Alfred Hitchcock (137 page)

If the writer stumbled, then implicitly it was Hitchcock’s turn to venture an idea “bold and outrageous,” in Lehman’s words. “He knows that you understand the anything-goes rule of this moviemaking game that the two of you play in his office, otherwise neither of you would risk the embarrassment. So
you look at him steadily and give him your full attention and listen to all of his ideas, and when he has finished you respond with one of your own personal devices for dealing with this sensitive work relationship.”

Either: “Hey, that’s nifty, Hitch. I really like that,” according to Lehman.

Or: “Hmmm … yes, that has possibilities …”

Or: “Very interesting … really interesting … I think we ought to throw it in the hopper with all the others …”

Or: “I don’t know … I see what you mean … but I don’t know.”

“The rules—never acknowledged or articulated—are: I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me,” reflected Lehman, “provided neither of us lets the other hurt the picture. I’ll let you fight me if you let me fight you, provided neither of us forgets that the main fight is to entertain an audience.”

At 12:30
P.M.
, the office door would burst open, heralding a studio waiter carrying two trays of New York steak and black coffee. On cue, the two would retreat to Hitchcock’s private dining room. “The story problems can go to the devil,” Lehman explained. “This is conversation time, much of it about rare dishes and vintage wines, because there are no calories in small talk, or in flashbacks to the triumphs and the defeats of yesteryear.”

When Hitchcock lit a cigar and asked, “Shall we return to our toy trains?”—usually about 1:40
P.M.
—it was the signal to amble back to the red leather chair and sofa.

“Now, where were we?”

Before lunch one day they had been discussing the kidnapping. Of course Hitchcock Americanized the victim
and
the scene of the crime. In the book the English archbishop is snatched during a country idyll; Hitchcock delighted in his substitution, which had “the special appeal of breaking a taboo,” in John Russell Taylor’s words. The film’s kidnapping would take place at Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco, with the victim, an Episcopalian bishop, injected with Pentothal and dragged off during services (“depending of course on the slightly embarrassed sense of decorum which possesses those in church and makes them hesitate to act in what would otherwise be a natural fashion,” observed Taylor).

Later, the kidnappers deposit the drugged bishop in their car on the way to making the ransom exchange. But just as they are about to leave their garage, the clairvoyant, with singular bad timing, turns up to identify the long-lost heir. As she is explaining her errand, however, a car door bulges open and the stupefied bishop pitches out the side. …

“But Hitch, I thought we had agreed that he can’t open the back door if he’s unconscious …”

“Well, if he doesn’t open the back door and fall out, how will she be able to see him? …”

“She won’t,” said Lehman. “So we’ll have to come up with another—”

“But think, when she sees the bishop’s head fall out of the open back door? …”

“How can an unconscious man reach up and open a car door?”

“I’ll shoot her point of view,” said Hitchcock, “and the bishop’s mouth will be hanging open like this, only upside down, of course …”

“But if he’s unconscious …”

“Did I ever tell you,” interrupted Hitchcock, “about the time I ran into Dorothy Hammerstein in a New York restaurant after having not seen her for thirty years?”

“No, please do …”

Daily at 3:15
P.M.
sharp a secretary entered with two wineglasses of chilled Fresca over a single cube of ice. Thus refreshed, Hitchcock and Lehman continued their debate about the unconscious bishop, without resolution. After a short while, the director called out “loudly for another glass, this time with two blocks of ice, please.” The secretary reentered, exited, “and this time,” wrote Lehman, “she leaves the door slightly open.”

“To this day,” wrote Lehman, he hadn’t “been able to figure out the signal, if indeed there is one.” Was it the words “two blocks”? Or was it the mere request for another glass?

All he knew for sure was that the door was opening, and he was being ushered out.

“I think we did very well today,” Hitchcock would say as Lehman departed, “don’t you?”

“Terrific, Hitch. Very encouraging. And tomorrow will be even better.”

“OK, old bean, see you in the morning.”

