It's Only a Movie

by Charlotte Chandler

  “I immediately felt that Alma was as important in my involvement as was Hitchcock. It seemed as if they were of one mind. They were rather united and talked to me very nicely. I felt immediately upon my arrival that they were eager to have me. They liked my look, and they indicated that they thought I had a resemblance to Grace Kelly, and they started to bring out photographs of Grace and magazines to show me. I was sort of stunned that they would be looking at me and comparing me to her. In retrospect, I think it was maybe a conscious effort on their part to look at someone new who might fulfill a need that they had to find a Grace Kelly for their movies.

  “Then it became much more difficult as the picture went on because of the turmoil. I felt he was struggling a great deal. He tended to fall asleep on the set after lunch when he was shooting. I began to understand that he and Tippi were having trouble.

  “I knew there was trouble, because he was becoming very solicitous of my interests, talking with me, and he spent a lot of time ignoring Tippi and paying attention to me, which really did disturb me. He was not talking much with her. I noticed he would always begin talking with me in front of her or around her dressing room. Something wasn’t quite right.

  “I was caught right in the middle. After it became clear that Tippi wasn’t going on with her contract after Marnie, I was invited to join the lunch group in his bungalow. I was very flattered. He profoundly affected me.

  “But sometimes he would embarrass me. A man who was a friend of my father’s dropped by to visit me on the set one day. He was head of transportation at Universal. When he left, Hitch said, ‘Another one of your boyfriends?’ so everybody could hear it. I was so embarrassed. I was angry.”

  Hitchcock’s humor was better appreciated by Anny Ondra in 1929. During her sound test for Blackmail, he asked her in front of all if she had been “a bad woman” the night before. Ondra’s response was to giggle and pretend mock shock.

  “When I saw Marnie, I wasn’t sure he fulfilled what he had in mind for our film,” Baker continued. “I’m pleased with my own work in some parts of it. My character was to come in and create havoc, and I was rather nicely evil, and also playful. I was disappointed that there was no dot at the end of the character. It wasn’t a fulfilled ending for my character. I just disappear.

  “But who can say in the whole of life that you got a chance to work with Alfred Hitchcock?”

  Hitchcock blamed himself for the film’s failure, referring to his disappointment when he felt he had lost Grace Kelly for a second time. The first time he had lost her to Prince Rainier, who offered the real-life role as Her Royal Highness of Monaco, beyond anything Hitchcock felt he had to offer.

  The second time, Hitchcock had regrets, because he believed “Miss Kelly” would have returned to star in another film for him, if he hadn’t used “the bad judgment” to offer her the wrong part, that of the mentally disturbed thief, Marnie. He believed that particular role was deemed “inappropriate” by the Prince, a reaction that probably would have been shared by the principality.

  In addition, there was a delay in the start of filming and the royal family had only one month in the year when they could be away from the palace for holiday. Any postponement meant there had to be a postponement until the next year. Grace Kelly might have accepted a postponement, but Princess Grace could not.

  When it was certain that she would not be doing Marnie, Hitchcock wrote her a gracious note that she told me about in London, many years later. What particularly impressed her was the phrase, “Remember, Grace, it’s only a movie.”

  “Because he handled it that way,” she said, “we were still able to be friends and have dinners together.”

  Princess Grace said she missed acting and had wanted to return to films, especially after her first two children were born. She added rather wistfully, “Really, there never was a chance of it.

  “Though Mr. Hitchcock wasn’t considered an actor’s director, as an actress, having worked with the best—George Seaton, Fred Zinnemann—I thought he was a wonderful director, as well as a dear man.”

  Marnie was Bernard Herrmann’s last score for a Hitchcock picture, though he would go on to write music that was not used for Torn Curtain. “They wanted a lousy pop tune,” Herrmann told me, “probably with bongo drums. Hitch was sensitive about the music being called ‘old-fashioned’ because, by implication, he felt the words might extend to him.”

