It's Only a Movie

by Charlotte Chandler

  “I remember when we were doing that scene in London’s Albert Hall, and I was chasing Doris Day up the stairs while the London Symphony was playing, loud. It was a long speech which sort of cleared up a lot of the story. I’d worked hard on those words, and I was talking my head off while I chased after Doris.

  “After we did the scene, Hitch said, ‘Let’s do it again. You were talking so loud, I couldn’t hear the London Symphony. As a matter of fact, let’s just cut the whole speech. Just follow Doris up the stairs and look tense.

  “Well, I considered the speech very important, but when you’re working with Hitch, you don’t try to do a scene two ways. You do it just one way. His. Hitch was always open to listening to an idea, if you had one. People say Hitch wasn’t spontaneous, but he was. It’s just that all of his spontaneity occurred on paper before he got to the set.

  “Well, over the years I’ve watched that movie quite a few times, and every time, I’ve tried to remember that talky speech on the stairs I thought was so key. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember what it was I was talking about.”

  Not all of the Albert Hall sequence was actually shot there. As art director Henry Bumstead explained: “A lot of Albert Hall, the boxes and things, I had to do back here in Los Angeles, so that was a matter of measurements and photos, and I remember many nights I would be out making measurements and getting color samples.”

  The Man Who Knew Too Much was shot on location in London and French Morocco, and at the Paramount studios in Hollywood. “Down in Marrakech,” Bumstead continued, “you’d come out of your hotel room in the morning, and you could hardly breathe, it was so hot. It was not only hot, but I’ll tell you, it was scary.

  “We had a bombing there. Hitch was directing out in the crowd from an old automobile. He sat in the front seat, with the driver, with the air-conditioning on, and it’s the only time in all the time I worked with Hitch I saw him in a polo shirt. With short sleeves. It wasn’t loose at the collar, it was buttoned, but no tie.

  “I was riding in a jeep with a French officer, and I saw all these black carcasses hanging there in a meat market. He said, ‘Watch this,’ and he honked the horn. Then, all of a sudden, there’s all this red meat. It was covered with flies.

  “I remember going out to a restaurant with Doris Day and eating couscous. You know, you use so many fingers. But Hitch never did that. Doris Day wouldn’t do it, either. She wouldn’t eat anything people had their hands in.

  “She had her husband and her little boy there. One day her husband, Marty Melcher, was photographing the set with a movie camera that was making noises. Hitch gave him a look, and we never saw that camera again.”

  Ray Evans told me how he and Jay Livingston came to write the Oscar–winning “Que Será Será.”

  “We were called in to meet with Alfred Hitchcock. He said, “Gentlemen, Doris Day is in the movie, and I need a song for her. I don’t know what kind of song I want, but if it has a foreign title, that would be relevant, and it should be a song a mother would sing to a child.

  “We had the title, ‘Que Será,’ in our file. When we played what we wrote for Mr. Hitchcock, he said, ‘Gentlemen, when I met you, I didn’t know what kind of song I wanted. That’s the kind of song I wanted!’”

  “Doris Day didn’t particularly like the song because she didn’t think it was commercial. The song became the biggest hit that she ever had.”

  IN 1955, shortly after Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine had been licensed, Lew Wasserman met with CBS television executives, and Hitchcock was offered a television series. He would be the host, an idea he particularly liked.

  He once told me he had “the heart of a performer,” but the more Hitchcock went public, the more he went private. “I was given a part to play, a public image to cover my nudity.

  “But I keep my cameo appearances short because I am an actor of limitations. I can only play myself.”

  Hitchcock formed a television company, Shamley Productions, to produce a weekly series of half-hour shows for CBS. Joan Harrison became executive producer. Later, Norman Lloyd became an associate producer. At a Valentine’s Day party in 2000 in the Hollywood home of director Curtis Harrington, Lloyd talked with me about Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

  “What we wanted were stories with suspense, a twist, and an overlay of humor. In the early days of the show, we favored short stories that had already been published. When we liked a story, we had it synopsized and Hitch had the final say. Once the story was approved, we brought in a writer, developed the show, and hired a director. Hitch himself directed about twenty. I did quite a few. Some other directors were Robert Altman, Arthur Hiller, and Sydney Pollack.

