, pointing to the wall, “there’s the one where I left the camera running on the tripod, remember?” (A Hitchcock line.) From her crushed look, the camera pans to the home movies, where the honeymooners are still cavorting. It is far and away the purest Hitchcock moment in Rebecca.

  The summer of 1939 passed almost uneventfully as Hitchcock made steady progress on his first Hollywood film. The family settled into an American rhythm. They found a place of worship at the Good Shepherd Church in Beverly Hills, and a school for Pat in Marymount, a private academy for girls run by the Marymount order of nuns, on Sunset Boulevard in Bel Air. The family Austin was traded in for a new Chevrolet. Though Hitchcock pooh-poohed driving, insisting to interviewers that he didn’t even know how, he often chauffeured his daughter to school at Marymount, and for a long time drove her to Sunday Mass.

  In their heady early days in Hollywood, the Hitchcocks frequently attended premieres and nightclubs and the best restaurants—Perino’s, Romanoff’s, and Chasen’s. They were already well known to most film folk in the British colony, and were welcome guests wherever expatriates gathered. One of the persistent misconceptions about Hitchcock is that he was aloof from Hollywood’s English community. In truth he was friendly with many of them, and he and Alma were hosted regularly by the Cedric Hardwickes, the Reginald Dennys, and the Basil Rathbones (Hitchcock had known Rathbone’s second wife, Ouida Bergere, as far back as Islington, when she was married to George Fitzmaurice).

  Although David O. Selznick and his wife were known as fabulous party hosts, Hitchcock didn’t spend much time socializing with the couple after hours. Leonard Leff suggests that Irene Mayer Selznick never warmed to Hitchcock, though judging by their correspondence over the years they were cordial. One memorable evening that Hitchcock and DOS spent together was part business—attending the premiere of The Wizard of Oz in August 1939. Afterward the pair dined and drank, talking up a storm. “He’s not a bad guy, shorn of affectation,” DOS wrote his wife, “although not exactly a man to go camping with.” (Not that DOS was known for roughing it.)

  The brothers Selznick competed socially, too, and Hitchcock was taken under Myron’s wing after work hours. It was Myron who introduced the director around, made certain he met other producers, and got Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock (along with Joan Harrison) added to the buffet-style supper-party circuit and more intimate dinners thrown by stars and VIPs on the agency’s client list; Myron also invited them to Arrowhead Lodge for weekends. In their first months in Hollywood, the English newcomers kept up an intense get-acquainted schedule and befriended a regular circle of Selznick Agency clients, including actress Loretta Young, director Leo McCarey, the William Powells, and Carole Lombard and Clark Gable.

  Under the watchful eye of Selznick International, Hitchcock also met the Hollywood press. DOS prided himself on his salesmanship, and especially on the West Coast it was he who took charge of Hitchcock’s publicity. Hitchcock’s initial press coverage was low-key, but most of the director’s quirks are there in the first American newspaper and magazine articles about him. He liked to read history, biography, and travel books—not mysteries or thrillers. (A white lie, but good for publicity.) He did the eating, Alma did all the cooking. (Ditto.) He didn’t drive, because he was afraid of police. (Ditto.)

  Hungry for colorful details, the press seized on Hitchcock’s reputation for telling raunchy stories at elegant dinner parties, or falling asleep between courses. At one party, according to some accounts, Hitchcock caught forty winks amid an unscintillating conversation between novelists Thomas Mann and Louis Bromfield. Another time, regardless of his glamorous dinner partners—Loretta Young and Carole Lombard—the director dozed off at Chasen’s. “No one was ever quite sure how far these naps were genuine and how far he staged them impishly to test other people’s reactions,” wrote John Russell Taylor. Was it a defect in his makeup, or just part of the publicity?

  By August, the Hitchcocks were thoroughly integrated into Hollywood life. Increasingly uncomfortable in an apartment, they decided to lease a house. Carole Lombard mentioned that she happened to be vacating the house she was leasing at 609 St. Cloud Road in Bel Air, and moving into Gable’s ranch house in Encino. The Hitchcocks knew and liked the Lombard place, a furnished English-style cottage, and they made plans to move in in October.

  Hitchcock jousted with Selznick over Rebecca’s cameraman. He wanted Harry Stradling, who had shot Jamaica Inn with Bernard Knowles. But DOS wanted a cameraman loyal to the producer, and vetoed Stradling. (Hitchcock got Stradling later for Suspicion.) From Warner Bros. the producer borrowed George Barnes. There was nothing wrong with Barnes, who photographed many prestigious Hollywood films, save that his forte was a gauzy look that didn’t have much in common with Hitchcock. But DOS was a believer in the gauzy perfection of his leading
ladies.

