Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Hitchcock had done substantial preproduction work, along with his work with Allen on the script, and Albert Whitlock, who drew “a lot of sketches” for Mary Rose before it was canceled, asked the director why he had succumbed to front-office pressures and abandoned the project. “They believe it isn’t what audiences expect of me,” Hitchcock explained. “Not the kind of picture they expect of me,” he repeated.

  Later, Hitchcock would make a sad boast to interviewers: an actual clause had been inserted into his Universal contract, he said, stating that he could make any film for the studio that he wanted, as long as it was budgeted under $3 million—and as long as it wasn’t Mary Rose.

  His contract was, in fact, amended around the time that Mary Rose was canceled. Officially Marnie had been a coproduction between Universal and “Geoffrey Stanley Inc.”—a legal entity named for the Hitchcock family dogs—but all future Hitchcock films would be produced and owned outright by Universal. The salary and benefits guaranteed by the new contract of August 1964 reportedly made Hitchcock the highest-paid director in Hollywood history; but more important, the contract made him a part-owner of the studio. He and Alma became the third largest stockholders. In exchange for the stock transfer, Universal assumed ownership of Shamley Productions, including all rights to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the reverted Paramount films, and future marketing of the name “Alfred Hitchcock.”

  Although it was immensely satisfying to become a part-owner of the Hollywood studio that first showed interest in bringing him to America, back in 1931—the studio, moreover, where he had made Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt—there were still tensions in Hitchcock’s relationship with Universal. While Lew Wasserman was trying to transform the once lowly studio into a first-class operation, it would prove a long, slow process, and Universal would cling to television and television-style filmmaking far into the 1970s. Hitchcock couldn’t shake the feeling that Universal would always be more Woolworth than Cartier.

  And while his amended contract was generous, friends say that both Hitchcocks resented its strictures and, in sour moments, complained that he had been robbed of his golden opportunity to film Mary Rose. Alma felt that it was worse for her husband to have been robbed of his name, even though in exchange he received the pleasure of lifetime security.

  The personal bond between Hitchcock and Wasserman was transformed and aggravated by their professional realignment. Once Hitchcock’s agent, Wasserman was now his employer. Hitchcock “resented it,” said Jay Presson Allen. “I know he did.” Universal had been forced by the U.S. Justice Department to divest itself of MCA in 1964, and Arthur Park was Hitchcock’s main contact at the agency now; still, despite Wasserman’s efforts to put intermediaries between himself and Hitchcock in the decision-making process, either at MCA or Universal, there was no question who was the boss of bosses.

  The two strove to preserve their always equable personal relationship. The new contract made Hitchcock the undisputed king of the lot, and Wasserman paid court, visiting Hitchcock’s office almost every day to gossip or talk about the stock market. They lunched privately once a week, and at night the Wassermans regularly dined out with the Hitchcocks.

  While she was working on Marnie and Mary Rose, Jay Presson Allen sometimes joined the pair for lunch. While Hitchcock and Wasserman gossiped, she listened, secretly amused, because she knew that the rest of the industry gossiped about them—the two most powerful men in Hollywood. According to the scuttlebutt she had heard, both men were sexually impotent. Hitchcock had confessed his impotence to Allen (one reason she never believed that he propositioned Hedren), and although Wasserman had a beautiful wife, he was a notorious workaholic who slept on the couch while his wife slept around.

  Although Hitchcock had made The Birds and Marnie with little interference, the failure of Marnie—from the first puzzled reactions elicited at studio screenings—would haunt him at Universal. His new contract made him a bird in a gilded cage. At Universal he would be worry-free financially, but creatively he had sacrificed his power and freedom.

  Before Marnie was released the Hitchcocks took a two-month vacation, stopping first in New York to see the hit musicals—High Spirits and Hello, Dolly—and rendezvous with François Truffaut, who was conducting follow-up interviews for his book-in-progress. Then they headed for the Villa d’Este at Lake Como, Italy, where they had shot location scenery for the first Hitchcock film. From there the couple followed a complicated itinerary that took them to favorite places (Paris, the south of France, Rome, Vienna, Munich, and, as always, London) as well as new places they had always wanted to explore—Belgrade, Dubrovnik, and Zagreb, Yugoslavia. A driver accompanied them, and as much as possible they journeyed by car.

