Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  The major changes to Highsmith’s story began with the two main characters. In the book, the strangers—Bruno and Guy—actually do swap murder victims. Bruno, the psychopathic instigator, slays Miriam (Guy’s estranged wife), and afterward hounds Guy into killing his father. Bruno later dies in a boating accident, while a guilt-ridden Guy is finally cornered by a dogged detective.

  Highsmith’s Bruno is a physically repugnant alcoholic, but now the three Hitchcocks began to reimagine him as more of a Hitchcockian killer—dapper and charming, at least on the surface. The homoeroticism that Highsmith hinted at in Bruno’s idolization of Guy would be preserved. Just as he had with Rope, Hitchcock would make Bruno’s sexuality a fascinating subtext of the film, for anyone who cared to notice it (as long as that someone wasn’t a studio or censorship official). Whitfield Cook knew how to code the signals from his circle of friends, and in his hands the film’s Bruno became a dandy, a mama’s boy who speaks French, and who professes ignorance of women.

  Guy really got the bigger makeover. In Highsmith’s novel Guy is an architect; but tennis was a sport Hitchcock had played and observed for years, and so for the film Guy became a top amateur tennis player with aspirations for political office. (Bruno has avidly followed his athletic career and rocky love life in the newspapers.) To head off the censors, Guy became a decent guy who refuses to carry out his part of the crazed bargain, killing Bruno’s father.*

  But there was also a subtext to Guy, hinted at in the film’s relocating of key action to Washington, D.C. The politically left-leaning Cook was the second writer drafted by Hitchcock expressly because he was comfortable with sexually ambiguous characters. Cook used Guy to make the film a parable “quietly defiant of the Cold War hysteria sweeping America,” in the words of film scholar Robert L. Carringer. That hysteria was targeting homosexuals along with Communists as enemies of the state. Concurrent with the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ ongoing probe of Communists in Hollywood, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on Soviet moles in the State Department, the U.S. Senate was busy investigating the suspicion that “moral perverts” in the government were also undermining national security—going so far as to commission a study, “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.”

  In his analysis of Strangers on a Train, Carringer persuasively argues that the film was crucially shaped in part by these Cold War events. The very blandness and decency of Guy, wrote Carringer, made the character a stand-in for victims of the antihomosexual climate. “To all appearances Guy is the all-American stereotype,” Carringer writes, “an athlete, unassuming despite his fame, conservatively dressed.” Guy is “a man of indeterminate sexual identity found in circumstances making him vulnerable to being compromised.” Guy’s decency also sets him up for Bruno’s revenge, which becomes the excuse for Hitchcock’s spectacular crosscutting between the two sequences he had in mind to climax the film.

  Besides Washington, D.C., which isn’t in the book, Hitchcock envisioned other settings different from the Highsmith book. The novel had long sections set in the Southwest and Florida, but Hitchcock planned to stick to the corridor of East Coast cities linked by rail, which figure only fleetingly in the novel. One of Highsmith’s settings, however, was a Connecticut amusement park, and Hitchcock homed in on that favorite locale—changing the particulars for Bruno’s fairgrounds murder of Miriam, and then staging Bruno’s return to the fairgrounds as the film’s crescendo.

  These changes and new ideas first coalesced in the treatment Cook began to work up on the train—“not a treatment exactly,” in the words of Czenzi Ormonde, the final scriptwriter of Strangers on a Train, but something “called a ‘step line’ and it was in great detail.”

  On this run-for-cover project, Hitchcock raced ahead of everyone: the script, the cast, the studio. Already on this auspicious train trip, pieces of the film were dancing like electrical charges in his brain. He moved quickly in sewing up the rights for a pittance, and in getting the go-ahead from Warner Bros. to substitute Strangers on a Train for I Confess. To a studio still concerned about the director’s preoccupation with Catholic priests and capital punishment, the Highsmith novel looked like a return to a more familiar, more comfortable brand of Hitchcock suspense.

  While Hitchcock developed Strangers on a Train, Sidney Bernstein could further develop I Confess. In London, the Transatlantic producer engaged Paul Vincent Carroll—a cofounder, along with James Bridie, of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre—for another treatment of the wrong-priest story.

