Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Ron Miller was an editor of the San Jose State College campus magazine Lyke when he sought to interview Hitchcock just before the release of Psycho. Later a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Miller recalled that Hitchcock was “far from boastful and, in fact, suggested that many of the innovations he was credited with on screen were not original with him.” Neither Miller nor the student photographer who accompanied him “ever felt he was talking down to us or showboating. I’d say he was actually more modest than vain.” A “good-natured,” even jolly man, “he took time out of his very busy schedule—at the very peak of his career—to sit for an interview with a couple of college journalists. He gave us no ground rules for the interview, no time limits and treated us as if we were distinguished guests.”

  After Psycho, the press was younger and younger, however, and no longer on any kind of equal footing with him. Like the actors in his films, they were increasingly aware of Hitchcock’s mystique. His move to Universal obliged him to become an even more aggressive salesman for himself. It had been three years since the last Hitchcock film, and the budget for The Birds was so astronomical that it was crucial to promote the film to the hilt: Increasingly, the director felt compelled to posture in interviews, especially with the younger journalists. And some of them, without a close relationship or any long view of his career, sharpened their pencils to define Hitchcock according to their own presuppositions.

  The most unfortunate example was Hitchcock’s encounter with the well-known Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci at Cannes in 1963. Fallaci missed Hitchcock’s sense of humor, and all his usual talk about sex and chastity and policemen and murderers disgusted her; he seemed nothing more than a swaggering old man. Besides the New Wave of filmmaking, the 1960s also saw the emergence of a blunt New Journalism, which allowed Fallaci to describe Hitchcock physically as never before: “ugly: bloated, purple, a walrus dressed as a man—all that was missing was the mustache. The sweat, copious and oily, was pouring out of all that walrus fat, and he was smoking a dreadfully smelly cigar.”

  In the end, the reviews for The Birds were generally better overseas (“brilliantly-handled,” said the Times of London) than in America. The French fuss (and all of Hitchcock’s carefully orchestrated publicity) may have backfired in the United States—in its Cannes coverage the New York Times questioned the “artistic” wisdom of even showing The Birds at the festival. The American reviews were surprisingly harsh, with Newsweek insisting the horror was “inexpertly handled,” Time decrying its “silly plotboiling,” and the New Yorker calling the film an outright “sorry failure.” In the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris hailed the picture as “a major work of cinematic art,” but his was a lonely voice.

  Even though the grosses were respectable (its $5 million in rentals placed it in the top twenty in 1963), the expense of the film ate into the profits; and especially after Psycho, Hitchcock and Universal couldn’t help but see it as a disappointment.

  During the East Coast publicity swing for The Birds, Hitchcock and Robert Boyle also scouted Baltimore, where Marnie is said to have grown up, and Philadelphia, near where the Rutlands live. Tippi Hedren’s briefings for the press tour alternated with costume, hair, and makeup appointments for Marnie. The director was very exacting about her look: for the riding scenes, Hedren’s face must be “clean, with shine”; for the death of Forio (the horse), he advised “shadows above and below her eyes.”

  On May 29, Jay Presson Allen came to Santa Cruz to meet with Hitchcock for the first time. The important thing happened—they talked and laughed easily—and Allen was signed to write the final script for Marnie. A week later, she started work in Los Angeles.

  Once again Hitchcock had lighted upon a talented unknown. In 1963, the forty-year-old Allen was something of a late bloomer: she had written an overlooked novel, a handful of television shows, one unproduced play, and another—The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—that had just been announced for a 1966 opening in London, starring Vanessa Redgrave. Based on a Muriel Spark novel, set in the late 1930s, about the influence of a strong-minded Edinburgh schoolmistress on her pupils, Brodie was shown to Hitchcock by one of the New York agencies scrambling to find a successor to Evan Hunter.

  A Texan transplanted to New York, Allen had performed on radio and in cabaret before turning to writing. A smart, fetching blonde, she was effortlessly amusing—and endlessly amused at life. Flattered to be writing a Hitchcock film, she was a novice wholeheartedly interested in the teaching he did “naturally, easily, and unselfconsciously,” in her words.