  “Most people think Hitch wrote his lead-ins or just made them up as he went, but they were all written by Jimmy Allardice, who found his niche writing Hitch’s voice. He could only work under pressure, just in time for when we needed it.

  “Sometimes he’d write something we knew Hitch wouldn’t do. But when Hitch read it, he was delighted. Jimmy Allardice had a genius for capturing Hitch’s unique sense of humor.”

  Arthur Hiller told me his favorite Hitchcock story.

  “When his longtime friend and producer Joan Harrison married mystery writer Eric Ambler, Hitchcock gave a party at Chasen’s. He found an old menu from 1892, and had Chasen’s re-create the eighteen-course meal.

  “Much of the food was flown from England. The fish was Dover sole. It was a long, long dinner. Hitchcock seemed to enjoy it immensely.

  “Every course had a different wine, and he seemed to empty every glass.

  “At the end of the meal, Hitch rose, or he tried to. He had a lot of trouble getting up out of the chair, but it would have been embarrassing to offer him help, not only for Hitchcock, but for the person offering.

  “Finally, he got to his feet. He was holding a legal-sized pad of lined yellow paper. He had six or seven pages covered with notes. He began to speak. The words were formal, but the delivery wasn’t. His speech was so thick, you could hardly understand him.

  “‘We are here to honor Joan and Eric. They first met in London, and we are wishing,’ etc. As he spoke, Hitch’s speech got thicker and thicker.

  “We were all very nervous, sitting on the edge of our seats, leaning forward, terribly embarrassed for him. We kept hoping he would stop. He was swaying. He actually was pitching forward.

  “Suddenly, he straightened up, looked at the audience, and in absolutely perfect British English, clearly enunciated, totally sober, without any hint that he had had one drop to drink, he said:

  “‘I do hope they’ll be very happy.’”

  THE HALF-HOUR SHOWS were so successful, the program was expanded to an hour in 1962 and retitled The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

  Lloyd said that one of Hitchcock’s prime rules for directing television was, “‘Remember, it’s a close medium.’

  “Hitch believed it, and I agree. In television, you get in close as fast as you can. Another rule he had was ‘to write with the camera.’ He hated, ‘photographing dialogue,’ as he considered most directing after the silent films. We tried to deliver those twist endings visually.”

  The program’s musical theme, Charles Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette,” was chosen by Hitchcock. He had heard it in one of his favorite pictures, F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise. When a musical sound-track was added to the silent film in 1928, composer William Axt included it in his score.

  The shows, which were shot at Universal’s Revue Studios, were aired on CBS and NBC during their ten-year run. Among the stars who appeared on the program were Robert Redford, Joseph Cotten, Claude Rains, Vera Miles, Barbara Bel Geddes, Steve McQueen, Peter Lorre, and Robert Morley.

  The most important star who emerged from the series, however, was Hitchcock himself. He became an instantly recognizable celebrity all over the world. Pat Hitchcock recalled being in Tahiti with her parents about one year after the debut of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. “The recognition and rece
ption was what you might expect for Elvis Presley.” Television had given him a satisfaction that he would otherwise have been denied.

  Pat Hitchcock remembered: “Actually, his fame with the average person didn’t come really until after the television series. Then he couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized, and he had to be very careful about the cameos after the television series. He had to put his appearance in the beginning of the story, because people would see him on the screen and say, ‘Oh, there he is!’ and that would break any mood, so he did it very early on in the movie.

  “It was an experience for my daughters when they were out for a drive with their grandfather. Whenever they stopped at a light, people in cars next to them would wave, and daddy would turn to my daughters and say, ‘You certainly have a lot of friends.’”

  Pat appeared on ten of the programs. “It seemed a good idea,” Norman Lloyd said, “to have three generations of Hitchcocks on one show. So, in 1960, Hitch, Pat, and Mary, Hitch’s oldest granddaughter, appeared in the episode called “The Schartz-Metterklume Method.”

