Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  The amount of time Hitchcock would need to set aside was seven to ten days, Truffaut estimated; he hoped to arrange the sessions before September 15, when he was slated to embark on his next production, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

  At the apogee of his fame and success, Hitchcock nonetheless had fresh cause to feel underappreciated and buffeted about by the exigencies of the film business, and on the heels of Princess Grace’s defection from Marnie, he was all the more profoundly touched and flattered by Truffaut’s overture. Inside of a week, he sent a night cable to Paris, declaring, “Your letter made me cry and how grateful I am to receive such a tribute from you.” Hitchcock told Truffaut he needed to wait until he was through with the effects work for The Birds, but thought they might be able to get together at the end of August.

  As he launched postproduction of The Birds in July, Hitchcock also devoted himself to preparing and shooting the one-hour “I Saw the Whole Thing”—the last television show he would ever direct, and the only one he made for the new Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

  “I Saw the Whole Thing” was adapted from a story by Henry Cecil, the author of No Bail for the Judge. John Forsythe played an attorney defending himself against a felony hit-and-run charge. In the opening sequence, five different witnesses observe a car braking after hitting a motorcyclist, and each person’s reaction to the incident is reconstructed in a short-story flashback. Forsythe’s baffling decision to represent himself in court, while refusing to testify on his own behalf, is explained by a twist ending: he has been sheltering his wife, the actual driver, who was on her way to the hospital, pregnant with their child. “Although well-constructed,” wrote J. L. Kuhns in his authoritative article on Hitchcock’s TV work, the episode “lacks stylistic interest. The director was undoubtedly putting all his effort into The Birds.”

  Not quite: The Birds had already been turned over to the special-effects wizards. What was preoccupying Hitchcock was Marnie. With a partial continuity under his belt and studio money already invested in the project, he was loath to quit. But who could ever replace Grace Kelly?

  One candidate was Claire Griswold, who received special billing for her small role in “I Saw the Whole Thing.” The character she played—a divorcée distraught over having to give up her child for adoption—had psychological frailties reminiscent of Marnie’s. Certainly “I Saw the Whole Thing” was a kind of tryout for Griswold: August was full of hair and costume appointments for the young actress, like Tippi Hedren under personal contract to Hitchcock. She looked more like Vera Miles than like Grace Kelly, so the director concentrated on reshaping her look.

  Hitchcock also met with Miles, another possible Marnie, and mused about putting her in the part. And of course he saw Hedren nearly every day, having lunch with the actress between stints of dubbing and looping The Birds. But he couldn’t make up his mind, and he didn’t want to resume the script until he had decided on his lead.

  François Truffaut and Helen Scott arrived in Hollywood on Sunday, August 12, 1962. Hitchcock, had arranged for them to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, though Truffaut later insisted on paying all his own bills, including the expensive lodgings—all except the limousine service that Hitchcock himself arranged. On Monday they plunged into work. In the morning, Truffaut and Scott watched the first rough cut of The Birds (still missing many of the optical effects, and with sound effects in place for only the final reel, the attack on the Brenner house). In the afternoon they turned on the tape recorder for the first time, then celebrated the Hitch-cocks’ sixty-third birthdays in the evening at Perrino’s.

  The Frenchman had prepared exhaustively, spending three days at the Royal Cinémathèque in Brussels watching all of Hitchcock’s English films—including the rare silents, with which he “was ill acquainted,” according to his biographers, “and liked only moderately.” In spite of his winning smile and elfin looks (Scott dubbed him “Hitchcoquin,” a pun meaning “little rascal”), Truffaut was a tough customer who took to heart his role of critical investigator. If necessary, he would extract the interview like a bad tooth.

  Scott’s excellent English made her involvement essential, for Truffaut’s was only passable—like Hitchcock’s command of French. Besides, Scott was feminine and charming, and Truffaut rightly anticipated that she would help put Hitchcock at ease. Scott often understood Hitchcock’s anecdotes and bawdy jokes when Truffaut did not, but her diligent efforts to interpret and bridge the dialogue led to rushed or awkward translations during the conversations, some of which would survive into the book.

