Although Dial M for Murder was planned for 3-D, Hitchcock didn’t foresee any outrageous effects. “No spears or chairs to throw at the audience,” he assured Bernstein. He would stage it all quite simply, letting his camera glide fluidly around the furniture to add subtle depth of field. A good thing too, for—just as Hitchcock had anticipated—by the time Dial M for Murder went before the special cameras in August, the 3-D fad had faded. During filming it became common knowledge that, as Hitchcock informed Bernstein, “it is quite possible that Dial M for Murder may even go out as a flattie.”*
One of Hitchcock’s secret motives for switching to Dial M for Murder was that, at his urging, Cary Grant had seen the play, and was “very, very keen to play the lead”—at last fulfilling his ambitions to play a wife killer for Hitchcock. But Jack Warner vetoed that idea, too, saying he did not think it was “possible to overcome [the] public being used to Cary as a light comedy type,” in Hitchcock’s words. Privately, the director thought the real reason was that Grant had asked too high a salary, as well as a percentage of the gross; with House of Wax a smash hit in theaters during the negotiations, Warner believed any 3-D Hitchcock stood to earn a “big gross and he obviously thinks that Cary’s ten percent of the gross is too much to pay.”**
So instead Hitchcock engaged Ray Milland, an Oscar winner for The Lost Weekend (and Best Actor at Cannes that year, beating Cary Grant in Notorious). Milland was a hardworking actor, but without Grant’s charisma. “Cost,” Hitchcock dryly informed Bernstein, “$125,000.”
The cast of the Broadway show yielded two actors for the film who needed little rehearsal in reprising their roles. John Williams had played the Inspector and Anthony Dawson was Lesgate, the crooked ex-classmate blackmailed into handling the murder. Hitchcock had tried to promote the countercasting of suave Louis Hayward as Lesgate—the part he was still calling, in silent-film parlance, the “heavy.” But Hayward asked for $10,000, which taxed the studio’s bargain budget of $805,000 (before overhead), a ceiling already burdened by the $150,000 and percentages passed to Korda for the screen rights. Dawson, a Scot, was less of a name to American moviegoers, and he also required less of a salary, earning a mere $8,000 for his role. Savings to the budget: $2,000.
Robert Cummings seemed the best man available for the second lead, the American crime writer Mark Halliday. Hitchcock had a soft spot for the self-effacing star of Saboteur, a periodic guest at Bellagio Road. Besides, Cummings took a low salary of $25,000.
For Margo, the victim of her husband’s jealousy and greed—and the only lady in the cast—Hitchcock couldn’t afford a top star. But here he turned his limitations to advantage.
The budget needed an unknown, or at least an actress who wouldn’t demand an inordinate salary. Hitchcock remembered a discarded Twentieth Century–Fox screen test, in which he had seen a young hopeful portray an Irish immigrant girl. Her accent was wrong, but the actress was irresistibly photogenic. John Ford’s Mogambo was being shown around Hollywood, and Hitchcock was able to watch the young actress in her latest film—the breakthrough role for this twenty-four-year-old, whose electric charm and sensuality were not so evident in her first two films. Still a relative newcomer in the spring of 1953, Grace Kelly was not yet in demand. MGM, which owned her contract, was willing to loan her out for only $14,000.
The quick script (polished and done by the end of July), the streamlined casting, and rapid preproduction—all these not only served the budget, but allowed Hitchcock to intersperse what he called intense “bouts” of preparation for the project that was being quietly lined up as his next film—another intended “breather” before To Catch a Thief. Lew Wasserman closed a $40,000 deal transferring Cornell Woolrich’s short story, which would become the film Rear Window, from Leland Hayward and Joshua Logan to Hitchcock: $25,000 for the rights, $15,000 for Logan’s treatment. After Dial M for Murder, Hitchcock would direct the Woolrich story for Paramount, with James Stewart as his star. In return for certain distribution rights, Warner Bros. agreed to loan Hitchcock out to the rival studio, where Stewart had a multipicture deal and a window of availability in the fall.