  After Marnie, Hitchcock lost two of the dedicated technical people who had been so important to him and his films and who referred to themselves as “the Hitchcockians.” Robert Burks died in a fire in his home, and editor George Tomasini died of a heart attack.

  TOWARD THE END of Marnie, Hedren and Hitchcock were widely reported not to be speaking to each other. Assistant director Hilton Green was there on the set every day.

  “On Marnie, I was close to Tippi Hedren. Nothing that was really bad happened. It’s not true that Mr. Hitchcock and Tippi were not speaking to each other. You can’t direct someone and not have them talk to each other.

  “They weren’t making polite small talk, but then, it wasn’t Hitchcock’s way to say much to actors on the set.”

  “Marnie,” Hitchcock told me, “is about a girl who’s a compulsive thief, but after every robbery, she goes to a farm in Maryland and uses some of the proceeds to support her horse. She loves to ride in the open air, with her hair blowing free, almost as though she were cleansing herself of the crime she’s just committed.

  “She runs up against a man who knows she’s a thief, but he engages her in his company anyway. He courts her, but he’s a little disturbed when he finds out she’s robbed him, too. He’s a late-Victorian, Edwardian type of hero, you know. That’s a time I know and feel. It’s a very intriguing yarn, very meaty stuff.

  “It had wonderful possibilities, or so I thought. I thought I could mold Miss Hedren into the heroine of my imagination. I was wrong.”

  “It was a very painful experience I don’t like to think about,” Tippi Hedren told me. “I felt very sorry for Mr. Hitchcock.

  “I trusted Hitchcock and he made me feel confident. But doing The Birds turned into a nightmare, when all those birds started pecking at me. He hadn’t told me about that. I could have been blinded. But I was so very young, I did what I was told. I shouldn’t have been put through that.

  “I can’t say I’m sorry I worked with Hitchcock, but I can’t say I’m glad. I certainly wasn’t happy about the way it all turned out. After Marnie, I was what they called hot, but he kept me under contract.” She believed he prevented her from working with other directors who wanted her.

  In 1967, with her contract ended, she was featured in Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong. Then, Hedren appeared in films, on television, and devoted herself to animal activist activities.

  When I spoke with her in 2003, she said that she hadn’t changed her opinion on Hitchcock, and that she felt exactly the same as she had after Marnie. Her tone indicated that, indeed, she did feel the same anger and disappointment.

  Hedren felt that Hitchcock was obsessed with her, and then disappointed in her, professionally. “She didn’t have the volcano” was how he summed it up. The film ended with an enduring bad relationship between the director and the star he had planned to create.

  She blamed him. He blamed her. But if Marnie had been a success, it all might have been different.

  Hitchcock sometimes may have fallen in love with one of his leading ladies, as she appeared onscreen, playing her part, a role that was partly his own creation. Then, when the film wrapped, so did his relationship to the character. Thus, Alma could say to me that she had never been jealous of any actress who appeared in her husband’s films.

  An actress, however, on occasion “betrayed” the character when, in Hitchcock’s opinion, “She couldn’t live up to her character. What it meant,” he said, referring to Hedren’s performance in Marnie, “it really was my fault. I couldn’t bring her far enough.”

 
; Despite the troubled relationship, Hedren was there for Hitchcock when the American Film Institute honored him in 1979.

  “I THINK THAT Torn Curtain was miscast,” Hitchcock said. “I should have had a hero who was a singing scientist, to go with Julie Andrews.

  “Casting is important, and it’s very difficult to go against wrong casting. I had two stars, but they weren’t right for their characters.

  “At the beginning of shooting, [Paul] Newman sent me a several-page memo offering suggestions about his character. I took it quite personally and found it insulting. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was not behavior uniquely designed for me. He was given to the practice with other directors. I gather they took it better than I did. Perhaps I suffered from a case of memo-itis, after my time served with Selznick.”

  Neither Andrews nor Newman was pleased by Hitchcock’s light-touch style of directing actors. Andrews looked for more help and some encouragement. Newman wanted to try it more than one way to see how each performance played. Hitchcock felt he should do that at home.

