Alfred Hitchcock (101 page)

One person who never wrote for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
was John Michael Hayes.

When Hitchcock returned, refreshed, from his monthlong trip around the world in January 1956, he had his next four projects lined up ahead of him, enough to fill out the decade. Paramount had optioned two books for him:
Flamingo Feather
, a big-budget jungle adventure set in South Africa, and
D’Entre les Morts
(“From Among the Dead”), a French thriller by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
Flamingo Feather
was intended as a Paramount film, like
To Catch a Thief; From Among the Dead
would be an Alfred J. Hitchcock production. The third project was a true wrong-man story based on a
Life
magazine article by Herbert Brean. The fourth was “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose”—the idea hadn’t grown much beyond Otis Guernsey’s brief treatment, but the concept still intrigued Hitchcock.

Hitchcock wasn’t yet sure in what order he would make the four films; it all depended on how easily the scripts and other elements came together. But in January 1956 it still seemed possible that Hayes might write one of the films. The trade papers had even announced “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose” as a “Hitchcock-Hayes production.” That kind of shared attribution really irked the director, believed Hayes, who after the success of
Rear
Window
was feeling a little irked and underpaid himself. Hitchcock and Hayes were both MCA clients, and the writer believed their separate agents were colluding to keep his salary low. “They were all in on it because Hitchcock was their big client,” Hayes said bitterly, years later.

Whenever Hayes complained about his salary, his agent urged patience: “Stick with Hitch and you’ll get a diploma from Hitchcock University, which will be extremely valuable in the future.” When the bonus Hitchcock promised Hayes for
Rear Window
never materialized, the sore point was aggravated. Yet even Steven DeRosa, in his book celebrating Hayes, discovered that the writer’s salary “doubled” after
Rear Window
; and Hitchcock considered Hayes’s all-expenses-paid trips to France for
To Catch a Thief
, to Vermont for
The Trouble with Harry
, and to London for
The Man Who Knew Too Much
as bonuses of a different kind.

But the personal chemistry between the director and his longtime collaborator was never strong. Hayes complained in one interview that Hitchcock never invited him and his wife up to their second home in northern California, and even in Hollywood the Hitchcocks didn’t socialize after hours with the Hayeses.

The director’s ego couldn’t accept Hayes’s role in shaping several of Hitchcock’s most important successes, the writer believed. Hitchcock found a reason to skip the Mystery Writers of America banquet the year Hayes received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for
Rear Window
, and afterward made light of the award when Hayes showed it to him: “You know, they make toilet bowls out of the same material.” (Even DeRosa says Hitchcock was probably joking, but Hayes didn’t appreciate the humor.)

After giving published interviews that annoyed Hitchcock, Hayes was ordered to refrain from personal publicity without prior approval. It wasn’t an extraordinary demand in Hollywood, but Hayes detected the insecurity of a director who “wasn’t going to be Barnum and Bailey,” as he frequently put it, in later interviews. “He was Alfred Hitchcock, Genius. He was the Creator, the Master; it was an Alfred Hitchcock film and nothing else. It was not an Alfred Hitchcock film written by John Michael Hayes.”

According to associate producer Herbert Coleman, though, Hayes was the real grandstander, from the point of view of the Hitchcock circle. It was Hayes who flaunted the “oversized ego,” in Coleman’s words. It was Hayes who was capable of boasting in print, saying in subsequent interviews that he crafted “the whole construction and treatment and screenplay [of
Rear Window
] on my own,” or that “most of
To Catch a Thief
was again my creation.”

Hitchcock’s view was that
Rear Window
was handed to Hayes on a silver platter—not only the story but the main characters and the stars playing them, along with detailed discussion of every scene. The same with
To
Catch a Thief
, on which Mrs. Hitchcock had made a significant contribution, not to mention the emendations on location and during postproduction. As for
The Trouble with Harry
, Hitchcock had practically memorized the book, and the film followed it closely.

But the latest conflict between them would prove the worst. Who ought to be officially credited for the screenplay of
The Man Who Knew Too Much?
When Hitchcock insisted that Hayes share credit on the screen with Angus MacPhail, Hayes appealed to the Writers Guild of America; after reviewing all the written material, their arbitration panel ruled in favor of Hayes. A staunch member in good standing with the Hollywood organization, the American trumped the Englishman, who was viewed suspiciously as an arriviste and personal friend of the director’s.

