When Freeman arrived, the secretaries were in a “tizzy,” he remembered. “It seems that Mr. H. is not only expecting me, he’s expecting Thom Mount, the head of production at the studio. Mount has not been informed of this. After much frantic buzzing about the lot, Mount is located and changes his plans at the last minute.” Waiting for Mount, Freeman was introduced to Hitchcock, his first glimpse revealing a short man “with almost unwrinkled skin” who was “very fat. The famous deadpan eyes that stared out so opaquely, so unrevealingly on television, permitting only drollness to be perceived, seemed a little more relaxed now, less guarded, less contrived. A hopeful sign. We shake hands and he immediately begins a monologue about prison breaks and South America. It makes very little sense.”
After Mount arrived, the trio headed to the private dining room, several steps down. “Hitchcock remarks that he fell on these steps a few days ago. Now there are rails. He needs them.” The table was set with steaks and coffee. “As we eat, he continues to deliver various monologues. It’s all interesting, but the sort of stuff you read or hear if you spend any time in Hollywood. The truth is I’m starting to get uncomfortable. I begin to think he doesn’t know why I’m here. Does he think I’ve come to interview him?”
Mount smoothly steered Hitchcock (who had been “going on about English pork butchers and how to best prepare pork cracklings”) toward the film project. The talk narrowed. “He has ideas, I have ideas,” recalled Freeman. “We agree here and disagree there. His face lights up and he sounds a hell of a lot better. It’s amazing. A minute ago I was convinced this wasn’t going to work, and now I can feel a script forming.”
They agreed to meet again the following Monday, whereupon they began five months of collaboration on the fifty-fourth Hitchcock—a period Freeman chronicled in his book The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock. Freeman forthrightly warned Hitchcock that he might write such a book, that he was keeping a journal. Imagine: Hitchcock knew his daily deterioration was being recorded for posterity. Although the director didn’t acknowledge Freeman’s comment, “I think he heard me,” said Freeman—who suspected that some of what later transpired between them was intended for posterity.
The big difference between Ernest Lehman’s draft and Freeman’s was that Lehman’s began after the jailbreak, according to Freeman, “focusing on the hero of the picture, an American who pursues Blake,” while his started in England with the traitor and the prison escape. “The idea is to show how determined the hero’s adversary is,” said Freeman, “and because it follows a narrative device Hitchcock has used to good effect in the past: a story begins one way, proceeds, then stops abruptly, allowing the main story to begin.”
Hitchcock showed his age-old appetite for researching all the physical details—“how high is the wall, what is the geography of the prison yard, what sort of uniforms do the convicts wear,” in Freeman’s words. (If the Blake character used a rope ladder to escape, for example, what kind of rope should it be? Jute?) Though he could no longer visit London, Hitchcock ordered up enlarged maps, positioned them on his belly, and studied them with a magnifying glass.
To Freeman, he seemed obsessed with such minutiae, “even if it’s all to be shot on a soundstage. It reminds me of Stanislavski’s dictum about stage sets: A living room might be all the audience sees, but the director and the actors must know what’s in the hypothetical offstage rooms, right down to what’s in the linen closets.” According to Freeman, “He’s immersing himself in it, creating the density of felt detail, from which fine performances emerge. Hitchcock moves from the general to the particular in his script preparation exactly as he does in the celebrated sequences of his films.” He was defining for himself “first the place (if it’s unusual),” said Freeman, “then the people—much of the discussion wide-ranging and speculative—then the details about the people that will drive our story forward. Sure enough, the general to the particular, the farthest to the nearest.”
If the detail-seeking was “compulsive and a little nuts,” it was also, Freeman perceived, partly “to avoid actual script writing.” When Hitchcock was bored or having a painful day, they switched to discussing “the nature of the love affair,” which usually alleviated his bad mood. The vengeance seeker making love to the traitor’s wife: that excited Hitchcock. When Freeman brought up his vision of “compulsive, life-changing, soul-altering sex—all to be made more explicit than any scenes in his previous films,” Hitchcock responded, “Yes, yes. That will work, very exciting.” (“It was as elaborate as praise ever got,” Freeman recalled.)