  “In that little bit of time that I worked for him, he taught me more about screenwriting than I learned in all the rest of my career,” Allen recalled in an interview. “There was one scene in Marnie, for example, where this girl is forced into marriage with this guy. I only knew how to write absolutely linear scenes. So I wrote the wedding and the reception and leaving the reception and going to the boat and getting on the boat and the boat leaving. … I mean, you know, I kept plodding, plodding, plodding. Hitch said, ‘Why don’t we cut some of that out, Jay? Why don’t we shoot the church and hear the bells ring and see them begin to leave the church. Then why don’t we cut to a large vase of flowers, and there is a note pinned to the flowers that says, “Congratulations.” And the water in the vase is sloshing, sloshing, sloshing.’ ”

  The “little bit of time” they worked together ran from June through September—and for the first several weeks Hitchcock wouldn’t even let Allen write a word. They “talked endlessly,” Allen recalled, usually about the two main characters. “Characterization escaped him more than he would have wished it to,” Allen said. “We just played and chatted, day after day after day,” she said. “He got very involved in trying to get some reality in the relationship between [Marnie and Rutland].”

  Virtually adopted by the Hitchcocks, Allen more or less moved into Bellagio Road, and spent long weekends with the couple up in Santa Cruz. As she later told author Tony Lee Moral, “I got to know him, personally, certainly as well, and much better, than most writers.”

  It may have been Alma who urged her husband to discharge Hunter and hire a woman for a story that needed feminine insight. Once again, it seems, there were three Hitchcocks on the project. When Allen recalls her stint on Marnie she makes an occasional slip of the tongue, describing how they—not he—taught her how to write a film. Mrs. Hitchcock was “around a lot, though not for script sessions,” Allen recalled. Yet “it was all very easy and open,” the writer added. “Alma was knowledgeable, more sophisticated than Hitch. We were together all the time and got along well.”

  They got along so well that, one day, Hitchcock asked Allen to interpret a recurring dream he’d been having about his penis. In a moment’s break from a script delving into sexual psychology, he told the writer that he often dreamed his penis was made of etched crystal—that it was extraordinarily beautiful and valuable. His main concern in the dream was to keep his penis hidden from the cook. “I just screeched,” recalled Allen. “I mean it seemed so obvious [that] he was trying to keep his talent separate and safe from Alma, the cook, who had of course contributed greatly to his career, and who was, certainly by the time I came along, still enormously useful. When I told him that,” Allen added, “he giggled.”

  Allen was even encouraged to suggest casting (Louise Latham, who made her screen debut as Marnie’s mother, was an old Dallas chum of hers); later she was welcomed on the set during filming, then invited to watch edited scenes and offer postproduction advice. Many of her ideas were incorporated into Marnie’s final form.

  And then, early in the summer, it was tacitly agreed that after she finished Marnie Allen would write the next Hitchcock film. And in mid-July, Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock flew to Scotland for two weeks, visiting Glasgow, Mallaig, Kyle of Lochalsh, the Isle of Skye, Oban, Inverness, and Aberdeen—an informal location survey for Hitchcock’s dream project, his long-mulled film of James M. Barrie’s Mary Rose.

  While the Hitchcocks were a
way, Allen was given her freedom, working off progress already made by Hunter—although the director didn’t clarify the origins of the previous draft, any more than he had told Hunter about Joseph Stefano’s earlier contribution. As always, Hitchcock was cultivating the script through different writers and progressive stages, melding and molding them to fit his final vision. “A direct comparison between Hunter’s and Allen’s scripts,” wrote Tony Lee Moral in Hitchcock: The Making of Marnie, “shows a similarity of scenes which can only be attributed to Hitchcock’s authorship.”

  Unlike Hunter, Allen felt no compunctions about the rape scene; it was she who penned the version that stands in the film. Making Rutland a would-be zoologist was also her idea. “I wanted him to be very knowledgeable about animal emotions,” she explained. “Animals have the same emotions as we do, they’re all from the same lower part of the brain.” According to Moral, Allen also crucially developed the “themes of class distinction, religious transgression and Marnie’s childlike mannerisms as a result of her trauma.”