At their first meeting, Hitchcock looked Grace Kelly up and down, and proceeded to lecture her on what she would wear in Dial M for Murder. He had one of his color-coded ideas: initially, Margot would be clad in a bright wardrobe; then, gradually, as she is victimized by events and indicted for murder, she’d go to “brick, then to gray, then to black.” Except for the red lace dress she wears in the first scene, they would buy everything off the rack of department stores.
Kelly listened politely until Hitchcock told her she would wear a velvet robe for the scissors-stabbing highlight. At which point the young actress disagreed; her character wouldn’t don a fancy robe in the middle of the night, she said, just to answer a ringing telephone.
“Well, what would you do?” Hitchcock asked. “What would you put on to answer the phone?”
Kelly said she wouldn’t put anything special on. She’d be wearing her nightgown. She had trumped him, and that was part of their bond. A nightgown it was.
Born to wealth and connections in Philadelphia high society, a former model who had studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Kelly was the Hitchcock fantasy woman come to life—a dream blonde as ladylike as Madeleine Carroll, but as earthy and wanton as Ingrid Bergman. Kelly didn’t mind Hitchcock’s abruptness, or his despotism, which amused her. She wasn’t shocked by his oft-crude sense of humor. Having attended a girls’ convent school, she had heard every conceivable crudeness before she was thirteen.
A naughty girl herself, Kelly juggled two or three affairs during the filming of Dial M for Murder, much to the director’s delight. “That Gryce!” Hitchcock was wont to exclaim privately. “She fucked everyone! Why, she even fucked little Freddie, the writer!” Her hand-holding with the playwright (and screenwriter) appeared in the entertainment columns, and her dalliance with Anthony Dawson was also grist for the rumor mill. And published accounts agree that Kelly and Ray Milland carried on an especially torrid affair, which almost broke up Milland’s long-secure marriage.
Hitchcock the voyeur couldn’t have been more delighted. And as Dial M for Murder was being shot, he was already shaping his next film to showcase this prepossessing young actress.
“All through the making of Dial M for Murder,” Kelly recalled, “he sat and talked to me about it [Rear Window] all the time, even before we had discussed my being in it. He was very enthusiastic as he described all the details of a fabulous set while we were waiting for the camera to be pushed around. He talked to me about the people who could be seen in other apartments opposite the ‘rear window,’ and their little stories, and how they would emerge as characters and what would be revealed. I could see him thinking all the time.”
“I could have phoned that one in,” Hitchcock liked to say about Dial M for Murder, making a bad pun out of his modesty. He insisted that he did very little with the film, creatively. He merely cast the film well, turned on the cameras, and documented a taut, well-made play.
But in spite of its humble reputation (Robin Wood refers only briefly to the film in his book, and in the Truffaut book Hitchcock cursorily dismisses it), Dial M for Murder ended up as more than just another photographed play. The script was intentionally laced with Hitchcock’s “familiar ironic humor,” as Peter Bordonaro noted in his definitive article in Sight and Sound; and on a thematic level the adaptation introduced “subtle shifts in Knott’s characters and in the arrangement of dialogue in order to express” Hitchcock’s own ideas about “the nature of human relationships” and “sexuality in general.” Scene after scene was made cinematic, with editing, high-angle shots, and recurring motifs (including the phallic implications of certain household objects).
And with Grace Kelly’s affecting performance at the heart of its suspense, Dial M for Murder drew crowds, grossing $5 million worldwide—the fourth hit in a row for Hitchcock and Warner Bros.
*
Not that the incident changed Greene’s mind about Hitchcock. In a new introduction to a collection of his film essays in 1972, Greene wrote, “I still believe I was right” in the 1930s to be irritated by Hitchcock’s “‘amusing’ melodramatic situations,” full of “inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities.”
* A Hitchcockian detail: Guy is supposed to shoot the father with an old German Luger from a San Francisco pawnshop.
* Except for a bit part in The Graduate, it was Lorne’s only screen appearance. On television the actress became widely known, later, on the Mr. Peeper series and as Aunt Clara on the long-running Bewitched.
** It must have happened to him with peculiar frequency, judging from a host of similar eyewitness accounts. “One time I was taking him home—in those days I had a Volkswagen Bug,” recalled art director Robert Boyle. “We were going down a street, and as we stopped at the stop sign, a motor cop came by on his motorcycle. Hitchcock was rigid. His palms were sweating.”