One day, discussing the scene between the two lovers in a cabin on the Finnish island, Hitchcock visualized an X-rated interaction. “The lovers are seated across the room from each other,” he intoned—with their robes open, he added. (Freeman: “He stopped, savoring the scene, repeating that the robes were open.”) “Their robes open as they look at one another,” Hitchcock continued, breaking into a lascivious grin. “Outside, on the bay, a tiny boat is approaching, coming over the horizon. The lovers know the husband is approaching. They can hear the sound of his boat’s motor, growing louder as it comes over the horizon. They stare at each other and begin to masturbate, each of them. The camera moves closer to their eyes. The sound of the motor grows louder as their eyes fill the screen.”*
As Hitchcock talked, he stretched his legs and his cane fell away, according to Freeman; then the director who had always styled the hair of leading ladies to his whim finished his depiction of the scene with a triple-X flourish. “Then after orgasm, the man must take an ivory comb and comb her pubic hair.” Not really a scene intended for “The Short Night,” this was, according to Freeman, “a private vision, playful and from the heart, a true home movie. This led to a general chat about pornography. I told him about the Pleasure Chest—a Hollywood shop that sells sexual paraphernalia. I told him San Fernando Valley housewives walk up and down the aisles with supermarket baskets buying vibrators and dildoes. God knows if it’s true, but it astonished him, and he loved being astonished.”
This revealing incident, along with others, led the writer to believe that Hitchcock nurtured a Dionysian streak that “at least at the end of his life was trying to get out.” Although he was not the first, he was probably the last confidant taken aback to hear Hitchcock confess that he and his wife didn’t have “relations. Haven’t for years.” Freeman later reflected: “It’s clear he wanted posterity to know that sex and passion, the absolute fundament of his work, was not a part of his marriage. Surely he was trying to say, ‘I am my films, my films are me. If you want to know either, look at them, my spiritual legacy, not at my odd, misshapen corporeal presence. There is no other me.’ ”
Yet Hitchcock seemed ebullient one day when the two temporarily moved their sessions to Bellagio Road, and Alma agreed to sit in. Frail and twisted, Mrs. Hitchcock was helped by a nurse into the study. Freeman recalled how Alma looked “angry to be infirm.” And that day the director came alive as never before in their script discussions. “He was showing off for her,” Freeman recalled. “Strutting his stuff. He was saying, ‘Look, I can still do it. There’s a future. There’s going to be another movie. It’s worth it to go on.’ ”
Most days, though, Hitchcock and Freeman worked at the studio, usually alone, although a pretty young secretary was sometimes there with them, taking notes, and now and then Peggy Robertson sat in. Hilton Green, Robert Boyle, and Albert Whitlock came to meetings, but other visitors were rare. Although he was friendly with his staff, they weren’t close friends. In all the time he worked for Hitchcock, Boyle never spent much time at Bellagio Road, and Whitlock said, “I was known to some people as Hitchcock’s friend, but this always left me feeling part of the ‘friend enigma.’ I am mentioned as an old friend and colleague in John Russell Taylor’s biography, but I make no claim, although this assuredly came from Hitchcock, as did the rest of the quote about me. Hitch sent me an inscribed copy (with his caricature on the fly leaf) and marked also on the page.”
In fact, many of his old, true friends had quit the business or moved away. “No one seems to have the nerve to call him and he’s usually pleased when an old friend does,” wrote Freeman.
Hitchcock showed Freeman something like fifty bottles of pills on a tray in his bedroom at home, and told the writer there were half as many more in the bathroom. His arthritis (“my friend Arthur,” he dubbed it) was growing worse, and now the director had to be helped in and out of chairs and cars. There were pills at the office, too, and booze everywhere.
His drinking had grown “seriously worse,” in Freeman’s words. There might be wine at lunch, and always vodka and orange juice at the afternoon break. Between times, Hitchcock kept a brandy bottle in a paper bag in the office bathroom “as if he were some wino on the street,” Freeman remembered. “He’d always be shuffling off to have a little bit. That had a kind of sadness about it, as if he were ashamed to be doing it.”
