Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  The studio, the director’s staff, and his close friends secretly believed that Frenzy would be the last Hitchcock film. But throughout the global publicity campaign, whenever journalists asked him if he was on the verge of retirement, his shock and displeasure were unfeigned. “Retire?” Hitchcock would protest. “What would I do? Sit in a corner and read a book?”

  By now, however, his world was shrinking to include only his home and his office, and very often he did just that, stay home and read. Dr. Flieg didn’t encourage travel, except for his annual vacation to Hawaii. He didn’t go out at night, except for special occasions. Alma’s health had stabilized, but her heart was weak, and Dr. Flieg ordered occasional bed rest for Mrs. Hitchcock. Thus, the Hitchcocks’ Thursday nights at Chasen’s became a special occasion, and it was a big deal when Alma came to lunch or showed up for the afternoon screening.

  “Home reading” was what Hitchcock’s logbook reported, increasingly, in 1972 and 1973. He had always prided himself on getting up early in the morning and going to work; now he showed up in the office most days after 10 A.M. Some days it wasn’t until 12:30, and then the only thing on the schedule might be lunch with his agents, or with old friends like Norman Lloyd. Or it might be just him and Peggy Robertson. In the afternoons there were often showings of films by young directors, foreign and American, but just as often it was the latest musicals, Walt Disney, or James Bond.

  He browsed crime and spy books forwarded by Universal’s story department. Now his idée fixe became to do another realistic cold war thriller, to expunge the dishonor of Torn Curtain and Topaz. One day the studio arranged a lunch for Hitchcock with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin. Hitchcock told Dobrynin he aspired to make a film set entirely in the Kremlin. He insisted such a film would be a “formidable success,” recalled Dobrynin. Dobrynin probably wasn’t aware of the anti-Soviet drift of Torn Curtain and Topaz, but nonetheless voiced “doubts that the Moscow leadership would fully appreciate the depth and originality of the idea.”

  The right spy thriller eluded him, and shortly after the Buñuel luncheon Hitchcock had another studio lunch with two young television writers on the lot, William Link and Richard Levinson, who had written for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and wanted to spend time with the great man. Over lunch the director talked about his ongoing search for story material, and afterward the writers recalled a book they had read that they thought might be of interest. It wasn’t a political thriller—it was in a more familiar Hitchcock crime mode. They had it shipped up to Mrs. Hitchcock at the Santa Cruz house, which the couple was selling. Alma read The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning first, and recommended it to her husband.

  Victor Canning was a thriller writer of considerable distinction (V S. Pritchett was quoted on his dust jackets, hailing him as “a master of his craft”). Published in 1972, The Rainbird Pattern was a suspenseful double chase that on the surface seemed made to order for Hitchcock. One of the chases is quasi-comic, involving an oddball bunco clairvoyant and her out-of-work boyfriend, who are searching for a missing heir on behalf of a wealthy spinster (whose nickname in the book, oddly, is Tippy). The other chase pits hapless police against an archfiend who is plotting a high-level kidnapping. A stark climax, with the archcriminal revealed as the long-lost heir, unites the two story threads.

  The novel takes place entirely in England, and involves the ransom of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Although the police bungle along, chasing the wrong couple (an element Hitchcock must have enjoyed), in the end they manage to trap their man, and the archcriminal and his wife meet an ugly demise. So do all the other main characters: the clairvoyant, the boyfriend, the elderly heiress. A chilling coda demonstrates the triumph of evil, fulfilling the genealogical “pattern” of the book’s title.

  After deciding on The Rainbird Pattern, the director offered the script assignment to Anthony Shaffer, who read the book but balked at “the sort of version that Hitch was describing—a sort of light, Noel Coward-Madame Arcati thing with Margaret Rutherford.” (Thus, already, before there was any script, he was describing a Hitchcock film quite different from the book.) Shaffer agreed to think about it, but he had flashed the wrong signals, and Hitchcock phoned him a week later to say that his agent had made excessive demands. Shaffer felt Hitchcock was dissembling in order to avoid a later confrontation over his approach.

