Having started out in Hollywood as a story editor, MacGowan was also helpful in devising the story’s initial characters and situations in collaboration with Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock—the latter working “on a voluntary basis in these preliminary stages,” in MacGowan’s words. As Alma herself later recalled for the studio legal department, these first conferences among the latest three Hitchcocks were “general in nature, tossing the story idea around between us, and discussions as to possible writers, the development of characters—the same kind of conversations we have had for years about every story in which Mr. Hitchcock was interested.”
The lifeboat project was leaked to columnists before Christmas; it was described then as the story of the passengers of a merchant marine ship, sunk by a Nazi submarine, who are “thrown into the ocean at the same time with a single life boat between them.” This led to a letter from a merchant marine official, offering to assist the project, and to mistaken reports in later accounts of how Lifeboat originated with the merchant marine. Taking up the cue, however, Hitchcock called on the merchant marine for research and authenticity, and his office began to fill up with accounts of ship disasters and rescues.
Before Christmas the lifeboat passengers were only tentatively described, but they already included two ship’s officers, a Canadian nurse, and, significantly, a “moderately well-to-do woman with her maid”—the former a character intended as a starring part for a name actress—and the enemy captain rescued after his German submarine explodes.
After the initial brainstorming, who should write the script? At first Hitchcock thought of James Hilton or A. J. Cronin. But then, fresh from his happy collaboration with Thornton Wilder, he thought of another leading American author: Ernest Hemingway. MacGowan had a long acquaintance with Hemingway, whom the studios were always trying to woo to Hollywood. The producer authorized an offer that would meet any conditions (“WITHIN REASON”) stipulated by the author of The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Late in December, MacGowan and Hitchcock sent Hemingway a lengthy cable at his winter home in Finca Vigia, Cuba, inviting him to write “A DRAMATIC NARRATIVE” of the lifeboat idea. The cable made it clear: “THE WHOLE STORY TAKES PLACE IN THE LIFEBOAT WITH THE CONFLICT OF PERSONALITIES, THE DISINTEGRATION OF SOCIAL INEOUALITIES THE DOMINANCE OF THE NAZI ETC.” Hemingway could name his price, and work from Cuba if he pleased. Hitchcock would be glad to meet with him at intervals in Miami. Whatever Hemingway wrote, MacGowan and Hitchcock felt certain, would be valuable; and, however much they used or discarded, Twentieth Century–Fox could look forward to exploiting the Hemingway name in advertising.
Christmas was celebrated in a new home: “a snug little colonial,” in Alma’s words, the director’s forty-third-birthday gift to his wife. The Hitchcocks had begun looking for a house of their own after Alma grew dissatisfied with what she considered the steep terms of their lease on the Carole Lombard place. More prudent financially than her husband, she had tried to get the owner to lower the monthly rate, and when that failed, Mrs. Hitchcock started house hunting. After a while she managed to find a house she liked: a story and a half, with painted white brick and gray-brown shingles, paned windows, and a porch and patio, just across from the Bel Air Country Club golf course. When Alma showed it to her husband he gave her a practiced look of indifference. But on location for Shadow of a Doubt, where they jointly celebrated their birthdays, Hitchcock gave his wife a new handbag; inside was a gold key to the front door of 10957 Bellagio Road.
The forty-thousand-dollar purchase price was secured by Hitchcock’s bonus for Saboteur, and by the money he received for finally selling his share of the rights to The Lodger. In the end Hitchcock was bought out by his partner, Myron Selznick, who then turned around and sold the book to a studio that had all along resisted the property—Twentieth Century-Fox. (Briefly a candidate for Hitchcock’s second film at the studio, The Lodger was ultimately remade by director John Brahm, with a cast that included Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Cedric Hardwicke, and Laird Cregar. Hitchcock was not credited in any capacity.)*
The first week of 1943 brought unexpected sad news. Hitchcock’s older brother, William, died on January 4, following his mother to the grave by less than six months. William Hitchcock’s death, at age fifty-two, came at his home in Guildford. The coroner’s report attributed his passing to “congestive cardiac failure, probably contributed to by the taking of paraldehyde, thus aggravating the cardiac failure and precipitating death.” (Paraldehyde was a nervous system depressant used as a sedative, and given to alcoholics to induce calm or sleep.) Based on an interpretation of the coroner’s report, biographer Donald Spoto calls the death an “apparent suicide”; moreover, because Hitchcock was absent from his mother’s and brother’s deathbeds, he asserts that “some of the filmmaker’s associates felt there was nagging and gnawing guilt festering” in his soul. Yet surviving family members say that Hitchcock’s brother was a heavy, melancholic drinker who mixed alcohol and pills, dying accidentally as a result.
