Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Uncle Hitch also offered instruction in fine wines and spirits. “He did a wonderful, generous thing, by the way, which he later tossed off,” Peck recalled. “He sent me a case of twelve assorted bottles of wine, each a fine vintage, and on each one he had attached a handwritten label: ‘this is best with roast beef; and ‘this is best with filet of sole’; and ‘this is desert wine.’ All of them were Lafite-Rothschild, or Montrachet, or something equally good.”

  Selznick got his preferred leading man; Hitchcock concentrated on the supporting cast. Another Selznick actress, Kim Hunter, stood in for Bergman during the numerous test scenes with actors up for the role of Fleurot, a rakish psychiatrist. Hunter recalled how Hitchcock addressed each candidate at inordinate length, “giving them a gorgeously articulate, detailed description of who they were, what their character wanted, what was going on in the scene, what the whole film was about. … It couldn’t have been clearer.”

  At the end of “each magnificent offering to the actor,” in Hunter’s words, the director would turn to her and elaborately inquire, “Do you agree, Miss Hunter? Do you think that’s right?” Hunter recalled, “I think he took an evil pleasure in seeing me blush scarlet and stammer some inanity in reply. He teased me unmercifully. But it didn’t for one minute accomplish what I presume he also had in mind, to put the chaps who were testing at ease. At my expense, of course. It just made them more frightened.”*

  John Emery, one of Tallulah Bankhead’s ex-husbands, ended up with that part. But who would play the third-billed Dr. Murchison, the head of the clinic, who has murdered the real Dr. Edwardes on the ski slopes? During the rewrites, DOS kept trying to inject jealousy into the relationship among Dr. Murchison, the Edwardes impostor (Peck), and Dr. Petersen (Bergman), while Hitchcock—who was probably just being contrary—kept resisting any such triangulation. When Hitchcock chose Leo G. Carroll, the decidedly unsexy Englishman from Rebecca and Suspicion, the hint of romantic tension among the three all but vanished.

  The actor Hitchcock cast as Dr. Brulov, Bergman’s mentor, was Michael Chekhov. The Russian-born nephew of the famous playwright, Chekhov had run acting schools in London and New York before settling in Hollywood. Although well regarded as a mentor of performers, Chekhov had acted on-screen only twice in America, in In Our Time and Song of Russia.

  Predictably, DOS bolstered his hand with a crew whose loyalty would be primarily to him—art director James Basevi, editor Hal C. Kern, and cameraman George Barnes, all veterans of Gone With the Wind and Rebecca. Hitchcock regarded Barnes as almost an enemy, “a woman’s cameraman,” in his words, “whose whole reputation and living was built on the demand for his services by certain stars.” During the filming Barnes antagonized Hitchcock—insisting, whenever possible, on diffusing his lens to achieve his signature soft look. Hitchcock fought him, scene after scene.

  With Selznick’s permission, Hitchcock engaged Budapest-born composer Miklós Rózsa, who often wrote lush violin themes over rich strings—music that throbbed with gypsy wildness. His music for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, released earlier in the year, was the most admired score of 1944. (Wilder was another director whose films Hitchcock watched religiously.) Hitchcock gave the composer very “precise” instructions for Spellbound, according to Rózsa, including “a big sweeping love theme for Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck and a ‘new sound’ for the paranoia which formed the subject of the picture.”

  Filming began in the first week of June 1944.

  Selznick, meanwhile, was brooding over postproduction on Since You Went Away, his first picture since Rebecca four years earlier and his first to star actress Jennifer Jones. Though dizzily in love with Jones, he was also stewing over his divorce. His brother’s recent death had plunged him into depression. Most of the summer DOS spent “out of Hollywood,” wrote Leonard Leff—away from Hitchcock and Spellbound.

  During Rebecca, Hitchcock had been forced to suffer the occasional humiliation of the producer hovering over the filming, judging him with his watchful eyes. The rare times Selznick materialized on the set of Spellbound, Hitchcock reverted to his old English tricks, staging a phony mechanical failure. Although Selznick monitored dailies and wrote memos, “this didn’t perturb Hitchcock,” recalled Ingrid Bergman. He “just said, ‘That’s too bad’ if he didn’t agree. The movie was his.” Even if the script was again shaped by Selznick’s dictates, what happened on the set was the director’s exclusive province, and Hitchcock could direct such mumbo jumbo in his sleep.

