Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Up to that time no film boasted as many return viewings. Psycho capped ten years of sustained creativity for Hitchcock. And, along with his other 1950s films that crisscrossed a dangerous land, it showed him to be an American tragedian indeed—tragedy delivered, as always, with a wink.

  * Edith Head may have acted as consultant on Saint’s wardrobe, but only unofficially; quite remarkably, the credits for North by Northwest unspool without crediting any costume designer.

  * Originally it was a wheat field, but after research indicated that wheat wasn’t grown close to Chicago, Robert Boyle had planted a cornfield.

  * Grant had recently found a new “peace of mind” through lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). In publicity articles timed to coincide with the release of North by Northwest, Grant for the first time revealed that, in addition to hypnosis, yoga, and mysticism, after working with Hitchcock he had begun taking the synthetic, hallucinatory drug for psychotherapeutic reasons—and, he assured interviewers, it was working.

  * “Made in Japan” had won the Robert E. Sherwood Award given to emerging artists by the Mark Taper Forum, one of the theaters making up the Los Angeles Music Center.

  * Of course, there was one director whose camera had been darting into bathrooms on-screen ever since The Lodger in 1926: Hitchcock.

  * The “shower as baptism” was an idea Hitchcock extrapolated from Robert Bloch’s novel, where Mary Crane decides “that’s what she was going to do right now, take a nice, long, hot shower. Get the dirt off her hide, just as she was going to get the dirt cleaned out of her insides. Come clean, Mary. Come clean as snow.”

  * Not quite true, as the film makes clear, for Norman has already admitted that she stayed there.

  PART 6

  CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

  SIXTEEN

  1960–1964

  Once, standing in the middle of a square in Copenhagen, the director heard a siren blaring and spotted an ambulance heading straight for him. The ambulance screeched to a halt, and out jumped a man, crying, “Autograph, please!” Hitchcock scrawled his autograph, the man jumped back into the ambulance, and off it went, siren blaring. “I don’t know if the autograph was for the patient or the driver,” he mused later.

  Another time, stepping off a plane in Tel Aviv and heading down an escalator, Hitchcock was spotted instantly, and the whole airport seemed to pause and look up at him, showering him with applause as he descended. “That was very nice,” he admitted.

  When he traveled to Tahiti for a vacation, choosing such a remote place partly in order to escape his fame, even children recognized him, clustering around him on the beach. When he toured the Vatican, the Papal Guards standing around quietly hummed his television theme song.

  It can be said without exaggeration that by 1960 thanks to the boost from Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Psycho, the short, portly film director was indeed a citizen of the world.

  Psycho was nominated for four Academy Awards: Joseph Hurley, Robert Clatworthy, and George Milo for Best Black-and-White Art Direction and Set Decoration; John L. Russell for Best Cinematography; Janet Leigh for Best Supporting Actress; and Hitchcock for Best Director.*

  The favorite that year, with ten nominations, was Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Wilder was at the peak of his reputation and enjoyed widespread industry support whenever he was nominated, attracting votes from both the Writers and Directors Guild memberships. The controversy over writing credits for The Man Who Knew Too Much (a story that had become common knowledge in the Writers Guild) no doubt hurt Hitchcock at Oscar time, even at this high point of his career; but he was probably hurt more, ironically, by his proud refusal to take a writing credit. Wilder’s unique cachet came from being a writer and director. (Like Hitchcock, he also produced his films.) Hitchcock certainly could have claimed to have cowritten Psycho, but on principle he didn’t.

  Hitchcock admired the cynical, sophisticated Wilder as much as any director, always privately screening the latest Wilder film. He may even have voted for Wilder himself. Philip K. Scheuer wrote a sympathetic piece in the Los Angeles Times, trying to spark an underdog campaign: If Hitchcock won Best Director, he mused, all Hollywood would be shocked, and it would be “not so much for Psycho as to atone for having left the Master at the post the four previous times.”