Hitchcock was furious that Hayes had gone over his head, and felt that MacPhail had been unjustly usurped. Film scholars such as Bill Krohn, and insiders of the period, agree. “As far as I’m concerned,” Herbert Coleman believed, “the credits ought to read: script by Alfred Hitchcock, Angus MacPhail and John Michael Hayes.”

In spite of the tension between them, Hitchcock put off any showdown with the writer until his return from his holiday vacation, hoping that Hayes might yet reconcile himself to working amicably with MacPhail, who had since moved to Hollywood semipermanently to serve as de facto story editor of Hitchcock Productions.

As the only one of the four upcoming projects that wasn’t based on previously published material, “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose” needed the most development, so Hitchcock slotted it last. Likewise, the novel
D’Entre les Morts
offered the director a basic plot and characters to build upon, but needed substantial work—first a translation, then a transplant to contemporary America.

Flamingo Feather
and the true wrong-man case, Hitchcock decided, could be written simultaneously by MacPhail and Hayes, trading off on rewrites in Hitchcock’s customary fashion. MacPhail was asked to take the lead on
Flamingo Feather
because of its British Empire overtones, while Hayes was expected to concentrate on the other script, which Hitchcock felt was more up his crime alley. Set entirely in New York City,
The Wrong Man
would be scheduled first.

First Hitchcock had to arrange a leave from Paramount because
The Wrong Man
belonged to Warner Bros.; the studio had signed a contract with the actual wrong man in the New York incident. But Hitchcock also told Lew Wasserman that he was directing the film for Jack Warner because he wanted to make good on the single picture still outstanding on his 1947–54 contract. Over the years he would tell interviewers the same thing repeatedly. And it’s possible he was telling the truth; Hitchcock took contracts seriously.

But did he really owe Warner Bros. anything? It’s far from clear. And Warner’s was actually ambivalent about
The Wrong Man
until Hitchcock offered to waive his salary, an offer calculated to win him the go-ahead to make the picture. It’s hard to think of very many other directors in Hollywood history who have volunteered to work for free this way, at the peak of their success. Yet such a gesture was entirely in character for Hitchcock, who had often ignored money to make the films that interested him.

Hayes didn’t have that option. When it came to
The Wrong Man
, Hitchcock insisted that Hayes agree to collaborate with MacPhail, even stipulating in advance that they must share credit on the finished film. According to Hayes, Hitchcock even demanded that, like him, the American writer work “for nothing”—no salary. There is no proof of this astonishing gambit other than Hayes’s recollection—astonishing because Hitchcock must have known full well that the Writers Guild, which insisted on minimum fees for any script commissioned by a producer, would never allow such an arrangement, even if Hayes agreed.

Hayes believes that Hitchcock never really expected him to take the bait; the director knew “that I couldn’t do it,” in Hayes’s words. “If you don’t come to Warner Brothers with me,” Hayes quoted Hitchcock as saying, “I’ll never speak to you again.” Hayes refused—and that was the end of their relationship. Hitchcock—a “registered coward,” as Hayes liked to say—sent “emissaries” to tell the writer he’d been discharged. More accurately, the writer wasn’t “renewed”; with his four-picture contract fulfilled, Hayes was kicked out of Hitchcock University.

They did speak again, however, if only once, when Hitchcock ran into Hayes at the ballet a few years later. Hitchcock acted “very cordial” to him, Hayes recalled. But despite sporadic efforts by associates to reunite them, the director refused ever to work again with the scenarist of four films considered among Hitchcock’s greatest.

Herbert Brean’s June 29, 1953, article in
Life
had recounted the facts of
The Wrong Man
case, and there was even a television reenactment, produced by Robert Montgomery, which aired on NBC in February 1954.

Earlier in 1953, Manny Balestrero, a jazz bassist and father of two young children, was accused of stealing $217 from an insurance company in Queens. Protesting his innocence, Balestrero was arrested, jailed, and brought to trial. He was temporarily freed after a juror inappropriately spoke out from the jury box, causing the judge to declare a mistrial. Then, before Balestrero could be retried, the real criminal was caught robbing a delicatessen—but not before Manny’s wife, Rose, suffered a mental breakdown from the strain.