* Years later, Universal publicist Orin Borsten, working on Topaz, noticed two first editions of a Chandler novel among Hitchcock’s office library. He asked if he might have one. Take them both, Hitchcock said.
* Filling out the tapestry for Hitchcock, conspicuously standing in front of the mob, is a fat woman munching an apple as she glares at the priest—an idea the director proudly singled out as his own, in his conversations with François Truffaut. “I even showed her how to eat the apple.”
* Indeed, Dial M for Murder did go out as a “flattie,” playing only select theaters in major cities in 3-D.
** In addition, that is, to the director’s own guarantee of 10 percent profits, on top of the 3–5 percent of negative cost that had to be set aside for 3-D inventors Milton and Julian Gunzberg.
PART 5
PARAMOUNT
THE GLORY YEARS
THIRTEEN
1953–1955
“Palaces are for royalty,” Francie (Grace Kelly) tells John Robie (Cary Grant) in To Catch a Thief. “We’re just common people with a bank account.” Kidding with friends, the film’s director put it another way: “We can all be millionaires, and still only eat two lamb chops.”
The financial shortfalls and anxieties Alfred Hitchcock had experienced during the 1930s and 1940s were over and done by 1954. His salary was rising steadily, and had been augmented for the first time at Warner Bros. by profit-sharing arrangements on Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, and Dial M for Murder. Yet it wasn’t until he signed a contract with Paramount that he truly began to make dizzy money.
The Hitchcocks didn’t live in a palace, and they never indulged in extravagant habits. Food, wine, and travel were luxuries the couple shared with friends and relatives. He arranged for his sister and other family members to visit him in the United States, hosting his cousin Theresa on several expeditions she made to Hollywood; on one trip she created a scene worthy of Number Seventeen, when she was accidentally left behind at a train station in the Southwest and had to jump into a taxi and race along the tracks to catch up.
Having failed to lure his mother to America, he took special care to provide for other kin. (“There are precious few of us left!” his South African aunt Emma wrote him in 1956.) His account books indicate that he remained attentive to his family, and when his brother William’s widow entered a sanatorium in England fifteen years after her husband’s death, Hitchcock quietly instructed his accountant to pay her bills and provide a weekly allowance.
The Hitchcocks often received special shipments of gastronomic delicacies from England and Europe, and during filming had them delivered on location and served at the cast dinners Hitchcock grandly presided over. The director bought quantities of expensive wine for himself and for others as gifts, and prided himself on his vast collection of vintages; the one major addition the couple made to Bellagio Road was a wine cellar.
It was no accident that the stylish furnishings in his films were echoed in the aesthetic of his own homes: more than once he asked the art director of a film to suggest ideas for interior design. Visitors—to one of his houses, or to the homes of his screen characters—did double takes at the modern art on the walls. Hitchcock hated wallpaper, preferring walls of simple vanilla, with maybe a dash of color—a Utrillo here, a Picasso there.
Art was probably his most expensive indulgence, and Hitchcock’s small but noteworthy collection divided its loyalties between the English and the French. Especially at Bellagio Road, the walls were hung with postimpressionist favorites—Maurice Utrillo, Chaim Soutine, Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Amedeo Modigliani. He had three paintings by Paul Klee, the Swiss fantasist to whom he sometimes obliquely compared himself. “I’m not self-indulgent where content is concerned,” he once said. “I’m only self-indulgent about treatment. I’d compare myself to an abstract painter. My favorite painter is Klee.”
Two of his Klees—Odyssey 1924 and Strange Hunt—are allegories of Nazi persecution, according to film scholar Bill Krohn, who has written definitively about Hitchcock’s art collection; the third, Mask and Scythe, is the one that Hitchcock told John Russell Taylor he wasn’t sure he could afford when he purchased it for six hundred pounds in 1938, to celebrate the success of The Lady Vanishes.
