As a “crude example” of the kind of story he was proposing, Hitchcock imagined the “very American” son of Werner Von Braun—an ingenious scientist like his father—taking a vacation to visit his father’s relatives in East Germany. He might have a fiancée, who is “the daughter of a Senator,” whom the CIA and other “security people” enlist to keep an eye on Von Braun Jr.—and report back to them on the young scientist’s suspicious activities.
The plot would follow the “journey behind the Iron Curtain,” but the emotional focus would be on the girl and her dawning realization that her lover might defect. “Maybe she goes over to the side of her fiancé. It would depend upon how her character is drawn. It is also possible if she did this, she might be making a terrible mistake—especially if her fiancé, after all, turned out to be a double agent.”
Such a political thriller, the letter continued, should be “expressed in terms of action and movement and, naturally, one that would give me the opportunity to indulge in the customary Hitchcock suspense.”
If the realistic Bond story didn’t appeal to Nabokov, Hitchcock dangled another possibility, which he admitted might not be as attractive—“but on the other hand, it might.” This was the family of crooks in an Italian hotel, which, in an earlier incarnation, he explained, he intended to make for a studio in England. But he never completed a script “because I left to come to America.” (If he had, the film would have starred Nova Pilbeam.)
“I wondered what would happen …” wrote Hitchcock, spinning the tale of a young girl, raised in a Swiss convent, who leaves college and moves in with her widowed father, who is acting as general manager of a large London hotel (“at the time I imagined it would be the Savoy,” he noted). The father of “our young heroine” has one brother who is the concierge, another who is cashier, a third who is one of the chefs, a sister who is the housekeeper, “and a bedridden mother living in a penthouse in the hotel. The mother is about eighty years of age, a matriarch.”
Unbeknownst to the innocent heroine, the whole family is “a gang of crooks,” the hotel their headquarters. The “backstage” of the hotel, especially the kitchen and nightclub, would form an important part of the story. Hitchcock said he was seeking a film that would provide the colorful “details of a big hotel and not merely a film played in hotel rooms.”
Hitchcock conceded that he had related only “the crudest conception” of his ideas, adding, “I haven’t bothered to go into such details as characterizations or the psychological aspects of these stories.
“As I indicated to you on the telephone, screenplay writers are not the type of people to take such ideas as these and develop them into responsible story material. They are usually people who adapt other people’s work. That is why I am by-passing them and coming direct to you—a storyteller.”
For various reasons, the easier deal—the job-for-hire with Bloch—fell apart. Hitchcock had offered the author of Psycho $5,000 to write the novel, and another $20,000 if a film was produced. But Bloch’s agent knew the score this time, and countered by asking for 5 percent of grosses over $5 million, along with other rights and bonuses linked to sequels and merchandising. The negotiations waxed and waned briefly, until Hitchcock decided that his “modest idea” had been inflated by Bloch’s agent’s demands, and that he was “willing to gamble a small sum for a small picture … not an elaborate one.”
Bloch also didn’t appreciate the fine print in Hitchcock’s offer, which stipulated he wouldn’t receive any compensation until the director had read a treatment and approved his approach. That would mean Hitchcock got to talk (and talk), then wait for a story to be written and accepted, before Block received a nickel. “Mr. Hitchcock was in a position to proceed at his leisure, but this was a luxury I just couldn’t afford,” Bloch said later.
Hitchcock could have afforded to be generous, but curiously—and perhaps more importantly—the director felt no rapport with the author of Psycho; after their lunch, he showed no inclination to bend his rules. As for Bloch, he left his initial encounter with Hitchcock scratching his head. He phoned his agent and asked to be eased out of the deal.
But the more challenging deal, the one with the world-renowned litterateur, crumbled just as fast. It took Nabokov only a couple of days to respond to Hitchcock’s letter. Although both stories were interesting, he said, the political thriller “would present many difficulties because I do not know enough about American security matters and methods, or how the several intelligence bureaus work.” Surprisingly, he was interested in the family-of-crooks tale, a slice of life in a hotel setting. “Given a complete freedom (as I assume you intend to give me),” wrote Nabokov, “I think I could turn it into a screenplay.”
