The character of Scottie’s old college girlfriend Midge was Taylor’s idea. “She saved Stewart the embarrassment of having to talk to himself, and added some depth and detail to the character of Scottie,” he said.
Billy Wilder, who had made Sabrina with Taylor, particularly liked the film Vertigo. While in his nineties and suffering from vertigo, he told me, “Vertigo without Kim Novak is no fun.”
In the novel, the hero’s acrophobia is less important, and he continues to believe that Madeleine has been reincarnated even after he understands her part in the conspiracy and is responsible for her real death.
“What fascinated me about Vertigo,” Hitchcock said, “was the idea that the man is obsessed with turning the girl into what she is and is trying not to be.”
In the film, as in the novel, John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) had studied law, but chose the more physically active life of a police detective.
Following a traumatic experience involving him and a policeman who falls to his death from a high building, Scottie develops acrophobia and is unable to remain on the police force. Being “a man of independent means,” he recuperates during an early retirement.
Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), a wealthy shipbuilder who is an acquaintance from college days, approaches Scottie and asks him to follow his beautiful wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak). He fears she is going insane, maybe even contemplating suicide, because she believes she is possessed by a dead ancestor. Scottie is skeptical, but agrees after he sees the beautiful Madeleine.
Scottie falls obsessively in love with Madeleine after he saves her from attempted suicide. When she does kill herself by leaping from a high church bell tower, Scottie can only look on helplessly because his acrophobia prevents him from climbing the stairs to save her. Afterward, he has a mental breakdown.
Eventually recovering, Scottie is unable to accept Madeleine’s death. He searches for her until he finds Judy, a tawdry salesgirl, who physically resembles Madeleine. He makes Judy over into Madeleine in appearance, buying her the same clothes Madeleine wore and changing her hairstyle. He tries to love her as if Madeleine had returned from the dead. Then, a pendant exposes her as Madeleine.
She was Elster’s mistress, whom he disguised as his wealthy wife. It was part of a murder plot staged to look like a suicide. Judy dies just as Madeleine did, falling from the same church bell tower.
Visitors to Mission San Juan Bautista are disappointed not to find the Vertigo bell tower. It had been removed in 1949 because of dry rot. The bell tower seen in the film is actually a process shot superimposed on the real building.
An additional ending, never used, was filmed in case the studio insisted on Elster being brought to justice.
In her apartment, Midge is listening to a radio news report about Elster’s imminent capture in France. When Scottie enters, she turns off the radio. Without speaking, he walks to the window while she pours him a drink. As Scottie contemplates Russian Hill at night, she brings him the drink, then moves away, understanding his mood.
Vera Miles was to have played Madeleine and Judy, but there was a delay in filming because of Hitchcock’s gall bladder operation. When he was ready, Miles, who was having a baby, was not. Kim Novak was Hitchcock’s second choice.
I talked with her after the premiere of the restored version of Vertigo at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater in 1996.
Kim Novak was under contract to Columbia, and Harry Cohn was the head of Columbia. She remembered being called into his office.
“He threw a script at me. ‘Alfred Hitchcock wants you on loan-out,’ he said, ‘and I’ve agreed. I thought it would be good for your career.’ Then he added, ‘It’s a terrible, terrible script.’
“I took it home and read it that night. Well, I totally disagreed with Harry Cohn. The next morning, I went to see him, and I was happy he didn’t give me a chance to speak. He just said, ‘It was lousy, wasn’t it?’” Novak was loaned to Paramount by Columbia in exchange for James Stewart appearing with her in Bell Book and Candle.
“I never agreed much with Harry Cohn about anything, though I didn’t say much in the early days. He was really right about one thing when he said working with Alfred Hitchcock would be good for my career. It was great, working with Hitch and with Jimmy, and I knew it was a wonderful part and wonderful picture, but it didn’t have the immediate success I expected. Now, it’s not just a part of my life, but it seems to have become a part of so many people’s lives.”
