Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Once he had decided, he moved rapidly to recruit a writer. Stefano had taken other work, so Hitchcock met first with James Kennaway, who had written the acclaimed novel Tunes of Glory, made into a picture in 1960 with an Oscar-nominated script. “I see this film done in only one way,” Kennaway told him. “You should never see a bird.” Out! Hitchcock also interviewed Wendell Mayes, who had written Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder films, but didn’t feel right about Mayes either. So he offered the job to Ray Bradbury, now established in science fiction but also a regular writer for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (Bradbury had also written John Huston’s acclaimed film of Moby-Dick.) Bradbury was enthusiastic about the du Maurier story, but when he told the director he couldn’t start right away—ironically, he was busy with assignments for Alfred Hitchcock Presents—the impatient Hitchcock decided he couldn’t steal him away from Joan Harrison.

  Instead he picked a New York novelist who had less screen experience than any of them. Evan Hunter’s first novel, 1954’s acclaimed The Blackboard Jungle, had been made into a compelling film, though the Oscarnominated screenplay was written by director Richard Brooks. Hunter had also sold a short story to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Vicious Circle,” which was broadcast in April of 1957—though Hunter didn’t write the teleplay either, and Hitchcock himself didn’t direct the episode. It wasn’t until 1959 that Hunter was hired by Joan Harrison to work directly for the series, adapting a Robert Turner story called “Appointment at Eleven.”

  “Appointment at Eleven” was about a man sitting in a bar, nursing a drink, and watching the clock. As the story unfolds we learn that his father is scheduled to be executed in a nearby penitentiary, at 11 P.M. Hitchcock didn’t direct this episode, but it spoke to his opposition to capital punishment, and the host abandoned his customary tongue-in-cheek lead-in to introduce the show by saying the story’s importance spoke for itself.

  Hunter had dealt exclusively with Joan Harrison until the late summer of 1959, when the author came to California to adapt his novel Strangers When We Meet into a film for Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak, and to develop 87th Precinct, based on his detective series under the nom de plume Ed McBain, as an NBC television series. By this time Hunter had a solid reputation.

  Harrison invited Hunter and his wife over to the Revue screening room at Universal to view “Appointment at Eleven,” and afterward they were escorted onto a soundstage where the host of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was directing a scene for “The Crystal Trench.” The scene required an actor to lie beneath a block of ice, Hunter recalled; “the ice was resting on a narrow wooden ditch into which the actor had crawled. Another actor was supposed to rub his gloved hand over the ice, until the face of the actor below was gradually revealed.”

  Hunter was not the first or last writer to feel that his wife was an asset to his résumé where Hitchcock was concerned. Anita Hunter was then “all of twenty-nine years old, an attractive, russet-haired woman with green eyes, a warm smile, and a smart New York Jewish Girl sense of humor,” Hunter recalled in Me and Hitch. Hitchcock “took an immediate liking to her, which was somewhat surprising considering his predilection for glacial blondes,” and proceeded to ignore Hunter, guiding his wife around, “explaining pieces of equipment, introducing her to his cinematographer and his assistant director.”

  The crew was beginning “to get a bit frantic,” noted Hunter, “because the huge block of ice seemed to be melting under the glare of the lights and Hitch still showed no intention of wanting to direct the scene. Finally, after the plaintive words, ‘Mr. Hitchcock, sir, we’re ready to go now sir’ had been repeated a half dozen times, he cordially bade us goodbye.”

  Flash forward two years, to late August 1961, when Hunter received a telephone call from his agent asking if he’d be interested in adapting Daphne du Maurier’s novella into a Hitchcock film. “Why me?” the author wondered. Had Hitchcock finally remembered him, or his charming wife, Anita? “I told my agent I would have to read the story before I decided,” Hunter recalled. “In truth, for the chance to work with Alfred Hitchcock on a feature film, I would have agreed to do a screenplay based on the Bronx telephone book.”

  After reading The Birds, Hunter told his agent he would like to take a shot at it, and Hitchcock phoned him to talk that very day. They had several phone conversations discussing ideas before he left the East Coast for California. Hunter signed a contract for seven weeks; Hitchcock warned that it might turn into a three-or four-month stint, and perhaps he should bring his lovely wife and children to California for the duration.