It’s “all a game leading nowhere,” Lehman reflected, driving home; “you
know
it’s just talk until you both throw in the towel, you know that you’re never actually going to write a screenplay for a film called
Family Plot
, and even if you did, you know he has no intention of making it. Just as you knew there would never be a
North by Northwest.
”

Their talks were energized in the first months of 1974 by Watergate and the Patty Hearst affair. Hitchcock was fascinated by Nixon, a villainous president who “smiled” as he fended off impeachment, and by the headlines from San Francisco—the putative setting of his new film—about the newspaper heiress who enlisted in the very gang that kidnapped her. Somehow, he vowed, he would slip Nixon and Patty Hearst into “Deceit.”
^*

By mid-April Lehman had finished an initial draft, which Hitchcock critiqued
in detail. “Attached to each page of Lehman’s draft was an identical-size piece of paper, with Hitchcock’s observations on each scene and each line of dialogue,” according to Donald Spoto. “He added the opening shot of the picture in painstaking visual detail; made changes in major scenes; queried Lehman on motivations and major shots; altered a word or two; suggested clarifications; pointed out some problems of construction.”

That same month the director went all out for a trip to New York, with a press conference, interviews, and a gala tribute sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It must have been extremely gratifying for him; Princess Grace came from Monaco, and other veterans of his films stood at the podium, tweaking him with ironic praise. With a draft of his fifty-third feature in his pocket, Hitchcock was feeling almost buoyant. He also made a round of plays; watching old friends Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in Noel Coward’s
Suite in Two Keys
at the Ethel Barrymore Theater also gave him a chance to brush up on tone for
Family Plot.

Returning to California, Hitchcock went to the racetrack, attended
Gypsy
at the Shubert and
Mack and Mabel
at the Chandler. He spent several days posing for Philippe Halsman for a special issue of French
Vogue
, and also for Maureen Lambray, who was compiling a book of photographs of film directors. (Universal erected a special set for her so that Hitchcock could be snapped reclining on a train seat.)

The summer of 1974 was capped by his (and Alma’s) seventy-fifth-birthday party, which Lew Wasserman arranged and hosted at Chasen’s. Cary Grant, Laraine Day, Paul Newman, and François Truffaut were among the luminaries who toasted the Hitchcocks’ continued health and well-being, and ate cake with the director’s frosting-embossed profile.

The second round of script meetings with Lehman, though, went less well. “I found myself refusing to accept Hitch’s ideas (if I thought they were wrong),” Lehman recalled later, “merely because those ideas were coming from a legendary figure.” The writer had grown weary of Hitchcock overanalyzing everything, and he simply wanted the go-ahead to finish. The silences between them grew longer, the disagreements awkward. Hitchcock seemed overly worried about plot logic. Lehman worried more about the characters. They pondered possible stars, which for Hitchcock could be a substitute for characterization.

All along Hitchcock “sort of dropped things in to pay lip service” to characterization, Lehman remembered, “but he really didn’t want them in the picture. I pleaded with him, so he put them back in the script and shot them, then edited them out of the picture.”

Privately Hitchcock had decided that Lehman was “a very nervous and edgy sort of man” who was deliberately giving him “a rather difficult time,” as he complained in a letter to Michael Balcon in England. When
he suffered a heart attack in September, Hitchcock went so far as to blame the episode (only half kiddingly, it seems) on the constant “nervous state” induced by his arguments with Lehman. After dizzy spells, the director was taken in an ambulance to the UCLA hospital, to a special wing that had been built in part from his charitable donations, where a pacemaker to monitor his heart was installed under the skin of his shoulder blade. He took manifest pleasure in describing the operation later to friends and journalists; the device itself, he told Balcon, “looks like one of those old-fashioned watches that men used to wear in their waistcoats.”

But Hitchcock’s surgery was followed by complications—fever and pain, a severe bout with colitis, then a kidney stone operation and further complications in October. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Hitchcock injured himself in the first of several falls connected to his arthritis, his medication, and his excessive drinking. At that point, few believed that “Deceit” would ever get made.

