Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  In the end, they clung to their differences; Uris resisted doing Hitchcock’s bidding. The director warned Uris, for example, to write the intelligence agents and the revolutionaries as human beings, without regard to politics. But Uris’s treatment made Fidel’s lieutenant Rico Parra “a cartoon sex maniac to whom Juanita finally offers herself to distract him while Devereaux is getting out of the country,” in the words of Bill Krohn. “She then has rings inserted into her eyes to force her to watch while Parra is beaten to death, and is last seen with her breasts forcibly bared for carving by Havana’s chief of police.”

  In the end, director and writer did become enemies. Uris lasted only until July, though he delivered a partial draft before moving on. After turning it in, according to Uris, he tried to contact Peggy Robertson about something, and she cut him off on the phone.

  With Topaz in trouble, Hitchcock brought “Frenzy” back to the table. The director had valuable test footage, he had copious storyboards prepared, and he had a script all but finished. All he needed was one more writer and a final polish. He met with Herb Gardner, the playwright of A Thousand Clowns, and showed him the storyboards: the way Hitchcock explained it, what he was really looking for was someone to do the job that brought him into film, in 1921—a title writer, who would “caption” the drawn shots.

  Gardner was tempted, until he saw in one storyboard a shot of a character being choked and pushed off the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge—and then, two frames later, the same man sitting at an outdoor café on Fifth Avenue. “How do we get from the guy being pushed off the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to the same guy at a Fifth Avenue cafe?” he asked.

  “The crew goes there,” said Hitchcock, without cracking a smile.

  “Wait a minute. How do we get the audience there, is what I mean.”

  “Mr. Gardner,” said Hitchcock, “The audience will go wherever I take them and they’ll be very glad to be there, I assure you.”

  When Gardner bowed out, Universal itself proved unwilling to go any further with the project. On July 10, 1968, Hitchcock met with Edd Henry and Lew Wasserman, presenting the “Frenzy” slides and test footage in a last-ditch attempt to make his case for the film. The result, as Donald Spoto wrote, was humiliating. Over the next week the three met several more times, but MCA and Universal had been opposed to “Frenzy” all along, and now these two executives—the head of MCA and the boss of Universal—forcefully reiterated their opposition.

  “You may question my taste,” Sir John tells Handel Fane in Murder!, describing his plans to mount a play based on the murder he suspects Fane himself of perpetrating, “but as an artist you’ll understand my temptation.” Now, in addition to the studio and agency that represented Hitchcock, other friends questioned his taste, and few understood his temptation.

  Back at Paramount, when Psycho had encountered a wall of resistance inside his team, Hitchcock had proved everyone wrong. But that was ten years earlier, and Hitchcock was more vulnerable now. He had lunch with Herbert Coleman and Doc Ericksen, asking if they would come back to work for him, but Coleman expressed a distaste for the Psycho-like “Frenzy.”

  Even François Truffaut disappointed him. When Hitchcock sent him the script of “Frenzy,” just after the U.S. publication of Hitchcock/Truffaut, he couldn’t have predicted the reaction of his great champion. Truffaut was no Godard or Antonioni. He made humanist films, and he never intentionally shocked or alienated audiences. Although the Nouvelle Vague filmmaker strove to be diplomatic in his letter, praising certain scenes while stressing how much “I respect, admire, and esteem you,” in his words, the Frenchman obviously recoiled from “Frenzy.” He pointedly mentioned the pervasive nudity, sex, and violence (“It does not worry me too much because I know that you shoot such scenes with real dramatic power,” he temporized, “and you never dwell on unnecessary detail”), and targeted several key scenes of the script as simplistic or implausible. More broadly, he diagnosed the entire second half as “a trifle banal.”

  Perhaps this stark but promising film might have remained in the director’s sights if Mrs. Hitchcock had advised her husband to ignore the critics and go ahead with “Frenzy.” But there is no evidence she said anything one way or another. Her deep involvement in the script may even have made her shy about pressing her opinion; after all, she had backed Under Capricorn. Although she supported Hitchcock’s every move, the important moves were up to him. And perhaps he could have bucked Wasserman and Universal, insisting on making “Frenzy”—which, unlike Mary Rose, wasn’t strictly precluded by his contract. But the united front wore him down—and Hitchcock was reluctant to spurn advice from Wasserman, a friend who had done so much for him.