Except for one tiny matter—“the matter of time,” in Nabokov’s words. At present he was extremely busy in Switzerland “winding up several things at once,” and “I could devote some thought to the screenplay this summer but could hardly settle down to work on it yet.”
But Hitchcock had just emerged from a long period of rest and reflection, and time was once more an urgent matter for him. By Christmas Nabokov was out of the picture, and Hitchcock had decided to engage the two Italians, Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli, for the hotel-of-crooks script. On New Year’s Eve he hired an interpreter, and Age and Scarpelli arrived from Rome for their first Universal meeting on January 4, 1965.
The hotel was now going to be located in New York, he told the Italian writers. It would be a lavish hotel much like the Waldorf-Astoria, but the story would take place mainly in the kitchen and on the top floor, where a family of Italians live, dominated by a grandmother type. The family has been brought over from Sicily by the manager of the hotel, an immigrant who has worked his way up from being an elevator boy.
A valuable coin exhibition is taking place at the hotel, and an antique Roman coin is stolen. A homicide occurs. One of the family members, a beautiful maid (“a Sophia Loren-type,” according to Scarpelli) must solve (and survive) the mysterious goings-on. “I’d show the whole workings of the hotel,” Hitchcock explained in an interview, “the kitchen, the laundry etc.” After he outlined his ideas, Age and Scarpelli went to New York to acquaint themselves with the Waldorf-Astoria.
Concurrently, Hitchcock decided to push ahead with the political thriller, asking Universal to recommend a sophisticated novelist to write the original script. The thriller was Lew Wasserman’s favorite of the three projects, the one to which he felt he could make a contribution. Wasserman felt that Hitchcock should return to the Paramount formula of beautiful people and beautiful scenery—that coincided with Wasserman’s vision of the program Universal should be developing.
Wasserman was a heavy supporter of the Democratic Party in the mid-1960s—the era of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency—and Hitchcock was invited to visit the White House; he attended off-the-record meetings at the State Department, and was welcomed for private talks with Secretary of State Dean Rusk. All this was facilitated by Wasserman’s high-level contacts; eager to discourage another Psycho, the studio head subtly encouraged Hitchcock’s other projects, and now especially the realistic Bond.
Even though novelist Brian Moore said he didn’t want to write a movie for Hitchcock, Universal flew him and his wife, Jean, out to Hollywood to discuss the spy thriller with the director. Moore’s much-admired first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, portrayed the life of an alcoholic Belfast spinster. (On the basis of this and other works of spare, exquisite prose, Graham Greene called Moore “my favorite living novelist.”) Born in Ireland, Moore had emigrated to Canada after World War II and become a citizen, but was now living in New York. In advance of meeting him, Hitchcock screened The Luck of Ginger Coffey, a film adapted by Moore from his own novel.
Their “cordiality and mutual understanding were instant,” according to Donald Spoto. “Hitchcock confided that he understood Moore’s Irish-Catholic background and that the religious-school setting of his novel The Feast of Lupercal wa
s familiar to him from his own background.” Still, Moore said no, and “typically,” according to his wife, “the studio assumed he was wanting more money and upped the offer, whereupon our lawyer advised Brian that he needed the money and urged him to accept.”
Early 1965 would be divided between these two projects. During January and February Hitchcock worked principally with Age and Scarpelli on the hotel-of-crooks script; after they returned to Italy in early March to begin the writing, the director rotated to story conferences with Moore on the realistic Bond that would eventually become Torn Curtain.
Hitchcock’s script sessions with Age and Scarpelli were hampered by the language barrier and, as the director later insisted, by the Italians’ “slipshod” story construction. Indeed, the Italians were daunted by the complicated mechanics of the story Hitchcock outlined. For these reasons, the hotel-of-crooks script, tentatively titled “RRRRR,” was earmarked as the longer-term project.
On the other hand, Brian Moore’s political thriller progressed with alacrity. Moore completed the synopsis by March 26, and a longer treatment by May 19. The first fifteen pages of script went to Hitchcock on May 25, and the remainder of the draft followed by June 21.