  If Hitchcock read the Daphne du Maurier novella only once, his memory for the arc and details of the story was remarkable. Besides the pattern of birds “attacking, retreating and massing to attack again,” in the words of Bill Krohn in Hitchcock at Work, and the “vivid descriptions of bird attacks,” several key incidents in the film are lifted directly from du Maurier. These include the discovery of a neighbor found dead with his eyes pecked out, and the climax, with the family barricaded inside a house as the birds rally their final attack—followed by “the complete absence of explanation for the catastrophe,” in Krohn’s words.

  But the script also deviated radically from the book, and once again the first order of business was “transatlantic”—moving the story and characters from Cornwall to an America familiar to Hitchcock. The farming village in southwest England would become the seaside hamlet of Bodega Bay, sixty miles north of San Francisco.*

  Characteristically, this location was established before the writer signed his contract, and one of the first things Evan Hunter did was tour San Francisco and Bodega Bay, with Hitchcock as his guide. As usual, the reality inspired the director: a small lake ringed by a road gave him staging ideas, and the local schoolhouse prompted the imagining of a particular frightening scene, with a swarm of birds pursuing young, screaming children.

  The pair then launched into daily script conferences, with rituals that Hitchcock had been following for almost forty years. “During our first exploratory week of getting to know each other and our individual styles,” Hunter recalled in Me and Hitch, “I arrived in time for breakfast with him in the morning and we worked together till noon, when he broke for lunch.”

  “Tell me the story so far …,” Hitchcock always began.

  “Hitch shot down two ideas I’d brought out with me. The first of these was to add a murder mystery to the basic premise of birds attacking humans, an idea I still like. But Hitch felt this would muddy the waters and rob suspense from the real story we wanted to tell. The second was about a new schoolteacher who provokes the scorn of the locals when unexplained attacks start shortly after her arrival in town. In the eventual movie, the schoolteacher survived (but not for long) in the presence of Annie Hayworth. In the movie, the town’s suspicion and anger surfaces in the Tides Restaurant scene. But Hitch did not want a schoolteacher for his lead; he needed someone more sophisticated and glamorous.”

  Someone like …

  “Well, Grace, of course,” the director sighed. “But she’s in Monaco, isn’t she? Being a princess. And Cary [Grant] for the man, of course, whoever or whatever the character may turn out to be. But why should I give Cary fifty per cent of the movie? The only stars in this movie are the birds and me.” Almost as an afterthought, Hitchcock cast a wicked glance at his writer and added, “And you, of course, Evan.”

  In lieu of the princess, Hitchcock studied the field of up-and-coming actresses. On September 26 he tested Pamela Tiffin, who had been adorable in Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three. He also screened footage of Yvette Mimieux, Carol Lynley, Sandra Dee. It wasn’t until October 16—still only a month after the script had started—that the director sat in a projection room and watched 16 mm footage of an obscure ash-blond model.

  So obscure that the director’s appointment book misspelled her name: “Hedron,” instead of Hedren. Born Nathalie Hedren in Minnesota, the model went by the professional name of “Tippi”—an affectionate Swedish nickname me
aning “little girl.” Tippi Hedren had established herself first with the Eileen Ford agency in New York before moving to California to try acting; once married, now divorced, she was the mother of a little girl, four-year-old Melanie—who would grow up to be the actress Melanie Griffith.

  The Hitchcocks had seen Hedren in a commercial for Pet Milk on the Today show—nothing much, but it had a cute moment where Tippi whirled to acknowledge a boy’s wolf whistle. Hitchcock asked MCA to track her down.

  The agency contacted the model, asking her to come in for an interview, and bring along photographs and film footage of herself. “No one told her who exactly was interested,” wrote John Russell Taylor, “though the office was full of pictures of Hitchcock.” After a few days passed (while Hitchcock digested the photographs and footage), she came again, met with Herman Citron, and was offered a seven-year, five-hundred-dollar-weekly personal contract with Hitchcock. No mention was made of The Birds; she signed the contract, assuming it was for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

  Still, Hedren didn’t meet Hitchcock until lunch on October 24. Typically, the director kept the young model in the dark with idle talk of travel, food, clothing—“almost everything but” why he had engaged Hedren, as Taylor wrote. What he was doing was sizing her up. He liked her attentive face, her sophisticated manner, her statuesque looks. “Hitch always liked women who behaved like well-bred ladies,” explained Robert Boyle. “Tippi generated that quality. He was quite taken by the way she walked.”

