Alfred Hitchcock (105 page)

It’s tempting to date the personal crescendo Hitchcock had in his relationship with actress Brigitte Auber to the summer of 1956, when he was still preoccupied with
Vertigo.

He had at least two friendships with actresses go awry in similar fashion during this period, the mid-1950s. Both involved young actresses, foreign-born, who saw the director as a father figure. Only Auber would go on the record for this book. She can’t remember the exact dates, only that something happened about two years after
To Catch a Thief.
Hitchcock was in and out of London and Paris constantly, and the two had stayed in touch. When they got together, he treated her with “parental tenderness,” in her words.

His pursuit of her evokes
Vertigo
—with its story of a man pursuing an elusive fantasy creature. Auber felt that she and the director had a special friendship. If she found out that Hitchcock was in London, she had her favorite wines sent to his hotel. When he came to Paris he brought wine from his own cellar; they brought the wine with them to French bistros, where the chefs came out from the kitchen to taste from the director’s private reserve. Hitchcock seemed to know all the chefs by name. “He passed his life in restaurants,” Auber said.

He talked vaguely of starring Auber in a film he said he was planning: the story of an American serviceman who meets a French girl during World War II, then brings her home with him to the United States, where her illusions about him are rudely stripped away. She never saw anything on paper; he simply told her the story, embroidering it over dinners.

The director told Auber more than once an anecdote about a famous, beautiful actress throwing herself at him. He didn’t boast, or tell the story crudely; he refused to give the name of the star, or any details about what had happened between them. The French actress wasn’t sure whether or not to believe Hitchcock, but he talked about the incident so earnestly that she wanted to believe him. She thought perhaps it really had happened.

One night, after a dinner in Paris, Auber offered to drive him back to his hotel, but Hitchcock said he would walk back from her place. So she drove to where she lived with her boyfriend, a Spanish dancer. It was late at night; they parked in her small car and talked.

During a lull in the conversation, to her amazement, Hitchcock suddenly lunged at Auber, trying to kiss her “full on the mouth.” “I shied away immediately,” recalled the actress. “I said, ‘It’s not possible.’ Someone had once told me that, if a woman was ever [put] in this position, she must say, ‘No, I am faithful. I have a faithful temperament.’ ”

Hitchcock accepted her explanation that she felt the need to be faithful to her boyfriend. He appeared mortified by the incident. Over the years he
contacted her a few times, asking if they might patch up their friendship, but the bond was broken. The actress told Hitchcock she felt betrayed.

“One never imagines that someone like that has a crush on you,” the French actress said. “It was an enormous disappointment for me. I had never imagined such a thing. The quality of our relationship was entirely different.” Reflecting on what had happened between them, Auber said she thought Hitchcock felt ugly, and that this ugliness was a wall between him and women. “The poor cabbage had a wonderful soul, I know,” she added.

Once again in the summer he divided his time between film and television. As Hitchcock had explained in his letter to Michael Balcon even before the news was made public in the United States, the success of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
had generated a lucrative offer from NBC. The network was preparing a new series called
Suspicion
, for which it sought his imprimatur. The financial incentives were attractive, but so was the hourlong format. Hitchcock reached agreement with the network before his second hospitalization; then, after recovering, he plunged into shaping a second television series, and directing the premiere. Shamley Productions signed to produce at least ten episodes of
Suspicion.

In that busy first week of May 1957, Hitchcock met with Joan Harrison and Francis Cockrell to discuss the first
Suspicion
episode, based on a Cornell Woolrich story called “Three O’Clock.” Over the summer he then met repeatedly with Harrison.