  After finishing his treatment, Whitfield Cook moved back east to concentrate on novels, and once again Hitchcock went shopping for a writer—a name author, like Steinbeck or Thornton Wilder, who could lend prestige to the film. Like first-rank actors, however, prestigious writers turned Hitchcock down more than once in America. Weeks turned into months as Cook’s treatment for Strangers on a Train circulated around Hollywood. A host of writers dismissed Hitchcock’s distasteful little drama. “Eight writers turned me down,” Hitchcock told Charles Thomas Samuels. “None of them thought it was any good,” he told Truffaut.

  One of these was the hard-boiled novelist Dashiell Hammett. By midsummer, though, Raymond Chandler, second only to Hammett in the pantheon of American crime fiction, had surfaced as an alternative. Chandler lived in nearby La Jolla, and occasionally dabbled in film: the script he had recently cowritten for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity had even been nominated for an Oscar. Approached through his agent, Ray Stark, Chandler read the Highsmith novel and the Whitfield Cook treatment, and agreed to take the assignment, though privately he sided with the other notables who had deemed it “a silly enough story.” But Chandler would do it partly for the money and “partly because I thought I might like Hitchcock, which I do.”

  Chary of Hollywood, Chandler refused to drive to Burbank for meetings at Warner Bros., but that didn’t seem to bother Hitchcock. Starting in early August, he and Barbara Keon—late of Selznick International, now working as Hitchcock’s associate producer—made several limousine trips to the house in La Jolla, where Chandler was living with his semi-invalid wife.

  Chandler avoided studio appointments largely because he distrusted lengthy discussion about scripts. As much as Hitchcock enjoyed talking and socializing, Chandler preferred to get down to the writing. At first appreciative of the director (“a very considerate and polite man”), he soon grew tired of their meetings, which were like the tennis matches in the film—full of fast and furious volleys. “Every time you get set,” Chandler wrote to one intimate, “he jabs you off balance by wanting to do a love scene on top of the Jefferson Memorial or something like that.”

  Surprise of surprises, Chandler proved one of those dread “plausibles” who wanted all the film’s characters to have motivations, and every plot twist an airtight explanation. He wanted to spell things out with words, rather than leave any of the writing to the camera. He was underwhelmed by Hitchcock’s digressions—his anecdotes about Champagne, for example, which were intended to convey his visual philosophy, but which were Greek to Chandler.

  Hitchcock was too ready “to sacrifice dramatic logic (insofar as it exists) for the sake of a camera effect,” Chandler griped in one letter. He preferred a man “who realizes that what is said and how it is said is more important than shooting it upside down through a glass of champagne.”

  The trips to La Jolla yielded diminishing returns. The personal chemistry between the two men evaporated, and Chandler’s behavior turned odd and belligerent. All Chandler wanted to do, it seemed, was debate what Hitchcock had decided must be done. The crime novelist argued that Highsmith’s original story was superior to Hitchcock’s version, and kept trying to restore the book. The tension was heightened by the fact that Chandler drank heavily, and spent some of their meetings either tippling or fighting off a hangover. That kind of unprofessionalism irked Hitchcock. But he couldn’t fire Chandler—who had a firm contract—without alarming Warner’s.

/>   Hitchcock decided to make one last trip to La Jolla, but resolved to avoid an argument with Chandler if the author’s obnoxious attitude persisted. Upon arrival, the director sat down in his usual chair, taking his usual posture. Chandler, in his cups that day, began a scathing rant about why Hitchcock should stick to the book and forget all of his devious plot and camera tricks. The director let him go on … and on. Barbara Keon had to speak up during the silences, when it became embarrassingly clear that Hitchcock wasn’t going to utter a word.

  At the peak of Chandler’s oration, the director simply stood up, opened the door, and left the house. Keon hastily assembled her belongings and raced after him to where his car was waiting, the door held open by a driver who had been alerted to stand by. An amazed Chandler followed, shouting at Hitchcock. The director paused to let Keon plunge into the backseat of the car first, then tried to squeeze his bulky body into the vehicle as fast as possible.