  Truffaut had expected Hitchcock to be an elusive liar, an artist guarding precious secrets, a man as furtive and mysterious as his films. Yet the Frenchman learned what the working press already knew: Hitchcock was an articulate, conscious creator (the New Yorker “had the ridiculous effrontery,” he scoffed at one point, “to say a picture like North by North-west was unconsciously funny”), fundamentally open and truthful about his craft. “Everything happened as Truffaut and Scott had hoped,” wrote de Baecque and Toubiana. “Hitchcock was specific, voluble, spirited, and delved willingly into the technical or interpretative details suggested by his interlocutors. He even discussed aspects of his childhood and adolescence, and his ambivalent relationships with actresses.”

  In spite of his suspicious nature, Truffaut was completely won over. Hitchcock was reaffirmed as his idol—and all hints of the grand, secretive liar disappeared from his introduction.

  On August 18 Hitchcock left Los Angeles for London, where he conferred with Bernard Herrmann on the sound track-in-progress for The Birds. While overseas he also made an excursion to Paris, where Truffaut arranged a dinner with other Nouvelle Vague filmmakers. He didn’t return to Los Angeles until September 11. But the interview talks with Truffaut and the three weeks of travel had reinvigorated him, and now, as he put the finishing touches on The Birds and began advance publicity for the film (including the famous portrait sessions with Philippe Halsman for Life), Hitchcock was ready to face Marnie.

  Claire Griswold was still a long-shot contender for his leading lady, and in the fall of 1962 Hitchcock ordered that her hair be redone by experts, her wardrobe reorganized by Edith Head, her skin and makeup refined by beauticians. The actress ate lunch after lunch with the director, who rehearsed her in Grace Kelly’s scenes from Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, first at Bellagio Road and then, at great expense, camera-testing her at the studio. Again and again she was tested, and the Hitchcocks and the production staff pored over the tests.

  By November, Hitchcock was still unsure. The director took a day off to travel to Kansas City to attend to cattle shares he owned, while Mrs. Hitchcock traveled with Griswold to Bergdorf Goodman in New York for fresh fittings. The day before Thanksgiving, Hitchcock directed his last tests of Griswold—and by the following Monday he knew, painfully, that she would not be his Marnie.

  All along, Tippi Hedren had been waltzing in and out of the office, keeping extremely busy with postproduction and prepublicity chores—and everyone who had seen the partial and advance screenings of The Birds, including Mrs. Hitchcock and Lew Wasserman, thought the first-time actress had shown tremendous poise, that she had given a remarkable performance. Everyone liked her personally—and, like Griswold, she was under contract.

  Marnie was not so different from Melanie, who also bore a hint of frigidity and an emotionally scarred relationship with a callous mother. Hitchcock himself had written the scene where Melanie articulates her psychological wounds, and that dialogue could have been written for either of the two films on his mind at the time, The Birds and Marnie. Hedren had substituted for Princess Grace once before; surely she could do so again. Less ceremoniously than before, Hitchcock told Hedren she would be Marnie—and gave her a hundred-dollar-weekly raise. When she voiced doubts over whether she could “play a part of this size, of this caliber,” in her words, “once again Hitch gave me the assurance and never, ever, let me think that I couldn’t do it.”
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  Her casting, then, was almost circumstantial. During The Birds, no one had noticed any signs that the director was obsessed with his leading lady, that Hitchcock had fallen in love with Hedren—any of the preoccupation that has been alleged in the years since. Nor, as is alleged elsewhere, was there any evidence that he treated her with deliberate cruelty during the first film, though she suffered, in scenes calculated for their harshness and terror, just as Lillian Gish had, under D. W. Griffith, riding the ice floes for Way Down East.

