Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Half nobly, half opportunistically, Myron Selznick stepped forward, volunteering to pay half of the twenty thousand dollars and coproduce the film with Hitchcock. Myron had produced films in the 1920s, and now he was itching to best his brother in that arena, too.

  One attraction of remaking The Lodger was the prospect that Hitchcock might be able to draw on his frozen English funds to pay his ten thousand dollars. But the director’s liquid assets didn’t run to ten thousand dollars, not even after he tossed in the value of his life insurance policy. Ultimately Myron had to loan Hitchcock his half of the rights fee, while Edmund Gwenn exchanged English currency for U.S. dollars to lessen the surcharges.

  The Lodger waxed, even as Greenmantle waned. Walter Wanger finally dropped out of the running, exhausted by all the hemming and hawing. DOS simply didn’t want to encourage a relationship with a producer who guaranteed bonuses, profit participation, and creative free rein. Shortly thereafter Wanger struck a bargain with Fritz Lang, setting up the type of close partnership with an illustrious director that he had originally sought with Hitchcock.

  DOS prided himself on knowing what was best for Hitchcock; he vetoed some offers out of hand. MGM, Warner’s, Twentieth Century–Fox, Universal, and Columbia—each discouraged for different reasons—were forced to push ahead with their immediate projects, sans Hitchcock.

  That left only RKO. RKO had the inside track with both Selznicks, and even Hitchcock wanted to please Carole Lombard. In mid-June, O’Shea approved a contract with the studio that gave Hitchcock one hundred thousand dollars per film for two sixteen-week productions. The first four-month period took into account “Mr. and Mrs.,” but also the extra weeks the director thought he would need to develop a proper scenario for the second Hitchcock-RKO production—which was specified in the contract as Francis Iles’s Before the Fact.

  As an incentive for Hitchcock to agree to the loan-out, O’Shea granted Hitchcock a $250 per week raise, bringing his salary to $110,000 a year. He was promised a bonus of $15,000 if he finished the two RKO films within one year’s time. (Selznick International would meanwhile earn a 100 percent-plus profit on Hitchcock’s RKO salary.)

  While traveling to England, Hitchcock could begin discussing the adaptation of Before the Fact with Joan Harrison. But there was something else on his agenda, another project left over from the list the director had drawn up in May: The Lodger. Hitchcock carried with him the English currency he had managed to scrape together, intending to option the remake rights from Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. And that is what he did.

  England in June 1940 was anxiously awaiting the feared Luftwaffe, which was busy installing itself on airfields within easy striking distance of London. Mothers and children were being evacuated from the cities as the men rehearsed for the Battle of Britain with blackouts and air raid sirens. Rationing was introduced. And it was in June that Winston Churchill made his dramatic plea for American aid; as film historian Mark Glancy notes in When Hollywood Loved Britain, the coda of Foreign Correspondent is “a subtle, filmic representation” of the same. “In God’s good time,” the prime minister declared, the New World, “with all of its power and might,” must step forth to rescue the Old.

  In London, Hitchcock met with his old friend Sidney Bernstein, who had just resigned the chairmanship of Granada Theatres and other directorships for an unpaid appointment as adviser to the Ministry of Information. At Bernstein’s behest the director agreed to make war propaganda films for England. He also helped to arrange the evacuation of orphans, and on the way back from England, passing through Ottawa, met with officials to “snip governmental red tape and complete arrangements to bring sixty youngsters from the Actors’ Orphanage in London to a safe haven on this side of the Atlantic,” according to published accounts.

  Of all the Britishers in his Hollywood cell group, ironically, it was Hitchcock—avowedly the least political among them—who found the earliest opportunity to “do his bit.” The tense atmosphere in London stiffened his spine, and influenced the new ending he would shoot for Foreign Correspondent—though Hitchcock’s RKO contract indicates that an up-to-the-minute ending, a postscript to the main story, had been discussed before his trip.

