Alfred Hitchcock (39 page)

It would have been unheard of in 1937 for the British press to dwell on a physical description of Hitchcock, or to sling gibes about his weight. But that quickly became the routine in America. The U.S. press was awed by his size, reported now at 250 pounds. Interviews often took place during dinner or drinks, and American reporters wrote down not only what he ate, but the jokes he made about his weight too. One paper described him as looking like “one of those jolly Sultans in an
Esquire
cartoon,” while even the staid
New York Times
found him “Falstaffian”—“a walking monument to the principle of uninhibited addiction to sack and capon, prime beef and flowing ale, and double helpings of ice cream.”

The press was delighted at what good company Hitchcock proved to be—and how infinitely “quotable” he was. In this first round of American interviews, it’s palpably clear that a star was being born. He held forth not only on film, but on anything that came up. His trip coincided with the heavyweight championship bout between American Joe Louis and Tommy Farr, the Welsh coal miner who was the British Isles underdog. Farr battled hard for the full fifteen rounds but ended up losing the decision, which many considered unfair. It’s unclear whether the director of
The Ring
took in the bout in person, or listened on the radio, but Hitchcock could extemporize. “Before last Monday night [the day of the fight],” according to one newspaper, “Mr. Hitchcock didn’t think much of Farr’s chances. ‘Just popped up out of nowhere,’ he said. After Monday he didn’t think so much of our Brown Bomber, but Farr had gone up a couple of notches with him.”
^*

Speaking of boxers, Hitchcock mentioned that former British and Commonwealth Heavyweight Champion Joe Beckett, “whom somebody in the room ungraciously referred to as the Human Pancake,” was running a pub somewhere, and that Bombardier Billy Wells, another former champ (“Strawdin’ry man, Billy. Great style, but no guts. Knock a fellow silly and then stand back as if to say, ‘My, My! Look what I’ve done!’”), had performed fight scenes in
The Ring.

The “21” Club on West Fifty-second, where the rich mingled with the
literati, was
the
place to dine—and Hitchcock moved in, giving interviews. Dining there with columnist H. Allen Smith of the
New York Herald-Tribune
, Hitchcock was reported to have eaten three of the club’s famous steaks, followed by three of its famous vanilla ice cream desserts, followed by a pot of its justly unfamous English tea. (Afterward, Hitchcock said he was sorely tempted to fling the teapot to the floor, as was his wont back in England.) Instead, the director puffed upstairs three flights to examine the choice meat cuts hanging in “21”’s cooler.

Smith’s interviews could be fanciful; a screwball newspaperman known for his practical jokes, he once “kidnapped” Albert Einstein to keep him away from a dinner in his honor; and his popularity as a humorist would soon rival that of his friends James Thurber and Robert Benchley. But he presented this superb performance with a straight face, and so did Hitchcock.

It was hardly negative publicity; still, it was the first whiff of a Hitchcock caricature that would soon become the director’s public face, for better and for worse. And heading home on the
Georgic
in the first week of September, Hitchcock felt disheartened. The talks with Hollywood producers had proved inconclusive, and the “fat” articles had wounded his vanity. The
Hollywood Reporter
, quoting London sources, reported that Hitchcock returned “rather disconcerted” that “the American press boosted him as an expert on food instead of Britain’s ace director.”

“Learning from experience” could have been a motto for Hitchcock, though, and in time he would take the American fascination with his looks and personality and turn it to tremendous professional advantage. In time this puckish figure, a genial curiosity to the American press in 1937, would become the most interviewed, most profiled, and most written about and analyzed Hollywood director of all time.

For the moment, he was still a foreigner looking for an American home. The Selznick Agency tried once more to talk him into signing with Balcon and MGM-British as a surefire entree to Hollywood via David O. Selznick. All of Hitchcock’s instincts told him to decline. Balcon “was very possessive of me,” the director told François Truffaut, “and that’s why he was very angry, later on when I left for Hollywood.” But Myron Selznick succeeded in at least one crucial respect: he had convinced Hitchcock of his diligence. At last, the English director signed the papers to become an official client of the American agency.

Alfred Hitchcock was by any measure a self-made man. But even he had happy accidents that lifted him up at critical junctures in his career. Michael Balcon appointing him director of
The Pleasure Garden
was one such fortuitous event, if that anecdote is to be believed.
The Lady Vanishes
was another.