  The premiere of The Birds was still four months away. Evan Hunter came back from New York to work on Marnie until Christmas, when the Hitch-cocks traveled to Paris and St. Moritz, and then Hunter returned to Universal in January and February for additional script conferences.

  But Hunter wasn’t the same eager receptacle for Hitchcock’s ideas that he had been on The Birds. For one thing, the writer was disturbed by signs of what he considered artistic hubris. Taking his cue from François Truffaut, Hitchcock was now tape-recording all their script sessions, which were sometimes mysteriously attended by other people—Robert Boyle or Tippi Hedren. And the director didn’t begin every meeting by asking Hunter, “Now, what is our story so far?” Now Hitchcock himself told the story, over and over.

  But Hunter had been recruited at the very genesis of The Birds. He didn’t know that Hitchcock had been pondering Marnie for two years, and had already developed a partial continuity with Joseph Stefano. The tape recordings attest that Hitchcock was racing ahead of the scriptwriter, dictating shots for scenes as yet unwritten, which Hunter would have little choice but to write just as the director prescribed.

  “The film is going to open with a girl, back view, going to a railroad station at Hartford, Connecticut,” Hitchcock announced at a February production conference. “At present, I don’t know what time of the day we can shoot it because we don’t want it full of crowds because it may cover her up. The essential part is that we follow her back view into the station as she goes to the desk or booking office. … We go close enough to her to see the color of her hair, and finally she goes on to the platform down toward the train. And we end up with a CLOSE SHOT on a rather bulky handbag under her arm. So that would constitute the first scene.”

  But the script sessions were no less prolonged, with Hitchcock’s customary anecdotes and digressions, and one day the increasingly weary Hunter interrupted to ask, “Shouldn’t we get back to discussing Marnie?” The director raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

  After attending an early screening of The Birds, Hunter had quietly seethed over the changes Hitchcock had made to his script without his knowledge or approval, and he continued to seethe even after Hitchcock ordered that Hunter’s screen credit be enlarged from 25 to 50 percent of the size of the title. Hunter wasn’t that easily placated.

  Above all, though he professed admiration for Winston Graham’s novel, Hunter couldn’t bring himself to write the scene from the book where Mark Rutland rapes Marnie after their wedding: “There was only the small pilot light shining in from the bathroom. Perhaps that prevented him from seeing the tears starting from my eyes. In the half-dark he tried to show me what love was, but I was stiff with repulsion and horror, and when at last he took me there seemed to come from my lips a cry of defeat that was nothing to do with physical pain.”

  It was a key scene for the director, who had spent much of his career fascinated with evil Prince Charmings who kissed sleeping beauties and aroused them to violence and dread—a director who, from Spellbound and The Wrong Man to Vertigo and Psycho, had found sex and love at the root of dysfunction. Hitchcock had underlined the scene in the book—and it was critical to his vision of the film.

  “When I first read the book,” Hunter recalled, the scene “disturbed me enormously.” Then “when I [first] came to San Francisco to discuss it with Hitch, I told him that the psychological aspects of this woman really interested me, and I thought I could find out some things about that particular syndrome and we’d do something good with it. I said: But it really bothers me, the scene where he rapes her on their wedding night. He said: We’ll talk about it later, don’t worry about it. So I did the first draft and I grappled with that.”

  The grappling persisted throughout their story conferences. “Hitch,” Hunter pleaded at another point, “I’m still having trouble with the scene, I don’t understand why you want it in the movie. We’re going to lose all sympathy for the lead character; no guy who claims to love a woman, [and] sees her cowering in the corner, is going to rape her.”

  Hitchcock gave Hunter a look: it was supposed to be disturbing. With relish, Hitchcock then recounted the scene in crude, excruciating detail, doing “the director’s thing with his hands,” in Hunter’s words, “the way you frame a shot; he brought the camera in on my face that way,” concluding with, “Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face.”

  Whooaa, thought Hunter.

