“When I mentioned the robe, she protested. ‘Oh, no. My character, alone in her home at night, wouldn’t stop to put on a heavy robe. It would be silly.’
“I said, ‘What do you suggest?’
“She said, ‘I have to come out in my nightgown.’
“Thus, it was Miss Kelly who chose that particularly flimsy nightgown, saying it was the style she, herself, would wear—if she wore one at all.”
WHILE HITCHCOCK WAS working on Dial M for Murder, Lew Wasserman, was arranging a multi-picture deal for him with Paramount. Wasserman had been his agent since Myron Selznick died in 1944. Hitchcock would produce and direct five pictures that would eventually revert to him and four more pictures that would be Paramount’s. The first picture of this deal was to be Rear Window, for which Hitchcock felt he had to have Grace Kelly.
When Hitchcock offered Grace Kelly the part of Lisa Fremont in Rear Window, she already had planned to accept the lead opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront.
Then she heard from her agent that Hitchcock wanted her to be in Los Angeles for wardrobe fittings. “It was a big surprise,” she said, “because I was just ready to accept another role in a major film. I read the script, and I knew that Rear Window was for me.”
Rear Window was based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich, with a screenplay by John Michael Hayes; but there was a contributor not listed in the credits: Joshua Logan.
I was introduced to Joshua Logan by one of his closest friends, Henry Fonda. Logan, who lived at New York City’s River House, was a collector of automatons, Swiss music boxes with performing French dolls.
After I was announced by the downstairs reception, Logan wound every music box and dimmed the lights. When I entered his living room, every doll would be performing—the magician doing magic tricks, the ballerina performing a pirouette, the fortune-teller proffering a fortune, the clown doing acrobatics, all competing for attention. My favorite was a small French doll with pouty closed lips who sat at her vanity, powdering her face.
Once when he was convalescing from an injured ankle, Logan told me he had amused himself by looking out of a courtyard window, watching his neighbors, “just like [James] Stewart in Rear Window. Do you know that I was responsible for Grace Kelly’s character in that film?”
Leland Hayward, Logan’s agent, had been trying to interest Hitchcock in stories by mystery writer Cornell Woolrich, one of which was “It Had to Be Murder.”
“Leland asked me if I’d write a short treatment of it for the screen to help sell it to Hitchcock, so I read the story and made some changes. A few of them actually got into the movie, though I didn’t get any credit. Or money.
“I started out with the audience knowing Jeff’s leg is in a cast. In the short story, it’s the last thing the reader learns, but my most important addition was the girlfriend. There wasn’t any romance in the story, and I never saw a Hitchcock picture without it. Even Lifeboat has a love story. In Woolrich, there’s only a male servant and a friend who’s a police detective to help Jeffries [the Stewart character]. I kept them, changing the male servant into a female servant, and the girlfriend became his most important helper.
“Nedda [Logan’s wife] had the idea for her to be an actress. In the movie, Grace Kelly is a fashion model. Close.”
Hitchcock told me: “I always say Shadow of a Doubt was my personal favorite, but I am very proud of Rear Window.
“It’s a movie about a peeping Tom, to be blunt. I think it’s human nature. People love to peek, or they would if they weren’t afraid of getting caught. The tabloids are a kind of peeking.
“A great advantage of the cinema is you can show a state of mind. In Rear Window I wanted to show the claustrophobia of Stewart’s situation and the extent of his boredom. It brings him to the point where the ordinary lives of his neighbors have to replace the intensity of his own adventurous life. His neighbors at least are in motion. His confinement must be conveyed, but not in such a way that the audience feels so bored it runs out of the theater. It must be heightened, dramatic boredom.”
Confined to his Greenwich Village apartment, his leg in a cast, photojournalist “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart) peers at his backyard neighbors through a telephoto lens. He is visited daily by Stella (Thelma Ritter), a nurse, and by Lisa (Grace Kelly), a fashion model who wants him to settle down and marry her.
Each neighbor has a story. Jeff suspects that one of them, Thorwald (Raymond Burr), has killed his invalid wife. He tells a policeman friend, Doyle (Wendell Corey), who investigates but finds nothing.