When John Russell Taylor wrote his authorized biography of Hitchcock, the director asked for only two minor but revealing changes in the text. The first dealt with his personal acquaintance with convicted murderess Edith Thompson; the second concerned his brother’s drinking. When Taylor wrote that William’s death was hastened by alcoholism, Hitchcock asked him to take it out. “Do you really need that?” he asked gently. He didn’t see why William’s memory should be besmirched. The reference was deleted.
One repercussion from William’s death was Hitchcock’s suddenly vehement determination to curtail his own eating and drinking. He had begun watching his calories, but cheated whenever he felt like it. One day, however, Hitchcock fell on his arm while running to catch a train, and he was shocked by the tremendous pain caused by his own massive weight crashing down on him. Hitchcock also told interviewers that he had received a jolt of a different kind one day in Santa Rosa filming Shadow of a Doubt, when he glanced at his reflection in a shop window, and saw a grotesquely swollen man staring back at him.
He hovered around three hundred pounds. His back ached constantly. Now his physician, Dr. Ralph Tandowsky, a nationally recognized authority on cardiology and cardiovascular disease and a pioneer in the diagnosis of heart problems, joined Mrs. Hitchcock in imploring the director to stop cheating, and to take his diet seriously.
So for 1943, Hitchcock made a New Year’s resolution: From now on, he would eat and drink sensibly. He liked to tell interviewers that his weight-loss diet consisted of only a cup of coffee for breakfast and lunch, and a steak and salad for dinner. It wasn’t always that ascetic, but his resolve to lose one hundred pounds in record time was proof of tremendous willpower, and he swiftly lost enough to unveil the new “thin” Hitchcock for Lifeboat. How would the director contrive to squeeze his expected cameo into a film set entirely at sea, in a lifeboat? Even Hitchcock was stumped for a while, until the solution dawned on him. He would immortalize his profile in a before-and-after newspaper advertisement for the Reduco Obesity Slayer corset. “My favorite role,” he crowed to François Truffaut.
January was also the month that Shadow of a Doubt premiered in theaters. The new Hitchcock film was seen by most critics, at the time, as a modest crime thriller. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times found it exciting, but also specious and bathetic. In England the director’s reputation had predictably declined, with a general feeling among critics that Hollywood had not only robbed England of Hitchcock, but Hitchcock of his individuality. His “cinematic construction has had to be subordinated to pseudo-romantic conflicts involving the highlighting of principal players,” wrote Paul Rotha. When Shadow of a Doubt was shown in London, it didn’t impress Hitchcock’s old friend C. A. Lejeune of the London Observer, who subscribed to the general English disparagement of his Hollywood work.
Lejeune’s review, unflatteringly headlined “Stout Fellow,” compared Hitchcock to another sometimes overweight director, Orson Welles. “The overla
pping dialogue, unrelated conversation carried on between several people at one time, is common to both directors. So is the tendency to shoot a scene from the ceiling, the cellars, or the plumbing. So is the presence of Joseph Cotten in the leading role.” Lejeune charged Hitchcock with settling for the constraints of “run for cover” crime films—and claimed that, unlike Welles, he had “conspicuously failed” at everything else. “Statisticians who are interested in the relations between avoirdupois and the study of crime,” Lejeune sniffed, “may care to observe that the falling curve of his waistcoat has been followed by a corresponding fall in the curve of his films.”
Since 1943, however, Shadow of a Doubt has grown and keeps growing in critical esteem. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, in their pioneering 1957 appraisal of the director’s oeuvre, called the film brilliant, ascribing its few defects to its caricatured secondary characters (ironically, these were mainly of Hitchcock’s own devise). In The Murderous Gaze William Rothman found some of the dialogue worthy of Samuel Beckett. Even Sight and Sound’s Lindsay Anderson, who like other English critics embraced little of what Hitchcock did after he left home, called it the director’s “best Hollywood film.”
