It's Only a Movie

by Charlotte Chandler

  “I went over to M-G-M. We had a chat, and he walked me around and showed me the storyboards of the movie. I literally saw the movie before I did it.

  “Leonard was written as a henchman, but I chose to play him as a gay character, because Leonard felt the need to get rid of Eve Kendall. I felt it would be very interesting if he were jealous of her beyond just being a henchman. But this was 1958, so I played it very subtly.

  “Hitchcock had seen me in a play, Middle of the Night, in which I played a very macho, egocentric jerk, and he cast me as Leonard. It’s something that impressed me, and one day I drummed up the courage to say, ‘How in the world did you see me in that play and think of me for this role?’

  “He said, ‘Martin, you have a circus going on inside of you. Obviously, if you can do that part in the theater, you can do this little trinket.’

  “I remember going up to him after he whispered something to Cary Grant, and to Eva Marie, and to James, and he passed me by. I’d been working on the film for several weeks, and I walked up to him and said, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me, Mr. Hitchcock?’ In the theater, directors told you a lot. He had never said a word to me about my performance, and I felt a little left out. He said, ‘I’ll only tell you if I don’t like what you’re doing.’

  “I felt he loved what I was doing. The only one who didn’t love it was James Mason, who thought I was casting a kind of aspersion on his character.

  “I never discussed it with anybody, but I chose to think that James’s character was bisexual, and that my character was gay, but I think James didn’t like what I did. There was a line that was added for me by Ernie Lehman. I say, ‘Call it my woman’s intuition.’

  “At first, Hitchcock asked me to wear my own clothes for the picture. I said, ‘The clothes I wear are not the clothes Leonard would wear.’ To Hitchcock directly I said this. We got along very well.

  “Then, Hitchcock wanted me to be better dressed than Cary’s character, well tailored and neat. So, who does he take me to? A tailor on Wilshire Boulevard where he had the suits I wore in the film made to Cary’s specifications, unbeknownst to Cary.

  “We picked out fabric together. There was a blue suit. There was a gray suit.

  “We’re in Chicago, shooting the film, and I’m not working that day. I’m at the hotel. Hitch calls me from the La Salle Street Station, and he tells me he wants me to wear one of the suits to see how it looks in the environment. So, I put on the suit that I wear in the scene and go to the La Salle Street Station.

  “There’s a huge area of the station cordoned off. I wait my turn behind the barricade.

  “I get tapped on the shoulder by Cary Grant’s man, an English guy with a cockney accent. He says [cockney accent], ‘Excuse me, but Mr. Grant would like to know where you got that suit.’

  “I had not met Cary Grant up to now. He’d spotted this suit in the crowd. He said, ‘There’s only two tailors in the world that make a suit like that. One’s in Beverly Hills and one’s in Hong Kong.’

  “Now, I’m aware of what’s going on. He thinks I’m an extra from Chicago, and he spotted the suit. Obviously, no one in Chicago is as well dressed as Leonard.

  “Shortly after that, I met Cary, who sort of looked at me, but looked at the suit with more clarity. Even the angle of the lapels, a little cutaway there, was made to his specifications.

  “He would occasionally, when I wore a suit, say, ‘Martin, let me try on your jacket. Let’s see if it fits me.’ Because I didn’t have a thing in my contract saying that I would get the wardrobe, which he did. And I think he wanted my wardrobe as well. That suit fit him quite well, and obviously my character had more clothing changes than his character did.

  “I never saw the suits after the film. I have a feeling they went a certain way. Whenever I met Cary, I never knew whether he was wearing one of my suits or not.”

  At the Beekman Place apartment in New York City of Milton Goldman, James Mason spoke with me about Alfred Hitchcock and his experience working on North by Northwest. “Hitchcock’s efforts and genius went into preplanning and rapport with his technicians. We actors were typecast and chosen because of our track records that had shown him we could carry off the part he wanted delineated. He preferred that we not be overly creative, which meant anything that interfered with his camera and what he had in mind for it.

  “He was even in any crisis. I remember at some critical moment with Eva’s character, he said to her, ‘My dear, it’s only a moo-vie.’