The Lady Vanishes
was based on the 1936 suspense novel
The Wheel Spins
by Ethel Lina White, a contemporary Welsh author who specialized in mysteries featuring endangered heroines. Producer Ted Black had bought the screen rights and commissioned a script in 1936. Second-unit photography actually started under an American director, Roy William Neill, in August of that year, with a few exteriors in Yugoslavia, but the filming encountered problems and the production was temporarily shelved.

The novel concerns an English socialite who takes a European holiday and is befriended by an elderly English governess during a long train journey. The governess disappears in the middle of the train trip, but not a single passenger will admit to having laid eyes on her. The socialite suspects a conspiracy, or foul play. When no one listens to her, and the facts prove elusive, she begins to doubt her own sanity.

The adaptation by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat had turned a dramatic and somewhat monochromatic novel inside out; the result was an eccentric and hilarious script in the Hitchcock style, even before Hitchcock himself became involved. Launder and Gilliat added a pair of Englishmen more curious about cricket scores than the fate of the vanished governess, and a blossoming romance between the socialite and a folklore scholar, the only train passenger who believes her tale. Then everything was tied into a web of politics and spies.

Launder and Gilliant were at the beginning of their remarkable hyphenated careers. Earlier scripts for pictures like
Rome Express
(1932) had already demonstrated their penchant for ripping train adventures, but largely on the strength of
The Lady Vanishes
they would be catapulted behind the camera, jointly writing, directing, and producing such classic English films as
Night Train to Munich, Millions Like Us, The Young Mr. Pitt, The Happiest Days of Your Life, Geordie
, and
The Belles of St. Trinians.

Launder was an ex-civil servant turned actor and playwright, Gilliat the son of the managing editor of the
Evening Standard
, and a protégé of Walter Mycroft. Entering the film business as Mycroft’s assistant, Gilliat rode to his first day of work at Elstree in 1928 in the same taxicab as Mycroft, and rode home the same day with Mycroft and Alfred Hitchcock in the director’s car.

Gilliat started out as a low-level reader for Mycroft, sifting through the B.I.P. “tripe pile” of stories. He knew Hitchcock only in passing from those days. Hitchcock, Gilliat recalled, relished sending the worst “penny dreadfuls” over to the story department for Mycroft’s consideration; more than once, Gilliat said, he sent Hitchcock back a report on a submission (“without reading it, of course”), trumpeting an embryonic
Madame Butterfly.
He took pleasure in tweaking the great director, conjuring a love story with heroine attracted to hero by “the healthful glow of his countenance,” and ending with the two passionately “sharing the same kimono.”

According to Gilliat, Hitchcock was in distinctly bad odor with Gaumont when he returned from the United States, because of negative reaction to
Young and Innocent
at studio previews. “The Ostrer brothers who owned the outfit,” Gilliat recalled, “were ready to settle Hitch’s contract, pay him off and not make the last one. He was never regarded by the more commercial end of the business as particularly good box-office. They told Ted Black this and he said, ‘He’s got one picture to do.’ The Ostrers asked Black if Hitchcock had a suitable subject and Ted said, ‘I think I have.’ Hitch hadn’t found one on his own.”

The director’s nose twitched as he read Launder and Gilliat’s blend of comedy, romance, and suspense, with all the Hitchcock ingredients: a missing body, a speeding train, a young man and woman linked by distrust and danger. If he hadn’t yet read the Ethel Lina White novel, he certainly recognized its inspiration. The legend of an ailing elderly lady who vanished from a hotel in the place de la Concorde during the Paris Exposition of 1889 had been fictionalized by Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes in her 1913 novel,
The End of Her Honeymoon
, and retold by Alexander Woollcott in “The Vanishing Lady” in his book
While Rome Burns.
Changing the film’s title to
The Lady Vanishes
was a nod to Woollcott, one of the writers Hitchcock devoutly read in his favorite U.S. magazine, the
New Yorker.
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Even though there was already a script, there is nonetheless debate over what Hitchcock contributed to the Launder-Gilliat draft, which had already been stamped with front-office approval a year earlier. According to Gilliat, Hitchcock approached their script the way he would a play, restricting his tinkering mainly to the beginning and ending.