  The art director would be Lyle Wheeler, the editor Hal Kern. They were longtime Selznick associates and part of the Gone With the Wind production team.

  Working for Selznick had its good and bad points, but Hitchcock made lasting friends at Selznick International, especially among the women. He cultivated long-term relationships with Anita Colby, the tall blond model known as the Face, who consulted on fashion and beauty for Selznick (she was known as the “Feminine Director of the Selznick Studio”); Barbara Keon, a key assistant on Gone With the Wind, who now was acting as a liaison between Hitchcock and Selznick; Margaret McDonell, a British editor in the story department; and Kay Brown, who proved a walking index of New York writers and actors.

  It was Brown who pushed for Judith Anderson, then appearing on Broadway as the Virgin Mary in a religious allegory called Family Portrait, to play the insidious Mrs. Danvers: “tall and gaunt,” in Daphne du Maurier’s words, “dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheekbones and great hollow eyes gave her a skull’s face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton’s frame.” Onstage Anderson had played Gertrude to John Gielgud’s Hamlet, but she had appeared in only one previous film, 1933’s Blood Money—an improbable gangster drama in which Anderson played a tough, gutsy character. Hitchcock, who had admired Anderson in plays for years, also remembered that film role, in which there was more than a hint of a potential Mrs. Danvers.

  Hitchcock himself tested one Florence Bates, a plump, middle-aged former lawyer whose previous acting experience was limited to shows at the Pasadena Playhouse. Though she was an amateur in Hollywood terms, Hitchcock gave Bates the part of Mrs. Van Hopper, the vain American dowager who employs Fontaine’s character as her traveling companion—“her fussy, frilly blouse a complement to her large bosom,” “her voice sharp and staccato, cutting the air.” Bates’s scenes have a humor and bite absent from the rest of the film.

  The film’s other featured parts were filled by members of the Lost Legion. George Sanders was cast as Rebecca’s bounder cousin Favell (“a big, hefty fellow, good-looking in a rather flashy, sunburnt way,” in the book); other roles went to Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce, Reginald Denny, C. Aubrey Smith, Melville Cooper, and Leo G. Carroll.

  With September looming, the final script was approved by the producer, and photography was slated to begin. Yet there was still no word on the leading lady. Vivien Leigh was hoping against hope, while Joan Fontaine had given up altogether. She had impulsively decided to marry English actor Brian Aherne, and her August 19 wedding, combined with the pressing start date of Rebecca, jolted Jock Whitney and David O. Selznick into action. A telegram reached Fontaine on her honeymoon in Oregon, congratulating her, and ordering her to report for wardrobe fittings right after Labor Day.

  Before calling action on the first take of Rebecca Hitchcock was already scheming to get away from David O. Selznick for his second American film. He had already sized up the producer’s cautious approach, his need to dominate directors, and he knew that any breakthroughs he might hope to achieve in Hollywood would have to be achieved away from Selznick.

  He also grasped the less obvious fact that Selznick International wouldn’t have a new project immediately ready for him to develop after he finished Rebecca. Selznick was still preoccupied by Gone With the Wind, immersed now in planning its massive publicity and advertising campaign. At this rate, the director knew he couldn’t possibly grind out another Hitchcock-Selznick production within the first year of his contract.

  The escape clauses in Hitchcock’s contract had been carefully crafted by Selznick to place control firmly in the producer’s hands. If the director’s weekly salary paid the Englishman as little as a third of what his best-respected colleagues were making, that didn’t seem to bother Hitchcock—at least not at first. What did bother him were the restrictions on his ability to make films for other producers.

  Under Hitchcock’s contract, DOS could approve or reject any loan-out—or invoke an annual layoff period. The contract obliged Hitchcock to make two pictures a year to earn his salary—two Selznick films, or one Selznick and a loan-out. But if DOS rejected the loan-out, as he had every right to do—and if no substitute assignment was mutually agreed to—then Hitchcock could be laid off, and would forfeit a portion of his salary.

  Even if Hitchcock managed to knock off two pictures inside of twelve months, DOS had the right to suspend his weekly paycheck for up to twelve remaining weeks each year.