  In September 1973, Hitchcock recruited another familiar face: Ernest Lehman. Since North by Northwest, Lehman had written some of Hollywood’s most prestigious films: From the Terrace, West Side Story, The Prize, The Sound of Music, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Hello, Dolly! He had produced the latter two films, as well as Portnoy’s Complaint, his debut (and swan song) as a director.*

  Except for Sweet Smell of Success, which was adapted from his novel (and coscripted by Clifford Odets), North by Northwest was the only original script on Lehman’s filmography. But The Rainbird Pattern would also be an original once they had finished revamping the novel, Hitchcock assured him. With more than a touch of resentment—after all, he’d been stung by Arthur La Bern’s poisonous “Letter to the Editor,” and disapproved of the steep price he had had to pay for rights to Canning’s novel—Hitchcock told Lehman, “I don’t have any regard for the book. It’s our story, not the book’s. Canning’s a very lucky man.”

  “What’s he going to get out of this?” Lehman asked.

  “A lot,” Hitchcock replied rather uncharitably. “These fellows … you know what happens. They rerelease the book with our new title.”**

  The director told Lehman that he intended to keep Canning’s basic premise, but part of their job would include moving the whole shebang to California because of Hitchcock’s health concerns as well as budget considerations. Another part would be giving the material the Noel Coward tone Hitchcock envisioned.

  The September 1973 start of Hitchcock’s work with Lehman on “Deceit” (the first thing junked was Canning’s title) came fifteen months after the release of Frenzy, and those months had been hard on Hitchcock. In January 1973 he spent two weeks in the hospital, fighting gout. In the spring he struggled with the flu. In June he attended the funeral of Dave Chasen, owner of his favorite restaurant. August brought a heart scare, a flurry of tests, and days at home.

  There was something sad and beautiful about these two old warhorses reuniting, fifteen years after North by Northwest, each past his prime. “By now he was a legendary figure to me, too,” recalled Lehman, “yet at first I felt very comfortable being back with him. However, before long I realized that our relationship was quite different. Many years had passed. We had both had successes and failures. We were different people now.”

  At first the Hitchcock who rolled up his sleeves for work seemed almost unchanged from the practical artist Lehman knew from long before—the man who had worked with writers on scripts for fifty years, in much the same way. No matter how early the writer arrived for their morning sessions, Hitchcock was already there waiting, sitting in “his favorite red leather chair beside the red leather sofa surrounded by beige and mahogany and brass in the tasteful, soothing, orderly office … smiling, hopeful, expectant, hands folded over a navy worsted suit and black tie.”

  “Good morning, old bean.”

  “Morning, Hitch.”

  Lehman arrived about ten, but by the time they started talking about the script it was getting close to eleven. “The first forty-five minutes,” said the writer, “are always warm-up time, during which neither of you would dare commit the gross, unpardonable sin of mentioning the work at hand. There are more attractive matters to be discussed first… what dinner parties, if any, have been attended the night before, who was there and said what to whom? … or, if not a party, what about the movie that was seen last night and was now to be dissected, or how about those reviews in the morning trades, weren’t they shocking? … and let’s not forget the morning headlines and the stock market and the president and
the secretary of state and Lew Wasserman and the Middle East and the sagging U.S. economy.

  “How much more pleasurable, this sharing of the problems of others, than to have to sit there, sometimes in terribly long silences, trying to devise Hitchcockian methods of extricating fictional characters from the corners into which you painted them the day before.”

  Inevitably it fell to the writer to launch into script issues, usually by starting off with the previous day’s problem—suggesting a solution he had cogitated overnight. With Hitchcock, that was often like loading a bullet into a revolver for a friendly game of Russian roulette.

  “He looks at you with hope, or is it pity, and murmurs. Really?