Too often, by the spring of 1979, Hitchcock seemed “adrift in senility and depression,” and too often the production meetings had to be cut short, awkwardly, when he drifted off. The fifty-fourth Hitchcock film, too, was drifting away. Hitchcock was suffering feelings of embarrassment—and fear. But giving up on “The Short Night” and dying were interchangeable in his mind. Some mornings he wept with his pain, and the thought of dying: “When do you think I’ll go?” he asked Peggy Robertson. “When?”
Not before two final honors: first, the American Film Institute in October 1978 had announced that the Master of Suspense would receive its prestigious Life Achievement Award, established in 1973 and thus far awarded to John Ford, James Cagney, Orson Welles, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis, and William Wyler.
Although Hitchcock agreed to be the AFI’s honoree, the tribute dinner, scheduled for March 7, 1979, loomed before him like a sword he had to fall upon. He dreaded the upcoming ceremony, which had all the trappings of a public entombment. “He ignored it all, until the last week or so,” according to Freeman. With the AFI date looming, wrote Freeman, the pain and drinking “seemed to be constant,” and then the director “took to spending long, preposterously flirtatious sessions with a young secretary. When she walked past, he would crinkle his nose and give her little private waves. She always blushed.”
He dodged the witty veteran writer Hal Kanter, assigned by the AFI to ghost his acceptance remarks. “He kept canceling dates with Kanter,” recalled Freeman, “and denying any knowledge of the need to make a speech.”
The day before the event his doctors forbade him to go, throwing AFI officials into a “panic,” according to Joseph McBride. “As a precautionary measure,” McBride reported, “his acceptance speech was taped in advance, on the afternoon of the event.” Although Hitchcock mustered the courage to defy his doctors, the taped version was later intercut with the live version, to give television viewers “the illusion of an error-free delivery”—even though a close viewing shows him standing in the former and seated in the latter.
On the very day of the tribute, a telegram arrived from Frank Capra in Palm Springs, sending his regrets. “It was a message from one old lion to another,” wrote Freeman. “Hitch held it in his hands, read it, reread it and cried. Not for the sentiment, I don’t think, which was certainly genuine, but because he saw it as attesting to his own demise.”
At the Beverly Hilton, where the event took place, Universal had reserved a suite for Hitchcock and then frantically contrived to keep liquor out of his hands until the dinner began.
The cohosts of the evening were Ingrid Bergman and François Truffaut. The glittering assemblage included many veterans of Hitchcock films: Dame Judith Anderson, Teresa Wright, Jane Wyman, John Forsythe, Vera Miles, Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Rod Taylor, Sean Connery, Karen Black, and Tippi Hedren. There was also a sprinkling of younger Hollywood, including Barbra Streisand, Robin Williams, and Steve Martin.
All stood to cheer when the director entered the room, walking to his table—as he had insisted—without help. (“He might have as easily pole-vaulted his way,” recalled Freeman.) Spotlights covered his “step by agonizing step, his face red and wheezing, his eyes straight ahead,” said Freeman.
The honoree paused “gallantly” to kiss the hand of his daughter, Pat Hitchcock O’Connell, according to the Los Angeles Times, before arriving at his table, where he was ringed by Bergman, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Lew Wasserman, Lord and Lady Bernstein, and—“in her own show of gallantry”—Mrs. Hitchcock, even though it had been previously announced that she would be absent because of illness. (Like her husband, Alma hated the idea of appearing publicly in such condition, but at the last moment she decided to come.)
Each of the AFI tributes had its own “flavor,” Charles Champlin wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “James Cagney’s was a family picnic, a welcome home for a beloved and rascally uncle who had been away too long. Orson Welles’ was a mixture of reverential awe and sadness, that the astonishing triumph of Citizen Kane was a peak he has not equaled since. The tributes to Henry Fonda and Bette Davis were warm with admiration for achievements and for lives lived to the full. William Wyler’s night was touched with austere respect for a meticulous and demanding craftsman who was not a man you slapped on the back.”