  By the end of the summer, Hitchcock knew he was looking ahead to two or three months of photography and then postproduction on Rebecca. He knew he couldn’t possibly squeeze in a second film in the allotted months of contract time unless he shot another film from a producer’s fully prepared script, which he was loath to do. And he was desperate to know his next project, for “his financial position is such that he cannot afford a layoff,” as Dan Winkler advised Myron Selznick. By the time Selznick International yielded to common sense, granting Hitchcock permission to entertain proposals from other producers, the Selznick Agency had already spent months making covert contacts for him.

  Among the people who showed interest in the English director even before he finished his first Hollywood film were Loretta Young, who had struck up a rapport with him at parties; the former silent star Harold Lloyd, who operated a production unit at Paramount; and Walter Wanger, whose interest in Hitchcock had persisted since 1937.

  Wanger was the one with the most active program, and he wanted to produce a Hitchcock film as soon as possible. Primed by Myron Selznick, he had met with Hitchcock casually; now, in mid-September, with Rebecca entering its second week of photography, the director received Dan O’Shea’s official permission to talk with Wanger.

  As a directing prospect, Hitchcock had one curious shortfall: he didn’t own or possess any literary properties. He had never had the time, the inclination, or the financial wherewithal to keep a back file of stories or scripts to wave in front of producers. It wasn’t practical, and it wasn’t his style. He had always been a working professional under contract, who reviewed the available studio properties and then chose the project that best matched his sensibility.

  Starting over in Hollywood, when producers asked him what he wanted to do next, he found himself taking a shortcut and offering to remake one of his best-known English films, transferring the English settings and characters to America. A remake of a proven Hitchcock success was attractive to Walter Wanger. Lunching with Wanger in September, the director discussed transplanting The Man Who Knew Too Much to America. Or, if the producer preferred, Hitchcock could take The 39 Steps and craft a surefire sequel to it, using John Buchan’s second Richard Hannay novel, Greenmantle, which he had always favored anyway. Hitchcock even ventured that Robert Donat might be willing to reprise his role.

  Wanger was intrigued by Greenmantle, but knew it would take some time to negotiate the screen rights with the Buchan estate. Perhaps Green-mantle could be their second film together, Wanger suggested, already hoping for a long-term collaboration. In the meantime, the producer said, Hitchcock might consider taking over a troubled project called Personal History, whose off-and-on status had been splashed all over the trade papers.

  Personal History was a memoir by Vincent Sheean, an American newspaper correspondent who had chased headlines in foreign capitals during the 1920s. Ever since its publication in 1935, the producer had been piling up flawed scripts, trying unsuccessfully to turn the book into a Walter Wanger production. Wanger said he would be happy for Hitchcock to take over the challenge; for all he cared, as long as the story had an American foreign correspondent, Hitchcock could do anything he wanted—even change the book into a sort of The Man Who Knew Too Much, or an informal remake of The 39 Steps.

  Hitchcock didn’t need much convincing. Once he’d accepted, Wanger went after a deal with Selznick International. Wanger agreed to pay Selznick International $5,000 a week, only $2,500 of which would go to Hitchcock as his regular salary. But Wanger also agreed to employ
Mrs. Hitchcock for an additional $2,500 weekly, which Alma Reville could earn free and clear of Selznick, to whom, after all, she was not under any signed contract. Soon thereafter, as the director concentrated on Rebecca, Mrs. Hitchcock and Joan Harrison plunged into Personal History.

  On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and annexed Danzig; two days later England and France, which had mutual defense treaties with Poland, declared war on Germany. America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced, would abide by its Neutrality Act, which had been passed by Congress in the mid-1930s to keep the United States out of foreign wars.

  The war headlines shook the cast and crew of Rebecca. The director frantically phoned his mother, Emma Hitchcock, trying to convince her to come to the United States; but Mrs. Hitchcock refused to be uprooted, proud of having survived World War I in London. Alma was more successful with her family, and arranged to bring her mother and sister to America.

  Five days after Hitler’s invasion, Hitchcock commenced filming on Rebecca.

  Most of, the cast were professionals with sterling credentials. Hitchcock could trust their instincts, especially those of Laurence Olivier, just coming off his Oscar nomination for Wuthering Heights. Although his role in Rebecca was sketchier than that in Wuthering Heights, Olivier was always self-assured, even intimidating in performance.

  Hitchcock typically devoted more attention to his actresses, and that was true even in the case of Judith Anderson, whose charge it would be to convey—subtly enough to elude the censors—the peculiar closeness between Mrs. Danvers (“Danny”) and Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier had implied a protosexual bond between the women; two weeks before filming, the implication remained intact in the script. And now the Production Code office, known informally as the Hays Office, strenuously objected to “the quite inescapable inferences of sex perversion” in the film script.