  Immediately upon his return, Hitchcock and Walter Wanger met with Ben Hecht to brainstorm the ringing speech that Joel McCrea delivers into a radio microphone at the end of the film, with bombs dropping on London and the broadcasting booth plunged into darkness. Hecht, one of Hollywood’s best-known, highest-paid writers—also among the speediest—took only a day to pen the curtain-closer, which cribbed from Churchill:

  “All that noise you hear isn’t static, it’s death coming to London. Yes, they’re coming here now. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes. Don’t tune me out—hang on awhile—this is a big story—and you’re part of it. It’s too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark and let them come as if the lights are all out everywhere except in America.

  “Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, ring them with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them. Hello America, hang on to your lights, they’re the only lights left in the world!”

  It was a speech “out of key with your kind of picture,” Peter Bogdanovich told Hitchcock, fishing for confirmation that it was forced upon him by the politically active producer.

  “It’s all right,” replied the director blandly. “It worked.”

  “Don’t you think it was the wrong package for all your fine thriller ideas?” asked Charles Thomas Samuels, in his equally extensive interview with the director.

  “Got me a telegram from Harry Hopkins!” responded Hitchcock.

  No wonder he remembered that telegram—proof that Foreign Correspondent was seen in the highest circles, by President Roosevelt himself, and his cabinet.*

  The coda was finished by the end of the first week of July, and the swift postproduction—rarely protracted on a Hitchcock film—was completed in time for an August 16 opening.

  The reaction of audiences in the summer of 1940, when the war dominated American and British headlines, cannot quite be appreciated at this remove. Though the political context of Foreign Correspondent was artfully disguised (the Germans never identified as Germans), the contrivance was so clever, as Mark Glancy notes, that “audiences in 1940 would have had no problem in decoding the story, and they may not have noticed that they had to decode it.”

  The film’s courageous immediacy, its “mingling of realism and fantasy” (New York Sun), elevated it into “easily one of the year’s finest pictures” (Time). Commonweal found Hitchcock’s new work “brilliant.” The perceptive Otis Ferguson, writing in the New Republic, said that Foreign Correspondent provided “a seminar in how to make a movie travel the lightest and fastest way, in a kind of beauty that is peculiar to movies alone.” By contrast Rebecca was “fooling around,” wrote Ferguson, “not really a bad picture,” but inferior to Foreign Correspondent, and soaked with “a wispy and overwrought femininity.”

  The blitz attacks launched by Germany on England on September 8 made the ending especially prescient—a “flash forward,” with McCrea’s radio address eerily presaging Edward R. Murrow’s famous broadcasts from a blacked-out London.

  All the more peculiar, then, that only a week after Foreign Correspondent opened in the United States, producer Michael Balcon was quoted in London and New York newspapers denouncing the “famous directors” of England who had elected to hide out from the dangers of the war in Hollywood, “while we who are left behind shorthanded are trying to harness the films to our great national effort.” Although Balcon didn’t mention Hitchcock by name, he made no bones about citing “a plump young junior technician” who the producer said had been promoted upward “from department to department” by Balcon himself.

  Balcon’s comment was one part of “a particularly virulent campaign of abuse,” as Sidney Bernstein’s biographer Caroline Moorehead put it, in which the absent Hitchcock was more
than once smeared in the English press. Back in May 1940, Seymour Hicks had aimed a volley at expatriates “gallantly facing the footlights,” and proposed a film titled “Gone With the Wind Up,” to star Charles Laughton and Herbert Marshall, with Hitchcock behind the camera. And J. B. Priestley, just a few days after Balcon, took part in a shortwave broadcast that made similar accusations against the British in Hollywood.

  Balcon, Hicks, Priestley—they had all had past creative differences with Hitchcock. But Balcon had been a friend, and his widely circulated remarks were an especially low blow, with their shameless dig at Hitchcock’s weight. According to John Russell Taylor, both Hitchcocks felt “deeply upset,” but what could the director say? That he was doing everything he could behind the scenes? That, with Foreign Correspondent, he was flouting both the Hays Office and the Neutrality Act? That Selznick had him shackled to his contract and returning to England was inconceivable? That, having gone broke moving to Hollywood, he could hardly afford to move back? That he was overage and, yes, sadly overweight?