  Ironically, Allen herself is not a particular fan of Marnie—a film hampered, she says, by her own shortcomings. “I think one of the reasons that Hitch was fond of me and filmed a lot of the stuff I wrote,” the writer explained, “was that I am frequently almost crippled by making everything rational. There always has to be a reason for everything. And he loved that. Hitch was enormously permissive with me. He fell in love with my endless linear scenes. In point of fact, he loved what I wrote, he shot what I wrote, and he shouldn’t have.”

  The first mystery concerning Marnie is what happened, during the summer of 1963, with the script. Allen’s best explanation rings true: Hitchcock liked her so much that he shied away from tough editing of her work. He liked her so much that he asked her to write Mary Rose; after that, he suggested, maybe the three Hitchcocks would take a yearlong cruise, joined by her husband, producer Lewis Allen. Shades of Rich and Strange: Hitchcock told Allen the two couples would lead a merry shipboard life, anchoring in exotic ports, and in spare moments cook up a script about their capers. In the summer of 1963, before the filming of Marnie began, here was a happy, confident Hitchcock, dreaming up old and new ways to keep from going stale, and still making adventurous plans for the future.

  As Jay Presson Allen wrote, the second unit raced ahead of her pages, shooting exteriors and process plates in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Hartford, Connecticut. Already costly in preproduction, Marnie would be the first Hitchcock film in a decade to remain on the soundstage.

  Meanwhile, the casting also raced ahead. Millions of moviegoers had been captivated by Sean Connery as the virile, indestructible Agent 007 of Dr. No and From Russia with Love; one avid follower of the James Bond series was Hitchcock, who had read the Ian Fleming books and considered filming them as far back as the early 1950s. He first considered Connery as Mitch for The Birds; busy then with the 007 series, Connery now was growing desperate to change his image, and had agreed to play Mark Rutland in Marnie.

  The well-respected Diane Baker, who had just finished Strait Jacket—a horror film based on a Robert Bloch novel—would portray the scheming sister-in-law. Invited to brunch at Bellagio Road, the young actress was taken aback when Alma brought out a Grace Kelly layout and pointed out their resemblance—even though Baker was a brunette.

  Mariette Hartley, a promising newcomer who had made an impression in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country, would play an office mate of Marnie’s. Bruce Dern, already specializing in offbeat, often psychotic parts, was cast as the abusive sailor Marnie bludgeons to death in a childhood flashback. Martin Gabel, who had started his career in Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater, would play the first victim of Marnie’s thievery.

  Once again, as he had for the last ten years, Hitchcock would have Robert Burks as his cameraman, George Tomasini as his editor, Edith Head (with Virginia Darcy and Rita Riggs) as his wardrobe designer, and Bernard Herrmann as his composer. Hilton Green from Psycho was back as his assistant director. Tippi Hedren’s hairdos were assigned to an assistant to Alexandre of Paris, who regularly styled Elizabeth Taylor, the wife of the Shah of Iran, and the Queen of England.

  Between the second week of October, when Jay Presson Allen submitted her final script, and the last week of November, when principal photography began, Hitchcock turned his gaze—at first dotingly—to Tippi Hedren. The actress was still meeting with him regularly, but throughout the summer she had undertaken a grinding publicity schedule—including, for example, two weeks in London and Paris in August and September, where Peggy Robertson accompanied her on press appearances for foreign premieres of The Birds.

  It wasn’t until that publicity tour was concluded, and the script for Marnie was finished, that Hitchcock really focused on Hedren—and now, his attitude toward her seemed to change. As he had with other leading ladies, he began to behave as though he was enamored of her. He flattered her, gave her gifts of champagne and flowers. He even confessed to her that she had appeared in his dreams as his love object. As he had done with another nervous actress—Joan Fontaine during Rebecca—he tried to wall her off from other people, cocooning her while reinforcing the fragility that was Marnie’s hallmark.

