By early 1947, with The Paradine Case still slogging through production, the idea had gained momentum. Hitchcock was already telling close friends he was planning to shoot his next film within the confines of a single stage set, and entirely in continuous nine-and-a-half-minute takes. Cary Grant was penciled in as the star. Bernstein convened script conferences with the playwright in Transatlantic’s Wardour Street offices in London.
Warner Bros. was encouraged to see Rope as a run-for-cover crime film. Eager to set their first Hitchcock film in motion—starring Cary Grant, after all—the studio accepted the director’s hasty assurances that he could overcome any censorship objections, and the project was formally slated as Transatlantic’s first production.
Preoccupied by the more immediate project, Warner’s also overlooked another property the partners had cheaply optioned and were touting as the third Transatlantic film, to follow Under Capricorn. This was Nos Deux Consciences (“Our Two Consciences”), a 1902 French play written by Paul Bourde, a man of letters and editor of the daily paper Le Temps, under the pseudonym Paul Anthelme. Hitchcock had seen the play in London in the early 1930s; now, after meeting with French playwright Louis Verneuil, who was peddling the rights in Hollywood, Transatlantic commissioned a translation and film treatment from Verneuil.
Hitchcock didn’t encounter much competition in procuring rights to the 1902 play—especially given the fact that its protagonist was a priest who is executed for a crime he didn’t commit. At the start of Anthelme’s story, the priest hears a murderer’s confession, but when questioned by police is forced to abide by his vow of secrecy. The priest then becomes the chief suspect; unable to explain himself, he is arrested, tried, and executed. It was a bold premise, one to which few other directors might have been drawn. But daunted by The Dark Duty, Hitchcock saw the French play as an opportunity to make an anti-capital punishment thriller without paying too much money for the rights.
The wrong-man priest seemed a dubious premise to Warner’s, but Hitchcock pitched it as another run-for-cover crime film. There wasn’t any treatment (much less a script) to object to, and at studio meetings it was the least pressing subject. Again Hitchcock boasted of how cleverly he would handle the censorship obstacles, and of his intention to snare the biggest, most unlikely star imaginable to play the priest. Cary Grant, Cary Grant, Cary Grant, the director cooed, and the Warner’s officials were lulled into complacency.
At least Rope and the wrong-man priest could be rationalized as Transatlantic pictures. What really mattered to Warner Bros. was the projects that Hitchcock had promised to direct for the studio. The first of these was also penciled into the deal by the end of 1947: Transatlantic had optioned a British crime novel called Running Man; about to be published in England, it would see U.S. publication a year later as Outrun the Constable. The novelist, Selwyn Jepson, had little American reputation, so once again the rights weren’t costly.
With its London-based story of a young woman forced to play detective in order to rescue a man wrongly accused of murder, the property looked appealing to Warner’s. It would be their own Hitchcock run-for-cover—without any thrill-seeking killers or doomed priests. And so Rope and Under Capricorn for Transatlantic, and I Confess (the wronged-priest film, also for Transatlantic), were now joined by Outrun the Constable (for Warner Bros.) as the projects on Hitchcock’s future agenda over the summer of 1947.
Patrick Hamilton was invited to try his hand adapting Rope to the screen, but the playwright distrusted the medium of film, and without Hitchcock at his side Sidney Bernstein couldn’t guide their talks to success. “Neither Sidney nor Hamilton,” wrote Caroline Moorehead, “could see a way of transforming one of the clues, a ticket for the theater, which on stage could be handled in conversation, into a realistic shot on camera.”
The ever obliging James Bridie offered a few ideas, but by mid-March Hitchcock had nominated a left-field substitute: Hume Cronyn. “Why me?” Cronyn, the able actor from Lifeboat and Shadow of a Doubt, wondered. “I had no screenwriter credits. A couple of my short stories had been published; I’d written and sold a screenplay that was never made and that I doubt he [Hitchcock] ever saw. Perhaps he just wanted someone to talk to.”
Why not? Cronyn was intelligent; he had an easygoing friendship with the director. Hitchcock must have read at least one sample of his writing—a published account of the filming of Lifeboat. And Cronyn was familiar with New York, the new setting for Rope. This would become the first of several important Hitchcock films to adopt the setting of America’s greatest metropolis—its London.