  On April 17, 1961, Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock sat up front at the Academy Awards ceremony at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Alas, there were no surprises during the evening: not a single Psycho nominee went home with an Oscar. That night the Best Set Decoration and Best Editing honors went to The Apartment, and the Best Script, Best Director, and Best Picture Oscars went to one man—Billy Wilder.**

  Psycho would be Hitchcock’s last Best Director nomination. In his offices at Paramount and later at Universal, an increasingly crowded wall featured his many international awards, plaques, and trophies—including five certificates of Best Director nomination. He would point out the latter to visitors and shake his head ruefully, saying, “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” The statue is just a fancy doorstop anyway, he’d note, adding, “The studios run those things.” But his joking, close friends say, masked a deep private disappointment.

  He said little publicly about the Oscars. Once, when a BBC interviewer asked him directly if he was disappointed at having never received the Best Director prize, he replied, “We’re on dangerous ground here. I won’t talk about myself,” and quickly changed the subject.

  “Oscars aren’t the end-all of our business,” John Ford once crustily told an interviewer who pursued the same line of questioning. “The award those of us in this profession treasure most highly is the New York Film Critics Award. And those of us in the directing end treasure the Directors Guild of America Award. These are eminently fair.”

  But Hitchcock, despite being named a “finalist” and “quarterly winner” on occasion, never won Best Director from the Directors Guild of America, either. He was nominated a record eight times from 1948 to 1960: for Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho* And he fared little better with the New York Film Critics, who, after honoring him for The Lady Vanishes, shut him out of further awards for the rest of his career.

  Almost by default it had fallen to the French to lionize Hitchcock, and the young cineastes of Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif had been turning up the volume. Hitchcock’s incomparable run of films during the 1950s, climaxed by Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho, made him an exemplar of “auteurism”—their theory that described directors as the true authors of the consistent ideas and themes of their films. The incessant French “propaganda” (Truffaut’s words) gradually took root in America among the younger critics.

  Foremost among the young American auteurists was Andrew Sarris, not only the U.S. correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma, but a critic for New York’s alternative weekly, the Village Voice. Writing in the Voice, Sarris compared Hitchcock to Orson Welles, and hailed Psycho as the “first American movie since Touch of Evil to stand in the same creative rank as the great European films.” In 1962 Sarris went further, comparing Hitchcock to a French filmmaker widely regarded as an artist, and boldly stating that he was “prepared to stake my critical reputation, such as it is, on the proposition that Alfred Hitchcock is artistically superior to Robert Bresson by every criterion of excellence.” The lionization spread, and would give Hitchcock solace even as the Oscar receded from his grasp.

  “What will you do for an encore?” Lew Wasserman is said to have asked after Psycho earned controversy, acclaim, and the greatest box office a Hitchcock film ever enjoyed.

  In fact, for nearly a year after Psycho was released, Hitchcock himself didn’t know the answer. He busied himself in the second half of 1960 supervising the publicity and distribution of Psycho outside the United States, dubbing the film in several languages (a process that Hitchcock, unlike most Hollywood directors, personally oversaw), giving numerous i
nterviews to foreign outlets, and touring England and the Continent for five weeks in the fall.

  Hitchcock’s only production meetings in the fall concerned the coming 1960-61 season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for which he was slated to direct two episodes, “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat” and “The Horseplayer.” (The latter was a piece of black comedy, with Claude Rains as a church priest who has two problems: a leaky roof that costs too much to fix, and a parishioner whose luck at betting on horses improves with prayer.)

  The man who introduced his television shows with such flair was also becoming a toastmaster at public events unrelated to film. In the early and mid-1960s Hitchcock was invited to address college students at graduation ceremonies, businessmen’s clubs, organizations of writers and editors, even presidential inaugural events. Each time an invitation was accepted, James Allardice would troop into the office to discuss Hitchcock’s speech; the more important occasions usually demanded several drafts and revisions, with the director going over the lines as meticulously as if he were preparing a scene in a Hitchcock film.

