Notorious also marked the beginning of Hitchcock’s long collaboration with Hollywood’s premiere costume designer. David O. Selznick had been fussy about the look of his leading ladies, but Hitchcock had his own longstanding ideas in that department; now, with RKO’s permission, he made a point of borrowing Edith Head from Paramount, where she had supervised wardrobe for Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder films.
Head always said that of all the directors she worked with, Hitchcock was the most precise. “Every costume is indicated when he sends me the script,” Head wrote in her memoir. “There is always a story reason behind his thinking, an effort to characterize.” On another occasion, Head said, “He spoke a designer’s language, even though he didn’t know the first thing about clothes. He specified colors in the script if they were important. If he wanted a skirt that brushed a desk as a woman walked by, he spelled that out too.”
When Devlin meets Alicia for the first time, in the scene where she is partying to excess, Ingrid Bergman would be dressed in stark contrast to everyone else in the room—“a zebra-skin print blouse with her midriff exposed,” in Head’s words. Later on, Alicia had to wear more demure clothing; as an infiltrator, Hitchcock cautioned, she needed to blend in, not stand out. He did away with any ornate jewelry, furs and feathers, silly hats—the kind of showoff accoutrements Bergman had worn at Selznick’s behest in Spellbound. Costuming Bergman for Hitchcock was “an education in restraint” for her, said Head.
Although Selznick had written associate producer Barbara Keon into the RKO contract to watch over his interests, by now she was basically in Hitchcock’s camp. And William Goetz was as deferential as Jack Skirball. After twenty-five years in the business, it was Hitchcock’s first official film as his own producer, with nearly the power that came with the title. With the Notorious script finally finished, and the cast and crew finalized, the filming was ready to start on October 22—after more than a full year’s preparation.
From beginning to end, the filming of the dark-spirited Notorious was suffused with a positive glow. In November, champagne was popped on the set to celebrate the release of Spellbound, which had been launched by one of Selznick’s all-out publicity campaigns (ranging from fashion layouts to airplane skywriting). From the majority of critics—Newsweek hailed it as “a superior and suspenseful melodrama”—to the lines of moviegoers who spent upward of $7 million on the picture at the box office, the new Hitchcock film exceeded all expectations. Its success was later crowned by six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Hitchcock’s third as Best Director. Spellbound was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Michael Chekhov), Black-and-White Cinematography (George Barnes), Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Miklós Rózsa), and Special Effects (Jack Cosgrove).
The only nominee to collect an Oscar, however, was Rózsa. In his autobiography Rózsa complained that Hitchcock never even called to congratulate him—but Hitchcock had left Spellbound behind in postproduction, and one of its stupidities, in his opinion, was the otherwise stirring theme music that Selznick poured like syrup over too many scenes. In his sessions with François Truffaut, Hitchcock complained vigorously about the scene where Ingrid Bergman meets Gregory Peck for the first time. “Unfortunately, the violins begin to play just then,” said Hitchcock. “That was terrible!”
Any success was a dividend, but Hitchcock didn’t kid himself. He didn’t think much of Spellbound. “Just another whodunit,” he informed an interviewer in 1946. “The whole thing’s too complicated,” the director told François Truffaut—and all those eleventh-hour plot explanations were “very confusing.”
Notorious, on the other hand, was a consummate Hitchcock film, in every sense filled with passion and texture and levels of meaning.
The director adored his cast. He and Claude Rains were extremely friendly; Rains was born on the wrong side of the Thames, and his sophistication concealed a Cockney boyhood—he knew the same vernacular, even the same jokes, as Hitchcock. The director let Rains decide whether he would adopt a strong German accent (the decision was no); the actor even managed to retain his good humor when Hitchcock mentioned “this business of you being a midget with a wife, Miss Bergman, who is very tall.” Standing five feet seven—at least according to official publicity—Rains understood Hitchcock’s point. If Bergman (who stood roughly five nine, but looked taller) towered over him in their romantic scenes, the effect might be inadvertently comical.