Novak observed a difference in the attitude over the years of the fans who saw the film when it first opened and those who had seen it several times over the years. “People who had seen it when it first opened, and there were not so many of them, asked me simpler questions, about something in it they didn’t understand. Now, they don’t ask me, they tell me about it. They’ve seen it more times than I have.
“Once I made the mistake of asking Hitch about my character’s motivation, and he looked at me solemnly and said, ‘Let’s not probe too deeply into these matters, Kim. It’s only a movie.’
“I loved it. He allowed me to lose myself in the character, in both of the characters. He gave me the freedom to be creative. The only thing I couldn’t do was move away from that tree!
“Jimmy [Stewart] was the best. I thought of him as Scottie, because we were both so much in our characters. I liked playing two characters and finding both of them within me. I liked knowing their secrets, but I identified more with Judy.
“And who wouldn’t be great in that coat?” Though sometimes actors and actresses can keep the clothing they wear in films, she hadn’t asked for the white coat she wore in Vertigo. “Now it’s the most famous coat in the history of movies,” she sighed.
When I visited Edith Head at her home, I told her how much I liked the coat. She said that I was one of many, and that she received more fan mail for that coat than for any other design of hers in her entire career. Then, she gave me the original drawing of it.
Hitchcock specified that Madeleine should wear a gray suit. Novak told Head gray was not her color, not flattering to blondes. Novak wore that gray suit, however, which helps to define the character. Scottie tried to transform Judy into Madeleine by changing her brighter, tighter, inexpensive clothes to Madeleine’s classical, less obvious style.
“His pleasure,” Hitchcock said, “was dressing rather than undressing his love. Dressing Judy was really un dressing her. But Scottie can’t ever really possess the woman in his mind because she’s only in his mind.
“When Jimmy Stewart’s character undressed Madeleine, it’s not necessary to show it happening. The imagination of the audience goes into play when they see her garments hanging up to dry.
“I would, however, have preferred to make the image of his undressing even clearer, not by showing it, but by showing more specific undergarments drying—a brassiere here, a pair of panties there—but it wasn’t permitted.”
Judy’s loose hair contrasted with Madeleine’s upswept whirlpool coiffure, which incorporated titles designer Saul Bass’s swirling Vertigo effect. These hairstyles, which played a major part in the film, were the creation of Hitchcock with Nellie Manley, who had done Vilma Banky’s hair in the 1920s and was still working with Paramount.
Audrey Hepburn told me that a part she would like to have played was that of Madeleine and Judy. “It was very Pygmalion,” she said, “like Liza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, a cockney ragamuffin who’s taught to be a ‘Lai-die.’”
“Women don’t even want to be called ‘ladies’ anymore,” Hitchcock observed. “Have you noticed? Nowadays a lady is a woman who waits until she’s alone with you in the back seat of a taxi before she unbuttons your fly.”
Bernard Herrmann considered music an essential part of the film. “But the music can’t stand apart from the movie,” he told me. “Its function is to set the mood and give continuity to the separate strips of film.”
Hitchcock liked Elster’s office so much, he asked Henry Bumstead to design an
d build a room just like it in his Bellagio Road home.
“He wanted to do this Vertigo den for all of his electronic equipment,” Bumstead told me, “and I did it like the shipbuilder’s office. I did it in pico pine, and we put a carpet in there that came from Marrakech from when we were there for The Man Who Knew Too Much. I hoped he was pleased with it, but he never said so.
“One morning I was going to work, and a horn honked. It was Alma outside the production office. She was sitting there in their little Ford Mustang, and she thanked me for how wonderful the room turned out. She said, ‘Did Hitch ever say anything to you?’
“I said, ‘He’s never said a word.’ Well, I won’t tell you what she said.
“I said goodbye to her and got up to my office. The secretary said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock wants to see you, immediately.’
“I went down to the office, and he laughed about it, and made a joke of it, more or less, and he said it turned out beautifully. And it did.
“Whenever I went to his place in Santa Cruz, he carried my bag up to the room. Can you imagine? But then, the minute I left and drove away, I was an employee again.”