  “The Method actor may be all right in the theater,” Hitchcock said. “He has a whole stage to move about on. But when it comes to film and you cut from the face to what he sees, the subjective camera, there must be discipline. I remember discussing this with a Method actor, not Newman, and he said, ‘We’re given an idea, and then we’re supposed to interpret it any way we want.’ And I said, ‘That’s not acting, that’s writing.’

  “My own appearances on the screen, the cameos, are always short, because I don’t want to have to suffer the indignity of being an actor for too long. But I never improvise.”

  In a conversation with John Springer, Paul Newman’s longtime publicist and friend, and me, Newman said that he’d been very pleased to be selected by Hitchcock to be in Torn Curtain.

  Then, the rumor circulated around the set that Newman and Andrews had not been Hitchcock’s first choices and that he wasn’t pleased with “being forced to have us,” Newman said. “We tried not to be affected by gossip. Hitchcock seemed cool to us personally and casual in his direction of us. I usually had input with my directors, but not with Hitchcock. Later, I found out that this was his style. It meant I was doing well, but nobody told me that.

  “I think he owed it to us not to say we were miscast after he had approved us. We’d been signed and were doing our best. We were stars, and we brought in fans at the box office. We each said no to other scripts in order to say yes to him. I felt we were entitled to more respect.

  “Afterwards, I saw a piece of the film. I don’t make a practice of seeing my own films, but what I saw didn’t look so bad to me. I never found out how Hitchcock really felt at the beginning, what was true and what wasn’t, or how he felt after we made the film.”

  “THERE WAS AN ENDING written for Torn Curtain,” Hitchcock said, “which wasn’t used, but I rather liked it. No one agreed with me except my colleague at home [Alma]. Everyone told me you couldn’t have a letdown ending after all that.

  “Newman would have thrown the formula away. After what he has gone through, after everything we have endured with him, he just tosses it. It speaks to the futility of it all, and it’s in keeping with the kind of naïveté of the character, who is no professional spy and who will certainly retire from that nefarious business.”

  Torn Curtain was inspired by the defection to the Soviet Union of British and American spies, notably that of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Novelist Brian Moore was chosen to write the screenplay, but shooting began before Hitchcock was satisfied with the script, dictated by the limited availability of Andrews.

  When U.S. nuclear scientist Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) defects to East Germany, he is followed by his fiancée, Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews), who doesn’t know he is pretending to be a defector. His real mission is to steal a secret formula, and then return with it to the U.S. Accomplishing this mission, Armstrong’s escape is complicated by Sarah’s presence and by his having killed the agent assigned to watch him. After a wild bus chase, they are smuggled out of East Germany in the wardrobe baskets of a Czech ballet company traveling to Sweden.

  The East German scientist who is tricked into revealing his country’s nuclear secrets resembles Mr. Memory of The 39 Steps. Like Mr. Memory, Dr. Lindt (the name of Hitchcock’s favorite chocolate) feels compelled to speak, in this case, to correct a fellow scientist, who also happens to be an American spy.

  Hitchcock spoke about the drawn-out killing of Gromek, the East German agent, to show how “arduous” it is to kill a human being. “In my films, I believe, ‘Thou shalt not kill—too many people.’ Human life is too valuable. In my films, killing does not happen casually.

  “It has been suggested that the killing of Gromek by putting his head into a gas oven was a reference to the Holocaust. Who knows? I was deeply affected by film footage of the prison camps I saw at the end of the war.

  “Torn Curtain was a beige and gray picture. After Copenhagen, there was no more color. The hotel corridors were gray all the way, with one red fire extinguisher.” Hitchcock personally planned all the color and costumes related to the sets and was very concerned with the lighting.

  Bernard Herrmann took the same approach with the music, using an extremely unorthodox orchestra, mainly woodwind and brass, to create an oppressive atmosphere. After an argument with Hitchcock, the score was rejected and Herrmann was replaced by John Addison.

  “Hitch was strong enough to have been able to do anything he wanted to do,” Herrmann told me. “But he never liked to stir up things, to quarrel, and he didn’t think my music was worth disturbing the calm for.”