A little dog is found killed. The day before, the dog had been digging in the garden. When Thorwald leaves his apartment, Lisa and Stella investigate. Lisa enters Thorwald’s apartment.
Thorwald returns and finds Lisa there. He has her arrested. Thorwald sees Jeff watching.
When Stella leaves to post bail for Lisa, Thorwald appears at Jeff’s door. Using flashbulbs to temporarily blind him, Jeff slows Thorwald, but finally the enraged man pushes him out of the window. Jeff’s fall is broken by two policemen.
Thorwald confesses to having disposed of his wife’s dismembered body parts in the river and in the garden.
Now with both legs in casts, Jeff dozes. Lisa lounges in blue jeans nearby, reading Beyond the Himalayas, demonstrating that she is ready to share his life as an international photojournalist. Seeing him asleep, she picks up Harper’s Bazaar.
“At the end, Stewart is caught with his plaster down,” Hitchcock said.
Grace Kelly was proud of “a character contribution” she had made to the plot. She told me that she had pointed out to Hitchcock the importance to a woman of her purse, which represents “her security, taking her private world with her wherever she goes.” It was a prop that played an important part in pointing suspicion at the already suspicious-seeming husband who had his wife’s purse, but not his wife. “Personally, I wouldn’t go anywhere important without my own favorite Hermès black bag,” Grace Kelly said. “I have my jewelry with me in case something happens and I suddenly have to dress up. For me, going out without that purse would seem almost like going out naked. Well, almost.”
When the American Film Institute premiered the restored version of Rear Window in 1998, they wanted to invite the members of the cast, but they could locate only Georgine Darcy, who played Miss Torso, a dancer who was one of the neighbors James Stewart’s character watches. Still looking very much Miss Torso, she talked with me in 2002 about Rear Window.
“I was in Las Vegas, doing an act there, and I received a letter from Paramount. They wanted me to come for a screen test. I was really a dancer, originally with the New York City Ballet, and I was not interested in the screen world. I didn’t actually know who Hitchcock was. I had a three-month contract, and I didn’t want to go to Los Angeles to do an audition. So I just didn’t bother.
“Finally they sent me the script, and I read it. The truth of the matter was, I was finishing up my time in Vegas, anyway. So I came back to Los Angeles, and I went to see Mr. Hitchcock. I had never been on a soundstage before, and they were saying things like ‘Kill the baby,’ you know, the light, and I was looking around for a baby.
“Mr. Hitchcock was just watching me. It was almost like the beginning of Rear Window. He was watching every move I made. Then he called me over and said, ‘You have the job. Come into the office with me.’ I still didn’t know who Hitchcock was!
“I went into the office, and he said, ‘Now, Georgina’—he called me Georgina—‘do you have an agent?’ I said no, and he said, ‘There are a lot of men outside who would be happy to represent you. And you’ll get a lot of money. If you don’t have an agent, you’re going to get scale.’
“With an agent, I would have made $750, which was considered a lot of money in those days for a very small part. But I told Hitchcock I couldn’t do that, because I’d already told someone I’m going to give him 10 percent. Scale was $350, and that’s what I was paid. I was seventeen. Funn
y how you think when you’re little.
“I was dating a director, and we went out for dinner that night. I said, ‘I got the part,’ and he said, ‘Who’s directing?’ I said, ‘Gee, I don’t know his name. A short little man, a bald-headed man with a cockney accent.’
“He looks at me and says, ‘You don’t mean Alfred Hitchcock, do you? He’s only about the most famous director in the world! And don’t ever call him “Hitch.” You show him respect and call him “Mr. Hitchcock.”’ So, I never did call him Hitch.
“We were across the courtyard from him, and we all had little ear-pieces so he could direct you. The only time he ever came over was to personally direct someone. He’d ask you to put your earpiece in, and he’d talk to you.
“I remember one day he called me from the dressing room to watch a scene with the couple that lived on the fire escape, Frank Cady and Sara Berner. They slept on the fire escape, and they had their mattress out there. He asked Frank to put his earpiece in, and for Sara to take hers out. And he gave Frank instructions. Then he told Frank to take his out, and asked her to put hers in. And he gave her instructions. Then he said to me, ‘Now watch this.’