  And sometimes it certainly seemed he was sleeping. Hitchcock was “constantly nodding off,” recalled Gregory Peck. “He would sit in his canvas chair with his four chins drooping, sound asleep while they finished up the lighting. The first assistant, who was very tactful, would stand alongside him and jiggle him to wake him.”

  Yet a sleeping Hitchcock could be a deceptive, dangerous Hitchcock. When he woke up, said Peck, he seemed to know “exactly what was going on. He had the entire picture in his head, in his mind’s eye. Every shot and every frame was rolling through his head.”

  It took Peck and Bergman a while to adjust to working with a man who appeared to have every image in his head, right down to the actors’ gestures and intonations. Norman Lloyd was playing a small role in Spellbound, as a mental patient who insists he has murdered his father. His first scene was with Bergman; it was also the first scene in which Hitchcock directed the actress. Lloyd watched their battle of wills with fascination. Bergman wanted to play the scene according to her instincts, to speak and move in her own way. But Hitchcock, whose ideas for a scene grew more rigid whenever he was working under strain—or didn’t yet trust a performer—wouldn’t budge.

  “He would sit patiently,” Bergman recalled years later, “and he would listen to my objections that I couldn’t move behind a certain table, for instance, or that a gesture on a certain line was awkward. And then when I was finished complaining to him and I thought I’d won him over to my point of view he would say very sweetly, ‘Fake it!’ This advice was a great help to me later, when other directors wanted something difficult and I thought no, it was impossible. Then I would remember Hitchcock saying to me, ‘Fake it.’ ”

  Peck made the mistake of inquiring about his motivation in a particular scene. What were his character’s inner life and feelings? What should he be thinking? “My dear boy,” Hitchcock drawled, “I couldn’t care less what you’re thinking. Just let your face drain of all expression.” Peck’s “soul-searching and … lack of ready technique,” in the actor’s words, tested Hitchcock’s patience. The inexperienced leading man hungered for guidance. Much of the time Peck felt adrift, vulnerable—rather like the character he was playing. Although the drained expression was a guise, it also suggested the reality of an uncertain actor.

  Spellbound was not a film, however, in which Hitchcock required the stars to deliver immortal performances. The Bergman-Peck love story had been carefully mapped out in advance by the director as mainly a feat of camera work. Their hypnotic attraction to each other would be defined by some of his most sensuous, gliding camera moves, and by gorgeous, lingering close-ups that externalized her longing and his tortured doubt.

  He may have dozed, but the director didn’t dawdle. Principal photography was over by late August, and then it was on to the matter of Salvador Dalí’s dreams.

  Selznick had been slow to authorize the hiring of Salvador Dalí. “I think he didn’t really understand my reasons for wanting Dalí,” Hitchcock said later. “He probably thought I wanted his collaboration for publicity purposes.” The producer considered the surrealist’s initial asking price too high: five thousand dollars for approximately ten drawings and paintings, from which Hitchcock would derive his dream sequences. While the two DOSs negotiated with Dalí’s agent, Felix Ferry, the producer commissioned a poll to determine whether his hiring would be worth the expense—and if Dalí’s name signaled “art” to the general public—which DOS thought might be a bad thing.

 
It wasn’t until early August that Hitchcock was able to convene his first meeting with Dalí, his agent, and the special-effects experts. The meeting went well. The director told Dalí the entire story of Spellbound “with an impressive passion,” in the words of the surrealist, who afterward declared Hitchcock “one of the rare personages I have met lately who has some mystery.” But Dalí refused to start drawing until his contract was finalized.

  Dalí now said he was willing to accept four thousand dollars for his art, but he insisted on retaining ownership of all his sketches, as he felt they would have long-term value. Since he was paying for Dalí, though, DOS felt he should own the art. The final negotiations during filming led to a Solomonic solution: cut the baby in half. Dalí agreed to split the artwork “down the middle,” according to Dalí biographer Meredith Etherington-Smith, with the producer reserving the first pick of half the sketches, and the rest going to the artist.

  By the time the producer approved Dalí’s terms, however, “there was not much time to prepare. The various arguments leading up to Dalí’s hiring had left little time for the actual work,” according to James Bigwood in his definitive account of the production.

  Dalí’s contract spelled out four distinct dreams: “1. The Gambling Sequence, 2. Two Men on a Roof, 3. The Ballroom Sequence, 4. The Downhill-Uphill Sequence.”