The interior of Ernie’s, the San Francisco restaurant that is featured in Vertigo, was rebuilt at Paramount. “Ernie’s was entirely a set,” Bumstead said. “I was able to find the same wallpaper, and we had their dishes sent down from San Francisco. Even the Gotti brothers that owned Ernie’s, they were in the picture.
“For two or three years after that, everybody came into Ernie’s, and they wanted to sit where Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart sat. No matter where they were put, they thought they were sitting at the same table.”
After Vertigo was edited, Hitchcock was dissatisfied with an important shot in Ernie’s. “Kim Novak passes Jimmy Stewart for the first time,” associate producer Herbert Coleman told me. “She sort of glances at him as if she knows why he’s there. That would’ve given the whole plot away. Hitch was going away on vacation, so he told me to reshoot it. This meant rebuilding the Ernie’s set and bringing back Kim Novak and some background people in to reshoot the scene.
“Not all of the set was there, so I had to shoot in on a longer lens to hide what was missing in the background. When Hitch returned, he said, ‘You shot it on the wrong lens.’ He knew right away.” The second shot of Novak at Ernie’s was used in the film, but the first shot, with Novak smiling at the camera, can be seen in the original trailer.
A scene to which Hitchcock gave great consideration and one of the few about which he was ever indecisive was Judy’s voice-over admission, that she is Madeleine and an accomplice to the murder of Elster’s wife. Persuaded by Joan Harrison that the scene should be deleted in order to maintain the mystery until the end, Hitchcock ordered the film be released without it. An important theater chain owner, Barney Balaban, had seen the original version, and he liked it so well that he insisted the missing footage be restored. So did Alma, and the scene returned.
Henry Bumstead told me that Hitchcock specified Scottie’s apartment should be in view of Coit Tower, a San Francisco landmark, both for interiors and exteriors. Bumstead designed it without asking any questions. Years later, when he was working on Family Plot, he asked Hitchcock why.
“Coit Tower is a phallic symbol,” Hitchcock explained.
Hitchcock obtained composer Norman O’Neill’s manuscript score from the original London stage production of Mary Rose and gave it to Bernard Herrmann as a guide to the emotional mood he wished to create through music in Vertigo. Both stories shared the theme of a beautiful woman apparently returning from the dead. Vertigo resembles the Orpheus legend, with the hero unable to resist looking back at his beloved Eurydice, even at the price of her second life.
When Vertigo opened, it received some unfavorable reviews and audience attendance was disappointing. The picture was not rereleased until 1984. By that time, the film had begun to deteriorate noticeably. Universal Pictures began a meticulous restoration project directed by James C. Katz and Robert A. Harris. They produced a new “mint” version of the film which cost more than $1 million to restore. Their contribution is so great that they head closing credits, wedding them to Vertigo forever.
Since its original release in 1958, Vertigo has, in a sense, itself returned from the dead, to become one of Hitchcock’s most beloved films.
As work on Vertigo was being completed and promotion about to begin, and Hitchcock was thinking about North by Northwest, Alma was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her chance of survival was viewed pessimistically by her doctors, and Hitchcock’s world was in turmoil. The operation, however, was completely successful.
HAVING COMPLETED HIS five-picture deal with Paramount, Hitchcock accepted an offer from M-G-M to develop a property they owned, The Wreck of the Mary Deare. Hitchcock, however, had other ideas.
Without informing M-G-M, Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman began working on what would become North by Northwest. When M-G-M found out, they were delighted. They believed they would be getting two Hitchcock pictures instead of one.
For years he had wanted to use Mount Rushmore as a setting, and North by Northwest was the picture that could accommodate it. Since he envisioned the climax as a chase across the carved faces of the presidents, the screenplay was at first called “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose.”
New York advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is kidnapped by a gang of spies led by Philip Vandamm (James Mason), who believe Thornhill is CIA agent George Kaplan. Thornhill escapes, but must find Kaplan in order to clear himself of a murder it is believed he committed.