  Because his own company, Shamley, produced the shows, the value of the properties later allowed him to convert it to stock of Universal-MCA, thus becoming one of the largest stockholders of that company, and a very wealthy man.

  IN AUGUST 1955, Hitchcock returned to Warner Brothers for one picture. It was the film he had agreed to do without salary, for only a percentage of the profits, in return for being able to make I Confess.

  “My fear of the police was a help in making The Wrong Man,” Hitchcock told me. “I could empathize totally with our falsely accused hero, who was in the hands of the police. He was in their power and no one believed him, a terrible position for anyone to find himself in.”

  The Wrong Man was based on a true case of mistaken identity followed by tragic consequences. In 1953, a musician named Manny Balestrero was arrested in New York City for armed robberies that he did not commit. Before he was cleared, he suffered the indignities of loss of freedom and personal humiliation, resulting in his wife’s mental breakdown. After the story appeared in Life magazine, the writer, Herbert Bream, sold a film treatment to Warner Brothers.

  “In a way, it was ‘The Man Who Knew Too Little,’” Hitchcock said. “The hero is the man-on-the-spot.”

  He asked John Michael Hayes to work on the treatment and screenplay of The Wrong Man, also without fee, but for a percentage of the profits. Hayes declined, and their four-picture relationship ended. Playwright Maxwell Anderson accepted The Wrong Man assignment.

  After the opening of The Trouble with Harry, the successful launching of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on television, and the completion of a Far East promotional tour for Paramount, Hitchcock turned his attention to The Wrong Man. Anderson’s script was not going as Hitchcock envisioned it, though he respected Anderson and was proud to have worked with him. He brought in Angus MacPhail to provide a more starkly realistic quality. Hitchcock, along with MacPhail, did extensive research in New York City, where the film was set.

  “When I worked with Hitchcock,” Henry Fonda told me, “the backings were so real, you’d walk into them because you thought they were three-dimensional.”

  Christopher Emmanuel “Manny” Balestrero (Henry Fonda) is a musician at the Stork Club. When his wife, Rose (Vera Miles), needs expensive dental work, he hopes to raise money on his life insurance. At the insurance company office, he is mistaken for a criminal who held them up twice, getting away with $71. Arrested, he is identified as the suspect in other holdups, and he is treated as if guilty.

  He finds an inexperienced lawyer (Anthony Quayle), who is willing to defend him. The trial goes badly for Manny, but life is worse for Rose, who has a mental breakdown and has to be hospitalized.

  The judge declares a mistrial, and they must start over again. Meanwhile, the real robber (Richard Robbins) is recognized by a detective on the case, and Manny is set free.

  His wife, so mentally disturbed, no longer cares what happens.

  They go to Florida. Two years later, she recovers.

  Hitchcock and Alma had seen Vera Miles in a television drama, and believed she could be a star, even a replacement for Grace Kelly. He signed her to an exclusive five-year contract.

  “Rose Balestrero,” Hitchcock said, “had done her fashion shopping in a local basement store, so we didn’t need Edith Head. We would just buy her wardrobe where the real person shopped. So Miss Miles wouldn’t feel too deprived, we had Edith create a wardrobe for her to use on her promotional tour.”

  About his work on The Wrong Man, Henry Fonda told me, “I didn’t really know Hitchcock after that one experience. As a director, he obviously knew just what he wanted.

  “Hitchcock had a light touch. He didn’t say much, but I felt the part, and I could see in his eyes he was satisfied with what I did. It was a part I could really get into. Tragedy had touched my own life with the death of Jane’s and Peter’s mother.

  “The Wrong Man was based on a true story, which made it much more moving. My character was found innocent and he’d managed to stand up to everything he’d had to go through, but his wife didn’t make it. It was something I sure could identify with. She broke down from it all, and it was clear to me he wasn’t ever going to have the happy family life he’d had before. His life was ruined.

  “I had no criticism at all of the way Hitchcock worked, and I never heard any from anyone of the cast or crew. Of course, I was never one to get into that kind of thing. I was always too deep into my part.

