The character of Scottie was safe in Stewart’s hands, then; it was the part of Madeleine/Judy that was suddenly up in the air. That was the crisis facing the four men at the end-of-April lunch. When the director’s gallstones had forced yet a third postponement of Vertigo, Vera Miles had telephoned Coleman in a panic. “She was not the calm, thoughtful Vera I knew so well,” recalled Coleman. “Her voice revealed a troubled young lady”—because, as Miles informed Coleman, she was pregnant.
During the filming of The Wrong Man, Miles had married Gordon Scott, an actor who portrayed Tarzan in several 1950s movies. Their marriage had in fact aggravated the tensions between Miles and Hitchcock, for he had a history with actresses being distracted by new husbands, and he was especially opposed to a marriage if he didn’t think much of the husband.
And marriage inevitably produced babies. Now Miles was pregnant, which mandated either another postponement of Vertigo or a new leading lady. Although Hitchcock’s first personal star might have been able to finesse the role earlier in 1957, she knew she couldn’t disguise her pregnancy on a midyear shoot; besides, she wanted to take time off to be with her baby. That news ended her conversation with Coleman, he recalled—“together with Hitch’s dream of making Vera a major star.”
Coleman was the bearer of the tidings, bringing the news to Hitchcock when he was still in the hospital. The director didn’t curse or scream; he simply let out a long, weary sigh. First Ingrid Bergman, then Anita Björk, now Vera Miles. Actresses falling in love, and their ill-timed pregnancies, seemed to haunt his career. Though he tried to stay cordial with Miles, casting her in Psycho and as the lead of his only hour-long color telefilm, he “lost interest” in making the actress a star, Hitchcock later admitted. “I couldn’t get the rhythm going with her again.”
All along, Lew Wasserman had preferred a different actress, someone more glamorous and well established at the box office—someone like Kim Novak. Wasserman and Stewart had spoken enthusiastically about Novak, a twenty-four-year-old actress who had made her screen debut with a walk-on in a 1954 Jane Russell vehicle. Hitchcock had in fact looked at test footage of Novak while casting The Trouble with Harry. Although at first she seemed an obviously manufactured personality, and the critics loved to snipe at her, by 1957 Novak had not only made strides as a performer, but been named by Box-Office as the most popular star in the United States Best of all, she was a sexy blonde with ethereal looks—like Madeleine’s.
Novak was an MCA client but under contract to Columbia, where she was a pet protégée of studio head Harry Cohn. After Hitchcock agreed, Wasserman walked into the office of Harry Cohn and arranged a swap: James Stewart would consent to appear in a future Columbia production with Novak, in return for the studio loaning her to Vertigo. At lunch, the four men decided on a new start date: June.
Though still unfinished, the script of Vertigo was evolving as a jewel, the four men agreed. Taylor had improved scenes and dialogue throughout, although his only real innovation was coming up with the character of Midge, a college friend of Scottie’s with an unrequited crush on him, who would function as one of Hitchcock’s Greek chorus characters early in the story. Taylor even had an actress in mind for the part—his friend Barbara Bel Geddes, who had been nominated for an Oscar for I Remember Mama, but who worked mainly on Broadway.
Taylor’s first substantial conference with Hitchcock since the second hospitalization came the following week, the first week of May. It was then that Hitchcock, who had just spent weeks in bed brooding over Vertigo, broached a major departure from the novel. Judy’s involvement in the real Madeleine’s death, suggested the director, ought to be revealed to the audience two-thirds of the way through the film, rather than at the denouement as in the book. The truth would be made clear to audiences through Judy’s memories as she wrestles with her role in deceiving Scotty.
Taylor was “shocked” by the idea, Hitchcock later told Peter Bogdanovich. But the writer remembered things differently. “I kept saying to Hitchcock that there’s something missing,” Taylor said. “Then one day I said to him, ‘I know exactly what’s missing’—I said, ‘It’s really a Hitchcockian thing.’ I was naturally being ‘Hitchcock’ with him. I said, ‘This is not pure Hitchcock unless the audience knows what has happened,’ and he agreed.