  These were time-consuming distractions, as were the protracted negotiations with Paramount that would enable Hitchcock to move his offices to Universal later in 1962. The biggest, best bungalow was being set aside for him on the Universal lot, including offices for his design staff and a writer; adjoining rooms with editing equipment; a separate office for his assistant, Peggy Robertson; a kitchen, cocktail lounge, and bathroom attached to his spacious private office; a dining room; and a projection room seating eight.

  With several film projects competing for his attention, Hitchcock spread the assortment out on his desk like travel brochures, trying to decide where he wanted to go. In midsummer he talked with Ernest Lehman about an original story called “Blind Man,” which would have starred Jimmy Stewart as a blind jazz pianist (referred to in script notes as “Jimmy Shearing,” a combination of Stewart and pianist George Shearing, on whom the character was loosely based). The pianist regains his sight after an operation in which he obtains the eyes of a murdered man, and then develops strange memories and “disturbing feelings towards a man he meets who proves to be the murderer of his doctor,” according to film historian Greg Garrett. “The musician and the murderer play a game of cat and mouse that leads them both aboard an ocean liner. Disneyland was also to be an important setting,” as Garrett pointed out, “a vastly expanded carnival in the tradition of Strangers on a Train.”

  Among Hitchcock’s “crazy ideas” for “Blind Man,” according to Lehman, were a scene where “the heavy throws acid in Jimmy’s face and dies, blinding him for life, and he winds up just where he started”; and an opera with Maria Callas witnessing a murder while onstage singing—the note she is singing would then become “a scream which the audience applauds,” in Lehman’s words.

  Lehman signed a contract for the project in December 1960, but it didn’t help when the overcommitted Stewart backed out, leaving the blind pianist to become “a David Niven type.” Or when Walt Disney publicly declared that he wouldn’t let his children watch Psycho, “nor would he allow Hitchcock to make a movie about Disneyland,” according to Garrett. The death blow, however, came the day Lehman appeared at Hitchcock’s office and announced he wished to quit, finding himself unable to solve the plot problems. Canceling “Blind Man,” Hitchcock vowed furiously never to work with the capricious Lehman again.

  He told the press he might film Trap for a Solitary Man, a French play by M. Robert Thomas about a wife who disappears while on holiday in the French Alps—then resurfaces only to find her husband doesn’t recognize her. In interviews he insisted that he might still film No Bail for the Judge, with Audrey Hepburn and Laurence Harvey.

  Novels were still the most reliable source of potential material, and Hitchcock considered several as the encore to Psycho. One was Paul Stanton’s Village of Stars, a cold war suspense story that leaves the pilot of a plane stranded in the air, with an atom bomb rigged to detonate at a low altitude.

  Ultimately, though, Hitchcock chose Marnie, the latest novel by the English writer Winston Graham. Though Graham was best known as the author of the Poldark series about Cornish life in the eighteenth century, Marnie was a contemporary English story about a frigid kleptomaniac who is blackmailed into marriage by a man she has robbed. To cure her, he tries everything from forcing himself on her during their honeymoon to subjecting her to psychoanalysis, which traces the roots of her unhappiness to a sordid childhood.

  Reviewers had praised the book for its psychological suspense from a woman’s point of view; Marnie offered Hitchcock the chance for an informal remake of Spellbound, reversing the doctor-patient roles so that the man’s unconditional love cures the woman. This time Hitchcock wouldn’t have to contend with David O. Selznick. Until he embraced Marnie it had been unclear whether Hitchcock would direct another film for Paramount, but a skeptical Lew Wasserman accepted Marnie largely in order to finalize the move to Universal—reassured by Hitchcock’s promise that the Winston Graham story would be Grace Kelly’s comeback.

  Hitchcock had been in touch with Princess Grace in Monaco. He told her about Marnie, though he didn’t want her to read the book; he thought it would be better to send her a detailed treatment, with the story already transplanted to America. With Stefano, who had done such a splendid job on Psycho, and Kelly to bring her charm and energy to the character of Marnie, Hitchcock at first envisioned a movie laced with more black comedy than the final film suggests.

