Alfred Hitchcock (108 page)

On June 2, 1958, Hitchcock officially began work at MGM. Ernest Lehman was putting finishing touches on the script of the new film, which they were still calling “In a Northwesterly Direction.” On August 20, they left to begin location filming in New York, Chicago, and Rapid City, South Dakota.

Early that summer, James Stewart had honored his commitment to appear opposite Kim Novak in
Bell Book and Candle
, the Columbia picture owed to Harry Cohn in return for Novak’s loan-out to
Vertigo.
Thus Stewart diplomatically bowed out of “Northwesterly,” but by then he must have realized that Hitchcock had his sights set on another star. Only Cary Grant could play the sexy Thornhill that Hitchcock and Lehman were conjuring up—the man who elicits a swooning double-take from a hospital patient when he steps through her window in one scene, her frightened command to “Stop!” softening, when she gets a closer look at the handsome specimen, into a huskier plea: “
Stop
…”

Vertigo’s
weak box office may have been the deciding factor in the director’s mind when he finally turned against the possibility of Stewart. “In private,” François Truffaut revealed after Hitchcock’s death, “Hitchcock attributed the commercial failure of
Vertigo
to Stewart’s aging appearance.”
Hitchcock would continue to mention Stewart in connection with future projects throughout the 1960s, but none ever materialized, and the star of
Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much
, and
Vertigo
never again appeared in a Hitchcock film. In spite of their friendship, which never really abated, isn’t it likely that Stewart’s vanity was wounded?

Hitchcock “had a clear view of the value of the stars he employed,” recalled
North by Northwest
actor James Mason. The director “told me for instance that the name of James Stewart on an Alfred Hitchcock film could be relied on to bring in one million dollars more than that of Cary Grant. He said this without any disrespect to Grant who, he was quick to point out, would obviously be more valuable than Stewart in other contexts. But he wanted to hit the big markets of middle America, an area of which Stewart was the darling.”

But
Vertigo
had failed in those markets, and now Hitchcock looked for Grant to give a different sort of boost to the new film, even with its most memorable scene set in Middle America. As with
To Catch a Thief
, Grant’s presence would add to the film’s foreign prospects (“other contexts”) while making it more of a draw as a “woman’s picture.” All along Grant had been waiting in the wings to be tapped on the shoulder by the director he trusted. The seduction was completed by a contract giving the star $450,000 in salary, plus a share of profits.

Not only would Hitchcock sacrifice Middle America for Cary Grant, he’d also sacrifice the peace of mind with which he preferred to work. And sure enough, immediately after signing his contract, the film’s new star began to question the script, his part—the whole project. Indeed, Grant tried to renege. “Suddenly all Cary could think about and talk about was how desperately he wanted out of the movie,” said Lehman. “The role was all wrong for him. The picture would be a disaster, etcetera, etcetera. Apparently Hitch was accustomed to this sort of thinking from Cary, so he just shrugged his shoulders and held fast.” Grant abandoned his protests.

With the dashing Grant as Thornhill, who was going to portray Eve Kendall, the American Mata Hari with whom he falls in love? MGM, favoring its own roster, proposed the leggy dancer Cyd Charisse. Hitchcock temporized, considering other glamorous ladies, including Elizabeth Taylor. He spoke with Princess Grace, who said she might consider a comeback. By July, however, he had rejected all the studio names, and it had become obvious that Princess Grace wasn’t going to leave Monaco for Hollywood—at least not yet.

As the start date approached, Hitchcock announced a surprising selection: Eva Marie Saint. Surprising because, although Saint was an exceptional actress, she wasn’t regarded as particularly sexy or mysterious. Indeed, the actress had been quite the opposite of Mata Hari in her Oscar-winning
performance as Marlon Brando’s noble, salt-of-the-earth girlfriend in
On the Waterfront.