  Dream 3, the Ballroom Sequence, was slated to go before the cameras first, on the last two days of August. Dalí’s conception for that dream had Bergman as a stone statue with ants crawling out of the cracks, “representing life taking refuge inside the statue,” in his words. Hitchcock nixed the ants, an image he felt was too identified with the artist. But the statue was okay; and the production crew began a race against time to turn Bergman into one, and construct the ballroom.

  As usual, Hitchcock found himself hurting for time and money, for Selznick, resenting the size of Dalí’s fee, elected to compensate by scrimping on the length and budget of the dream sequences. Determined to have his Dalí dreams, Hitchcock insisted he could pull everything off with, if necessary, “no sets whatsoever—with possibly some miniatures but with somewhere between 80–100 [thousand dollars] per painting.” Instead Selznick slashed the entire dream budget—from the original plan of $150,000 to $20,000.

  Originally, Hitchcock had hoped to shoot “in the open air so that the whole thing, photographed in real sunshine, would be terribly sharp,” in his words. Now he beat a retreat to the soundstages. At first, in order to create the impression of a nightmare, with “heavy weight and uneasiness” hanging over the guests in the ballroom, Dalí had envisioned hanging “fifteen of the heaviest and most lavishly sculpted pianos possible” from the ceiling and swinging them over the heads of cutout dancers “in exalted dance poses” who “would not move at all, they would only be diminishing silhouettes in very accelerated perspective, losing themselves in infinite darkness.” Saving time and money, Hitchcock substituted miniature pianos dangling over the heads of live dwarfs.

  No one had bothered to inform Dalí of the changes. Arriving at the studio to observe the filming on August 30, the artist was “stupefied at seeing neither the pianos nor the cut silhouettes.” He was assured that tiny pianos and dwarfs “would give perfectly the effect of perspective that I desired. I thought I was dreaming. They maneuvered even so, with the false pianos and the real dwarfs (who should be false miniatures). Result: The pianos didn’t at all give the impression of real pianos … and the dwarfs, one saw, simply, that they were dwarfs. Neither Hitchcock nor I liked the result and we decided to eliminate this scene. In truth the imagination of the Hollywood experts will be the one thing that will ever have surpassed me.”

  Meanwhile, in order to turn Bergman into a statue, the actress had a breathing pipe placed in her mouth. A papier-mâché mold was constructed around her, and then she was draped in a Grecian gown, with a crown on her head and an arrow through her neck. When action was called, she burst out of the mold; when the film was run backward, the actress seemed to metamorphose into a statue.

  With Dream 3 completed, they had to wait a week before Dream 1 was ready, with its giant scissors and painted eyes. Dalí himself chalked up “the jagged path that he wished the giant scissors to follow,” cutting the eye-adorned curtains, according to Bigwood. “As specified in Dalí’s sketches and notes, metronomes embellished with cutout eyes (a twenty-year-old image borrowed from Man Ray) were set in motion ‘precisely synchronized in opposing directions’ on tables with human legs. His plan to have a ‘cockroach with an eye glued onto its back moving across the blank cards’ was politely rejected, as was his suggestion that ‘the eye could reappear and serve as a dissolve into the wheel in the chimney scene’ ” for the still-unfilmed Dream 2.

  Flitting around a nightclub and kissing all the gamblers in this scene was a lady sprite, or “kissing bug,” wearing “hardly anything.” (The gamblers are wearing weird stocking masks and playing distorted card games.) Dalí himself created the costume for kissing-bug Rhonda Fleming by spending two hours with a large scissors cutting a four-hundred-dollar Dior negligee into shreds. When his creation was shown to the Hays Office, however, the censors insisted on additional shreds to cover her exposed midriff, thighs, and breasts.

  Two dreams down, two to go: Hitchcock moved on to numbers 2 and 4. The Two Men on a Roof and Downhill-Uphill converged in a murder committed on a snowy rooftop, with one man sporting an insecure beard and another clutching a limp wheel—a Dalí trademark.

  By the end of the month the dreams were done, assembled, and shown to the producer. But Selznick was unimpressed. His notes ordered retakes, optical work, newly dubbed dialogue, and fresh editing of all sections of the dreams—adding significantly to the costs. “Selznick’s hopes for an inexpensive dream sequence were history,” wrote Bigwood.