“The trouble was, I didn’t know exactly how to write it because I thought originally of [having a] scene between Judy and Elster, in which he is preparing to go east and she is saying, ‘What will become of me?’ That would’ve revealed it to the audience, but I came to the conclusion—not I alone, but Hitch and I talking about it—we came to the conclusion that [that] would strangely rob Scottie. It was just an instinct with us both.
“We finally fastened on what we did, which is the writing of the letter and the flashback. I always felt that it was a weakness that we had to do it that way.”
As Hitchcock and Taylor continued refining the script, a minor crisis postponed the production once more: furious at Harry Cohn for profiting on her loan-out, Kim Novak refused to report to work. Cohn and Novak haggled throughout the summer. Vertigo was ultimately rescheduled to start filming in October 1957, almost a year from its original start date. With all that time to put to productive use, “the screenplay was written in great detail, as it should be directed,” noted Dan Auiler, “down to the camera directions and even the commentary on the music.”
The delays deepened and darkened the script. For the first time, a Hitchcock love story would end pathetically, with the abject failure of the hero and the death of the leading lady.
Over the summer, as Hitchcock pressed forward with Vertigo, he also met with Ernest Lehman, whom he had coaxed into writing The Wreck of the Mary Deare. Most of their time was spent gossiping over enjoyable lunches. In spite of the fact that Hitchcock had a signed deal, he didn’t seem eager to film the Hammond Innes best-seller. “Every time I brought up The Wreck of the Mary Deare,” Lehman recalled, “I saw looks of anxiety cross his face and he would adeptly change the subject.”
Lehman was likewise indifferent. All he managed to sketch out was “a powerful opening image of a ship drifting, deserted, in the English channel” and a tentative ending. He thought “the rest” was doomed to be “a boring courtroom drama” with manifold flashbacks. He waited and waited for Hitchcock to arrive at a similar conclusion, as their delightful lunches continued. Finally one day Lehman announced, “I give up. I just cannot see a way of dramatizing this book properly. Please get yourself another writer.”
“Don’t be silly,” responded Hitchcock, shaking his head. “We get along so well, let’s forget this one and think of some other picture to do together.”
“I think he sensed that he’d be ‘safe’ with me,” Lehman told Donald Spoto. “He cast those around him very carefully, based on his unconscious readings of their potential behavior—whether they’d be threatening to him, perhaps the type who could leap up and show anger. I was quiet, respectful, interested, maybe even interesting, and obviously one who would easily fit the role of ‘sitting at the feet of the master.’ ”
Lehman sat at the master’s feet for a few more weeks, kicking around ideas. Forgetting, once again, his vow to stay away from costume pictures, Hitchcock revived the idea of filming the life of eighteenth-century highwayman and escape artist Jack Sheppard. But Lehman wasn’t keen on Jack Sheppard, either, so eventually they fell to musing about what Hitchcock called “a sole provocative idea with which I had long been obsessed.” The idea for “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose” concerned a nonexistent master spy who has been set up as a CIA decoy. The man would be mixed up in an assassination at the UN, and the climax would be the decoy dangling from a presidential nose at Mount Rushmore—“a unique predicament” in the director’s mind “before even one word of the script was written,” in Hitchcock’s words.
Hitchcock had carried around the germ of North by Northwest for seven years, talking about it with friends and associates and other writers. “We used
to discuss it every time we had a chance,” recalled John Michael Hayes, now banished from Hitchcock’s employ.
Hearing the director sketch this ultra-Hitchcockian story—wrong-man suspense mingled with comedy and romance—Lehman grew excited. They brainstormed some ideas. The decoy agent, whose name was Thornhill from the earliest draft, was “probably a traveling salesman” in Otis Guernsey’s original synopsis. Hitchcock saw him as a New York businessman, and now, talking to Lehman, thought he might be an American supersalesman—a highly successful ad executive. Lehman had a Madison Avenue background, so why not?
There was only one hitch: MGM thought Hitchcock was busy developing The Wreck of the Mary Deare. No problem, the director told Lehman. He set up a meeting at MGM, and informed officials there that it was going to take him quite a while to lick the Hammond Innes novel, and he said he could knock off another MGM picture in the meantime. “Which delighted them,” recalled Lehman, “because they thought they would get two films instead of one.”* So MGM got a two-page outline of a story called “In a Northwesterly Direction.”