The first image to greet visitors stepping into the foyer of Bellagio Road was Georges Rouault’s La Suaire, which depicts the face of the Redeemer as imprinted in blood on Christ’s burial shroud. Eclipse of the Moon by Darrel Austin, a campy supernaturalist, decorated the director’s study. Sprinkled around the house over the years were a number of drawings by Walter Sickert, a disciple of Degas known for his low-life subjects;* the sensuous, semiabstract nudes of Claude Garache; and a variety of Chinese figurines.
The Jacob Epstein bust of Pat Hitchcock was displayed in the courtyard entry of the house overlooking Monterey Bay, while the rose garden featured a mosaic by Georges Braque. The etchings, caricatures, and paintings of Thomas Rowlandson, known for his evocations of crime and punishment (especially London hangings), set a more satirical mood inside the house. Equestrian art in the entrance hall was complemented by a Rowlandson painting, The Last Gasp, Toadstools Mistaken for Mushrooms, described in one catalog as “a macabre scene of a doctor ministering to a family, whose tongues—long, swollen and white—are telling him that they aren’t long for this world.”
The dining room featured two Rowlandsons that spoke to Hitchcock’s brand of social satire. Fast Day shows clergymen “preparing to stuff themselves on a day of fasting and self-mortification,” in Krohn’s words, with a painting of Susanna and the elders on the wall behind them. Sympathy is an engraving of a prison guard about to flog a female prisoner at Bridewell, while a judge looks on sympathetically. Two of Rowlandson’s “wrestling women” hung in the dining room, while Pigeon Hole—showing a horde of poor patrons jammed into the gallery at the Drury Lane—was in the guest room.
Visitors didn’t get to inspect all the Hitchcocks’ art: A set of evocative drawings of a nude man and woman by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska* hung in the master bedroom. And appearances could be deceiving: matte artist Albert Whitlock told Krohn that Hitchcock asked him to forge several of the most famous paintings he owned, so that copies of the valuable works could be hung at his vacation home up north, as a safeguard against burglars.
Nevertheless, it was a modest collection by Hollywood standards. Others in the film colony owned enough paintings and sculptures to fill warehouses. Perhaps the most valuable work Hitchcock owned, the Rue des Abbesses by Utrillo, was appraised in 1970 at forty-five thousand dollars.
The dizzy money began in 1954, courtesy of Lew Wasserman, MCA, and Paramount.
Sidney Bernstein’s advice helped Hitchcock build his art collection, but Wasserman and MCA did wonders for his stock portfolio. By 1954, thanks to Wasserman, Hitchcock was well invested in oil, and the animals to which he often compared actors: cattle. His in-laws guided him to aluminum and metals. His investments profited him so considerably that he could jo
ke about occasional losses. “The hell with new in-laws!!” Hitchcock wrote to Bernstein in late 1953 after taking a twenty-five-thousand-dollar hit on Canadian shares.
Wealthy by most measures, Hitchcock would be made immeasurably richer by his new contract with Paramount, which Wasserman masterminded. The contract had begun as a simple single-picture loan-out from Warner Bros., but swiftly evolved into a long-term agreement with the Hollywood studio whose parent company had run Islington, where Hitchcock first entered the business in 1921.
One of Wasserman’s many talents was his ability to sense when the revolving door of Hollywood might present a fresh opportunity for MCA clients. During the early 1950s Paramount underwent a sweeping change in management; now, prodded by Wasserman, the new bosses offered Hitchcock a lucrative and innovative multiyear package that the thriftier Jack Warner didn’t even try to match.
Paramount was in the process of switching over from a traditional system, built on salaried producers who operated under strict studio management, to outside production units, dominated by a director, producer, or star lured to the lot by promises of independence and profit sharing. Don Hartman and Y. Frank Freeman were the two men spearheading the revolutionary transition, which had demonstrated early success.
A former Wasserman client, Hartman had worked as a screenwriter and then an associate of Dore Schary at MGM, before joining Paramount as an executive in 1951. The courtly, soft-spoken Freeman, a former Georgia exhibitor, was the New York boss. While Hartman, in the words of Variety, “gave exclusive thought to the ‘art’ values” of Paramount films, Freeman supervised the budgets and profits, concerning himself with “the ‘art’ as an inherent part of the commerce.” Despite the industry’s early-1950s malaise, Paramount was prospering because of this “click combination.”
Alfred Hitchcock Page 68