  Besides Hedren, at least two other young actresses boasted current contracts with Hitchcock: Joanna Moore and Claire Griswold. They all were put through the same regimen: wardrobe fittings, hair makeovers, long discursive lunches with the director, and tutorial viewings of his best-known films. Each made camera tests, reenacting scenes from Hitchcock films. Moore appeared in only a couple of Hitchcock TV shows before leaving to make her mark independently, while Griswold stayed on salary, simultaneous with Hedren.

  For several weeks, as Hedren underwent this crash course, she had no idea that she was being considered as the possible leading lady of The Birds. She watched Rebecca, Notorious, and To Catch a Thief; then, at home with the Hitchcocks (Alma was usually in the room, observing but saying little, according to Hedren), she rehearsed the very same scenes Hitchcock had famously directed with Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman, and Grace Kelly. The week before Thanksgiving, Hitchcock scheduled an expensive color screen test. Martin Balsam flew out from New York to be her leading man for the occasion, and Robert Burks was behind the camera for the three-day shoot, which cost in the neighborhood of thirty thousand dollars.

  Still no one mentioned The Birds, until one night Hedren was invited to join the Hitchcocks and Lew Wasserman for dinner at Chasen’s. There, Hitchcock presented her with a pin with “three golden birds with seed pearls, in flight” and asked her to play Melanie, the young woman whose visit to Bodega Bay coincides with the murderous onslaught of birds. “Well, I cried,” Hedren recalled, “and Alma, Hitch’s wife, cried—even Lew Wasserman had tears rolling down his face. It was a lovely moment.”

  All the script sessions began with Hitchcock adopting the manner of a boy hearing installments of a favorite bedtime story. He would come into the office every morning, recalled Evan Hunter, “and he would sit down in a big wing-back chair, and his feet scarcely touching the floor, and he was always dressed in a very dark blue suit and a tie and a white shirt and black shoes and black socks. And he would sit there and he would say, ‘Tell me the story so far.’ And in the beginning that was easy. But as it went on and I had to tell him the story from the beginning, it got to be a rather lengthy exercise and he would pick holes in the story so far, and say: ‘Why does she do this? Why does she do that?’ ”

  Musing about the lead characters, they jokingly dubbed them “Cary” and “Grace,” or “the Girl”; though they eventually renamed Hedren’s character Melanie, after Hedren’s daughter. Hitchcock had initially sketched Melanie in as a San Francisco socialite who visits “a strange town which is attacked by birds shortly after her arrival,” in Hunter’s words. There she encounters “Cary,” who lives in the strange town, as does “Cary”’s ex-girlfriend, a schoolteacher, a tad frowsy, still pining for him—just as Barbara Bel Geddes pines for James Stewart in Vertigo.

  Why does Melanie decide to visit the strange town? As Hunter tells it, after their daily lunch he had the habit of taking a walk while Hitchcock napped. One day on his digestive stroll the writer came up with the idea for which he took “full credit—or blame, as the case may be.” The Birds, the writer decided, ought to begin with “Cary” and “Grace” meeting cute, so the audience is lulled by a seeming “screwball comedy that gradually turns into stark terror.”

  Some critics think a number of Hitchcock films—from The 39 Steps to Strangers on a Train to North by Northwest—qualify as almost-screwball comedies. Didn’t Hunter’s idea prove that Hitchcock still had the knack for picking writers who reached for the spot that itched?

  Before Hunter ever met Tippi Hedren, Hitchcock was already shaping scenes for the newcomer, his latest “personal star.” As Melanie, Hedren would make her entrance precisely the way she had in her TV commercial, crossing a San Francisco street and coolly acknowledging a wolf whistle. Then, on a visit to a pet shop, Melanie encounters “Cary”—renamed Mitch Brenner in the film. A lawyer, Mitch enters the shop to order lovebirds for his young sister; Melanie pretends to be a clerk knowledgeable about birds. Although he recognizes her as a socialite notorious for practical jokes, he plays along—a light scene, until a caged bird escapes and foreshadows the strange events to come.