Hitchcock and Cronyn began by talking, simply jawing their way through the script at Bellagio Road. “Then I would go back to North Rockingham Avenue [where he lived] and put it all down on paper,” recalled Cronyn. “We did not meet every day; I was too busy scribbling for that. When we did meet, there were certain hazards to be avoided; one of the most severe was that I should not get drunk. Hitch was a great believer in a relaxed approach to work, and before lunch the wine bottle would appear and he would descant on the vineyard, the vintage, and the nature of the grape as he poured and poured again. …
“Early on in the working relationship I discovered a curious trick of his,” said Cronyn. “We would be discussing some story point with great intensity, trembling on the edge of a solution to the problem at hand, when Hitch would suddenly lean back in his chair and say, ‘Hume, have you heard the story of the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter?’ I would look at him blankly and he would proceed to tell it with great relish, frequently commenting on the story’s characters, the nature of the humor involved, and the philosophical demonstration implied. That makes it sound as though the stories might be profound or at least witty.
They were neither. They were generally seventh-grade jokes of the sniggery school, and frequently infantile.”
One day, Cronyn asked the director challengingly: “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?” asked Hitchcock.
“Stop to tell jokes at a critical juncture.”
“It’s not so critical—it’s only a film.”
“But we were just about to find a solution to the problem. … I can’t even remember what it was now.”
“Good. We were pressing. … You never get it when you press.”
Cronyn said later that he never forgot “that little piece of philosophy” Hitchcock offered, “either as an actor or as a sometime writer.” Or another tidbit Hitchcock disgorged one day, during an argument about a story point. Seizing a pad and pencil, the director sketched a circle.
“This is the pie,” Hitchcock said. “We keep trying to cut into it here.” To illustrate, he carved a wedge into the circle’s perimeter. “What we must try to do is this—” Hitchcock said, his pencil racing around to the opposite side of the circle and digging out a different wedge.
“What does that mean?” asked Cronyn. “Turn day into night? Color into black and white? Change our antagonist into our hero?”
“Maybe,” answered the director. “What we’re doing is so … expected. I want to be surprised.”
Sometime in April, Arthur Laurents, another dark horse, joined the rotation, even as Cronyn continued developing the treatment. Sidney Bernstein flew to New York to meet Laurents and approve the hire, telling the new writer, “Every line must be a gem, my dear boy. Literature, that’s what we want, literature!” (This intimidating advice—the very opposite of Hitchcock’s approach—was one reason that the director would keep his partner at arm’s length during the development of future scripts.)
Laurents was a young, bright, bitterly funny New Yorker whose second play, a flop called Heartsong, had been backed by David O. Selznick’s ex-wife Irene, now a Broadway producer. Laurents had just finished his first Hollywood experience, rewriting The Snake Pit. Although he wouldn’t be credited for his work on the Anatole Litvak film, Laurents came with high recommendation from Litvak and Irene Selznick.
And he was homosexual�
�not unimportant among his credentials. Even Laurents suspected that Hitchcock had hired him because Rope “was to be filmed as a play and I was a playwright, and because its central characters were homosexual and I might be homosexual.” Not only that: Laurents was also having an affair with Goldwyn contract actor Farley Granger, whom Hitchcock already foresaw as Phillip, the weaker-willed of the two killers.*
In April, Laurents had not yet moved in with Granger, so Laurents doubted whether the director knew for certain they were lovers. Yet their affair was open gossip in Hollywood—and the sort of show business whispering that Hitchcock, a connoisseur of gossip, would have relished. Still, neither Laurents nor Hitchcock ever mentioned it.
“At Warner Brothers studio in Burbank where Rope was shot, homosexuality was the unmentionable, known only as ‘it,’ ” Laurents recalled in his memoir. “It wasn’t in the picture, no character was ‘one.’ Fascinating was how Hitchcock nevertheless made clear to me that he wanted ‘it’ in the picture. And of course, he was innuendoing to the converted. I knew it had to be self-evident but not so evident that the censors or the American Legion would scream. It’s there; you have to look but it’s there all right.”