Moore’s five-page synopsis concisely described key scenes of the eventual film. These included Torn Curtain’s opening aboard a cruise steamer in the Norwegian fjords, and the dispatch of the undercover agent Gromek by the American scientist and a farm woman “in a brutal and slow sort of murder,” in Moore’s words—the writer’s suggestion, and Hitchcock loved the idea, “and proceeded to act it out,” according to Jean Moore. There was no hint of the seriocomic slant that the director would endeavor to bring to these scenes, but Hitchcock kept insisting that he would add his trademark comedy in the latter stages of the writing and in “the attitude of the direction.”
Later, Hitchcock would say much the same to reassure Paul Newman, an early front-runner to play the scientist who pretends to embrace Communism in order to travel behind the Iron Curtain and investigate a secret formula for developing an “antimissile missile.”
Moore would later charge Hitchcock with having “absolutely no concept of character—even of two-dimensional figures in a story. He kept switching from the woman’s to the man’s point of view, and the original story idea began to shift and fade uncontrollably.” And it was true; Hitchcock kept shifting as he shopped for stars. The ones he trusted to bring their own dimensionality to his films were showing wrinkles, or threatening retirement.
In the spring of 1965 the director attended a Los Angeles Dodgers game with Cary Grant, and mused about strong-arming Grant into one last Hitchcock film. That would have turned Torn Curtain into more of a bookend with North by Northwest, and given the film a vastly different tone from what eventually resulted. But Grant had just agreed to star in a Universal picture shooting in Japan in the fall, and quite apart from the fact that this augured an irreconcilable scheduling conflict, Grant insisted he was going to retire after Walk, Don’t Run.
And Hitchcock appreciated that Cary Grant’s magical name meant less and less to increasingly younger movie audiences. By late spring, with the script just underway, Paul Newman and Julie Andrews had emerged as the likely leads. Lew Wasserman lobbied heavily for them, confident that they would contribute the glamour and prestige he wanted in a Hitchcock film.
Hitchcock had followed Newman’s career from the beginning, admiring the actor’s always conscientious choice of material. Back in the fall of 1964, Hitchcock had watched Newman in screenings of The Outrage, a Western remake of Rashomon, and The Prize, a political thriller which bore similarities to Torn Curtain.
Julie Andrews was another star he had been following. Hitchcock had enjoyed her as the original Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, and with his soft spot for musicals, he had screened the blockbusters The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins before their release. Andrews’s latest picture, Hawaii, was still in postproduction, and the trade papers were full of items about it. The director was open to Wasserman’s touting of Newman, but he was warier of Andrews as the female lead of Torn Curtain, unsure that she could be “convincing as a scientist.” But he debated Wasserman in vain; the director was now beholden to Universal, and the studio “insisted she was great box-office,” according to Hitchcock.
“Having had comparatively lesser known stars in the last three pictures,” Hitchcock privately wrote to François Truffaut in the fall, “I have now consented to please the whim of the ‘front office’ and to use two well-known players.” Andrews’s manager was also Jimmy Stewart’s, but Hitchcock didn’t strike any bargain there: he had to pay the actress $750,000 against 10 percent of the gross—a higher salary than top-billed Newman.
“It would interest you to know that this [salary plus percentage] total of $1,500,000 is more than we have to pay for the cost of the rest of the picture,” Hitchcock griped to Truffaut. “But that’s the way the business is today. Names are wanted, [and] there is such a shortage that these ‘cattle’ are demanding astronomical figures.”
Signing Newman and Andrews gave Hitchcock the opportunity to begin to integrate their personalities into the ongoing script development. But what were their personalities?
He met Andrews on April 3, well before the first draft was completed. She had always played goody-two-shoes characters in movies, and Hitchcock relished reversing her image in her very first scene, showing the scientist defector and his girlfriend undressed and under the covers in their ship’s compartment, their lovemaking keeping them warm as their boat glides up a frigid fjord toward Copenhagen, broken heater and all.