  That Lord Lothian, Britain’s ambassador to the United States, had publicly declared in July that “all British actors of military age”—up to thirty-one—should return home, but that older Englishmen “should remain at work until new regulations about military age were issued”?

  Balcon should have known about Lord Lothian’s statement—as he should have known about a gathering in Hollywood earlier in the summer, when the British consul told Hitchcock and other Britons that it was “not desirable,” in the words of actor Brian Aherne, who attended, “that we should all rush back to England, which had plenty of manpower for the foreseeable future but not equipment.” Members of the British colony were asked, temporarily, to contribute to war charities and to make themselves available for speeches or public events. Only a small number—David Niven, for one—actually did return and don combat uniforms.

  Balcon should have known about Forever and a Day, the upcoming charity film Hitchcock had signed on for. If he’d been better friends with Hitchcock, he might have known that the director had already volunteered to make war into films for England’s Ministry of Information.

  In truth, Hitchcock conducted himself admirably during World War II, doing war work steadily, often secretly, and never grandstanding. In spite of his own financial concerns, he gave time and money in generous amounts to wartime causes. From the very beginning of the war, he was wholeheartedly involved, and to the end of his life the full extent of his involvement was never publicized.

  Pressed by the Selznicks—and Mrs. Hitchcock—the director felt obliged to issue an uncharacteristic press statement saying that Balcon’s remarks were inspired by jealousy “colored by his own personal experiences in Hollywood, which have invariably wound up unfortunately for Balcon. He’s a permanent Donald Duck.” Hitchcock added pointedly in the press release, “The manner in which I am helping my country is not Mr. Balcon’s business.”

  Yet Balcon did not relent immediately. In fact, he and other prominent Britishers took surprising umbrage at Foreign Correspondent when it was released in England. Balcon, Dilys Powell, Paul Rotha, and other prominent figures signed a letter in the Documentary News Letter following the English premiere, denouncing McCrea’s staunch radio speech as the blatherings of “an irresponsible American news-hound” whose call to U.S. arms was “an insult” to the English “army of civilians” who would inevitably turn the tide.

  According to John Russell Taylor, only a short time later Balcon was “unofficially informed” of Hitchcock’s various contributions to the war effort, and “soon regretted” his very public remarks. “The harm had been done,” wrote Taylor; the insinuations of Balcon and others have left a lingering impression of Hitchcock as a shirker.

  Both Hitchcocks were hurt, and “Alma especially found it hard to forgive a number of the things which had been said about Hitch in Britain during the early days of the war,” wrote Taylor. The controversy hardened her “resolve to stay permanently in their new home.”

  The Hitchcocks celebrated the success of Foreign Correspondent by putting down a deposit on their first American home, in northern California. They had become friends with Joan Fontaine’s parents, the G. M. Fontaines, who lived in Los Gatos near Santa Cruz. After hearing of their interest in viticulture, the Fontaines recommended a search in the Vine Hill area. The search led to a nine-room Spanish-style house and estate known as the Cornwall Ranch, or “Heart o’ the Mountain,” first built in 1870. At the end of Canham Road near Scots Valley, the two-hundred-acre property overlooking Monterey Bay was shaded by giant redwoods and included tennis courts, stables, and a winery across Highway 17. The purchase price was forty thousand dollars.

  The summer of 1940 was crowded with activity. Besides the trip to England and the purchase of a new home, the completion of Foreign Correspondent, and the start of his contract with RKO, Hitchcock was endeavoring to launch himself as the host of a national radio series.

  The director had been a fan of English radio, but found it easy to transfer his affection to American radio programs, which he listened to whenever he had free time in the evening. He enjoyed the musical presentations but also the dramatic series. American radio was in its golden age, and the nighttime shows were a sort of campfire of the airwaves, around which unseen friends gathered for evocative storytelling. Hitchcock listened to the shows for relaxation, but also to pick up ideas for writers, actors, and stories.