  “Frenzy” was indefinitely postponed—and before too long Hitchcock was referring to Antonioni in interviews as “pretentious.” Topaz was swiftly given the green light.

  After he’d lined up Herbert Coleman and Doc Ericksen, the director’s attempt to recapture the halcyon days of the 1950s was symbolized by the eleventh-hour hiring of Sam Taylor—Hitchcock’s greatest stooge of that era, a writer who enjoyed long lunches with him, who vacationed with the Hitchcocks, and even hosted them at his home in Maine.

  Moving swiftly to make up for lost time, on July 21 Hitchcock, Coleman, and Ericksen left for England and the Continent. Taylor received a long phone call from Claridge’s, getting him started on the new script. While scouting locations in Denmark and France, Hitchcock interviewed European actors and shot tests of Vienna-born Frederick Stafford at Cinecittà in Rome.

  When Hitchcock returned to California by early August, the production was put on a pressure-cooker schedule. The director juggled script conferences with Taylor and staff meetings with costume designer Edith Head, art director Henry Bumstead, and editor William Ziegler—all veterans of Hitchcock films, adding to the déjà vu atmosphere. Even cameraman Jack Hildyard, who had won an Oscar for The Bridge over the River Kwai, was an old acquaintance, from his days at Elstree as a clapper boy.

  Universal was pushing for a fall start, but give Lew Wasserman credit: he put his money where his mouth was, investing $4 million in Topaz, Hitchcock’s biggest budget to date—his biggest ever, as it turned out. Universal figured that an international cast and exotic settings would serve as an antidote to the lure of watching free programming on a small living-room screen.

  Although Taylor had finished off Vertigo in style, that script was also indebted to an excellent novel, and a series of capable writers who built on each other’s drafts over a period of years. On Topaz, Taylor began with an unwieldy novel, one partial draft, and material alien to anything else he had ever written. Now, instead of Notorious, the script shifted toward a less romantic model: 1965’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, a film Hitchcock and his staff watched several times. Taking Uris’s criticisms to heart—that he was out of touch with spying—Hitchcock arranged for several briefings from intelligence officials, including George Horkan, former deputy inspector general of the CIA.

  Taylor got rid of the World War II-French Resistance flashbacks, which the budget couldn’t handle, and at Hitchcock’s behest turned Rico Parra into a sympathetic, almost tragic figure—in truth, the film’s most faceted character. Taylor also built up the Cuban scenes—his heavy rewriting would make them among the best in the film—and radically altered the plotting of Uris’s book.

  One highlight, Juanita’s death, was never fully described in the script, or even storyboarded, until it came up on the schedule. Though Hitchcock had mused about it endlessly—and built a floral motif into preceding scenes. As Bill Krohn observed, in the opening defection sequence Topaz “pauses to contemplate a ceramic flower being put together petal by petal”; later, when the American intelligence chief visits Devereaux in his hotel room, “he brings a grim-looking bouquet of yellow flowers as a pretext for screwing up a family vacation with an assignment”; and later still, there is “a dolly-in on a white funeral wreath” ending the sequence where the rogue employed by Devereaux
sacrifices a Cuban informant.

  Then when Juanita is shot to death at close range by Parra, her betrayed lover, the Cuban heroine collapses into Parra’s arms and sinks to the floor, her purple dress spreading out over the black-and-white tiles like a gorgeous flower blossoming.* The director filmed this stunningly from high overhead; it is the one shot people always remember from Topaz. “This is the level on which the film took shape in Hitchcock’s mind,” wrote Krohn, “often without being set down on paper, in images that are also metaphors for its venomous beauty.”

  Hitchcock and Taylor weren’t able to spend much time together, however, and the filming started without a complete script. Taylor had to rush pages over to Copenhagen and Paris during the location work in mid-September; then, at Universal in October and November, the remaining scenes were revised just days before they were shot. But a decent script eluded Hitchcock, and so did the right actors; certain roles were cast and recast. “An actor who, when he wasn’t employed, operated a beauty parlor was cast in a small but significant role,” recalled studio publicist Orin Borsten. “I watched as Mr. Hitchcock, walking over, the company within hearing distance, asked the actor to play the role in the acting style of Peter Lorre. Time was being lost as he worked with the actor, who either didn’t understand the director’s wishes or was incapable of satisfying him. That same day he was fired.”