  Except when they stayed at the Villa d’Este, where they tried to blend in and relax, the Hitchcocks made business and public events part of their vacation. In Rome, for example, Hitchcock met with the Italian writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli; billed as “Age & Scarpelli,” they had written Big Deal on Madonna Street as well as the successful Toto comedies, which Hitchcock had seen. He spoke of collaborating with them one day.

  At the Belgrade Airport the Hitchcocks were greeted by journalists and fans, and the director drew and signed caricatures of himself. He was presented to Yugoslavian colleagues at the national film archives. The Kolarc’s People’s University organized an “Evening with Alfred Hitchcock,” and afterward the couple dined with guests at a famous Serbian restaurant in the artists’ quarter, celebrating publication of the first monograph in Serbo-Croatian extolling his career. Hitchcock ate heartily of the local cuisine; when he was on vacation on doctor’s orders, he told people, he also vacationed from doctor’s orders.

  Their return to the United States coincided with publicity for the opening of Marnie. The reviews were unusually inconclusive. The new Hitchcock film was “at once a fascinating study of a sexual relationship and the master’s most disappointing film in years,” observed Eugene Archer in the New York Times. Edith Oliver in the New Yorker described it as “an idiotic and trashy movie with two terrible performances,” adding, “I had quite a good time watching it.” Archer Winsten of the New York Post thought the film’s “human warmth and sympathy” made it a “superior” Hitchcock production, while the usually admiring Philip K. Scheuer in the Los Angeles Times found the latest Hitchcock “naggingly improbable” and only “fitfully effective.”

  In America, Marnie would take in a $3.3 million gross (placing it below the top twenty), while in England it ranked as the twelfth most successful picture of the year. This, ironically, was due to Sean Connery’s drawing power (Goldfinger was the number one film that year), although his salary also had escalated the budget. (Meeting with author Winston Graham, Hitchcock “complained bitterly about the cost of his two stars.”) Although the box-office figures were modest, Marnie went into the black—outperforming Vertigo, for example.

  As a man who prized box-office success above reviews and was accustomed to ups and downs, Hitchcock undoubtedly considered Marnie a momentary dip in his long career, to be erased by whatever he did next. Everything still seemed possible in the fall of 1964, even the idea that he might mend fences with Tippi Hedren and make another film with her.

  On vacation he had talked things over with Alma, and he returned home with ambitious plans. As he often had before, he decided to launch several projects simultaneously. Whichever story came together easiest and fastest would be the film he made first.

  He had two stories, both no further along than the idea stage. One was a picaresque yarn involving a family-run hotel in Italy, which is a disguised criminal operation. Another was a run-for-cover crime drama based on the exploits of a notorious English murderer—which one he hadn’t decided—to be shot in a contemporary style, with explicit sex and violence.

  But in the summer of 1964, Hitchcock couldn’t possibly have predicted the run of bad luck and troubles that would begin to envelop his circle. Over the next three years he would suffe
r a series of dramatic losses from his valued production team—with whom, he had boasted on The Birds, he enjoyed “a sort of telepathic communication that sets us right.”

  The passing of his longtime editor George Tomasini was the first of several premature deaths to diminish his team. Tomasini, only fifty-five when felled by a heart attack in November 1964, had edited Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. Marnie and a cocredit on In Harm’s Way (released in 1965) were his last films.

  Regardless of the cheerful mortician’s mask (and uniform) that Hitchcock wore for public appearances, illness and death moved him. He visited old friends like cameraman Jack Cox in the hospital on their deathbeds, and was an inveterate attender of funerals; now the funerals were starting to accrue. He wept at the news of deaths, and his logbook scheduled his day around funerals; it was a point of honor to stand over the burial site of old friends like Edmund Gwenn. When he couldn’t attend the funeral, he always sent flowers and a note.