  As a sign of the importance, and self-importance, now attached to everything he did, many of their talks were tape-recorded for posterity, and hours of these discussions are preserved in the Hitchcock archives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Hitchcock went through every scene of Marnie with Hedren, “feeling by feeling, reaction by reaction,” in the actress’s words, functioning not merely as her director “but also my drama coach.” The Birds had called for a “classic beauty,” in Hitchcock’s words, but the birds were the real stars of that film, and Hedren had received scant acting guidance. Marnie, on the other hand, called for a psychological complexity that Hitchcock was particularly anxious for the unschooled actress to absorb and convey.

  Coming from a director known for his supposed taciturnity with actors, these were surprising, and impressive, tutorials from a master professor. For especially long, difficult passages, Hitchcock specified the tempo and tone of her lines. He defined Marnie’s dual nature, the contrast between her outward behavior and her emotions “underneath.” He explored, according to these tape recordings, the character’s torment “of being trapped and cautious and, shall we say, crestfallen” after being forced into marriage with Rutland. And he singled out particular instances in the story where the actress ought to transmit “strangely rather bewildered and pained” emotions.

  Musing, for example, on the front Marnie must put up at her forced-wedding reception, Hitchcock explained to Hedren, “I think that [what] we should try and photograph, as subtly as we can, is the inner person and her outward behavior. And I think the way to do it is when she feels that no one is looking at her, although it’s hard to discover what moment she would be left on her own, but her face would lapse into a mood, then brighten up when, say, Mr. Rutland kisses her—so that she isn’t constantly in an apparently happy marital mood—that we see her now and again with the shadow over her face.”

  Discussing the scene with the free-association game, when a stunned Marnie lapses into childlike speech and screams out at past demons (“White! White! White!”), Hedren asked Hitchcock, “It’s a very sad scene, isn’t it?” and the director replied, “Yes, but it comes out of anger. It’s a big—it’s a helluva scene. If you can bring it off, that’s one of the best scenes in the picture, because of the tremendous light and shade in it.”

  If she could bring it off: that was a thought Hitchcock had never needed to voice during The Birds. Then, Hitchcock had confidence enough to carry the day. Now, despite his own confident “outward behavior,” he was harboring hidden doubts. As were others: Lew Wasserman, who never had liked the property but was seduced by the prospect of Grace Kelly, held his tongue; still, he hovered around the project with obvious concern. Anecdotes about Hitchcock grandly escorting Wasserman around the set
, then inviting him to the screening room to observe “an Academy Award performance in the making,” have been trotted out as evidence of Hitchcock’s vanity, but there was also something poignant and defensive about the gesture.

  Jay Presson Allen tried to conceal her skepticism. “I never thought Tippi was vulnerable,” she said later. “The audience needed to have sympathy for the Marnie character. Hitchcock had a fancy for icy blondes, but for the lead character to be a liar and a cheat, [she] also needed to be deeply vulnerable to arouse sympathy in an audience, and Tippi Hedren doesn’t have that quality. I thought he [Hitchcock] got a fairly effective performance out of her. I never thought she was right in the first place.”

  Also dubious was Bernard Herrmann, whose antipathy toward Hedren shaped, in the words of biographer Steven C. Smith, “an extremely romantic and aggressive score”—later criticized by some reviewers—“to overcompensate for a dearth of emotion in the film.”

  Hedren herself had more confidence than she had during The Birds. She had just returned from a European tour where she was feted and praised everywhere she went. Other famous filmmakers had started inquiring about her availability. Passive, pliant, and grateful during The Birds, now she began to be discomfited by Hitchcock’s tight leash, his smothering attention, endless patter, and off-putting gibes.

  It didn’t help the deteriorating dynamic between them that Hedren had just announced her engagement to her agent, Noel Marshall. “I never talked about my private life. Never! It used to drive him [Hitchcock] crazy,” the actress noted in one interview. “He was almost obsessed with me and it’s very difficult to be the object of someone’s obsession. It’s a very painful thing. That’s the reason why I never talked about it for twenty years. I didn’t want people to think about it in the wrong light. I felt such empathy for him. To have such strong feelings and to have them not returned is very difficult.”