  “Occasionally, we would chat about the early British studios—Islington, Gainsborough. I knew quite a bit about that from my wife, Pamela, and Hitchcock enjoyed that subject.

  “I remember this young actor, Martin Landau, who had an interesting, rather small part, though it’s one people remember well. He had obviously worked a great deal on his lines, and he told me he felt he had the part down. He was rather a Method actor, which wasn’t what Hitchcock preferred. Anyway, Hitchcock had something else up his sleeve. He shot everything out of order, leaving no room for any ad-libs, and there weren’t any. But it was an exemplary performance by Landau, and it was obvious how much Hitchcock liked it.

  “I have been asked many times about homosexual overtones and undertones between my character and Landau’s Leonard. Well, of course. Obviously. But it was one-sided. Leonard had a crush on me which my character enjoyed, even his discomfiture, but my Vandamm had no homosexual tendencies, with eyes and whatever else, only for the Eva Marie Saint character, Eve.

  “There is a scene in which Eve is supposed to board a plane, and I’m supposed to follow her. I received the most direction I’d had for any scene I’d done for Hitchcock. He walked up beside me and spoke in that unique voice with its pear-shaped tones and his careful enunciation, a sort of posh cockney.

  “‘James,’ he said, ‘when she goes to board the plane, I want you to count to three, and then follow her.’

  “I looked like I was trying to comprehend his meaning. My brow furrowed. I said, ‘You mean three? But what if I don’t have the right feeling on three, but rather I feel it on two? Or what if…’ I saw the look on his face. I had him hooked. Absolutely hooked. Then he smiled. He’d realized I was putting him on.

  “Cary was a very serious person, not the character he played. He would be there waiting, clutching his script as though his life depended on it until the last possible second. Then, he would step into his part, confident, flippant, and casual, appearing to be making it up as he went along.”

  Cary Grant had suggested Sophia Loren, with whom he had had an affair, as perfect for the part of Eve Kendall. Hitchcock didn’t agree. “Miss Loren was not the right blonde.”

  “Hitchcock never liked to go on location,” art director Robert Boyle told me. “But on North by Northwest, we actually used Grand Central Station rather than constructing it on the set. The amount of light we had to pour into that station almost broke M-G-M. It was usually easier to ‘paint’ a location on glass.”

  Bernard Herrmann called the film “a picaresque romp.” As he told me, “The opening music, a fandango, anticipates the crazy dance Cary Grant is about to do across America. The final chase across Mount Rushmore was choreographed in the editing room to this fandango.”

  North by Northwest’s most famous scene, that of the crop duster attack on Cary Grant, has no music at all. “Silence is a sound, too, for the composer, just as white is a color for the painter,” Herrmann said.

  It was Herrmann who introduced his friend Ernest Lehman to Hitchcock. “Hitch was looking for a writer to work with him on The Wreck of the Mary Deare,” Herrmann told me. “I thought they would hit it off very well.”

  Eva Marie laughed when I asked her if she thought Eve and Roger Thornhill had a happy life together after the film ended.

  “Oh, definitely! Oh, yes! Or I wouldn’t have done the film!

  “I love where she explains herself in that scene where we have all the trees between us. Hitch wouldn’t cut it when the s
tudio said it was too long.

  “If you cut it, you never would have known about Eve Kendall. It’s the only place where she truly exposes herself.

  “Cary was dear to work with. He said, ‘Now, Eva Marie, you don’t have to cry in this movie. No more “sink parts” for you. We’re just going to have fun.’ He said that the first day. I’d been doing serious films like On the Waterfront and Hatful of Rain.”

  Saint characterized James Mason as “wonderful, but so sinister in his part! His character was such a mean guy!

  “Everybody got along so well. There wasn’t a diva among us. Certainly not Hitchcock.

  “During the final chase, when my scarf gets caught on a branch, that wasn’t planned, just a mistake but we stuck with it. It was a good mistake.

  “Something we had to change on the 20th Century dining car was my line, which went from ‘I never make love on an empty stomach’ to ‘I never discuss love on an empty stomach.’ I had to ‘loop’ that. Can you imagine?