So for the scenes where Alicia and Alex strolled together hand in hand, Hitchcock built ramps for Rains that were unseen by the audience. The rest of the time, he told Rains, the actor should try elevated shoes. Hitchcock asked Rains to buy a pair and get used to wearing them. “Walk in them, sleep in them, be comfortable in them,” the director urged Rains.
“In the close shots,” Hitchcock explained to Truffaut, “the difference between them was so marked that if I wanted them both in a frame, I had to stand Claude Rains on a box. On one occasion we wanted to show them both coming from a distance, with the camera panning from him to Bergman. Well, we couldn’t have any boxes out there on the floor, so what I did was to have a plank of wood gradually rising as he walked toward the camera.”
Rains liked the elevated shoes so much he adopted them for personal use. Cary Grant didn’t need extra height, but working with the enigmatic star was always a negotiation. The battle was half won once he was lured to the set; but even with a script he had approved, Grant was susceptible to mood swings, and always trying to rewrite his dialogue. Though Grant was open to direction, he didn’t really require it from anyone, including Hitchcock.
Grant came to Notorious full of bounce, though—enough that he was able to coach Bergman through her initial period of adjustment. It was Grant, as much as anyone, who helped the actress through her second Hitchcock film—rehearsing her the way Devlin rehearses Alicia. “One morning, when we were working on Notorious, she had difficulty with a line,” Grant recalled. “She had to say her lines a certain way so I could imitate her readings. We worked on the scene for a couple of hours. Hitch never said anything. He just sat next to the camera, puffing on his cigar. I took a break, and later, when I was making my way back to the set, I heard her say her lines perfectly. At which point Hitch said, ‘Cut!’, followed by ‘Good morning, Ingrid.’ ”
More in control on Notorious, Hitchcock also had more flexibility than he had enjoyed with Spellbound. He was more tolerant of Bergman the second time around, and allowed the actress to try her own ideas and moves.
Indeed, he had grown exceptionally fond of Bergman, and there is little reason to doubt biographer Donald Spoto’s assertion that the actress confided in the director—about her ongoing love affair with Robert Capa, for example (who photographed the production for Life), or, later, about her crush on Italian neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, for whom she left her husband. The Hitchcocks were among the first to know about Rossellini, and although they liked Dr. Petter Lindstrom, they stayed loyal to Bergman.
Hitchcock liked to tell a story that Spoto scoffs at as the delusion of a repressed personality: one day the director arrived at home, according to Hitchcock, to find Bergman waiting for him, enticing him toward the bedroom, pleading for a tryst with her adored Svengali. Hitchcock told this tall tale to writer John Michael Hayes and other close associates, only slightly varying the details. (Sometimes it happened in his home, sometimes in hers.)
Or was it such a tall tale? It only happened “once,” he always maintained. Hitchcock never dated the anecdote, but it’s tempting to believe it occurred during Notorious, when Bergman was under a romantic spell and in the mood for sex, rather than on Spellbound (a trial run) or the later Under Capricorn (a fiasco). Although most people doubt Hitchcock’s anecdote, why wasn’t such a thing possible? Don’t actresses fall in love with their directors all the time? He was no longer so grossly overweight—and wasn’t he devilish and charming? Didn’t Bergman have affairs with her other directors, notably Victor Fleming?
Was Rossellini, later, such a dashing physical type? Doesn’t the story Hitchcock told sound about right, for such a sly innocent?
Can anyone watch Bergman talk about the director, the night of the American Film Institute Life award in 1979, one year before his death, without feeling the love between them?
Whatever happened off the set of Notorious, Bergman described the filming as the “happiest experience” of her three Hitchcock credits, and that happiness—for all of them—translated into one of the director’s greatest films: richer, more seductive, psychologically and politically darker than the far more commercially successful Spellbound.