Following Kaplan to Chicago as a fugitive from justice, Thornhill is helped by beautiful Eve Kendall, who is really a member of Vandamm’s gang. In Chicago, she delivers a message to Thornhill that almost costs him his life when he is chased across a cornfield by a crop-dusting plane.
Thornhill finds out from a CIA official (Leo G. Carroll) that Kaplan does not exist and Eve is a CIA agent. Thornhill has unwittingly endangered her life. To save her, he goes to Rapid City, South Dakota, pretending to be Kaplan.
Before the spies flee the country with state secrets, a confrontation in which Thornhill is shot by Eve is staged to prove her loyalty to Vandamm. Later, the trick is exposed by one of Vandamm’s henchmen (Martin Landau). Thornhill arrives in time to rescue Eve in a chase over the presidents’ faces on Mount Rushmore.
The scene moves to Thornhill pulling Eve up into an upper berth sleeper on their honeymoon as the train enters a tunnel.
This ending was considered pornographic to Hitchcock.
Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance at the end of the credits when he rushes to catch a bus and misses it. The beginning of the credits, designed by Saul Bass, is over a crisscrossing grid of lines that become the glass skyscrapers of Manhattan. This was inspired by the opening credits of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, which begins with crisscrossing lines that become a European train station.
Mount Rushmore is located in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The sixty-foot-high faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt were carved from granite one and a half billion years old, older than the Alps or the Himalayas. The carving took fourteen years with about four hundred workers led by the artist Gutzon Borglum, who designed, promoted, supervised, and sculpted this extraordinary work. His vision was made possible because the idea had been born in the 1920s boom, when anything seemed possible, and completed during the 1930s Depression when nothing seemed possible, but the U.S. government was anxious to provide money for public works projects that created jobs.
Himself a person of innate talent as both an artist and an engineer, Hitchcock admired the massive sculpting achievement of Mount Rushmore’s faces and the prodigal engineering feat it involved. He said that he particularly respected the concern for the safety of the four hundred workers, with only two accidents resulting in minor injuries during the entire fourteen years the work required.
Hitchcock’s original plan was for Cary Gran
t to be chased up into Lincoln’s nostril. Then Grant would sneeze. Theoretically, this would have been possible, since the nose is twenty feet long. “The humor was too full-blown for the studio executives,” Hitchcock quipped.
The great success of North by Northwest caused renewed interest in Mount Rushmore, and brought millions of new visitors to the area. Many wanted to climb the presidents’ faces, as had Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. They didn’t realize that the actors had never climbed the carved faces in South Dakota, but rather a meticulously reconstructed scale-model Hollywood set. The Department of the Interior would not permit a chase on the real Mount Rushmore, not just because it could be interpreted as disrespectful, but because the faces had to be safeguarded from any possibility of damage.
Hitchcock was not disappointed; he always preferred the studio. Eva Marie Saint preferred the safety of the studio as well, and Cary Grant told me that he did, too, though adding, “I was grateful that it hadn’t become necessary for me to take a stand for cowardice.”
Saint recalled injuring her arm on M-G-M’s Mount Rushmore.
“It was made of some kind of rubberized material that made it look like rock. It was very, very high, but I had no problem with heights. I went up to the top, and then I got a little nervous. I saw them putting these mattresses all around in a circle where we were climbing. I looked down. ‘My God! One of us could fall.’ So, boy, did I hold on to Cary Grant’s hand! I still have a tiny, tiny little mark I got on my left arm.
“I’m always fascinated by what they’re able to do in the studio. When I’m running away from that house on Mount Rushmore, and I think they’re going to take me in the plane, I look back at the house, and it wasn’t the house at all. It was just a scrim with a light.”
“The first script I got was called ‘The Man in Lincoln’s Nose,’” Martin Landau told me. “Usually, the script comes to you with a letter that says, ‘Check out this role.’ This one just said, ‘Read this. Alfred Hitchcock wants to have a meeting with you.’ So, I read it, and I knew it wasn’t the Cary Grant part nor the James Mason part. It could have been one of the henchmen, but I had no idea what role I was going for when I went to see him.
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