Hitchcock maintained his own inner compass. In interviews he did little to help critics distinguish between his best and worst, any more than he might expound on the hidden meaning (if any) of his films. He liked to call Shadow of a Doubt a “most satisfying picture”; more than once, he called it his favorite. But “favorite” wasn’t quite the same as best; and, speaking for posterity, he pointedly told François Truffaut it wasn’t his favorite, and told Peter Bogdanovich it was merely “one of his favorites.”
Among his best it certainly was, and is. But equally important to Hitchcock were the fond memories he had of making Shadow of a Doubt. He had a productive collaboration with Thornton Wilder, and began long friendships with Hume Cronyn and Joseph Cotten. Working on location, he had made a film with more independence than he had yet managed in Hollywood. As physically unfit as he was at the time, Hitchcock was in prime creative condition. Making Shadow of a Doubt was a proud memory that never dimmed.
Drubbed by some critics for losing his artistry in a layer of “fat,” Hitchcock was busy thinning—and launching a film no one could dismiss as a run-for-cover proposition. Any hopes that Ernest Hemingway might write Lifeboat, however, were dashed by a cable the writer sent Kenneth MacGowan in early January, saying that other work precluded his involvement. “THANK HITCHCOCK FOR ASKING ME STOP PERHAPS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER ANOTHER TIME BEST REGARDS.”
Hitchcock immediately began casting in other directions. John Steinbeck, at that time ranked as Hemingway’s peer among American novelists, was suggested by Nunnally Johnson, who had adapted Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath into an Oscar-nominated Best Picture for Twentieth Century–Fox in 1939. Though he lived much of the time in northern California, near his hometown of Salinas, Steinbeck was between books, and leasing a house in Hollywood. He knew the sea, owned a ketch, and spent time sailing and fishing; he’d also just finished a novel for 1942 that explored similar terrain to what Hitchcock had in mind. The story of a prototypical European small town invaded by a fascist force, The Moon Is Down was another cautionary wartime allegory.
Like Hemingway, Steinbeck had never written expressly for Hollywood, but his name was golden at Twentieth Century–Fox, where he visited to meet with MacGowan and Hitchcock. Their first two-hour meeting took place in MacGowan’s office.* Hitchcock briefly outlined the lifeboat story, and Steinbeck said he liked the idea. The author offered to launch a prose treatment over the coming weekend; he would write a few pages, and destroy them if he was dissatisfied with what he wrote. If the writing clicked for him, he would accept the assignment and write the treatment as a short story.
Over the weekend, as it happened, Steinbeck turned out “quite a number of pages,” according to MacGowan’s recollection—and then kept writing until the short story evolved into what he called a “novelette.” His contract would eventually stipulate two hundred pages of manuscript, with a clause that reserved Steinbeck’s right to publish the eventual novelette as a Steinbeck book. That was fine with MacGowan and Hitchcock, who thought a Steinbeck book tied into the picture would make great publicity.
As Steinbeck raced ahead of the contract, though, he was also racing ahead of Hitchcock. He met with Hitchcock and MacGowan only once more; all Steinbeck could recall about that second meeting, when deposed later by lawyers, was that Hitchcock “was interested in dramatic incident and technique, and most of his suggestions had to do with that,” in his words.
Steinbeck recalled only one specific suggestion that Hitchcock made: The well-to-do female passenger in the lifeboat—the lead character Hitchcock had envisioned from the beginning—ought to be wearing a diamond ring, the director said, which the other boat passengers are forced to use as a fishing lure. That was the director’s “usual irony of using a fabulous thing” as a physical detail, Steinbeck said. MacGowan recalled Hitchcock also stressing that the German in the lifeboat should deceive and betray the other survivors. But the director was diplomatic, saying Steinbeck should think his suggestions over.