Notorious was completed in January, the same month Sidney Bernstein visited Hollywood for his first talks with studio heads about Transatlantic Pictures. With both Transatlantic partners making such a confident impression in business meetings, getting American banks behind the new company was almost a snap. The partners struck up a fast relationship with Security National Bank in New York City and Southwest Trust and Savings in Los Angeles. Both were financial institutions with farsighted loan officers, Alex Ardrey in New York and George Yousling in California, who took the lead in investing in postwar independent production.
Ardrey and Yousling were not only reasonable about financial policy; both were Hitchcock fans. The director grew particular close to Ardrey, sometimes phoning the banker after hours just to chat, relating scary bedtime stories to be passed on to Ardrey’s children. When Hitchcock received the Irving G. Thalberg Award at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1967, his brief acceptance speech mentioned Ardrey, probably mystifying the audience—possibly it was the first time a banker had ever been thanked from that podium.
Bank loans made Transatlantic more attractive, but still, some studio had to share the risks. Which would offer the best combination of gross and profit percentages, office and studio space—and, not to be underestimated, the highest degree of creative autonomy?
From the first, Jack Warner at Warner Bros. emerged as most likely to succeed. The fact that Hitchcock had never worked at Warner’s was an advantage; the head of the studio, eager to sign a three-time Best Director nominee, was like a suitor who’d waited all evening for a dance. Warner wanted Hitchcock to direct one Warner’s picture for every Transatlantic film. Though Warner insisted on script and casting input on studio and Transatlantic productions, Transatlantic could develop its own packages autonomously—once the subjects were approved.
Warner was eager to get Hitchcock working on a Warner’s film right away, but naturally the partners wanted to launch Transatlantic with a Transatlantic production, a property that gave them the advantage of ownership. Although all the stories were subject to approval by the banks and Warner’s, it was up to Transatlantic to find its own material.
The time and expense typically involved in that process were extraordinary. MGM, for example, held weekly staff meetings at which a dozen story and production officials discussed between ten and twenty possible subjects that had been submitted by a wide array of scouts, agents, and editors. These stories—originals as well as adaptations, older books and plays as well as newly published ones seen before publication—were presynopsized, rated, and ranked by readers. Only if they passed muster were they read in their entirety by experienced in-house story editors. Each was then analyzed in terms of potential box office, critical or awards value, budget liability, and appropriate contract actors, writers, and directors. This laborious process could consume weeks before a decision was made—a tentative decision, and always subject to reevaluation, starting the process all over.
In the case of Transatlantic, Hitchcock had big eyes at the start, and once again he began rhapsodizing aloud about the kind of big-canvas, slice-of-life picture he’d always dreamed of making. “Whenever I have used New York in a picture,” he told the New York Herald Tribune in 1945, “I have been licked by it. It’s too big, too hard to get at with the camera. It would be wonderful to do a story entirely about New York in color. What I mean is not the New York as it exists to the tourist or the casual observer, but inside New York, a behind-the-scenes, backstage New York, something that would show the inner life of the city, like the things that go on in the kitchens of big hotels.
“I would begin the story at four o’clock in the morning and end it at two the following morning,” he continued. “I’d like to open with a scene in the Bowery showing a bum drowsing in a saloon, a fly walking on his nose: starting with the lowest form of life in the metropolis. And I’d end up, ironically of course, with the highest form of life, a scene the following morning in a swank nightclub, with well-dressed drunks slouching over their tables and passing out. I don’t know what the story would be in between. That’s the problem.”
Almost from Bernstein’s first visit to Hollywood, though, the partners were forced to scale back their ambitions. The real problem was that the partners didn’t have the time or money to develop such an artistically ambitious film, when Warner’s was clamoring for something commercial and modestly budgeted. Reluctantly, they decided to inaugurate a Transatlantic story department, although they could afford to hire only one person, in Hollywood, to sift through a pile of properties and submit reports. Their limited resources gave them little choice but to concentrate on obscure or first-time authors who might have been overlooked by the aggressive major studios. They gravitated to English novels in part because such books were more affordable and less likely to have already been sold to the Americans.