It’s tempting to date the personal crescendo Hitchcock had in his relationship with actress Brigitte Auber to the summer of 1956, when he was still preoccupied with Vertigo.
He had at least two friendships with actresses go awry in similar fashion during this period, the mid-1950s. Both involved young actresses, foreign-born, who saw the director as a father figure. Only Auber would go on the record for this book. She can’t remember the exact dates, only that something happened about two years after To Catch a Thief. Hitchcock was in and out of London and Paris constantly, and the two had stayed in touch. When they got together, he treated her with “parental tenderness,” in her words.
His pursuit of her evokes Vertigo—with its story of a man pursuing an elusive fantasy creature. Auber felt that she and the director had a special friendship. If she found out that Hitchcock was in London, she had her favorite wines sent to his hotel. When he came to Paris he brought wine from his own cellar; they brought the wine with them to French bistros, where the chefs came out from the kitchen to taste from the director’s private reserve. Hitchcock seemed to know all the chefs by name. “He passed his life in restaurants,” Auber said.
He talked vaguely of starring Auber in a film he said he was planning: the story of an American serviceman who meets a French girl during World War II, then brings her home with him to the United States, where her illusions about him are rudely stripped away. She never saw anything on paper; he simply told her the story, embroidering it over dinners.
The director told Auber more than once an anecdote about a famous, beautiful actress throwing herself at him. He didn’t boast, or tell the story crudely; he refused to give the name of the star, or any details about what had happened between them. The French actress wasn’t sure whether or not to believe Hitchcock, but he talked about the incident so earnestly that she wanted to believe him. She thought perhaps it really had happened.
One night, after a dinner in Paris, Auber offered to drive him back to his hotel, but Hitchcock said he would walk back from her place. So she drove to where she lived with her boyfriend, a Spanish dancer. It was late at night; they parked in her small car and talked.
During a lull in the conversation, to her amazement, Hitchcock suddenly lunged at Auber, trying to kiss her “full on the mouth.” “I shied away immediately,” recalled the actress. “I said, ‘It’s not possible.’ Someone had once told me that, if a woman was ever [put] in this position, she must say, ‘No, I am faithful. I have a faithful temperament.’ ”
Hitchcock accepted her explanation that she felt the need to be faithful to her boyfriend. He appeared mortified by the incident. Over the years he contacted her a few times, asking if they might patch up their friendship, but the bond was broken. The actress told Hitchcock she felt betrayed.
“One never imagines that someone like that has a crush on you,” the French actress said. “It was an enormous disappointment for me. I had never imagined such a thing. The quality of our relationship was entirely different.” Reflecting on what had happened between them, Auber said she thought Hitchcock felt ugly, and that this ugliness was a wall between him and women. “The poor cabbage had a wonderful soul, I know,” she added.
Once again in the summer he divided his time between film and television. As Hitchcock had explained in his letter to Michael Balcon even before the news was made public in the United States, the success of Alfred Hitchcock Presents had generated a lucrative offer from NBC. The network was preparing a new series called Suspicion, for which it sought his imprimatur. The financial incentives were attractive, but so was the hourlong format. Hitchcock reached agreement with the network before his second hospitalization; then, after recovering, he plunged into shaping a second television series, and directing the premiere. Shamley Productions signed to produce at least ten episodes of Suspicion.
In that busy first week of May 1957, Hitchcock met with Joan Harrison and Francis Cockrell to discuss the first Suspicion episode, based on a Cornell Woolrich story called “Three O’Clock.” Over the summer he then met repeatedly with Harrison.