  HITCHCOCK ATTEMPTED A project called Kaleidoscope Frenzy, and he shot some test footage in New York. The style of film he was contemplating was similar to that of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose Blow-Up he greatly admired. “Those Italian fellows are a hundred years ahead of us,” he said.

  Written by Hitchcock, Kaleidoscope Frenzy starts with a brutal murder by a killer who is moved to kill when he is close to any large body of water. The murderer is finally exposed by his mother. There were to be no stars, it was to be shot in New York and there would be nudity.

  Hitchcock believed in it, but Universal said no, a word Hitchcock hadn’t heard since his days with Selznick.

  “I’M VERY ENTHUSIASTIC about my next picture,” Hitchcock told Herbert Coleman. “Lew [Wasserman] has just bought Leon Uris’s newest book for me, and Uris is writing the screenplay. I think it will be as picturesque as The Man Who Knew Too Much and as suspenseful as Vertigo.”

  The screenplay Hitchcock received from Uris didn’t please him, and he contacted Arthur Laurents, who read the book and declined to try his hand at it.

  “He called up and asked me to come over,” Laurents told me, “and for the first time ever, he asked why I didn’t think it was good. He listened, but the old fervor was gone. I felt he wasn’t Hitchcock anymore.”

  Samuel Taylor accepted the assignment, sometimes writing scenes just before they were shot. Art director Henry Bumstead felt the pressure.

  “You know,” he told me, “Topaz was a nightmare. I got high blood pressure on that picture. I’m still taking pills for it, and that’s a long time ago.

  “We started in Copenhagen, and we didn’t know who the cast was. Hitch had a terrible time casting that picture.

  “In Europe, I didn’t have that much help. I was doing props and everything. I want to tell you, that was the toughest show I ever did. Doing all those sets, and European sets at that, the detail and the molding and everything is much more complicated. I was working every night.

  “All the exteriors were done on location, and all the interiors at Universal. I had all the stages filled with sets. I was building furniture, and I had three assistants and three decorators.

  “There were some good moments in the picture, but the thing is, there was no time to prepare, and they were writing the script as we started and were casting. Poor Edith Head! I remember sh
e was going crazy, and I didn’t know all the sets. There was just no time for prep, and I’ll tell you, prep is the most important time on a picture.”

  In 1962, a defecting Soviet official reveals that something important is happening between Russia and Cuba. CIA agent Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe) asks French agent André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford) to investigate, because France maintains diplomatic relations with Cuba. The French already know about a strategic agreement between Russia and Cuba.

  During a visit of Cuban leader Rico Parra (John Vernon) to the U.N., Devereaux arranges to steal a copy of the secret treaty between Moscow and Havana. Traveling to Havana, he learns from his undercover agent and mistress, Juanita de Córdoba (Karin Dor), that the Soviets are building missile-launching sites there. After he leaves, she is exposed as a spy and shot by Parra, whose mistress she also was.

  Devereaux, recalled to Paris and reprimanded for cooperating with the CIA, warns a senior official, Jacques Granville (Michel Piccoli), about Topaz, a French spy ring loyal to the Soviets.

  When Devereaux’s son-in-law (Michel Subor) is wounded while investigating French official Henri Jarre (Philippe Noiret), Nicole (Dany Robin), Devereaux’s wife, admits that she was having an affair with Granville, whom she incriminates. Granville, exposed at a peace conference by Nordstrom, commits suicide.

  Two other endings were filmed. In one, Devereaux and Granville have a duel in an empty Paris stadium, and Granville is shot from the stands by a sniper. In another, Devereaux sees Granville leaving on a plane for Russia at the Orly airport, and they exchange greetings. The ending finally used was an outtake of Philippe Noiret entering a house. Since his character walked with a cane, it was necessary to include only the last part of his going through the door before the off-screen gunshot signaling his suicide is heard. Audiences didn’t respond well to the ending, but the studio had objected to any ending with the spy unpunished, and suicide offered a compromise.