It took him one week, in mid-July, to direct the Woolrich-inspired drama—retitled “Four O’Clock”—with E. G. Marshall as a man who rigs a time bomb in his cellar to murder his wife (Nancy Kelly), whom he suspects of infidelity. Unfortunately, thieves break into the house and bind and gag the man next to his ticking bomb. “It is one of Hitchcock’s best televisual efforts,” wrote J. Lary Kuhns in a definitive article about Hitchcock’s television career, “rigorously done, without any atmospheric score, and climaxing in a stunning montage sequence.” The second half might be seen as “a companion piece to ‘Breakdown,’ ” wrote Kuhns, “with the internal monologue acting as a counterpoint to the visual.”
^*

Norman Lloyd joined Shamley Productions in the summer of 1957 to assist with its burgeoning operations. After acting in Charles Chaplin’s
Limelight
, Lloyd had moved back to New York in 1952 to work in theater and television, but he felt stalled professionally. When Hitchcock called to offer him a job as an associate producer on
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
,
Lloyd was surprised. Hitchcock was taking a chance on the actor’s moving behind the camera, but he liked Lloyd and trusted his intelligence. When Lloyd came out to Hollywood, he left his family in New York at first, joining Shamley on a six-month tryout. He started as an assistant to Harrison.

Yet Hitchcock still approved the stories and writers, helped with script problems, discussed the major casting of all the television shows—even working on Sundays when his weekdays were crowded. He regularly met with James Allardice to cook up his monologues, and watched all the finished episodes before they were aired, although his postproduction suggestions were usually diplomatic. His television duties were sandwiched into an appointment book never more crowded than in 1956. And whenever there was spare time, he had lunch with Ernest Lehman.

Hitchcock’s chagrin over losing Vera Miles kept him from going wild over Kim Novak.

Novak annoyed him, even before he met her. At her first wardrobe meeting with Edith Head, the actress informed Head that she was disposed to wearing any color “except gray”—which was the color of Madeleine’s suit in the book
and
film. Head recalled: “Either she [Novak] hadn’t read the script, or she had and wanted me to think she hadn’t. I explained to her that Hitch paints a picture in his films, that color is as important to him as it is to any artist.” Her assistant stuck “the sketch of the gray suit off to the side so she wouldn’t see it,” while Head showed her “some of the other designs.”

After Novak left, the costume designer called Hitchcock, “asking if that damn suit had to be gray, and he explained to me that the simple gray suit and plain hairstyle were very important, and represented the character’s view of herself in the first half of the film. The character would go through a psychological change in the second half of the film, and would then wear more colorful clothes to reflect the change. Even in a brief conversation, Hitch could communicate complex ideas. He was telling me that women have more than one tendency, a multiplicity of tastes, which can be clouded by the way they view themselves at any particular moment. He wasn’t about to lose that subtle but important concept.”

“Handle it, Edith,” Hitchcock said, “I don’t care what she wears as long as it’s a gray suit.”

Coming to lunch at Bellagio Road in late June, Novak persisted with her conditions. She didn’t care for Madeleine’s prescribed hairstyle or color; she didn’t wear suits in real life or on camera—especially gray suits.

Hitchcock didn’t blink. “Look, Miss Novak,” he said, “you do your hair whatever color you like, and you wear whatever you like, so long as it conforms to the story requirements.” (As Hitchcock later told Truffaut,
“I used to say, ‘Listen. You do whatever you like; there’s always the cutting-room floor.’ That stumps them. That’s the end of that.”)

Sam Taylor was also present for the Bellagio Road lunch. To Novak’s consternation, Hitchcock steered the discussion toward “everything except the film—art, food, travel, wine,” the writer remembered, “all the things he thought she wouldn’t know very much about. He succeeded in making her feel like a helpless child, ignorant and untutored, and that’s just what he wanted—to break down her resistance. By the end of the afternoon he had her right where he wanted her, docile and obedient and even a little confused.”

At her next meeting with Head, Novak seemed chastened. Brunet hair (for Judy) and a gray suit were now acceptable. There was one point of principle she refused to surrender, however: the buxom actress often preferred to go without a brassiere in life, and wanted to do the same in some scenes on screen. Though he preferred to dictate ladies’ underwear too, that was all right by Hitchcock.
^*

August and September were taken up with final script meetings, scouting up north, casting featured parts, wardrobe, and camera tests. The days were filled with meetings at which Hitchcock reviewed all the design and storyboard sketches. He watched all the second-unit footage, looked at photographs, and approved all the locations.