  He collected actors, literally, from around the world. The cast included imposing Montreal-born John Vernon as Rico Parra, and the African American actor Roscoe Lee Browne as the operative hired to purloin incriminating documents from the Cuban delegation visiting New York. There were Danes, and there were Germans too. Two distinguished Frenchmen, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret, had parts in the French section, as the Soviet moles. The only old Hitchcock hand was John Forsythe, as the American spy official probing the Cuban-Soviet-French connection.

  To save money, and avoid coping with another quirky figure like Paul Newman, Hitchcock thought this time he would launch his own male star. Frederick Stafford was a virtual unknown; Hitchcock had spotted him in a French James Bond hand-me-down called OSS 17, about a CIA agent pursuing smugglers in Brazil. Just as he had tried to make Tippi Hedren into Grace Kelly, he would try to transform Stafford into a realistic Bond—“the director’s approximation of a Cary Grant persona,” in Borsten’s words. But Hitchcock’s casting judgment deserted him in his worst hour, and just as in days of yore he found himself stuck with a wooden, unsexy lead.

  “One of the tragedies of Topaz,” Sam Taylor recalled in one interview, “was that Hitch was trying to make something as if he had Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in it.”

  Topaz featured several beautiful, competent women, but none of them compared to Ingrid Bergman, or the other great ladies of Hitchcock’s past. Stafford’s daughter was played by Claude Jade, who had appeared in Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses and came recommended by the French filmmaker. Stafford’s wife was played by the ex-ballerina Dany Robin.

  The casting process was chaotic, and Juanita, the key role for an actress, wasn’t filled until just days before her scenes had to be shot. Hitchcock had interviewed actress after actress, finding fault with each one. With the Cuban scenes fast approaching, there was anxiety among the staff. But the director seemed untroubled. “She will show up,” he assured people.

  So it came to pass: one day an agent brought in Karin Dor, a ravishingly Latinesque German actress who spoke flawless English. Even better, Dor had appeared in You Only Live Twice; how could Hitchcock resist adding an actual Bond girl to his realistic Bond film? Dor was handed a script, costumed, made up, and pushed in front of the cameras.

  Alma shared her husband’s instant infatuation with the German actress, and the Hitchcocks took Dor to Chasen’s night after night. Her scenes got extra attention, though ultimately she disappointed Hitchcock, more off-camera than on. One day, during a break in filming, Borsten arranged for a photographic session with Dor and John Vernon, for advertising and promotion purposes. Hitchcock sat in, posing them sexily together. He zeroed in on Vernon’s cigar, telling Dor, “Karin, put it in your mouth,” according to Borsten—“innuendo manifest, a sly twinkle in the director’s eyes.”

  Dor blushed, giggled, demurred. Hitchcock insisted: “Come on, Karin, you know you’ve had it in your mouth before. …” She pleaded, refused. Angrily, Hitchcock ended the session, but not before asking Borsten, “Now do you have all the art you need?” Borsten said he would like a few shots of Hitchcock with his brunet star, in contrast to all the photographs that existed of him with blondes. Still visibly deflated by Dor’s refusal to play along with him, the director muttered, “I wouldn’t want a picture with her.” (Borsten recalled: “Only the night before the Hitchcocks had dined her at Chasen’s.”)

  The actors resisted him, or they didn’t fathom him. Hitchcock’s sense of humor was off throughout the filming. His back-alley jokes, wasted earlier on Leon Uris, were really squandered on the French actors, according to Borsten; even the best English-to-French dictionary wouldn’t have helped them decipher his Cockney slang and puns. “They gazed at him un-comprehendingly, the humor pointless to them.”