Yet Hitchcock’s was undoubtedly “the most filmic of all,” wrote Champlin, and also “one of the most melancholy.” For it was obvious to everyone present—and then, when the tribute was broadcast one week later, to a national TV audience—that the unsmiling Master of Suspense was deeply mired in a private hell. No matter how merciful, the later crosscutting between clips and rehearsed speeches strained to find any expression in Hitchcock’s blank, defeated face. He briefly rose to the occasion with a subversive speech, which Kanter had cobbled together out of his own resourcefulness. He spoke almost with aplomb, although he couldn’t stand and had trouble with the “idiot” cards. The audience “couldn’t be sure whether he accidentally or intentionally alluded to the Life Amusement Award instead of the Life Achievement Award,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “He said all a man required was affection, approval, encouragement and a hearty meal, and he was grateful for having received three out of the four this night.”*
Then Hollywood, a den of iniquity for mistresses and divorce, heard something rare, as Hitchcock proceeded to rhapsodize about “the woman at my side” as the ultimate wife, mother, writer, editor, and cook. On the occasion of his last public appearance, he paid moving tribute to the lifelong partner who was still there with him.
When AFI director George Stevens Jr. came to his table to hand him the award, Hitchcock tried to stand up, but fell back into his chair—a moment briefly captured in the televised version. And then there was an especially heartbreaking moment at the end of the evening, when Ingrid Bergman came over to him and made a declaration of her gratitude, presenting Hitchcock with the prop key to the wine cellar, which had been tucked in her hand in a famous shot from Notorious. She and Cary Grant had shared custody of it, as a good luck charm, for thirty years. Now she was returning the key—and its luck—to him.
Totally out of character, Hitchcock embraced the actress, trembling. “Suddenly it was not a public show of affection,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “it was a parting at the platform of two old and dear friends who could not be sure they would meet again.” Grant, who typically had balked at rehearsing and saying anything lengthy at the podium, spontaneously jumped up and joined the embrace, ending the night on “a moment of high and genuine emotion whose honesty transcended the circumstances of a fundraising event,” according to the Los Angeles Times, which added that there were moist eyes throughout the room.
His flirtations with the pretty young secretary worsened, and “soon enough she was spending time with him in his office, à deux,” according to David Freeman. “No one but the two of them can say what went on, though I imagine it was something along the lines of Hitch posing her and gazing at her while she unbuttoned herself. Looking was a particular specialty of h
is. It’s unlikely that Hitchcock was capable of much more than that.”
The office rumor was that Hitchcock—on the pretext of considering the young secretary for a part in his fifty-fourth film—gave her a little money for posing. “To set this down makes it sound sleazier than it was,” said Freeman. “The whole thing had a pathetic innocence about it.” Then one day the secretary disappeared; the new rumor was that Lew Wasserman had found out about it and put an end to the matter. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Lew Wasserman had paid her to go away,” said Freeman, “if he thought Hitch’s good name was at risk. He was Hitch’s friend, but equally important, Hitch’s name was an important studio asset.”
The director and writer continued their work up until May 1979; as they left it, “The Short Night” would be polished enough to be published, after Hitchcock’s death, along with Freeman’s memoir. A short time after the draft was delivered, however, Hitchcock called in Hilton Green and asked him to notify Wasserman that his fifty-fourth film would never be made. Wasserman, a friend to the last, pretended it was a temporary decision. Hitchcock’s office stayed open, and he still came in to work when he felt like it, sitting at his desk and dictating correspondence, or jotting fresh notes on “The Short Night.” Whenever he was there in the afternoon, he watched a film in his private projection room—often alone.
Although he considered himself a Catholic, he had long since stopped going to church, and now the Jesuit father Thomas Sullivan, friendly with Hitchcock since 1947, insisted on coming to Bellagio Road once a week to say Mass for him and Alma.
He had also long since stopped going to Dr. Walter Flieg’s office, asking apologetically if he might have his checkups at home, where the doctor was now his most regular visitor. Hitchcock enjoyed Dr. Flieg’s company, among other reasons because they tended to talk about movies, not his health. Dr. Flieg loved Hitchcock’s anecdotes and reminiscences. The checkups were brief and routine; the conversation and cocktails took longer.
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