  “And you begin to talk, and he watches you, and he listens, and you watch him carefully, and you continue, and finally you’ve said it all. And then he does one of several things. His face lights up with enthusiasm. Good sign. Or his face remains unchanged. Question mark. Or he says absolutely nothing about what you have just told him, and talks about another aspect of the picture. Pocket veto. Or he looks at you with great sympathy and says, But Ernie, that’s the way they do it in the movies.”

  If the writer stumbled, then implicitly it was Hitchcock’s turn to venture an idea “bold and outrageous,” in Lehman’s words. “He knows that you understand the anything-goes rule of this moviemaking game that the two of you play in his office, otherwise neither of you would risk the embarrassment. So you look at him steadily and give him your full attention and listen to all of his ideas, and when he has finished you respond with one of your own personal devices for dealing with this sensitive work relationship.”

  Either: “Hey, that’s nifty, Hitch. I really like that,” according to Lehman.

  Or: “Hmmm … yes, that has possibilities …”

  Or: “Very interesting … really interesting … I think we ought to throw it in the hopper with all the others …”

  Or: “I don’t know … I see what you mean … but I don’t know.”

  “The rules—never acknowledged or articulated—are: I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me,” reflected Lehman, “provided neither of us lets the other hurt the picture. I’ll let you fight me if you let me fight you, provided neither of us forgets that the main fight is to entertain an audience.”

  At 12:30 P.M., the office door would burst open, heralding a studio waiter carrying two trays of New York steak and black coffee. On cue, the two would retreat to Hitchcock’s private dining room. “The story problems can go to the devil,” Lehman explained. “This is conversation time, much of it about rare dishes and vintage wines, because there are no calories in small talk, or in flashbacks to the triumphs and the defeats of yesteryear.”

  When Hitchcock lit a cigar and asked, “Shall we return to our toy trains?”—usually about 1:40 P.M.—it was the signal to amble back to the red leather chair and sofa.

  “Now, where were we?”

  Before lunch one day they had been discussing the kidnapping. Of course Hitchcock Americanized the victim and the scene of the crime. In the book the English archbishop is snatched during a country idyll; Hitchcock delighted in his substitution, which had “the special appeal of breaking a taboo,” in John Russell Taylor’s words. The film’s kidnapping would take place at Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco, with the victim, an Episcopalian bishop, injected with Pentothal and dragged off during services (“depending of course on the slightly embarrassed sense of decorum which possesses those in church and makes them hesitate to act in what would otherwise be a natural fashion,” observed Taylor).

  Later, the kidnappers deposit the drugged bishop in their car on the way to making the ransom exchange. But just as they are about to leave their garage, the clairvoyant, with singular bad timing, turns up to identify the long-lost heir. As she is explaining her errand, however, a car door bulges open and the stupefied bishop pitches out the side. …

  “But Hitch, I thought we had agreed that he can’t open the back door if he’s unconscious …”

  “Well, if he doesn’t open the back door and fall out, how will she be able to see him? …”

  “She won’t,” said Lehman. “So we’ll have to come up with another—”

  “But think, when she sees the bishop’s head fall out of the open back door? …”

  “How can an unconscious man reach up and open a car door?”

  “I’ll shoot her point of view,” said Hitchcock, “and the bishop’s mouth will be hanging open like this, only upside down, of course …”

  “But if he’s unconscious …”

  “Did I ever tell you,” interrupted Hitchcock, “about the time I ran into Dorothy Hammerstein in a New York restaurant after having not seen her for thirty years?”

  “No, please do …”

  Daily at 3:15 P.M. sharp a secretary entered with two wineglasses of chilled Fresca over a single cube of ice. Thus refreshed, Hitchcock and Lehman continued their debate about the unconscious bishop, without resolution. After a short while, the director called out “loudly for another glass, this time with two blocks of ice, please.” The secretary reentered, exited, “and this time,” wrote Lehman, “she leaves the door slightly open.”

  “To this day,” wrote Lehman, he hadn’t “been able to figure out the signal, if indeed there is one.” Was it the words “two blocks”? Or was it the mere request for another glass?

  All he knew for sure was that the door was opening, and he was being ushered out.