But Hitchcock was still a believer, and once again, miraculously, he bounced back. By the first week of January 1975 he was going to plays (Ingrid Bergman in
The Constant Wife
) and dinner parties (a guest of the Victor Savilles at Hillcrest Country Club), and holding meetings with Howard Kazanjian, the assistant director lined up by Universal; art director Henry Bumstead, who had worked with him as far back as
The Man Who Knew Too Much;
and cameraman Leonard South, who once was Robert Burks’s assistant. By the end of the month he was watching casting reels; even Mrs. Hitchcock, drawn into the excitement, came into the office for lunch, screenings, and meetings, to help narrow down the casting.

Jack Nicholson was one possibility for George Lumley, the boyfriend of the spiritualist, Blanche. Hitchcock had watched
Easy Rider
and the explosion of Nicholson films that followed. But Nicholson was heavily committed, and busy with preproduction for
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
More than ever, Hitchcock felt the need to move quickly. Once more forced to settle for a second choice, now he found a backup Nicholson: Bruce Dern, who had costarred memorably with Nicholson in
The King of Marvin Gardens
and other young-audience films. Of course Dern had cut his teeth as the sailor bludgeoned in
Marnie
, and Hitchcock fondly recalled his offbeat personality.

Universal recommended Liza Minnelli for the clairvoyant, but Hitchcock couldn’t see her in the part, nor did he want to jack up the budget for her star salary. The New Hollywood theme continued with the casting of Barbara Harris, whom Hitchcock had watched in the film of
A Thousand Clowns;
though Harris was mainly a Broadway name, she had also played a psychic in
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
, and had just finished a
major role in Robert Altman’s
Nashville.
Hitchcock followed the career of Altman, who had worked for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
—though, as he later told Penelope Gilliat, he didn’t much like
Nashville
, with its loose episodes, so antithetical to his own tightly choreographed style.

Everyone warned him against Harris, a Method-trained improvisational talent regarded as intuitive but quirky (and not the slightest box-office draw). But Hitchcock thought her background was fine for the character she was playing, and he liked her temperament when he met her. (It didn’t hurt that she physically resembled Alma in her younger days.)

Karen Black was also New Hollywood, a prominent player in the Nicholson films
Five Easy Pieces
and
Drive, He Said.
(She was also in Ernest Lehman’s
Portnoy’s Complaint
and Altman’s
Nashville.
) Another free spirit, Black met Hitchcock in February, and on the spot he decided to cast her as the wife of the master villain, the Trader. During her crime sprees, however, Black would be disguised by an ugly wig and mens-wear, and thus all but unrecognizable. (She was meant to evoke Patty Hearst.)

But who should be the Trader, the coldhearted chief of the kidnapping scheme? Perhaps it should be someone from Old Hollywood; perhaps John Houseman, the director mused during one script session—for his friend from
Saboteur
days had now transformed himself into a portly but Oscar-winning actor, playing a Harvard law professor in
The Paper Chase.

“What would John Houseman be doing as a resident of San Francisco?” a skeptical Ernest Lehman had asked.

“Well, he could be in clerical work,” Hitchcock answered warily.

“I see him more as the owner of an art gallery,” Lehman countered. “John Houseman would never lower himself to do clerical work.”

“John Houseman, on the other hand, might not lower himself to do kidnapping either. I know he’s a professor at Berkeley.”

“He could be an impresario of the San Francisco Opera,” mused Lehman.

“That’s too high, isn’t it?” wondered Hitchcock.

“Sounds like Houseman, doesn’t it?” insisted Lehman.

But it was a subtext of Hitchcock’s last several films that people from the old school were now simply
too
old to play leads for him. In the end, the Trader would be presented as neither an art gallery owner nor an opera impresario, but the master salesman of a jewelry store; Hitchcock accepted Universal’s recommendation and cast a younger man named Roy Thinnes, the former star of TV’s
The Invaders
who was under option and just finishing
The Hindenburg.

The only old acquaintance who did get a plum part was Catherine Nesbitt, whom Hitchcock had admired in the 1920s as a leading lady in West End plays such as James Barrie’s
Quality Street.
Nesbitt had made one of
her infrequent screen appearances in 1935’s
The Passing of the Third Floor Back
—a rare non-Hitchcock written by Alma.