“The cameras start to roll, and it starts to rain. He’s pulling his mattress one way, she’s pulling hers the other way, and they’re fighting. You can hear them bickering. As it turns out, Frank fell into the window upside-down. And it was a perfect scene, just exactly what Mr. Hitchcock wanted, uncut.
“Well, the actress was furious when she found out that Mr. Hitchcock had given them different directions. But these are the kind of things that he did that I didn’t see anything wrong in, or think it mean-spirited. There was a logic behind it. He was very much, in a strange way, into improvisation.
“I remember when he said to me, ‘You’re getting the only close-up in the entire movie.’ It was when the little doggie was strangled. I said, ‘I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to act. What am I supposed to do?’ Now, there’s no dog, no basket, nothing. Nothing to look at. He said, ‘I want you to look over there and throw up.’ That was his direction. I didn’t need to throw up, but I guess I looked like I was going to throw up. And that’s the kind of thing he would do.
“He loved Judith Evelyn, who was Miss Lonelyheart. He said, ‘Now, watch this actress. She’s really good.’ Then, there were people he just didn’t bother with. The worst thing that he could do was ignore you.
“He used to tell jokes, lots of cockney jokes. Some of them were off-color. He told them when he had Herbie [Herbert Coleman, the assistant director] and a lot of guys around, but no women. He called me, and he started this joke, and it was really endless! He went on and on and on. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. They were all laughing their heads off. He finished with the punch line, and they were hysterical!
“And he looked at me. He said, ‘Georgina. You didn’t laugh. Didn’t you think my joke was funny?’ I said, ‘I didn’t get it.’ He looked over to Herbie, and he said, ‘Herbie, explain it to her.’ And, of course, there was no joke.
“Once he asked me, ‘What kind of pie do you like, Georgina?’ I said, ‘Oh, I guess apple pie, maybe cherry pie. But I hate pumpkin pie. Ugh!’ He got pumpkin pie, and he did the scene several times. I had to eat this pumpkin pie, and I’d told him I hated it. But those were his little tricks, his private jokes.
“He was always kind of teasing me. I remember another time when I came back from lunch, and he said to me, ‘Georgina, did you mast…’ Just the beginning of the word, my eyes bulged out of my head. He said, ‘Did you mas-ticate your food?’
“James Stewart was very sweet, nice to be around, but a very private man. I took a picture sitting on his lap, with his cast on, sitting in the wheelchair, and he said to the photographer, ‘That’s just for Georgine.’
“Grace [Kelly] wanted to be a ballet dancer, you know. She was always impressed with my ability as a dancer. I remember one day, Ross Bagdasarian, who wrote a lot of songs that he ultimately had published, came into my dressing room with Frank Cady. And he’d pound out these songs, and you’d hear all this noise coming from my dressing room. I remember Grace knocked on the door once and said, ‘What’s happening? Can I come inside and play?’
“Grace was very sweet. Without makeup, you wouldn’t know it was Grace Kelly. She wore glasses, and she was a little pigeon-toed. Very unassuming, very much a lady. Very quiet.
“Afterwards, I ran into the killer, Raymond Burr. A darling man. I was doing a movie in New Orleans, and we were on the same plane. He was going to play King Bacchus at the Mardi Gras, and he asked me to call him at his hotel. He wanted to do a second Rear Window. Isn’t that crazy?
“I think I worked six weeks on the movie, and we finished January 14th, the day of my birthday. I had my long hair in big curlers, and all my makeup off, and I was hot to trot. I had one foot out the door. And there’s a knock on the door, and it’s Herbie Coleman. He said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock would like to see you on the set.’ So I threw on my slacks and went over.
“And everybody—Grace Kelly, Jimmy Stewart, and all the rest—they were all there to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, and the photographers were there. Mr. Hitchcock called me over, and he said, ‘Georgina, would you please go back into the dressing room and take the curlers out of your hair.’ So I ran back and took the curlers out of my hair, but no makeup on at all. I looked like a sheet. And he had a cake made for me. It had the breasts, the torso—a headless torso. It was my eighteenth birthday and it said, ‘Happy Birthday, Miss Torso.’