  “I think we did very well today,” Hitchcock would say as Lehman departed, “don’t you?”

  “Terrific, Hitch. Very encouraging. And tomorrow will be even better.”

  “OK, old bean, see you in the morning.”

  It’s “all a game leading nowhere,” Lehman reflected, driving home; “you know it’s just talk until you both throw in the towel, you know that you’re never actually going to write a screenplay for a film called Family Plot, and even if you did, you know he has no intention of making it. Just as you knew there would never be a North by Northwest.”

  Their talks were energized in the first months of 1974 by Watergate and the Patty Hearst affair. Hitchcock was fascinated by Nixon, a villainous president who “smiled” as he fended off impeachment, and by the headlines from San Francisco—the putative setting of his new film—about the newspaper heiress who enlisted in the very gang that kidnapped her. Somehow, he vowed, he would slip Nixon and Patty Hearst into “Deceit.”*

  By mid-April Lehman had finished an initial draft, which Hitchcock critiqued in detail. “Attached to each page of Lehman’s draft was an identical-size piece of paper, with Hitchcock’s observations on each scene and each line of dialogue,” according to Donald Spoto. “He added the opening shot of the picture in painstaking visual detail; made changes in major scenes; queried Lehman on motivations and major shots; altered a word or two; suggested clarifications; pointed out some problems of construction.”

  That same month the director went all out for a trip to New York, with a press conference, interviews, and a gala tribute sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It must have been extremely gratifying for him; Princess Grace came from Monaco, and other veterans of his films stood at the podium, tweaking him with ironic praise. With a draft of his fifty-third feature in his pocket, Hitchcock was feeling almost buoyant. He also made a round of plays; watching old friends Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in Noel Coward’s Suite in Two Keys at the Ethel Barrymore Theater also gave him a chance to brush up on tone for Family Plot.

  Returning to California, Hitchcock went to the racetrack, attended Gypsy at the Shubert and Mack and Mabel at the Chandler. He spent several days posing for Philippe Halsman for a special issue of French Vogue, and also for Maureen Lambray, who was compiling a book of photographs of film directors. (Universal erected a special set for her so that Hitchcock could be snapped reclining on a train seat.)

  The summer of 1974 was capped by his (and Alma’s) seventy-fifth-birthday party, whic
h Lew Wasserman arranged and hosted at Chasen’s. Cary Grant, Laraine Day, Paul Newman, and François Truffaut were among the luminaries who toasted the Hitchcocks’ continued health and well-being, and ate cake with the director’s frosting-embossed profile.

  The second round of script meetings with Lehman, though, went less well. “I found myself refusing to accept Hitch’s ideas (if I thought they were wrong),” Lehman recalled later, “merely because those ideas were coming from a legendary figure.” The writer had grown weary of Hitchcock overanalyzing everything, and he simply wanted the go-ahead to finish. The silences between them grew longer, the disagreements awkward. Hitchcock seemed overly worried about plot logic. Lehman worried more about the characters. They pondered possible stars, which for Hitchcock could be a substitute for characterization.

  All along Hitchcock “sort of dropped things in to pay lip service” to characterization, Lehman remembered, “but he really didn’t want them in the picture. I pleaded with him, so he put them back in the script and shot them, then edited them out of the picture.”

  Privately Hitchcock had decided that Lehman was “a very nervous and edgy sort of man” who was deliberately giving him “a rather difficult time,” as he complained in a letter to Michael Balcon in England. When he suffered a heart attack in September, Hitchcock went so far as to blame the episode (only half kiddingly, it seems) on the constant “nervous state” induced by his arguments with Lehman. After dizzy spells, the director was taken in an ambulance to the UCLA hospital, to a special wing that had been built in part from his charitable donations, where a pacemaker to monitor his heart was installed under the skin of his shoulder blade. He took manifest pleasure in describing the operation later to friends and journalists; the device itself, he told Balcon, “looks like one of those old-fashioned watches that men used to wear in their waistcoats.”