Remarkably, by the second week of January—still with no signed contract—Steinbeck had churned out more than one hundred triple-spaced pages. Reporting to Hitchcock, he announced that he had elected to tell the story through the eyes of a single character—an ordinary seaman. “My reason for using this method is to focus the film through a human eye, a single human eye and a human brain which is as nearly the camera eye as anything we imagine,” Steinbeck explained. The author said he wasn’t trying to write “stock characters” but “on the other hand I haven’t the slightest intention of going out of my way to make them unusual.” Steinbeck recommended unfolding the entire story in flashback, and using hallucinatory effects to show the progress of starvation. “The overtone of the whole story will be misty, almost dreamlike—actually a memory pattern, as will be described in the beginning of the story of the film,” said Steinbeck.
One ordinary seaman’s subjectivity, a life-and-death drama recounted wholly in flashback, hallucinatory sequences: it wasn’t quite what the director had in mind, but it could work. Hitchcock didn’t panic. Anything Steinbeck wrote was bound to be workable.
After completing most of the first draft of his novelette, Steinbeck headed for New York, where he was preparing to travel overseas as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock followed him there on January 14, convening two weeks of script conferences and revisions. The Hitchcocks stayed at the St. Regis, Steinbeck at the nearby Beekman Tower. Although Hitchcock and Steinbeck spent a concerted amount of time together—joining Alma for lunch at “21”—their meetings were hampered by the fact that Steinbeck already considered the bulk of his job done.
In Steinbeck’s “dramatic narrative,” Willie, the German rescued and squeezed into the lifeboat, was the story’s pivotal figure, as Hitchcock had wanted. But Steinbeck left it unclear whether or not Willie was a Nazi, whether or not he was an officer of the submarine that torpedoed the ship. Steinbeck’s Willie was an enigma, his true nature an issue raised but never resolved by the author. The other passengers can’t communicate with him, for he doesn’t even speak English. Where Hitchcock had envisioned a story that hinged on concrete deceit and betrayal, Steinbeck offered only a general atmosphere of distrust and paranoia.
As intriguing as this might be, it wasn’t what Hitchcock wanted. But asking Steinbeck to change Willie’s characterization was problematic: Steinbeck had no time for a wholesale rewrite, and besides, he was confident of what he had written. One thing Hitchcock asked for was a new crescendo—not the relatively benign conclusion of the novelette, but a culminating episode of “dramatic violence” of some sort. “Whether his suggestion or mine, I don’t know,” recalled Steinbeck later for lawyers; “we agreed to put in the ending of the destroyer and the German ship which hadn’t
been in my original idea. I had wanted to end by having the boat picked up.”
Later, when Lifeboat stirred up controversy, Steinbeck would complain that Hitchcock was “one of those incredible English middle-class snobs who really and truly despise working people.” But his animus seems to have been inspired less by Hitchcock himself than by resentment over the substantive changes Hitchcock made to his version of the lifeboat story. The two men may not have cozied up the way Hitchcock and Wilder had, but they got along professionally, and spent very little actual time together.
By the time he returned to California, however, Hitchcock realized that Lifeboat needed a fresh writer, one with a better understanding of his kind of storytelling. Even before Steinbeck had finished the revisions to his novelette, Hitchcock was meeting with MacKinlay Kantor, an acclaimed author of short stories and novels about America in wartime (his novel in free verse Glory for Me would become the basis of The Best Years of Our Lives, and he’d win a Pulitzer Prize for Andersonville). As a kind of audition, Hitchcock asked Kantor to work with Alma on devising the opening scenes of Lifeboat.
Mrs. Hitchcock, who returned to the project on salary, and Kantor then drafted an opening set in a movie theater, featuring a sailor and his girlfriend on their last date before he ships out to sea—one of Hitchcock’s Chinese-box conceits, reminding audiences they were watching a piece of fiction. This segued into a seaboard sequence introducing the other characters just before the ship is sunk by a German torpedo. But Hitchcock didn’t feel a connection with Kantor; “I didn’t care for what he had written at all,” he recalled. Kantor was dismissed inside of two weeks.
That was toward the end of February 1943, almost simultaneous with Steinbeck’s submission of the revised novelette. By March 1, Steinbeck was done with Lifeboat. Yet in the credits Steinbeck alone was listed for the film’s “Original Story”; he was even nominated for an Oscar, and his contribution has been routinely praised ever since.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 47