“I was like his mascot. He’d always call me to hear his jokes. He would pull little tricks on actors, and he’d want me to be there. He told me about his career, and I really liked him. I thought he was cute.
“After the movie, I called him at work, and we’d just chat. The secretary always put me through. When he was doing Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one time he asked me would I like to be in it.
“While we were doing the movie, he said to me, ‘Georgina, if you would go over to Europe and study with [Michael] Chekhov for a couple of years, when you come back, I would make a big star of you.’ I thought, ‘Ha, ha, ha, isn’t that funny.’ I never took him seriously, but he actually meant it, I found out later on, because he really loved blondes, and he loved molding people. He didn’t like ‘actor’ actors, he liked people like Tippi Hedren, people he could mold to do just what he wanted them to do. I wouldn’t say not thinking for themselves, but almost.
“I was a kid; I didn’t know, I didn’t care, and he knew that. He asked me if I wanted to be in one of the television episodes. And what do you think I said? ‘Oh, no, Mr. Hitchcock! I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.’ Well, I must have been really stupid. He really wanted to put me in a part.
“People came from all over the world to look at the Rear Window set. They dug the bottom of the floor out and dropped it so that they could have the Greenwich Village set down below and the apartment up higher. You didn’t have to go anywhere.”
Production manager C. O. “Doc” Erickson added: “It was all shot on Stage 18 at Paramount. “Mac” [Joseph MacMillan] Johnson built the set, and we had to rip up the floor and use the basement portion of the stage, which became the courtyard of the apartment building. It was my first job as production manager and the first time I worked on a Hitchcock picture. We didn’t get credit in those days.” Erickson worked as production manager on five Hitchcock films, from Rear Window to North by Northwest.
“We had three sets of lights,” Darcy continued. “You just pull one switch and all the lights, the entire place changed. You had the daytime, the late afternoon, and night.
“It was one total set. You didn’t have to go from room to room and break things down and put them up. I lived in my little apartment. I had a refrigerator that was plugged in. It was a complete little village. The only thing I didn’t have was running water. It was an incredible set. It was his dollhouse, and we were his dolls.
“When they were restoring
the film, I filled them in on a lot of the technical things, like the lighting, which no one really seemed to know about, which is extraordinary.
“It was funny, because they were asking me questions like, ‘What color were Jimmy Stewart’s pajamas?’ That I couldn’t tell you, but I certainly could tell you what color Grace’s dresses were. And I still have the shorts from the movie. My little pink shorts. The men restoring the film turned the cuffs down, and you could see the original color. They kept them a long time because they were the key to the colors that had faded so badly on the film. It was wonderful the role my shorts played in restoring the film.
“Interviewers came here and talked with a lot of people, including myself for television. They kept trying to get me to say things about Hitchcock. ‘Was he salacious? Was he mean? Was he gay?’ You know, things like that, and I wouldn’t do it. I knew what they wanted. You know, I’m not a little girl anymore.
“I thought, ‘The man is dead. He was a genius. It’s his hundredth birthday, and this is the way you celebrate his life? Looking for garbage?’ I would not do it, and I ended up on the cutting room floor, with only two seconds of me. Tippi Hedren was the one who was quoted.
“I hate gossip. I saw him through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old. He never did anything that was out of line with me.
“He was unique. I mean, how many geniuses come along? And the junk that they’re putting out. I mean, you go to the movies now, and it gives you a headache. Rear Window really has held up, hasn’t it?”
“THE KISS IN THE HALLWAY is as if she unzipped his fly,” Hitchcock said of To Catch a Thief. “The fireworks scene is the orgasm.” He described Grace Kelly’s character as “Ice that burns.”
“Of all the pictures I’ve ever worked on, To Catch a Thief is my favorite,” costume designer Edith Head told me. “And it was also the most difficult. From Grace Kelly’s pièce de résistance gold ball gown to shopping for bathing trunks that would please Cary Grant, who was even more difficult to please than Hitch was. Cary knew exactly how he wanted to look, but he also wanted to be comfortable. He didn’t want a tight elastic distracting him. He selected most of his clothes for his films. Grace was much easier to work with, but I never had a free moment to see the Côte d’Azur.”
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