  But Hitchcock’s biggest defeat was Dor’s big love scene with Stafford, which all along Hitchcock had eagerly planned (“unknown to actors and [the] entire company,” according to Borsten) as his first opportunity to thumb his nose at the fading Production Code; he’d show his lead actress and actor naked from the waist up. A wardrobe woman rushed up to him before the filming, wringing her hands. “Oh, Mr. Hitchcock, Mr. Hitchcock, Miss Dor can’t do it. …” Dor’s body was marked with scars from surgery. Then, almost laughably, Stafford followed a moment later to explain that he too had gone through lung surgery and now bore a livid scar from one side of his chest to the other. Hitchcock merely gulped, and said with a deep sigh, “Very well, we shall film the scene from the shoulders up.”

  From script to postproduction, Topaz was nothing but “a dreadful experience,” in Taylor’s words. Hitchcock rushed through all the planning. He shot backgrounds that weren’t used, and scenes that were later dropped. At the same time he indulged in foolish extravagances over minute details: on the verge of shooting a French dinner scene, he held up filming until he could make contact with a Parisian restaurateur to confirm the precise amount in a single serving of pâté de foie gras.

  He wasn’t the same Hitchcock who could patch the flaws of To Catch a Thief into a sparkling film, regardless of trouble along the way. Ralph Tandowsky’s longtime partner, Dr. Walter Flieg, had inherited the job of Hitchcock’s physician, and for the first time a doctor attended the director on-set throughout the making of a film, hovering discreetly nearby even in Copenhagen and Paris. The obvious burden Hitchcock was under alarmed friends and associates. “He was no longer the great brain that sat in the chair watching ‘round him,” recalled John Forsythe, who had acted in The Trouble with Harry and on television for Hitchcock. “He would go away for fifteen or twenty minutes and lie down if he could, and it was sad to see.”

  After finishing principal photography in March, the director took a short break, then returned to Paris in mid-April to shoot the grand climax of the film. This was to be the greatest of the film’s choreographed crescendos—a scene not in the book, but in Hitchcock’s mind from the beginning. It was an old-fashioned pistol duel between Devereaux (Stafford) and Granville (Piccoli), the “Topaz” mole and lover of Madame Devereaux, set at dawn in a deserted soccer stadium. During the duel, Topaz is shot in the back by a Russian sniper.

  Hitchcock got only halfway through the weeklong shoot before he was forced to leave the set prematurely for entirely unexpected reasons. Whereas Forsythe and others had been holding their breath over the director’s health, word came from America that Alma—invincible Alma—had been hospitalized. Distraught, Hitchcock told Herbert Coleman that he was unable to continue filming. Topaz didn’t matter to him at all, he said, if Alma was in danger. He gave precise instructions to Coleman, who�
��just as he had done for Hitchcock on To Catch a Thief—finished the location work. The director left for Hollywood, where news of Alma’s brief illness—vague and undiagnosable—was kept from the papers.

  The film was jinxed to the end—and the editing of the duel sequence became a particular sore point.

  The French government had objected to Topaz, with its portrait of Soviet sympathizers infiltrating their highest ranks. Permission to film in Paris was suspended until the U.S. ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver, arranged a meeting and reassured authorities of Hitchcock’s honorable intentions. Although Hitchcock was perfectly capable of double-crossing the French, as he had fooled censors and studio officials throughout his career, the duel sequence was there partly to assuage them by exterminating the Soviet mole—punishing the villain, as in Production Code days of old.

  But when the Hitchcock film was test-screened in San Francisco, the audience reaction was divided dramatically between people who thought Topaz was the best movie they had seen in years, and others who felt it ruined a great book. “Because the audience had been recruited from fans of the Leon Uris novel on which the film was based,” wrote Bill Krohn, “outrage was in the majority.” And the worst derisive laughter greeted the visually spectacular duel scene, which nonetheless struck many Americans as a ludicrous anachronism.

  Although Hitchcock had always pooh-poohed previews, this time he had to answer to Universal—and to his own nagging doubts about Topaz. Although he had always toyed with alternative endings, now, for the first time since Suspicion, he changed an ending purely to answer the preview cards. He hastily agreed to ditch the duel, and returned to France to film an alternative ending at Orly Airport, with Devereaux and the French traitor boarding plans for Washington and Moscow, respectively, and waving to each other cynically.