When Hitchcock wasn’t dreaming of grand-scale epics, he was recalling past ideas that had eluded him. One story that intrigued Hitchcock harked back to his boyhood, and the inn in Leyton that had once been a hideout for famous highwaymen. Off and on over the years he returned to the notion of filming the saga of Jack Sheppard, the eighteenth-century English highwayman whose numerous jailbreaks made him a folk hero. He also talked over the years about mounting a version of Lorna Doone, the oft-filmed romance between a farmer and rebel’s daughter, set in seventeenth-century England. Both of these projects were presented to Bernstein, who reminded the director of his vow to avoid costume pictures; but Hitchcock wasn’t easily dissuaded—in fact, the challenge of overcoming his Achilles’ heel seemed to tempt him all the more. The partners usually compromised by commissioning an inexpensive treatment, though the scope and expense of these costume subjects generally relegated them to the back burner.
One of the first books Transatlantic tried to option was The Dark Duty by Margaret Wilson, a novel Hitchcock had coveted since its publication in 1931. Its story concerned the harrowing hours leading up to the hanging of a murderer in England, and the injurious effects of the death sentence not only on the falsely accused man, but on the governor of the penal institution and his wife. An aficionado of the grisliest murder cases, Hitchcock was also an aficionado of executions—though he opposed capital punishment, and always thought that The Dark Duty, a propaganda novel about the execution of a wrong man, offered a welcome platform for his views.
But Transatlantic learned an early lesson in economics when the agents for Wilson, an Iowan transplanted to England who had won a Pulitzer Prize for The Able McLaughlins in 1924, learned that the film’s director would be Alfred Hitchcock. The forgotten fiction’s price went up, up, and up, until it was almost out of sight. Once again the partners compromised, throwing a pittance at the project, taking the shortest-term option, and authorizing a treatment—several steps ahead of real money, or a real commitment.
Among the authors the partners discussed was Helen Simpson, the cowriter of Enter Sir John, who had also helped out on the script for Sabotage. Simpson had died during World War II when German planes bombed the hospital where she was recovering from surgery. One of her admired novels, Under Capricorn, struck Hitchcock as a possible vehicle for Ingrid Bergman—even though, as Bernstein pointed out, it was yet another costume drama, set in Sydney, Australia, in the mid-nineteenth century.
Remakes were always on Hitchcock’s mind, and the partners
mulled a new version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and discussed the possibility of expanding Bon Voyage or Aventure Malgache into features. While the partners read material and searched for the right property—at the right price—to use in launching their company, Jack Warner waited. Sorting things out would take time, and Transatlantic would need to have not just one project, but a whole roster of story material, before it could cement the best extended terms with the studio.
Meanwhile, David O. Selznick had been galvanized into action. With Hitchcock spending so much time in meetings at other studios, his prize director appeared to be slipping away from him. Anxious not to lose Hitchcock, the producer made an unexpected offer to renew his contract. It was an offer unheard of in Selznick annals: the director would remain under contract indefinitely, but nonexclusively, as long as he agreed to direct one Selznick production per year, at a guaranteed one-hundred-thousand-dollar salary plus a percentage of gross and profit receipts.
Hitchcock was tempted, if only momentarily. He had only one Selznick film left on his eternally amended contract, and now the onus was on the producer to decide what that film would be. Now, finally, it was Hitchcock who could afford to bide his time. Selznick was paying him five thousand dollars weekly to while away his time planning the future of Transatlantic.
Digging frantically into his sorely depleted story files, Selznick came up with a 1933 novel by English author Robert Hichens, purchased by MGM years before as a possible vehicle for Greta Garbo. Among the prolific author’s many other books was the well-regarded The Garden of Allah, which had been adapted for stage and then filmed twice—once as a silent, and in 1936 as one of the first Selznick International pictures.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 55