Alfred Hitchcock (123 page)

Hitchcock disliked the husband-to-be, and his muttered acerbity, his warnings to eschew marriage, fell on burning ears. His single-mindedness has been interpreted in other books as jealousy of Hedren, but it was also a knee-jerk reflex. Hitchcock was quite capable of
encouraging
the marriage of a close associate—he had thrown himself wholeheartedly, for example, into the Joan Harrison-Eric Ambler nuptials in 1958—but he had lost too many other leading ladies to marriages and motherhood.

Even so, in spite of all the pressures, everyone who was there agrees that the first half of filming was relatively trouble-free.

In the first half, Connery’s professional amiability seemed to lighten the air. Hitchcock supplied the star with “very little direction, didn’t even look through the viewfinder,” Connery recalled. But every once in a while the director did venture minor “adjustments and suggestions” (Connery’s words) in the rhythm of scenes—which, according to one Connery biographer, largely consisted of advising the actor to shut his mouth while listening for his cues, and inserting “dog’s feet” into his lengthier speeches. “Dog’s feet?” asked a mystified Connery. “Pawses,” Hitchcock drawled.

Connery could grin at that (and whenever he liked)—but Hedren couldn’t so much as smile without permission. Hitchcock watched closely over her scenes, hovered and stared, adopting the same inhibiting attitude toward her that Mark Rutland assumes toward Marnie in the film. The director always built up to the critical scenes during a production, so the first half of the filming was primarily groundwork. And the first half of filming went along fine—or were there certain warning signs?

Throughout his long career, Hitchcock had been a master of technical challenges; it was often the human challenges—the failures of an actor or actress to embody his vision sufficiently—that had stymied him. And now, realizing that his handpicked star was standing between him and his realization of
Marnie
, the director felt an unaccustomed, rising panic.

The first half of filming was done by Christmas, and it wasn’t until after
the New Year that Hitchcock’s attitude demonstrably changed. His good humor seemed to slip away, and he seemed sluggish on the set. Mariette Hartley recalled that the director, initially affable, ceased to take notice of her. Connery no longer amused him; in one later interview, Hitchcock said he would have preferred an older man as Rutland—perhaps Laurence Olivier.
^*

Hedren’s performance was coming along, though ultimately she would prove somewhat inadequate in the role. The tension between her and the director had not dissipated—and now, worse, the actress seemed to be resisting him. The holiday break had allowed him time to brood over the rushes; now, with the darkest scenes coming up, it was make-or-break time.

Hitchcock tried any desperate means he could think of to rouse Hedren. Diane Baker, part of the film’s on-screen triangle, was suddenly drafted into an offscreen one. Around Christmas Hitchcock began plying the third-billed actress with gifts, inviting her to lunch in his trailer, conspicuously flattering her. “I was embarrassed for Tippi,” recalled Baker, “and feeling sorry that he was turning his attention onto me in front of Tippi, when Tippi was within ear range or sight.”

In this and other ham-handed ways, Hitchcock tried to get a rise out of Hedren—tried to force her to
be
Marnie. As her resentment grew, so did his dismay. Even then, it wasn’t until “the last quarter of the shoot,” in Hedren’s words, that the unthinkable happened.

In the last week of January 1964, Hedren asked to be excused for a few days to travel to New York to pick up a “Star of Tomorrow” award at a press function, and make an appearance on
The Tonight Show.
The director said no. Hedren was furious. “Not only would it be inconvenient, but he thought a break like that, taking her out of the mood they had created for the character (mainly by keeping her in virtual isolation during the shooting period), would harm her performance,” wrote John Russell Taylor, defending Hitchcock.

In an ugly flare-up, the actress screamed at Hitchcock—reportedly calling her director a fat pig in front of other people on the set. “Afterwards,” wrote Taylor, “all Hitch would volunteer was, ‘She did what no one is permitted to do. She referred to my
weight.
’ ”

Afterward, Hedren angrily demanded to be released from her exclusive contract with Hitchcock. Every bit as angry, the director said he would destroy her career before he let her go.

Communication between the two all but broke down, with a few weeks
of photography remaining. Although John Russell Taylor, in his authorized account, and Donald Spoto, in his unauthorized version, give highly disparate accounts of this incident, they agree on one detail: that Hitchcock thereafter distanced himself from the film and spoke to his leading lady only through intermediaries. However, Tony Lee Moral’s meticulous behind-the-scenes chronicle of the production insists upon a more tangled scenario—with Hitchcock, only momentarily defeated by his humiliation, springing back to life and trying to mend fences.

Hitchcock finished
Marnie
gamely, according to Moral’s book, as he had always finished embattled films throughout an embattled career. In February, for example, the director supervised the highly emotional scenes in Rutland’s car, where he grills Marnie about her true identity—“some of the best scenes in the finished film,” as Moral points out.

That better explains the timing of what Hitchcock is alleged to have done extremely late in the schedule—some time after the “Star of Tomorrow” brouhaha. In “late February,” according to
The Dark Side of Genius
, the director “finally lost any remnant of dignity and discretion. Alone with Hedren in her trailer after the day’s work, he made an overt sexual proposition that she could neither ignore nor answer casually.” Hitchcock had too long repressed his Victorian sexuality, Donald Spoto theorized, and “a healthy, active libido, earlier, would have prevented this entire chapter of his life.”