  For three months, starting on March 1, 1961, Hitchcock met daily with Stefano, trying to develop an Americanized version of Marnie, even dummying in dialogue for certain scenes to give Kelly “the best possible explanation of the movie she was coming back to,” in Stefano’s words.

  As Kelly was from Philadelphia (like Stefano), that and other East Coast cities became the story’s new terrain. In the book there are two male cousins competing for Marnie’s affections, but Hitchcock wanted to make the film more a story of two women fighting over the same man. So the script invented a beautiful sister-in-law suspicious of Marnie. Marnie’s affinity for horses comes from the novel (she rides them, Hitchcock slyly informed one interviewer, “as though she were cleansing herself”), as does the very English foxhunt. Partial to the pastime (there’s also a foxhunt in The Farmer’s Wife), Hitchcock planned to preserve Marnie’s love of horses, while shifting the foxhunt to Philadelphia high society.

  But Hitchcock and Stefano were still working in June, when word arrived from Monaco that 1962 was an impossible year for Grace Kelly. If Hitchcock waited for her, Kelly assured him, she would gladly appear in Marnie in 1963 or 1964. Hitchcock was willing to wait, and since nothing else was ready, he and Stefano parted amicably, and the partial draft of Marnie went into the files. The Hitchcocks took a longer-than-usual trip to New York later that month, meeting up with the director’s sister, Nellie, and his cousin Teresa, who were in from London; the family took in the hot-ticket musicals together, and paid a visit to Washington, D.C.

  In July, he took longer than usual for the only episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents he would direct for the 1961-62 season—and the last of the half-hour shows he directed. “Bang! You’re Dead” was a taut suspense story about a boy (Billy Mumy) who roams his neighborhood with a seeming cap pistol, which nobody realizes is a real gun loaded with bullets. As he did now and then, Hitchcock introduced this episode with an atypical lead-in, gravely intoning a warning about the danger of keeping firearms in the home.

  Throughout the summer, he sifted through other stories. One novel he considered, interestingly, was The Mind Thing, a work of science fiction by Fredric Brown about an alien visiting earth who is able to possess living creatures. At the end, the alien assaults the hero “in an isolated cabin [with] a variety of animals that the alien is using as weapons, ranging from a bull to a dive-bombing chicken hawk,” as Bill Krohn recounted in Hitchcock at Work. “Clearly,” wrote Krohn, “Hitchcock wanted to make a film in whi
ch Nature declares war on the human race.” From Village of Stars to Marnie to The Mind Thing: the diversity bespoke a remarkable range of imagination for a man in his sixties. Hitchcock refused to ossify or be pigeonholed.

  It wasn’t until nearly August 1962, some eighteen months after he had completed Psycho, that Hitchcock settled on a new project, one with noticeable similarities to The Mind Thing. As usual, the choice was triggered by a number of factors, including coincidence: he had read in the newspapers of an August 1961 incident in Capatolla, California, when thousands of seabirds swarmed down from the sky, wreaking havoc—and that reminded him of a Daphne du Maurier novella.

  Du Maurier’s The Birds was first published in Good Housekeeping in 1952; Hitchcock had reprinted it in his 1959 anthology, My Favorites in Suspense. Du Maurier’s moody novella concerned an epidemic of murderous bird attacks on a quiet Cornish village, as told from the point of view of a peasant farmer, his wife, and their children.

  Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and now The Birds: for the third time Hitchcock would film a du Maurier story, although he was sensitive to that fact, and insisted in later interviews that he had no special affection for the author. Indeed, as Hitchcock told François Truffaut, in a comment that he asked be excised from their published interviews, “I only read the story once. … I couldn’t tell you what it was about today.” Yet there was something that drew him to du Maurier’s fiction, even as he felt compelled to slight it in public.