  In an uncontrolled stream of invective Chandler called Hitchcock a fat bastard, and worse, as they drove off. The remarks “were personal,” recalled Czenzi Ormonde, who heard about the incident from Keon, “very personal.” Hitchcock kept his poker face until they had safely escaped; even then, he gazed out the window for a long time as the limousine clocked the miles. Halfway back to the studio he finally turned to Keon and said simply, “He’s through.”

  It wasn’t Chandler’s finest hour. But in his alcoholic haze, the writer seems not to have realized the damage he had done. He settled down to five weeks of scriptwriting, griping to his agent, the head of the Warner’s story department, and anyone who would listen that Hitchcock never again spoke to him. “Not even a telephone call,” he complained to Warner Bros. “Not one word of criticism or appreciation. Silence. Blank silence.” Hitchcock never even acknowledged receipt of Chandler’s script, which arrived at the studio at the end of September.

  In late August Hitchcock had to shoot the first backdrops back east before the script and cast were finalized. He personally supervised the second-unit work, including at the Davis Cup competition in Forest Hills, where they amassed footage of every imaginable backhand and serve. (“I remember asking them would they mind moving that Davis Cup out of the way, please?”)

  He would make use of this footage in two splendidly staged tennis matches in Strangers on a Train. The first contains the unforgettable image of the spectators swiveling their heads from side to side as they follow the intense volleys, while Bruno’s head (and gaze) remains conspicuously fixed on Guy.

  The second match is the one Guy must win—as fast as possible—in order to slip away from police and foil Bruno’s attempt to frame him with evidence planted at the fairgrounds. (The Hitchcockery included doubles as well as newsreel footage, and a specially created machine that shot the balls just under the camera, to make it look as if Guy is hitting straight into the lens.) This second tennis match is magnificently intercut with a “game” every bit as tense: Bruno “playing” inside a storm drain, reaching and stretching his fingers as he struggles to retrieve an initialed cigarette lighter (the significant trifle which will incriminate Guy).

  Back east, Hitchcock also shot establishing footage of Penn Station and the national monuments of Washington, D.C. He had to use a stand-in for Bruno, who posed as a shadowy figure on the distant steps of the Jefferson Memorial—symbolic, wrote Donald Spoto, of “a malignant stain … a blot on the order of things.” The second-unit footage was precisely the kind of sightseeing scenes that Raymond Chandler, busy writing an irrelevant draft, most vehemently opposed.

  Chandler’s version was delivered in late September, and filed away. The new writer Hitchcock then hired, in October, was not a famous author but a Hollywood stooge—not even famous among other stooges. If there is a perfect example of Hitchcock’s instinct for finding compatible writers, it is this unfamous lady with an exotic name: Czenzi Ormonde.

  Ormonde was American-born, of Dutch and Bohemian ancestry; she and Hitchcock had met during his first month in Hollywood, and their paths continued to cross over the years. Ormonde had been working for David O. Selznick, doing research for Gone With the Wind, and she ended up in Barbara Keon’s office, helping writers with script drafts. Later, she went to work as a dialogue writer for Sam Goldwyn. “I wrote on many, many pictures, for which I received no credit, just probing and sharpening the dialogue,” Ormonde recalled.

  Publicity photographs show her to be a fair-haired beauty with long shimmering hair. In interviews the director sometimes obliquely referred to Ormonde as “Ben Hecht’s assistant,” leading other books about Hitchcock to describe her as one of Hecht’s “ghostwriters.” In truth, she assisted Hecht on research for Gone With the Wind (hence Hitchcock’s remark) and then stayed close friends with the Hecht family, taking over the lease on Hecht’s house whenever the writer was east. But it would be more accurate to call her Keon’s assistant.

  In 1950, Ormonde had just published Laughter from Downstairs, a collection of her short stories culled from Cosmopolitan, depicting the life of a Bohemian-American family from the point of view of a nine-year-old girl. (The dust jacket said “parts of it were written with the aid of a flashlight tied on the end of a belt before the advent of electricity at her farm.”) But although she had recently finished an assignment for Twentieth Century-Fox, Ormonde couldn’t boast a single big-screen credit.