  Suddenly he seemed surrounded by death, and Hitchcock’s own health began to preoccupy him, much earlier than has been reported. During the making of Marnie, he called Norman Lloyd in and told him that something was wrong with him. Dr. Ralph Tandowsky couldn’t pinpoint a cause, but Hitchcock felt tired, with constant aches and pains. Though the director kept his concerns from the cast, he told Lloyd, “You might have to finish this one for me.”

  Everyone thought the usual vacation would do the trick. Marnie had been stressful, but Hitchcock always bounced back. Shortly after returning from abroad, though, he was still feeling poorly, and in mid-July he enlisted a crew of specialists to conduct tests. Again the diagnosis was elusive, and it’s possible that it was all in his head. But Hitchcock was feeling his age, and it was quietly agreed that he would cancel his television series, now in its third season as an hourlong program (the half-hour show had run for seven seasons). Although it had been three years since he directed an episode, he couldn’t let go of his pervasive involvement, and he took his role in approving the main elements and performing the lead-ins seriously.

  Doctors advised him to slow down, restrict his activity, cut down on food and drink. His weight, which he had kept under control since Lifeboat two decades earlier, was rising.

  So the summer of 1964 was a quiet one, by choice. Hitchcock held meetings with Norman Lloyd and Joan Harrison about the final television season, conducted a few interviews with journalists, spent long weekends in Santa Cruz. But he continued to feel anxious about his health, and initiated regular medical appointments, twice weekly. He had long taken vitamin B boosters, but it now appears that he began to receive cortisone shots as well.

  Hitchcock was a lifelong devotee of studio screenings, and now he had his own private screening room. The films he watched had always run the gamut; he’d watch almost anything—except films that implied cruelty to animals. (He cut off The Misfits and walked out, and remained furious with Peggy Robertson all the rest of the day for booking it.) But once Hitchcock had a definite project in mind, the roster homed in on similar subjects, and in the fall of 1964 he began watching a spate of recent films—The Prize, Seven Days in May, Fail-Safe, The Manchurian Candidate—that pointed in a new direction. To the hotel-of-crooks project and the run-for-cover about a serial murderer, Hitchcock now added a contemporary political thriller.

  Briefly he had toyed with filming another John Buchan novel with Richard Hannay as its central character, but the book he considered, The Three Hostages, was set in the year of its publication, way back in 1924, and was hopelessly quaint. Rereading Buchan helped him recharge his batteries, however.

  Though he was a fan of the James Bond films, Hitchcock resented how brazenly the 007 series appeared to be borrowing from North by Northwest. The duel between Cary Grant and a crop-spraying biplane had been shamelessly lifted and copied, Hitchcock believed, for the clash between Bond and a helicopter in From Russia with Love. In Hitchcock’s estimation the Bond films had taken his vision one step further toward comicbook storytelling; the only way to compete, he felt, was to make a more “realistic Bond.” After all, he had been making spy thrillers since The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps; he had this branch of his reputation to uphold.

  Besides the “realistic Bond,” Hitchcock toyed with the possibility of shooting the hotel-of-crooks story on location in Italy. He watched the latest works by Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, and other Italian filmmakers, while returning to Big Deal on Madonna Street, a robbery-gone-wrong satire he liked for its sophisticated plot mechanics and ironic tone. (He also liked, according to Furio Scarpelli, the fact that it “somewhat mocked the film style of Hitchcock” himself.) Hitchcock inquired about the availability of the veteran Italian writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli, and then arranged a spate of meetings with other writers who might be right for one of his other future projects. He spoke with novelist Richard Condon, the author of The Manchurian Candidate, and with Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, who had scripted Seven Days in May. He lunched with old Vertigo hands Alec Coppel and Sam Taylor, wondering if either of them might click with a run-for-cover crime picture or the political thriller.

  But his days were uncrowded, and there was no urgency until after Thanksgiving—and George Tomasini’s death. Then he struck out in several directions at once.