Andrews was game for the scene and the role reversal. But what was the value in reversing an image if the audience was left with a veritable blank afterward? And Andrews seemed a blank to Hitchcock, even after they met. “Hitch speaks politely of her,” wrote John Russell Taylor. “She speaks politely of him. But there was no spark of communication.”
That may have not been the worst thing about Andrews. More inconvenient was the fact that the actress was in such demand (“Upfront they said, ‘Oh, she’s so hot!’ ” the director bitterly recalled) that Hitchcock would absolutely have to shoot Torn Curtain in the fall, or risk losing his leading lady to other commitments.
As for Paul Newman, to Hitchcock he was a strange type—and one who got off on the wrong footing with the director. “Hitch invited Newman to a small dinner party,” wrote Taylor in his authorized biography. “The first thing Newman did was to take off his jacket at table and drape it over the back of his chair. Then he refused Hitch’s carefully chosen vintage wine and asked for beer instead. And to make matters worse, he insisted on going and getting it himself out of the refrigerator in the kitchen and drinking it from the can.”
Which of them—the ill-suited good girl with the bigger salary, or the star who drank beer from a can—should be the subjective focus of the film? From the start, Hitchcock had favored making Andrews the lead, and Moore had begun his work on the script on that basis; he was hired expressly for his strength with female characters, and the film’s opening scene was devised specifically to explode the image of Julie Andrews. But Andrews in person didn’t excite Hitchcock, and after that opening scene the script began to back away from its intended focus on her. Originally envisioned as the story of a defecting scientist’s wife, the script swung toward the defector—the star with the more legible personality. The defector became terse, moody, a tortured enigma—more like the Paul Newman of Somebody Up There Likes Me, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, and Hud (all films Hitchcock watched).
At the start of the writing process, Hitchcock had talked about the characters as being interchangeable with the stars; now he openly expressed anxiety about the ones he was stuck with. The casting “inhibited” Hitchcock, said Moore. Losing interest in his leads boosted his preoccupation with the lesser characters, and with “the most trivial details of a story,” in Moore’s words, “such as what airline departs a city on a given day—but, oddl
y, this was his strength at the time, and it assured a wealth of accurate historical and social and cultural detail. But it also covered a profound ignorance of human motivation.”
Perhaps the supporting cast could help him forget the stars. Lila Kedrova, a flamboyant Tallulah Bankhead type, born in Russia but a resident of France, had been Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actress for Zorba the Greek; now she would play the red-haired, French-accented Countess Kutchinska, who befriends the defectors on the outskirts of Berlin.
Moore later conceded that much of Torn Curtain’s script originated with Hitchcock. (“I told him,” Moore recalled, “that for truth’s sake the credits should read ‘Screenplay by Alfred Hitchcock, assisted by Brian Moore,’ but he said he never took writing credit.”) But Countess Kutchinska was all Moore’s, though the casting was Hitchcock’s; the character derived from a brief story sketch Moore carried with him at the outset of their deliberations, which explained the Countess’s desire to emigrate to the United States, and her hopes that the defector will help her. The sketch inspired the scene where the countess risks everything to help the scientist couple escape, even going so far as to tackle a pursuing policeman. She is left behind as they flee, crumpled on a stairwell, plaintively crying out, “My sponsor!”
Kedrova would become the director’s favorite among the cast; he ate lunch with her several times during the filming, and brought her home to Bellagio Road for dinners with Mrs. Hitchcock. And in spite of the eventual rupture between Hitchcock and Moore, he let Moore’s lengthy Countess Kutchinska scenes run intact in the final film.
Two more close Hitchcock associates died in first half of 1966. The first, in February, was James Allardice, only forty-six when he suffered a fatal heart attack. Allardice had been responsible for the pixie humor of Hitchcock’s tag-end appearances on television, as well as the speeches he had been making at public events, and even the articles under his byline (Hitchcock’s contribution to the Encyclopaedia Britannica on filmmaking). Norman Lloyd believed that Allardice’s unexpected passing affected the director profoundly. Whenever Allardice dropped into the office, no matter what else was going on, Hitchcock’s mood had always lightened. He would visit no more.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 95