The film would visit several Bay Area landmarks, including Fort Point, where Madeleine attempts a watery suicide; the Palace of the Legion of Honor, where Madeleine sits transfixed before the portrait of Carlotta Valdes; Golden Gate Park, where Scottie and Judy take their most romantic stroll; the church at San Juan Bautista, whose bell tower would be matted in; and the cliffs and redwood forests of Big Basin, where Scottie kisses Madeleine.

Besides Barbara Bel Geddes, the supporting cast included Tom Helmore (who had played a liaison officer in
Secret Agent
) as the duplicitous Gavin Elster, and the Russian-born Konstantin Shayne as Pop Leibel, the bookshop proprietor and local-history buff who relates the legend of Carlotta Valdes.
^*

After almost two years of scriptwork and preparation, the filming began in San Francisco on September 30. The first scene photographed dated back to the original novel and Maxwell Anderson’s initial script: the scene where Scottie follows Madeleine as she visits the grave of Carlotta Valdes at the Mission Dolores, one of San Francisco’s oldest structures. (In
the novel the site is the Cimetière de Passy in Paris.) The first day’s work had been estimated in advance by script supervisor Peggy Robertson at two minutes and forty-nine seconds of screen time. “In a testament to Hitchcock’s efficiency and planning,” Dan Auiler wrotes, it’s “within seconds of the duration of the finished sequence.”

Everyone agrees that Hitchcock approached
Vertigo
with an unusual air of seriousness.

“We could all tell,” screenwriter Sam Taylor recalled, “that this was a very important project for Hitch, and that he was feeling this story very deeply, very personally.”

“The atmosphere of the film, and of the shooting,” concurred John Russell Taylor in the authorized biography, “was so strange and intense it seemed to affect everyone.”

It was true even of the leading man who usually made things look easy. James Stewart, who stayed with the Hitchcocks at their Santa Cruz home during the location work, driving to and from the set with his friend—his partner, his director—he too caught the intensity. This, his fourth Hitchcock film, would elicit Stewart’s darkest high-wire act of vulnerability, passion, and rage.

The leading man was wont to plunge “deep inside himself to prepare for an emotional scene,” Kim Novak remembered. “He was not the kind of actor who, when the director said, ‘Cut!’ would be able to say, ‘OK’ and walk away. I was the same way. He’d squeeze my hand and we’d allow each other to come down slowly, like in a parachute.”

Stewart spent a lot of time squeezing Novak’s hand, and defusing tensions between the leading lady and director. Her costar “looked after me,” Novak said. “He was like the boy next door, my father, and the brother I wished I had. He had a natural kindness and sensitivity. I was nervous at first with Hitchcock. I kept saying to Jimmy, ‘What do you think he wants me to do?’ Jimmy put a gentle arm on my shoulder and said, ‘There, there now, Kim. It will be fine. Now, if Hitch didn’t think that you were right for the part, he wouldn’t have signed you to do it in the first place. You must believe it for yourself.’ ”

Novak never enjoyed the same rapport with Hitchcock. He thought the actress was full of herself, and stubborn about her bad ideas. Novak had arrived on the set, Hitchcock explained later, “with all sorts of preconceived notions that I couldn’t possibly go along with.” They retreated to the privacy of her dressing room, where he told her to blank out her emotions for the camera. “You have got a lot of expression in your face. Don’t want any of it. I only want on your face what you want to tell to the audience—what you are thinking.

“Let me explain to you,” Hitchcock continued. “If you put in a lot of redundant expressions on your face, it’s like taking a sheet of paper and scribbling all over it—full of scribble, the whole piece of paper. You want to write a sentence for somebody to read. If they can’t read it—too much scribble. Much easier to read if the piece of paper is blank. That’s what your face ought to be when we need the expression.”