Although Hitchcock always insisted he made
The Wrong Man
because
it was “the available project,” it was also precisely what he’d been after for some time. Partly by circumstance, his passion for research and authenticity had been overshadowed in recent films by artifice and Hitchcockery, and now he wanted to sink his teeth into a neorealistic subject.

In interviews, Hitchcock sometimes disparaged what he (and some critics) called “kitchen sink” neorealism, telling the press that he and his Italian housekeeper watched Vittorio De Sica’s
The Bicycle Thief
in San Francisco one day, and that his housekeeper was half bored by the masterpiece. He didn’t always describe his own reaction, but he was impressed by the film, and once told the
New York Times
that
The Bicycle Thief was
a perfect double chase—physical and psychological. Hitchcock’s love for Italy was genuine; and he kept up with the postwar cinema there, paying special attention to Roberto Rossellini’s films—in part because Rossellini’s latest featured Mrs. Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman.

The ideal film, in the words of neorealist theorist (and scenarist) Cesare Zavattini, was “ninety minutes of the life of a man to whom nothing happens.” The Italians were developing a vision of film as a documentary-style snapshot of real life, with storytelling that was antidramatic. They valued nonprofessional acting and visual simplicity, eschewing suspense and camera trickery in favor of insights into society and a humanistic vision. Italian neorealism had already crept into the American films of Fred Zinnemann, George Stevens, and William Wyler, and now Hitchcock was drawn by its tenets and aesthetic.

The Wrong Man
offered Hitchcock a real-life incident—involving an Italian American—that would enable him to continue his lifelong critique of the judicial system. It gave him an opportunity to adopt an “unmistakably documentary” approach, in his words—a radical challenge for the director. And it would mean a script credit for his friend Angus MacPhail.

Once Hitchcock parted ways with John Michael Hayes, he needed another writer to complement MacPhail, and once again he reached beyond Hollywood for a quintessential American. Maxwell Anderson, like Thornton Wilder and John Steinbeck before him, rarely wrote directly for Hollywood, and most of his screen credits—such as the most recent,
Joan of Arc
starring Ingrid Bergman—were based on his acclaimed stage work. Insistent in their moral stance, Anderson’s Broadway plays ranged from experimental verse drama to satire and musicals. And one of his most famous historical dramas,
Winterset
, concerned two Italian American immigrants who may have been wrongly executed: Sacco and Vanzetti.

Anderson said yes, and by February 1956 Hitchcock, MacPhail, and Herbert Coleman were living at the St. Regis in New York, scouting locations and holding meetings with the writer, who commuted from his home in nearby Stamford, Connecticut.

Although in some ways it was the opposite of everything Hitchcock had
ever done, fidelity to life was Hitchcock’s unusual, almost compulsive goal in making
The Wrong Man.
He wanted to tell the story
exactly
as it had transpired, with minimal dramatic or cinematic embellishment. To that end, the New York team tried methodically to retrace Balestrero’s footsteps, his habits and experiences. Coleman himself rode the 3:30
A.M.
subway train Balestrero had taken home after finishing his Stork Club gig on the night of his fateful arrest. MacPhail ate breakfast at the café where the musician had dined that morning, and both visited the delicatessen where the real criminal was apprehended, quizzing the deli owners.

Coleman and MacPhail interviewed the actual judge in the case, the defense attorney, the prosecutor, and Rose’s psychiatrist. Along with Hitchcock, they visited the actual jail and observed how prisoners were booked and handled. They visited the actual psychiatric rest home.

They tried as much as possible to retrace the police procedures, but were stonewalled by the current New York police commissioner, who wanted nothing to do with a film highlighting a false arrest. Writing to Anderson, Hitchcock complained that police officials were acting as though “grave secrets might be given away if we asked a detective whether he blew his nose loudly or softly while interrogating a suspect.” As devious with police commissioners as he was with Production Code officials, Hitchcock simply switched gears, enlisting retired policemen as consultants. (Later he got his own revenge, insisting on dropping any mention of New York police from the screen acknowledgements.)