  “I remember reading the script for the first time and thinking, ‘I don’t come in until page fifty-eight. What is this?’ And then, I reread it. It’s not On the Waterfront. It doesn’t all have to make sense.”

  Between takes of the auction house scene, Hitchcock noticed Saint standing there in her elegant cocktail dress drinking coffee from a plastic cup. “Hitch was horrified, and I didn’t know what I did wrong. He said, ‘Eva Marie, there are so many people on the set. I don’t want my leading lady wearing a beautiful $3,500 frock and drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.’ He had me put it down, and then had them put my coffee into a china cup on a china saucer. I thought, ‘I should have known better.’” Hitchcock believed that she shouldn’t break the illusion in front of other people, and not in front of herself, either.

  When he was dissatisfied with some of the dresses M-G-M had designed for her, he said, “We must go to Bergdorf.” He took her shopping at Bergdorf Goodman, New York’s fashionable department store, where she tried on the most expensive outfits. “I told him that was the first and last time I had a sugar daddy.

  “He picked out every piece of jewelry, every earring. He had a woman looking in Chicago for a stone to match a stone that I had.

  “Sydney Guilaroff did the hair, and so many women through the years have said, ‘Oh, it’s such an easy bob.’ It looks easy, but that’s the whole idea. You think you can do it at home, but no. I said, ‘I’ll do anything to be this lady.’ And so, he would do my hair during lunch, and we’d be eating our sandwiches over the hot iron.

  “I loved it that Hitchcock cared so much—about Eve Kendall.”

  Not all of the clothes were bought at Bergdorf Goodman. The black dress with the red roses, that was Bergdorf. I loved that one. Everybody asks me if I kept it. But movie clothes were like maternity clothes for me. After you have the baby, that is it!

  “Eve Kendall was the best money could buy, and her clothes had to reflect this.

  “Hitch knew where you were going to sit, like in the auction scene. He knew I would be in the middle, Mason on one side, Cary on the other. You didn’t wander around wondering. I never looked at a storyboard. We trusted him, and you felt you were the only person to play that part, because he saw you as that character.

  “And he was always dressed up. You know, even the crew wore suits!”

  There was a story of Saint blushing during her first scenes with Cary Grant because as a girl the actor had been one of her idols. “No,” she said, “I liked Claude Rains when I was a little girl. And Charles Boyer, and Fred Astaire. I hate when they make up things.

  “About five years ago, they had the Hitchcock ladies interviewed together at a broadcasters convention in Pasadena, all of us who were around who had acted in his films. In the middle of it, I said, ‘I really feel like we’ve all been married to the same man. We’re the Hitchcock widows.”

  A young, very young, aspiring actress was taken shopping by Alfred Hitchcock. He wasn’t, as Eva Marie Saint had joked, her sugar daddy, but rather, her real daddy. Pat Hitchcock recalled:

  “Beginning when I was twelve or thirteen, my father took me shopping for my clothes, usually without my mother. He had very definite ideas for me, as he did for my mother and his leading ladies. I can’t say I agreed with all of his selections for me. His taste for me was conservative. He had a tailored point of view, which I wasn’t too mad about at the time. Skirts, blouses, and sweaters. He liked slacks, too, very much. I wasn’t totally thrilled, but I wish I had all of those clothes now. He had a wonderful sense of what would look best on me, of what was appropriate to my personality, and comfortable.”

  Hitchcock admired Audrey Hepburn, and she was anxious to work with him. She had agreed to be in a film he was preparing, No Bail for the Judge, until she learned that she was going to be raped in a violent scene. Her character was a judge’s daughter who pretends to be a prostitute in order to clear her father of murder.

  “I had a responsibility to The Nun’s Story, which I had just done,” Hepburn told me, “and I owed it to Mr. [Fred] Zinnemann, who was a great director, not to do anything that would tarnish that film.”

  Samuel Taylor had written a screenplay and Laurence Harvey had been cast as her co-star. Then, she found out she was going to have a baby, and the project was abandoned.