  Hitchcock liked Ormonde, though, which automatically ranked her ahead of Chandler. She was a young free spirit who preferred to live away from Hollywood on a ranch. Through the years she had been an occasional dinner guest at Bellagio Road (“An exchange I heard between Mrs. H. and the daughter Pat Hitchcock proved to me she was a wonderful, clear-thinking and tender mother,” Ormonde recalled). Furthermore, Ormonde, who came inexpensively, was ready to go to work. Dispensing with Chandler was awkward, but ruffled feathers were smoothed by the fact that Ormonde was also a Ray Stark client. (That really annoyed Chandler; “it’s bad enough to be stabbed in the back without having your agent supply the knife,” he wrote.)

  At their first conference, Hitchcock made a show of pinching his nose, then holding up Chandler’s draft with his thumb and forefinger and dropping it into a wastebasket. He told the obscure writer that the famous one hadn’t written a solitary line he intended to use, and they would have to start all over on page one, using Cook’s treatment as a guide. The director told Ormonde to forget all about the book, then told her the story of the film himself, from beginning to end.

  Hecht had less than Chandler to do with the final script of Strangers on a Train; the true credit belongs to Alma Reville, Whitfield Cook, Barbara Keon, Czenzi Ormonde, and—of course—Hitchcock. The director knew Ormonde was the right choice after she wrote a handful of informal try-out pages for the first scene between Bruno and his daffy mother—a scene that finds Bruno lounging in a silk robe in the family mansion, getting a manicure from his mother before his father arrives to rail in the background. The chirrupy Mrs. Anthony appears ignorant of her son’s vices. She is blithely devoted to her hobby of painting badly—“such a soothing pastime.” (Former St. Ignatians might have gotten an extra chuckle out of the portrait Bruno’s mother is painting: a grotesque modern-art smear that she insists is Saint Francis.) Under Ormonde, Mrs. Anthony had emerged as an ultimate Hitchcock mother.

  As the director read over Ormonde’s first pages he grew excited: the character brought to mind a certain actress. He got on the phone to England and arranged to hire Marion Lorne, an American stage actress managing theaters in London with her husband. Lorne, making her screen debut, would make Mrs. Anthony one of the film’s memorable characters—both touching and absurd.*

  Ormonde was one of many people who witnessed a Hitchcock performance that attested to his fear of policemen. So many similar anecdotes have been told about him that they amount to one of two things: either evidence of a bona fide complex, or a lie so smooth and practiced that no one ever saw through it. One day, according to Ormonde, the two were driving to t
he studio through heavy traffic, when a motorcycle cop suddenly appeared behind them, following their car (a scene, incidentally, echoed in several Hitchcock films). Ormonde—who of course was doing the driving—assured the panicked director that she had been proceeding legally, under the speed limit. Then, at a traffic stop, the motorcycle cop swerved up ominously beside them. “I saw you and Mr. Hitchcock leave the studio,” the policeman exclaimed, pushing his helmet up with a grin, “and want to tell him I never miss a Hitchcock film. They’re the greatest!”

  Ormonde glanced over at Hitchcock, who wasn’t responding. He seemed to be in a trance. “He did not care what was said, perhaps had not heard it,” Ormonde said. “Fists were clenched, face was pale, his eyes stared ahead. Visibly this was a very frightened man.”**

  Mrs. Hitchcock once explained that her husband was “afraid of any brush with the law,” not merely because of the boyhood incident in which he was briefly locked in a jail cell, but because the director once “swerved slightly over the white line in England and was stopped by an English bobby who took down the particulars. Hitch drove everyone around him crazy for days, worrying whether or not he was going to get a summons.”

  After two weeks of meetings with Ormonde and Barbara Keon, Hitchcock switched to preproduction full-time, leaving the writing to the two women. “We were dominated by time, and time meant everything to us,” said Ormonde. Keon, who had already been through it once with Chandler, guided the drafts through revision. The two women often worked until four in the morning, trying to make pages in time for the planned late-October start date. Keon knew “exactly” what Hitchcock wanted. “She’d take two or three scenes and condense them,” recalled Ormonde.