  “When I was offered the part, I liked it right away, and I was pleased to be in a Hitchcock film. The Wrong Man wasn’t typical Hitchcock, but as soon as I read it, I knew it would be good.

  “I think I’m an instinctive actor. Anyway, that’s how I would describe myself, but I don’t try to analyze myself. My daughter says, ‘I’m a Method actor,’ and I say, ‘If you say so,’ because if I don’t, she can talk about the Method for hours.

  “I’m not really a very interesting person myself. I haven’t ever done anything except be other people: Clarence Darrow, Justice Snow, Manny Balestrero. I’m all the parts I ever played, so I guess I’m Manny, too.”

  Fonda considered himself like the subjects he preferred to paint—still-life. One of his favorites among his own works was a group of three Mason jars.

  “Hitchcock was a good artist,” Fonda said. “I would like to have talked about art with him. Drawing and painting always meant a great deal to me. But we never quite made it to a personal relationship.

  “He was pretty reserved, and I guess I am, too. He didn’t waste a lot of words. Neither one of us knew how to step over our shyness without being afraid of tripping.

  “Alfred Hitchcock was always a gentleman, and I would like to have done another picture with him, and to have known him better, but our paths didn’t cross again.”

  Hitchcock did not do his usual cameo appearance for The Wrong Man. It was a true story with an element of tragedy, so the humorous reaction his appearance would have elicited was deemed inappropriate. Instead, he spoke seriously in an introduction to the film.

  “ROMANTIC OBSESSION has always obsessed me,” Hitchcock said. “Obsessions of all kinds are interesting, but for me, romantic obsession is the most fascinating.”

  For Hitchcock, the ideal setting for a story of romantic obsession was San Francisco. “The first time my father saw San Francisco,” Pat Hitchcock told me, “he fell in love with it, and throughout his life, he only fell more deeply in love with it. He thought it was very like Paris. He always wanted to make a picture in San Francisco.” Until Vertigo, however, the closest he had come was Santa Rosa for Shadow of a Doubt and the Monterey coast for Rebecca.

  Whenever the Hitchcocks were in the vicinity of San Francisco, which was as often as they could manage, Alma indulged in the luxury of having her hair done, with a manicure, at the chic red-doored Elizabeth Arden salon. Afterward, she enjoyed having her husband meet her so she could see the look on
his face as she walked out with her fresh coiffure.

  While he waited, Hitchcock would look at Gump’s, buy some cigars at Dunhill, and visit the nearby Williams-Sonoma store, which offered the ultimate in French cooking tools, pots and pans, and kitchen appliances. Hitchcock enjoyed searching for ways to enhance food preparation in their kitchen, and usually bought more than he had intended.

  Since he enjoyed the immediate gratification of taking his purchases away with him rather than having them sent, he and Alma carried all of the pots and pans, copper and otherwise, they could manage.

  Vertigo was based on the French novel, d’Entre les Mortes (“Between the Deaths”) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Their earlier novel, Diabolique, had been successfully done by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1952, and was one of Hitchcock’s favorite films. Both stories concern a man and his mistress conspiring to kill his wealthy wife in a way that doesn’t appear to be murder.

  The first title considered for Vertigo was “From Among the Dead,” and the setting was changed from Paris and Marseilles to San Francisco.

  When I spoke with Clouzot about Hitchcock, the French director said: “He is very attentive to logic, but it is the logic of his characters, which is not everyone’s logic. I admire him very much and am flattered when anyone compares a film of mine to his.”

  Maxwell Anderson, who had written The Wrong Man screenplay, wrote a treatment of the Boileau and Narcejac novel that he called “Listen, Darkling.” Hitch and Alma found it unsatisfactory and brought in Alec Coppel, who had written The Captain’s Paradise. Coppel’s treatment included the opening chase across San Francisco rooftops and the livery stable in the background of the final revolving seduction scene. Finally, Samuel A. Taylor, who had grown up in San Francisco, wrote the definitive screenplay. He had written the successful Broadway play Sabrina Fair, and collaborated with Billy Wilder and Ernest Lehman on the movie version, Sabrina.