It took him one week, in mid-July, to direct the Woolrich-inspired drama—retitled “Four O’Clock”—with E. G. Marshall as a man who rigs a time bomb in his cellar to murder his wife (Nancy Kelly), whom he suspects of infidelity. Unfortunately, thieves break into the house and bind and gag the man next to his ticking bomb. “It is one of Hitchcock’s best televisual efforts,” wrote J. Lary Kuhns in a definitive article about Hitchcock’s television career, “rigorously done, without any atmospheric score, and climaxing in a stunning montage sequence.” The second half might be seen as “a companion piece to ‘Breakdown,’ ” wrote Kuhns, “with the internal monologue acting as a counterpoint to the visual.”*
Norman Lloyd joined Shamley Productions in the summer of 1957 to assist with its burgeoning operations. After acting in Charles Chaplin’s Limelight, Lloyd had moved back to New York in 1952 to work in theater and television, but he felt stalled professionally. When Hitchcock called to offer him a job as an associate producer on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Lloyd was surprised. Hitchcock was taking a chance on the actor’s moving behind the camera, but he liked Lloyd and trusted his intelligence. When Lloyd came out to Hollywood, he left his family in New York at first, joining Shamley on a six-month tryout. He started as an assistant to Harrison.
Yet Hitchcock still approved the stories and writers, helped with script problems, discussed the major casting of all the television shows—even working on Sundays when his weekdays were crowded. He regularly met with James Allardice to cook up his monologues, and watched all the finished episodes before they were aired, although his postproduction suggestions were usually diplomatic. His television duties were sandwiched into an appointment book never more crowded than in 1956. And whenever there was spare time, he had lunch with Ernest Lehman.
Hitchcock’s chagrin over losing Vera Miles kept him from going wild over Kim Novak.
Novak annoyed him, even before he met her. At her first wardrobe meeting with Edith Head, the actress informed Head that she was disposed to wearing any color “except gray”—which was the color of Madeleine’s suit in the book and film. Head recalled: “Either she [Novak] hadn’t read the script, or she had and wanted me to think she hadn’t. I explained to her that Hitch paints a picture in his films, that color is as important to him as it is to any artist.” Her assistant stuck “the sketch of the gray suit off to the side so she wouldn’t see it,” while Head showed her “some of the other designs.”
After Novak left, the costume designer called Hitchcock, “asking if that damn suit had to be gray, and he explained to me that the simple gray suit and plain hairstyle were very important, and represented the character’s view of herself in the first half of the film. The character would go through a psychological change in the second half of the film, and would then wear more colorful clothes to reflect the change. Even i
n a brief conversation, Hitch could communicate complex ideas. He was telling me that women have more than one tendency, a multiplicity of tastes, which can be clouded by the way they view themselves at any particular moment. He wasn’t about to lose that subtle but important concept.”
“Handle it, Edith,” Hitchcock said, “I don’t care what she wears as long as it’s a gray suit.”
Coming to lunch at Bellagio Road in late June, Novak persisted with her conditions. She didn’t care for Madeleine’s prescribed hairstyle or color; she didn’t wear suits in real life or on camera—especially gray suits.
Hitchcock didn’t blink. “Look, Miss Novak,” he said, “you do your hair whatever color you like, and you wear whatever you like, so long as it conforms to the story requirements.” (As Hitchcock later told Truffaut, “I used to say, ‘Listen. You do whatever you like; there’s always the cutting-room floor.’ That stumps them. That’s the end of that.”)
Sam Taylor was also present for the Bellagio Road lunch. To Novak’s consternation, Hitchcock steered the discussion toward “everything except the film—art, food, travel, wine,” the writer remembered, “all the things he thought she wouldn’t know very much about. He succeeded in making her feel like a helpless child, ignorant and untutored, and that’s just what he wanted—to break down her resistance. By the end of the afternoon he had her right where he wanted her, docile and obedient and even a little confused.”
At her next meeting with Head, Novak seemed chastened. Brunet hair (for Judy) and a gray suit were now acceptable. There was one point of principle she refused to surrender, however: the buxom actress often preferred to go without a brassiere in life, and wanted to do the same in some scenes on screen. Though he preferred to dictate ladies’ underwear too, that was all right by Hitchcock.*
August and September were taken up with final script meetings, scouting up north, casting featured parts, wardrobe, and camera tests. The days were filled with meetings at which Hitchcock reviewed all the design and storyboard sketches. He watched all the second-unit footage, looked at photographs, and approved all the locations.
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