  “A WOMAN WROTE to me that she had a problem,” Alfred Hitchcock told me. “Her daughter had seen the man murdered in the bathtub in Diabolique. So, she wouldn’t take a bath. Then, she went to Psycho, and after that, she wouldn’t take a shower. The woman asked me what she should do about her daughter.

  “Well, I didn’t waste a moment. I sent her a telegram saying, ‘Send her to the dry cleaner.’”

  “After Alfred Hitchcock, I became a ‘psycho’ for the rest of my life,” Anthony Perkins told me. “Whenever I go into the store, or drive into a gas station, or walk on the streets, or go into a restaurant, I hear people saying, ‘Look, there’s Norman Bates.’

  “Just one thing,” he added. “When you write about me, could you please get it right? Tony Perkins, not Norman Bates.”

  Hitchcock said, “Anthony Perkins was marvelous, so perfect in the part that it may have damaged his career, and I may have done him harm.”

  Perkins had met Hitchcock only once before they began filming. “I signed before I ever saw a script,” he told me. “I just wanted to work with Alfred Hitchcock. I was told I’d have the most important part, but I would have accepted any part to be in a Hitchcock film. When we met, Hitchcock told me, ‘You are the film.’ I didn’t quite understand what he meant. I found out soon enough.

  “I had heard something about the story, but not much. Everything was very hush-hush. I remember we all had to swear an oath that we wouldn’t say anything to anyone about the story. Then, just before Psycho came out, one person was careless. Fortunately the picture was close to release, and it didn’t do any harm. The person let it slip that I wore a dress in the film.

  “Hitchcock was furious, though he kept his calm demeanor.

  “I told Hitch I was tired of being a young romantic lead, and I wanted to do more interesting parts; but I was a little worried about playing a homicidal transvestite. It seemed to me that there was some risk to my career in taking on a part like that. I asked Hitch what he thought, and he just said, ‘Why don’t you give it a try? I would.’

  “Martin Balsam and I had this scene together. We’re talking it and rehearsing together, and we figured out that it would work much better if we overlapped our lines. Just as we were about to shoot the scene, I saw the storyboard, and realized we wouldn’t be able to do it overlapping because we were both in close-ups. I’d been told that the storyboards were inviolate, and that he’d already made the movie in his head before he came to the set. But I thought I’d try anyway.

  “I said, ‘Hitch, Marty and I have been rehearsing our lines, and we thought it might go better if we overlapped our lines.’

  “Hitch said, ‘Try it.’

/>   “He listened, and then he dropped the storyboard into a wastebasket. So much for anyone saying he wasn’t open to suggestions.”

  “An example of where you need to storyboard,” Hitchcock said, “is the man coming up the stairs to make sure that you get the contrast in the size of the image.” He was referring to Martin Balsam’s character, Arbogast, on his way to Mrs. Bates’s bedroom, when the detective is seen from the front and from high above.

  Hitchcock was open to other suggestions from Perkins. “It was my idea to be munching candy,” Perkins continued. “Since my character has a line about eating like a bird, Hitch suggested candy corn.

  “I told Hitch I really felt the character of Norman, and would it be all right if I wore my own clothes?

  “He said, ‘Fine.’”

  Assistant director Hilton Green remembered Perkins as generally keeping to himself. “He was always private. Polite, pleasant, but kind of a loner. He asked me to have someone let him know five or ten minutes before he was to be called. Then, he’d go into his trailer, and when he came out, five or ten minutes later, he came out Norman Bates.”

  Anthony Perkins had a theory about why Alfred Hitchcock chose not to make Psycho in color.

  “Hitch really loved Clouzot’s Diabolique. I think it was one of the reasons he made Psycho in black and white.”

  Hitchcock had a different explanation.

  “I do not like to see blood in life or on the screen. I made Psycho in black and white because I knew I did not want to show all of that red blood in the white bathroom.”

  Another reason was he wanted to keep costs down and to be able to use his TV production unit, which was accustomed to shooting in black and white.

  Hitchcock continued. “It was important to have the biggest star we could have for the role of Marion Crane for the element of surprise, because no one would expect us to kill off our star so early in the film.”