While Cronyn served as a sounding board, Laurents began working independently on the actual script—the kind of awkward overlap that wasn’t uncommon with Hitchcock, or Hollywood in general. While Cronyn wrote, Hitchcock met with Laurents, but Laurents was “never shown what Hume [Cronyn] did”—which helps explain why he spent the rest of his life insisting that Cronyn had done little or nothing.
At the start of the summer, Hitchcock envisioned the soulful Granger as Phillip, the rising star Montgomery Clift as Brandon, the mastermind of the murder, and Cary Grant as Rupert Cadell, the former prep-school master who introduces the students to Nietzsche—“the one man alive,” says Brandon in the film, “who might have seen this thing from our angle, that is, the artistic one.” Rupert is the story’s pivotal character—obviously another homosexual, thought Laurents—“probably an ex-lover of Brandon’s.” The trio would amount to “dream casting,” from the writer’s point of view.
As their meetings progressed, Hitchcock slyly began inviting Granger to join him and Laurents for dinners. “It was very Hitchcock,” explained Laurents. “It tickled him that Farley was playing a homosexual in a movie written by me, another homosexual; that we were lovers; that we had a secret that he knew; that I knew he knew—the permutations were endless, all titillating to him, not out of malice or a feeling of power but because they added a slightly kinky touch and kink was a quality devoutly to be desired.”
Transplanting the setting and characters was an underrated Hitchcock move. It was laborious, tricky business, even in this simple story with its handful of characters and single setting. (It was more heroic with Vertigo.) The transplant had to be seamless and credible, and with every scene the director intended to block out the action and his camera work as never before, mapping out each of the uninterrupted takes. Hitchcock, now rid of David O. Selznick, seemed in no great hurry. He met with Laurents regularly over the summer, endlessly talking it over.
Thus the summer of 1947 passed slowly and pleasurably. In early June, the Hitchcocks celebrated Pat’s high school graduation with a party at Bellagio Road—a lavish affair for them, with more than fifty guests. Among those congratulating Pat were Alida Valli and her husband, composer Oscar de Mejo; Whitfield Cook and his writing partner, Anne Chapin; Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy; Arthur Laurents and Farley Granger; and Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant.
Sidney Bernstein was still in London, but he and Hitchcock had begun speaking at length by phone every Sunday morning, a habit that waxed and waned over the years. Sometimes they talked business, other times they traded gossip or family stories. Alma was a doting godmother to Sidney’s son David.
It was Bernstein’s job to build the future, and he went about entreating other talented people to join the fledgling Transatlantic operation. Hooks were baited, but the fish swam by. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, by now a highly successful writing, directing, and producing duo, met with Bernstein and considered signing with the company. According to Caroline Moorehead, when Launder asked Bernstein who had “final say” over major decisions, he or Hitchcock, the producer replied, “I do … because otherwise we could find ourselves in a situation where nothing got done.” After which Bernstein forthrightly added, “But I’m well aware of the fact that the moment I exercise it, it’s the end of our partnership.” Launder and Gilliat declined. Bernstein tried hard to attract other luminaries, but while the Hitchcock name may have pleased bankers, fellow filmmakers were wary, suspecting Transatlantic was a one-man show.
In late summer Bernstein moved his family to Beverly Hills and rented a house on Palm Drive, overseeing the final stages of preproduction for the maiden Transatlantic production at Warner Bros. The partners—often augmented by Victor Peers, a universally liked production manager who was their chief lieutenant—had an office at the studio, but also held informal meetings at Hitchcock’s house. Between their planning sessions the two friends managed to have “a great deal of fun,” according to Moorehead’s biography. “When Sidney was told by an employee that Jack Warner, the more tycoonlike and aggressive of the brothers, with his small mustache and dapper appearance, received a copy of every Western Union telegram dispatched from his studios, he and Hitchcock started inventing joke ones calculated to perplex and tease him.”