  In early November, Hitchcock had registered “an untitled original story subject” with the Writers Guild, broadly outlining a sort of prequel that would “cover the events prior to the beginning of the story told in Shadow of a Doubt.” Following “an attractive man” who murders rich widows while on the run from police, the prequel would present “the events surrounding the killing and disposal of these various women.” According to the outline, the story would draw on the facts of “famous English criminal cases” such as John Haigh, John Christie, or Neville Heath, while Americanizing the characters and situations.

  Later that same month, Hitchcock invited Psycho author Robert Bloch, whom he didn’t know very well (though Bloch had gone on to write multiple episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents), to a “gourmet luncheon accompanied by wines of appropriate bouquet and vintage,” in Bloch’s words.

  At lunch, Hitchcock explained that he was mulling approaches to a run-for-cover crime film whose true inspiration harked back to Jack the Ripper. But he wanted to modernize the story by borrowing from public-domain accounts of more contemporary killers. He was thinking of adopting the stylistic methods of the Nouvelle Vague, or Italians like Antonioni.

  The lunch was more of a monologue, all of it captured on tape—Hitchcock rambling on about the necrophile Christie (“a very sordid little man … almost like Hume Cronyn could be”), Heath the flagellator of women (“he always went beyond … the thing got to the point where he would push the crop up them and bite their breasts and all that kind of thing”), even bringing up Patrick Mahon (“I used some aspects of his case in Rear Window because he got a girl in the family way and he killed her—you know, all it is, is a matter of economics really”). The director said he could envision using another detail of the Mahon case in the new planned film: when Mahon tried to destroy the head of a victim by shoving it into a fireplace and lighting a fire, Hitchcock recalled, “the heat caused the eyes to open.”

  The theory was that Hitchcock would pay Bloch to write a novel based on an actual serial killer’s exploits; then, after Bloch wrote the novel, the director would convert it to film—a plan that had worked for Hitchcock at least as far back as Dale Collins and Rich and Strange. The director recommended that Bloch read Ten Rillington Place, a nonfiction account of the Christie murders and trial by journalist Ludovic Kennedy, as the kind of realistically flavored narrative he wanted to sponsor. His story ideas were sketchy, Hitchcock admitted, and he wasn’t sure which of the notorious murderers offered the best prototype. All that was up to Bloch.

  And then, during same week he met with Bloch, Hitchcock
wrote to Vladimir Nabokov in Montreux, Switzerland, following up on an earlier telephone call to the world-renowned author of Laughter in the Dark and Lolita (Nabokov had helped adapt the latter into a well-regarded Stanley Kubrick film). It is unclear whether Hitchcock knew the Russian-born author beforehand, whether he had met him in England (where Nabokov was educated after World War I), in the United States (where he had taught college after World War II), or in Switzerland (where Nabokov moved in 1959). Whatever the case, the director addressed him formally as “Mr. Nabokov,” and offered the world-class writer—as highbrow a candidate as Bloch was low—his pick of the two other competing projects.

  The one he thought optimal for Nabokov was the political thriller, which was shaping up as a fictional riff on the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. As Cambridge students in the 1930s, Burgess and Maclean had belonged to a circle of left-wing intellectuals, several of whom were recruited as Soviet spies. Later, as British diplomats, Burgess and Maclean funneled secrets to Russia during and after World War II, until their treachery was discovered and they fled from England in 1951. Hitchcock had long been fascinated by Burgess and Maclean, and discussed them with Angus MacPhail (another Cambridge graduate) while remaking The Man Who Knew Too Much.

  The real-life Bonds were often shabby, cold-blooded ideologues, and the kind of political thriller Hitchcock had in mind would delve deeper into the women who attached themselves to such Cold War pawns—women not unlike Mrs. Drayton (Brenda de Banzie), the more sympathetic of the villains in the second Man Who Knew Too Much. The drama would focus on “the problem of the woman who is associated, either by marriage or engagement, to a defector,” in his words.

  A woman who loved such a Cold Warrior, Hitchcock explained in his letter, would share his fate. “We have, for example, the case of Burgess and Maclean, where Mrs. Maclean eventually followed her husband behind the Iron Curtain, and obviously Mrs. Maclean had no other loyalties.”