Note that Hedren is not quoted directly in this account. According to Spoto, he did not quote “Hitch’s vulgar proposition to her—because she did not repeat the words to me for decency’s sake.” “All I can say is demands of me were made that I couldn’t acquiesce to,” the star of
Marnie
explained in one interview. Hitchcock “didn’t want me for a mistress,” she said on another occasion.

So what happened exactly? What if this despicable secret would look merely foolish if explained in print? What if Hitchcock was thinking like Mark Rutland, telling Hedren how sexy and attractive she was, how much he wanted to sleep with her? What if he really
did
want to sleep with her? Or what if, while trying very hard to patch things up with his leading lady, he made one of his clumsiest attempts at tongue-kissing, or just as clumsy, a vulgar joke?

“I was with Tippi Hedren once on a CBS show,” recalled actress Joan Fontaine, who could boast of surviving a similarly complicated relationship with Hitchcock, “when she said he had propositioned her. Well, what he did was to see her Achilles’ heel, and, knowing that pretty young actresses wanted to feel that he was a dirty old man, he would play it up. ‘Yes, I must get into your bloomers, young lady!’ he would puff and growl. I can just see him leering at them in jest, but they never realized he was teasing them.”

Something happened: nobody doubts it. Whatever happened, if it happened on the stage in her trailer, the worst thing of all was that Hitchcock broke his own inviolable rule of professionalism at work. And whatever happened, it was his miscalculation, his mistake, his failure. The filming of
Marnie
ended on an unfortunate note.

The very last shot, incidentally, was captured on March 14. At the San Jose railroad station, a depot familiar to Hitchcock from his commutes, the director and a small crew photographed the opening of
Marnie
, which Hitchcock had precisely outlined a year earlier: a tracking shot of Hedren, walking through the station, a close-up on her bulging handbag full of stolen cash.

Tippi Hedren was
not
nominated for Best Actress. Neither was anyone else associated with
Marnie.
Indeed, after
The Birds
(and its sole nomination for Ub Iwerks for Best Special Effects), no Hitchcock film would ever again be nominated for an Academy Award.

Considering the Sturm und Drang behind the scenes, it’s ironic that
Marnie
has become, over time, the vital film for many Hitchcock cultists, who see in it the filmmaker’s maturity of craft and persistence of vision. What happened between the director and his leading lady, in the view of Hitchcockians, mirrors the complex angst of the subject.

Robin Wood insists that
Marnie
is “one of Hitchcock’s richest, most fully achieved and mature masterpieces.” Donald Spoto agrees: “I think it’s Hitch’s last great masterpiece.” Tony Lee Moral—noting that for Hitchcock’s centenary “a panel of top directors” assembled by
Sight and Sound
ranked
Marnie
as number ten among Hitchcock’s greatest films
^*
—wrote that the film continues to develop followers who probe its meaning, and especially has “become a time capsule for gender representations and psychoanalytical ideas for key traumas and events.”

Tippi Hedren would later tell interviewers that “for two years after
Marnie”
Hitchcock “cheated her out of a career” by refusing to release her from her contract, while informing other directors, including François Truffaut, that she was “busy.” But the record is far from clear.

Donald Spoto wrote that the director refused ever again to speak the actress’s name directly—ruefully referring to her, among friends and associates, as “that Girl.” But then Hitchcock had always referred to Hedren,
outside her own presence, as “the Girl” (it was how many silent-film directors referred to the leading lady’s role, and it was the established nickname of the character Hedren had played in
The Birds
).
^*

“Sometimes of course I have failed,” Hitchcock admitted in one interview. “Tippi Hedren did not have the volcano.” Yet his logbook indicates that he met with Hedren several times over the next year, trying to bridge the gulf between them. Neither party could muster the old goodwill, though Hitchcock continued to pay her salary of five hundred dollars weekly, or twenty-six thousand dollars per year.

Vera Miles had done television for Hitchcock after starring in
The Wrong Man
and
Psycho;
but for Hedren the last straw came when the director asked her to appear in a Universal telefilm, and she refused. That dissolved her contract, and by the fall of 1965, about a year and a half after completing
Marnie
, she was in London for a small role in
A Countess from Hong Kong
—Charles Chaplin’s last film. “When Hitch heard I was going to do the Chaplin film,” she boasted in a subsequent interview, “he almost had a heart attack, he was so upset.”

But her future as an actress was not grand.

As late as March 1964, even as he was finishing
Marnie
, Hitchcock was still looking forward to making
Mary Rose.
In the spring Jay Presson Allen delivered her second-draft script for a film that would have comprised an informal trilogy of dissimilar subjects linked by the same director and star: Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren. “This ghost story,” Joseph McBride observed in his definitive article on the subject, “would have taken Hitchcock’s characteristic mingling of eroticism and death into dimensions beyond which any he had explored on the screen.”