  Hitchcock had compromised, he had cut corners, he had labored mightly—and it was no longer any fun. After finishing the rough cut, he spent only one more day in the studio, according to Leonard Leff. Then the director abandoned Spellbound and his Dalí dreams for England, where he had agreed months earlier to meet with Sidney Bernstein.

  Selznick was glad to let him go. The Dalí dreams were bothering DOS—he questioned even the merit of the art—and now he could tinker freely with them. The producer ordered another art director, William Cameron Menzies, to begin retakes stripping away Dalí’s background for the statue dream, and refilming Bergman sitting in a “weird deserted place.” Menzies shot new close-ups of the man cutting the giant eye. “Though the scene had been originally shot using a double, Norman Lloyd did the honors in the closeup,” according to Bigwood. “His presence in the dream (as well as Rhonda Fleming’s) was a subtle clue to the mystery, as both appeared elsewhere in the film. The fact that they are both unrecognizable in the finished sequence somewhat diminishes the clue’s value.”

  The retakes spilled into December. There was so much reshooting, re-cutting, and redubbing that Selznick decided the dreams were no longer Dalí’s—they were Dalí’s with “other work, not by Dalí, being mixed in.” He explored the possibility of lowering the size of, or changing the wording of, the famed surrealist’s screen credit. But the credit was mandated by contract: “Dream Sequence Designs—by Salvador Dalí.”

  Later interviews with Bergman have given rise to the idea that the dreams were originally “a wonderful twenty-minute sequence that really belongs in a museum”—that Selznick hacked the Hitchcock-Dalí vision to bits. This is pure myth, according to Bigwood. On-screen, the dreams totaled slightly under three minutes. “The sequence was indeed originally intended to be longer,” Bigwood explained. “Never twenty minutes long—Ingrid Bergman exaggerates a bit—but certainly forty or fifty seconds longer than it finally wound up.” The only one of the vignettes to be dropped entirely was that of Bergman as a statue, along with the “weird deserted place” as its background.

  The dreams may not have been hacked to bits, but Selznick had fought them from the beginning, and
then starved the budget, reshooting, recutting, and finally attenuating Hitchcock’s vision. The director blamed Selznick, but he blamed the surrealist equally. The famed artist was “really a kook,” Hitchcock told Charles Higham years later, whose notions were too bizarre for Hollywood.

  When Dalí finally saw the finished Spellbound, he too was disappointed. “Les best parts in Hitchcock que I like he should keep,” the surrealist was quoted, “that much was cut.”

  En route to London, the director stopped in Boston to attend the preview of a new play. His daughter, Pat, now sixteen, had landed another part in a Broadway-bound comedy drama called Violet, adapted from a series of Redbook stories about a young Miss Fix-it who helps untangle her father’s love life. Having missed his daughter’s professional debut during Saboteur, Hitchcock had no intention of missing this play for Spellbound. He proudly congratulated Pat backstage.

  The producer of the play was Albert Margolies, who had been Gaumont’s publicity chief in the United States, and then Hitchcock’s East Coast press agent after the director moved to America. The playwright was Whitfield Cook, a Yale-educated author who had published short fiction in American Mercury, Story, and Cosmopolitan. (Cook’s American Mercury story won an O. Henry “Best First-Published” award in 1943.)

  Mrs. Hitchcock had read Violet and asked to meet Cook, who was working in Hollywood under contract to MGM. He was also going to direct the play. She liked the playwright as much as his play, and helped with some structural suggestions for the final revisions.

  Read-throughs and rehearsals were in September, and once again Alma accompanied Pat to New York, staying with her at the Wyndham. Alma wrote home about the time they spent with Joan Fontaine after the premiere of Frenchman’s Creek and the plays they attended, like Samson Raphaelson’s latest—the Hitchcocks always kept up with the careers of people they knew personally. Her letters also make it clear how much the New York cost of living worried her (“things are dreadfully expensive here, much higher than L.A.”). She asked about the family dogs (one had been left in the care of Joan Harrison), and fretted about her husband’s weight, which was always burgeoning. She knew Hitchcock had a habit of stalling his checkups with Dr. Ralph Tandowsky, and urged his secretary to remind him to make a doctor’s appointment when he returned to the United States. New York weather was “very dreary and humid,” she said. “I miss the house and garden so much, and Mr. H.,” Alma wrote her husband’s secretary, “I don’t think I can do this again.”