When Saint came to lunch at Bellagio Road in the first week of August, Hitchcock joked about changing her image in
North by Northwest.
“You don’t cry in this one,” the director told Saint. “There’s no sink” (as in “kitchen-sink neorealism”). Unlike with Kim Novak, however, he instantly felt comfortable with the good-humored, unpretentious actress, as well educated and well trained as she was beautiful. Saint went away from lunch thinking “one of his greatest gifts as a director was that he made you feel you were the only perfect person for the role and this gave you incredible confidence.”

She placed herself trustingly in Hitchcock’s hands, and he rewarded that trust. MGM prepared an expensive wardrobe for her; Hitchcock rejected the designs. “I acted just like a rich man keeping a woman,” he later boasted. “I supervised the choice of her wardrobe in every detail—just as Stewart did with Novak in
Vertigo.
” They visited Bergdorf Goodman and picked out her clothing from the latest styles for sale.
^*
“I suggested,” Hitchcock recalled, with impressive exactitude, that she “be dressed in a basic black suit (with a simple emerald pendant) to intimate her relationship with [James] Mason; in a heavy silk black cocktail dress subtly imprinted with wine red flowers, in scenes where she deceived Cary; in a charcoal brown, full-skirted jersey and a burnt orange burlap outfit in the scenes of action.”

The intention, Hitchcock explained, “was that she be dressed brightly while the mood of the scene was subdued—and quietly while the mood was exciting.” While filming in New York, he boasted, “I’ve done a great deal for Miss Eva Marie Saint. She was always a good actress, but [in
North by Northwest
] she is no longer the drab, mousy little girl she was. I’ve given her vitality and sparkle. Now she’s a beautiful actress.”

But it was true enough, and her transformation served as much to fix his own mental image of her as it did to help the actress find her character. Even off-camera: one day during a lull in the filming, Saint, decked out for the auction scene in her cocktail dress, wandered off the set for a cup of coffee. Spying her standing around with a Styrofoam cup in her hand, Hitchcock was taken aback and admonished her. “Eva Marie, you don’t get your coffee,” the director told her bluntly. “We have someone get it for you. And you drink from a porcelain cup and saucer. You are wearing a $3,000 dress, and I don’t want the extras to see you quaffing from a Styrofoam cup.”

The rest of the cast was almost ideal. Wisecracking Jessie Royce Landis,
who’d stolen her scenes in
To Catch a Thief
, was back as Grant’s scornful mother. (It was an in-joke flattering to Grant’s perpetually young persona that, in real life, Royce was very nearly the same age as the man playing her son.) Leo G. Carroll would make his sixth appearance in a Hitchcock film as the tweedy chief of the U.S. counterintelligence agency.

Yul Brynner was Hitchcock’s original choice for the heavy—Vandamm, the importer and exporter of government secrets, and the betrayed lover of Eve Kendall. When Brynner proved elusive, Hitchcock went for James Mason, whom he had seen on the London stage early in his career—Mason played the lead, for example, in a famous revival of
Escape.
Mason was underrated as a suave leading man, while always creepy as a villain. (He is one actor all the guests in
Rope
agree on: “So attractively sinister!”)

Vandamm has a young, fiercely devoted, implicitly homosexual (“Call it my woman’s intuition, if you will”) attaché, a part for a newcomer—Martin Landau. Hitchcock had seen Landau onstage with Edward G. Robinson in the Los Angeles road show production of
The Middle of the Night.
Like Saint, Landau had studied with the Actors Studio, but while Saint was flexible in her approach, the younger actor’s Method was more tortured—and contrary to Hitchcock’s approach. Mason watched the director have malicious fun undercutting Landau in his first scene, where Thornhill is kidnapped and brought to meet Vandamm.