  After putting the bird back in its cage, Mitch tells Melanie, “I’m putting you back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels,” a sentence Hitchcock said he added “during the shooting because I felt it added to her characterization as a wealthy, shallow playgirl”—and because it corresponded with the later scene where she is trapped by gulls in a glass telephone booth. “Here the human beings are in cages,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut, “and the birds are on the outside. When I shoot something like that, I hardly think the public is likely to notice it.”

  Each time they met to discuss the story, Hitchcock “would ask questions about it, and I would try to answer them, and then accommodate them,” recalled Hunter. “In this way, he edited the script before any of it was actually written, commenting on character development and comic effect in these early scenes of the film. We knew that once the bird attacks started, the audience was ours. But would we be able to keep them sitting still while a Meeting Cute romance between an impetuous young woman and a somewhat staid San Francisco lawyer developed?”

  How staid? Why was “a man of Mitch Brenner’s age,” in Hunter’s words, “still effectively living at home with his mother and kid sister”? To explain this away, the script noted his father’s recent death, and then Annie (the frowsy schoolteacher) described “the mother’s possessive behavior in a heart-to-heart talk with Melanie, who at this point in the script seemed to be in more danger from Lydia Brenner than from any of the still quiescent birds.”

  From the outset, Melanie was the main, subjective character through whose eyes audiences would experience the horror of The Birds, and from the outset Hitchcock and Hunter struggled with her characterization. Neither the director (“True, I wasn’t too keen on the girl’s story”) nor the writer (“I realize now that I was uncomfortable with the character of Melanie Daniels from minute one”) ever felt quite satisfied with their creation.

  Also from the outset, they debated the impetus behind the bird attacks. In du Maurier’s story there is a “complete absence of explanation,” in Bill Krohn’s words; as the novella ends, the birds are regrouping for another strike. Hunter initially favored some attempt at a logical connection. “Do the townspeople have something to hide?” the writer mused, seeking the solution. “Is there a guilty secret here? Do they see this stranger [Melanie] as a messenger of revenge? Are the birds an ins
trument of punishment for their guilt?”

  As usual, provocative ambiguity enticed Hitchcock more than stark explanation. But he brooded about the options. He and Hunter toyed with blaming the attacks on a Russian conspiracy (a dash of Cold War humor), or on ornithological revenge for human abuse. Eventually Hitchcock set the issue aside, leaving it for Hunter to grapple with as he wrote the first draft, without supervision, in his rented home.

  The director left Hunter alone but phoned Mrs. Hunter every day, “and chatted with her on the phone, asking if she’d yet found a tennis partner or a good hairdresser,” according to the writer. “Never once did he ask her how the screenplay was coming along. Nor on our frequent social outings did he ever ask me how things were progressing.”

  For Halloween, Hitchcock brought over signed copies of his new book, Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful, for the three young Hunter sons. The Hitchcocks and the Hunters often socialized after hours, and the two couples went to the racetrack together, at the director’s behest. (He tried to hand them each a hundred-dollar bill for betting; taken aback, the Hunters declined.) The two couples dined out together, and more than once dined in at Bellagio Road, sharing Saturday night supper around the kitchen table.

  “After he’d had too much wine,” Hunter recalled, Hitchcock “would take Anita’s hand between both of his and pat it, and tell her he was nothing but a big fat slob.” But Hitchcock and Hunter seemed to be enjoying their collaboration. And after he handed in his first draft, Hitchcock, in the glow of the moment, said perhaps Hunter could also write his next film—Marnie.

  Reviewing Hunter’s draft in a five-page letter dated November 30, 1962, Hitchcock listed his key concerns: Melanie and Mitch were still “insufficiently characterized,” and Hunter had written too many “no-scene scenes.” The director explained: “By this, I mean that the little sequence that might have narrative value but in itself is undramatic. It very obviously lacks shape and it doesn’t within itself have a climax as a scene on the stage might.”