The partners often worked all day and into the night. One evening, taking a dinner break at the Bel Air Hotel, they encountered the caustic novelist Evelyn Waugh, who had “a ferocious and inexplicable hatred for Hitchcock,” in Moorehead’s words. “Let’s pretend we’re having a really funny time,” Bernstein suggested. “Whatever I say, you laugh and I’ll do the same.” Once started, they couldn’t stop laughing, and from a nearby table, Waugh, “his face purple with loathing, sat glaring at them, in silence,” according to Moorehead.
It wasn’t until the waning days of summer that the Rope casting bubble burst. Although the sexuality of the three leads had not been explicitly defined by Hitchcock, in script or production meetings, there were clear implications in the script. (Brandon wears cologne; his mother is mentioned pointedly.) Both Cary Grant and Montgomery Clift understood, and both were leery. “Since Cary Grant was at best bisexual and Monty was gay,” recalled Arthur Laurents, “they were scared to death and they wouldn’t do it.”
Hitchcock and Grant got into a heated argument, and the star of Suspicion and Notorious backed away not only from Rope but also from plans to formalize any association with the director. “Hitch swore he would never work with Cary again,” recalled screenwriter Bess Taffel, who never finished “Weep No More,” the script intended to launch a Hitchcock-Grant partnership.
Losing Grant and Clift was a terrible letdown, but Hitchcock didn’t have to look far for his new Brandon. He kept running into John Dall at Chasen’s and Romanoff’s. Dall was Columbia-educated, with experience at the Pasadena Playhouse, and in his first screen role, as the coal miner taught by aging spinster Bette Davis in The Corn Is Green, he had been nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. While not as popular or magnetic as Clift, Dall was a powerful actor—and a homosexual willing to play it subtly that way.
Granger was signed on as the other killer, but that left Rupert, the third focal character. With Clift and Grant out of the equation, Hitchcock needed a star of a certain magnitude, and he now cast his eye in a very different direction.
The casting of James Stewart as Rupert is still a matter of debate among critics of Rope, but the normally folksy actor had endured a grim firsthand experience of World War II and returned a changed man. “Stewart was in fact thinking of quitting Hollywood and going back to Pennsylvania to run his father’s hardware store,” wrote Joseph McBride in Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. During the making of It’s a Wonderful Life, Stewart told Lionel Barrymore that after what he’d seen in the air force, he wa
sn’t sure acting was a job for a man. Hitchcock picked up on this new, disillusioned Stewart, now looking for meatier roles.
Their go-between was Lew Wasserman, a man as important as any other in Hitchcock’s life story. After the death of Myron Selznick in 1944, Hitchcock had stayed wary of, even hostile to, the idea of formal representation. Since his next long-term contract was with Transatlantic—an equal partnership with his best friend—Hitchcock had no urgent need for an agent.
After Myron’s death, the Selznick Agency had been purchased by Leland Hayward, the New York-based talent and literary agent who had roomed with Myron and David during their salad days in Hollywood, and who had longtime business ties with both Selznicks. Kay Brown switched over to the new Hayward agency, and so did most of Myron’s remaining clients; the Selznick agents who joined the new entity included Nat Deverich, who had been one of Hitchcock’s champions behind closed doors. Deverich became manager of the Hollywood office, which became known as the Hayward-Deverich Agency.
The newly constituted Hayward-Deverich Agency represented the crème de la crème of Hollywood, including Billy Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, Myrna Loy, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart. The agency represented Hitchcock only nominally, but Hitchcock and Hayward (who was married to the actress Margaret Sullavan) moved in the same circles, and the two men were quite friendly. In 1945 Hayward quit the agency business to become a Broadway producer; he and Deverich sold out to a rival, the Music Corporation of America, and MCA absorbed their rolls—including James Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock.
Wasserman was one of the rising lights of MCA, a company that had its origins in the popular music field. Originally from Cleveland, where he had started out in the 1930s booking nightclubs and doing low-level publicity, Wasserman had developed into one of show business’s most committed go-getters. Transferred first to New York and later to Hollywood after MCA branched out into the motion picture business, Wasserman had unmatched energy, and devotion to his clients. Tall, thin, bespectacled, always immaculately tailored, he had “an air of complete confidence with a penumbra of wisdom and assurance,” in the words of Dore Schary, one of his clients.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 58