Landau had persuaded himself that it was “an important scene,” according to Mason, who shared the scene with him. “He had given it much thought and, with a sense of something already achieved, said to me, ‘There is a very clear progression for me in the course of this scene and, step by step, I have planned exactly what I must do with it.’ ”

When Hitchcock arrived to take charge, the director asked his assistant, Peggy Robertson, to remind him of the order of the setups. She consulted her notes, and said he had planned to shoot the high-angles first, then the other shots. According to Mason, the scene had been deliberately cut up, “so Landau never had a chance for his clear progression.” Mason admitted he himself wasn’t particularly stimulated by his villainous role. He liked Hitchcock, enjoyed his films, but found him a director who used actors like “animated props.”

The first footage for
North by Northwest
was captured in front of the United Nations on August 27, 1958. UN officials had (understandably) refused Hitchcock permission to shoot an assassination on-site, so cameraman Robert Burks hid inside a carpet-cleaning truck and stole a master shot of Cary Grant leaping out of a taxi and crossing the street to the entrance. “Then we got a still photographer to get permission to take some colored stills inside,” Hitchcock later recalled, “and I walked around with
him, as if I were a visitor, whispering, ‘Take that shot from there. And now, another one from the roof down.’ We used those color photographs to reconstitute the settings in our studios.”

Establishing scenes were also photographed on Madison Avenue, at Grand Central Station, and on Long Island; then the company headed to Chicago for filming at LaSalle Station and the Ambassador Hotel; and from there to Rapid City, South Dakota, for the story’s climax at a National Park Service cafeteria, a mythical Frank Lloyd Wright-type house, and airstrip atop Mount Rushmore, ending with the famous chase across the presidential faces.

What happened at the United Nations was reprised in Rapid City. Although he knew full well what was called for in the script, the location manager had to promise there would be no depiction of violence atop the “Shrine of Democracy,” or even on the slopes, in order to secure the necessary filming permissions from the National Park Service. When the cast and crew arrived, the Hollywood folk gave interviews, and Hitchcock cheerfully dissembled. “When they say we’ll do something on Lincoln’s nose, this is very bad,” he was quoted upon landing at the Rapid City airport. “We wouldn’t dream of it. In fact, it would defeat the purpose for which we are using Mount Rushmore in the film.”

One reporter then asked specifically “about the chase scene,” according to Todd David Epp, writing for
South Dakota History.
“Hitchcock, ever the showman, handed the journalist a napkin with the presidents’ heads drawn on it and a dotted line purporting to show the chase path. The Rapid City newspaper printed the story and a picture of the napkin. Citing ‘patent desecration,’ the Department of the Interior (the Park Service’s parent agency), summarily revoked Hitchcock’s original permit and prohibited the filming.”

Hitchcock’s schedule for Mount Rushmore filming was cut back to only two days—and then only in the park cafeteria and parking lot, and on the terraces that afforded views of the memorial. But two days—along with permission for still shots of the stone presidents, which, as ingenuously reported in the
Rapid City Daily Journal
, would help in creating a full-scale replica “for additional closeup scenes back in Hollywood”—was enough.

Meanwhile at MGM, production designer Robert Boyle was busy creating a glorious fake, where everything forbidden could take place: spy planes landing on Mount Rushmore, bad guys firing guns, actors climbing over the stone faces. After viewing
North by Northwest
a year later, Department of Interior officials felt “hoodwinked,” according to Epp. Authorities wrote incensed letters to MGM, and South Dakota senator Karl Mundt demanded the filmmakers be penalized. The park service succeeded only in having its screen acknowledgment deleted.

Fine by Hitchcock.

Where the actors were concerned, Hitchcock was the ultimate stone face. As the years passed, he addressed actors less frequently; he consistently pared down their unnecessary dialogue; and for this film—the opposite of kitchen-sink drama—what he really required from the actors was an attitude, rather than any in-depth exploration of humanity.

Eva Marie Saint already felt transformed by her handpicked wardrobe. She recalled that all Hitchcock offered her were three simple instructions: “Lower my voice; don’t use my hands; and look directly at Cary Grant in my scenes with him, look right into his eyes. From that, I conjured up in my mind the kind of lady he saw this woman as.” He must have been right: Saint’s performance—the epitome of playful chic—stands up for all time.