  With his capacity for what is nowadays called multitasking, Hitchcock thought he could preside over a radio series practically in his spare time. Radio would mean excellent publicity, not to mention added income.

  The idea of putting Hitchcock on the radio had originated in the publicity department of United Artists, which distributed Walter Wanger’s films, back in January 1940. It was United Artists who first facilitated contacts with New York advertising agencies and producers, who thought Hitchcock might “more or less do a ‘De Mille,’” pointing to Cecil B. De Mille’s regular stint as host of the Lux Radio Theater.

  Wanger endorsed putting Hitchcock on radio mainly for the promotional value—at that point he and Hitchcock were talking about a long-term association—whereas the Selznick Agency was motivated by the financial considerations. Myron’s brother David, as usual, was the chief skeptic. Wasn’t radio déclassé? Wouldn’t a radio series take too much of Hitchcock’s time—time better spent on prestigious Selznick films or better-paying loan-outs? And if Hitchcock did apply himself to radio, wouldn’t DOS be entitled to his usual cut?

  Throughout the spring of 1940, the director squeezed in meetings and phone calls and memos, dreaming up an Alfred Hitchcock radio series. Radio producer Joe Graham saw Hitchcock as emcee of a weekly anthology program presenting the favorite detective stories of famous people; the first episode, hypothetically, might be based on a story of President Roosevelt’s choice. But Hitchcock told Graham he wasn’t a fan of detectives per se—he was generally more interested in the victims and criminals—and the concept evolved, after a few meetings, into a series of mystery melodramas of Hitchcock’s choosing, with him introducing and producing. The series would be called Suspense.

  But the meetings and preparatory work were suspended after DOS decided he didn’t want his director wasting valuable energy on a radio program over which Selznick International exerted no control, and for which it was unclear who would receive the payment. Myron tried to budge his brother—this is one instance where the agency aggressively pursued Hitchcock’s wishes—but, as was becoming typical, without effect. DOS was adamant: No radio series. Because the contract with DOS was ambiguous when it came to nonfilm activity, Hitchcock wasn’t convinced it was the producer’s prerogative. But lawyers for the director and the agency warned him repeatedly against skirting the contract.

  Shrewdly, then, Hitchcock floated an idea: What if he exercised his newly acquired rights to The Lodger for radio? Not only would that help him establish a foothold in the broadcast medium, but a we
ll-done radio show would enhance his prospects of remaking the film.

  DOS reluctantly okayed a radio production of The Lodger as a onetime experiment. Hitchcock borrowed two of the main actors from Foreign Correspondent: Herbert Marshall as Mr. Sleuth (the Lodger) and Edmund Gwenn (whose English currency had helped secure the rights) as the landlord. (This was an in-joke: his brother Arthur Chesney had played the part in Hitchcock’s silent film.) The Lodger was broadcast as an audition in the Forecast series on July 22, 1940.

  The ending of the radio show, like the novel, left open the question of whether the Lodger was the killer stalking London. Before the end of the show, an actor playing Hitchcock interrupted the presentation and asked viewers to write in and vote on the ending—and the Lodger’s true identity. Viewers were also urged to write NBC to request a regular Hitchcock series, but despite an “overwhelming” number of letters, according to Martin Grams Jr. in Suspense: Twenty Years of Thrills and Chills, the series didn’t make it on the fall 1940 schedule. DOS had absolutely refused to give his permission. The Suspense concept was shelved until 1942, then revived without Hitchcock; it would enjoy an acclaimed twenty-year run on American radio.

  From that initial flirtation with radio, however, Hitchcock took away a stubborn yearning to shape a suspense series for national broadcast. Around this time he also made his first contacts with New York publishers and agreed to edit his first book of suspense stories. Last but not least, a New York adman working on the radio series had come up with the idea of dubbing Hitchcock “the Master of Suspense.” That was snappier than “the Master of Melodrama,” as Selznick had promoted him for Rebecca, and more accurate.