Launder “agreed some new scenes with Hitch,” recalled Gilliat on one occasion, and “because Ted Black admired Hitch, they had decided to put a little extra in the budget, so they were able to extend the ending, which Frank rewrote. They also knocked off the opening, so, essentially, the parts that were ‘authored’ by Hitch were the beginning and the end. There were odd alterations in the middle, which Frank did with Hitch.”

Yet that doesn’t do credit to the scope of the tinkering, which involved not only Hitchcock, Launder, and Gilliat, but others at the studio. It was “all in the family,” according to Val Guest. Guest and Marriott Edgar (known as George) interrupted their work on Will Hay vehicles to kick in ideas. “We always used to wander in and out,” recalled Guest, “and Hitchcock used to wander in and out, and he would ask, ‘Got a better line for this?’”

The new opening was one of Hitchcock’s andantes: A revolving-door
introduction of guests crowding into a small inn on the night before the train departs. (“Originally, I had written a much longer opening which took place on a lake steamer in the Balkans,” recalled Gilliat.) And the original Launder-Gilliat script ended, according to the director, “when the lady is removed on a stretcher.” Instead, Hitchcock came up with a shootout between border police and train passengers committed to defending the elderly lady. The former established the setup and characters (“rather like jumping half a reel into the picture, in comparison to the original,” in Gilliat’s words), while the latter provided the big-bang finish.

Along with these crucial changes—without which it’s hard to imagine the film today—there were those “odd alterations in the middle.” It was always Hitchcock’s policy to build up the supporting characters. In this case, he enlarged the parts of the cricket-obsessed Englishmen—he already had the actors in mind—and transformed a banker, who in the Launder-Gilliat draft shared a compartment with the socialite and governess, into a stage illusionist whose “Vanishing Lady” specialty would add to the conceit.

The original script was full of allusions to foreign ministers of propaganda and “England on the brink,” but the rewrites also strengthened the sly political commentary. The absurd Macguffin (a coded song) is linked to the meddling of a fictional Mittel European nation (Bandrieka, “one of Europe’s few undiscovered corners”), replete with its own pretend language. Audience members would have fun guessing at the real Bandrieka.

The train shoot-out reinforced the politics. The hero and heroine try to rally their countrymen away from teatime, but the English passengers are stubbornly complacent: “They can’t possibly do anything to us, we’re British subjects!” One Englishman—an adulterer, and worse, a heel—declares himself neutral, and steps from the train waving a white flag. He is promptly shot dead. The message is clear: England is kidding itself to think it can appease Hitler.

Especially in light of the bad feeling that developed between him and the two scenarists, it must be said conclusively that Hitchcock (or, rather, both Hitchcocks, for Alma was credited with “continuity”) put his stamp on
The Lady Vanishes
—as a writer, before he’d even set foot on the set.

The Lady Vanishes
would be a reunion with cameraman Jack Cox, and one last Hitchcock film produced at Islington. Cox had to summon his old resourcefulness on the once-grand soundstages, now small and threadbare compared to Lime Grove. The pictures shot at Islington during this era were conveniently set in train compartments and lighthouses and cramped prison cells. Alex Vetchinsky, the resident designer, had become an expert
at that sort of inexpensive single set, and his influence is conspicuous on
The Lady Vanishes.
Hitchcock was encouraged to make abundant use of his full arsenal of back-projection, trick shots, and miniatures to maintain the illusion of a real train in constant motion.

Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford (Nova Pilbeam’s uncle in
Young and Innocent
) were teamed up by Hitchcock as the cricket-mad Englishmen. The two actors had never performed together, but their rapport was so instantaneous that their parts grew during filming, and
The Lady Vanishes
cemented them as a team for other films.

The duplicitous brain specialist was Paul Lukas. Cecil Parker and Linden Travers were the adulterous couple. Philip Leaver was the magician Doppo, and Catherine Lacey was memorable as the accomplice whose high heels clash with her nun’s habit—another Hitchcock touch. The frumpy “vanishing lady,” Miss Froy—“rhymes with joy”—was a part for Dame May Whitty, a stage star on both sides of the Atlantic since the turn of the century.