  Returning to New York for the actual writing, Hunter tried to give Hitchcock what he wanted—as well as another option. “I wrote the script two ways,” Hunter recalled, “and I gave it my best shot. I wrote the scene where the camera’s right on her face and he sticks it in her. And I wrote it as well as I know how to write any rapist. But then I wrote it another way, where he comes to her and says: All right, don’t worry, we’ll work this out, whatever it is, we’ll work it out, I love you. That kind of scene. I wrote my scene on white paper within the body of the script. And I wrote the rape scene on yellow paper outside the script.”

  Attaching a note to his submission, Hunter said he firmly believed the rape scene was “out of place” in Marnie, and hoped Hitchcock would consider his alternative. His script arrived the first week of April; Hitchcock quickly read it, and responded that there was “still a lot of work to be done with it. Unfortunately, I feel that I have gone stale on it, and think it will have to be put aside for a little while until I can decide what to do about it. It may be it needs a fresh mind altogether, and this probably will have to be the next procedure.”

  Hunter wrote back, insisting he had done his best to comply with story directives and that he would like to have another try at the script after The Birds was released, when both of them could return to the subject refreshed. The writer stated that he would do his “utmost, as always” to complete the Marnie project “to our mutual satisfaction.”

  On May 1, however, Peggy Robertson called Hunter’s agent to say that his services were no longer required. Hunter believes that he was fired for balking at the rape scene, although Hitchcock never named it as the cause.

  And Hunter’s anecdote, with Hitchcock salivating lasciviously as he describes how he intends to film the scene, is never compared to the way the marital rape was actually shot. It’s certainly an unsettling scene, but it offers little of the patent ugliness that Hunter recalls from the script conference with Hitchcock. Photographed with little dialogue, as a progression of virtual close-ups, with Mark’s face closing in fixedly on Marnie’s, the rape scene has a formal beauty as well as an emotional delicacy. Marnie’s expression is obviously traumatized, just as in the book; her eyes glisten with tears; and as she is forced to yield to her husband, the camera lifts up and glides silently away, panning across the cabin walls to rest, finally, on a porthole framing an absolutely flat gray sea.

  It was typical of Hitchcock—Evan Hunter couldn’t have known how typical—that he blamed himself for going “stale” on the script, even if they had gone stale together. Now Hitchcock recognized that he needed a new writer to help him take Marnie across the finish line.

  As the March release of The Birds approached, the director spent much of his time with his publicity team, preparing trailers, teasers, and radio spots for the film. (Hitchcock himself came up with the witty tag line: “The Birds Is Coming!”) Hitchcock’s private showing of the film, topped by a dinner at Chasen’s, was held on Saturday, March 2. The New York premiere followed a week later, timed to coincide with a Mus
eum of Modern Art retrospective prompted by American critic Peter Bogdanovich, who had followed Truffaut with his own extensive interviews with Hitchcock, initially for Esquire. The Hitchcocks and Tippi Hedren would travel to New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and literally dozens of other interviews were set up by phone: Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Denver, New Orleans, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Portland, and many more. In May, Hitchcock would escort his leading lady to Cannes, where he had regularly shown his films since the first festival in 1949, and make a red-carpet entrance for the opening night.

  Such events were shrewdly incorporated into Hitchcock’s publicity. But although he controlled the promotional campaigns as never before, and the combination of the television series, Psycho, and the Truffaut book made him all the more inviting an interview subject for intellectual critics as well as workaday journalists from all over the world, the scope and nature of the publicity was changing.

  In the past, he had approached journalists as equals in related fields. New York Herald Tribune newspaperman Otis L. Guernsey Jr., who came up with the original idea for North by Northwest, met with the director frequently through the 1940s and 1950s, for example, and felt they had a warm, comfortable friendship. They talked easily about any subject, and not just films. Guernsey’s opinions of Hitchcock’s films never entered into their relationship, he said, and if you let him off the hook in a conversation, Hitchcock wouldn’t dwell on his own films.