Alfred Hitchcock (54 page)

One of the unfair myths about Hitchcock is that he wasn’t generous toward his colleagues. It’s true that he didn’t often sing the praises of fellow directors in print, believing in part that naming some would omit others. But he prided himself on keeping up with the best films and filmmakers, and especially in the 1940s, when there really was a community of directors in Hollywood, Hitchcock was very much part of it, attending dinners and parties with William Wellman, Leo McCarey, George Cukor, and others whose company he enjoyed.

Cukor and Ford were two he especially respected, and Cukor would become a real friend over the years; Hitchcock knew Ford only in passing. Ford was directing
The Long Voyage Home
for Walter Wanger at the Goldwyn studio at the same time that Hitchcock was finishing
Foreign Correspondent
for the same producer. Joel McCrea remembered that Ford made a point of stopping by the Hitchcock set on the day they were shooting the film’s broadcast coda. According to McCrea, Ford even volunteered “a kind of reading” of his lines, a gesture that amused—and flattered—Hitchcock.

For a Directors’ Guild booklet after Ford’s death, Hitchcock handwrote a tribute to the man who bested him in his first Oscar race—a gesture so rare for Hitchcock as to be almost unique. “A John Ford picture was a visual gratification—his method of shooting, eloquent in its clarity and apparent simplicity,” Hitchcock wrote. “No shots from behind the flames in the fireplace toward the room—no cameras swinging through chandeliers—no endless zooming in and out without any discernible purpose. His scripts had a beginning, a middle and an end. They are understood all the world over and expand as a monument to part of the land he loved: Monument Valley.” Never mind that Hitchcock didn’t care for most Westerns,
and never tried to make one himself. (He liked to say he didn’t know what people ate in frontier times, or where they went to the bathroom.)

Like Ford, Hitchcock feigned indifference to the Academy Awards. He would also be nominated for Best Director five times: for
Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window
, and
Psycho.
Unlike Ford—in a measure of his outsider status—he never won.

Hitchcock sincerely believed he didn’t make the kind of pictures rewarded by Academy voters, and he was never a contract director with a major studio and the guaranteed voting bloc of its employees. Except for his time with Selznick—and then again, at the twilight of his career, at Universal—he never enjoyed the benefit of lavish award campaigns.

When the final Academy Award of the evening was given out, however, the Best Production nod went to
Rebecca.
The trophy itself, of course, went home with the producer, David O. Selznick.

So Hitchcock had good reason to be cynical about the Academy Awards, even though
Rebecca
’s Oscar meant that his stock in Hollywood took a sharp rise. And once again the pattern held that, as one Hitchcock production started filming, the director was already agitating behind the scenes for his next assignment. Once again Hitchcock was panicked about the twelve-week layoff period DOS might invoke at any time.

All of a sudden, Hitchcock didn’t expect, or want, any extension of his relationship with RKO. The controversy over
Citizen Kane
, and the failure of the Orson Welles film at the box office, had sent shock waves through the studio, and the supportive climate that had surrounded Hitchcock during the making of
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
had changed.

Immediately after the Oscars, in March 1940, the Selznick Agency went into action, trying to sell Hitchcock to another studio. Once more, the agency tried to convince DOS to suspend the director’s normal contract, so he could maximize his market value on at least one film independent of Selznick International. But again DOS said no, reiterating that he intended to approve any outside work—the terms
and
the subject matter.

Over at Universal, Frank Lloyd, a Myron Selznick client who had directed 1935’s Best Picture,
Mutiny on the Bounty
, had just formed a new unit with producer Jack Skirball. Skirball (more than Lloyd) liked and was impressed by Hitchcock, and was receptive to producing two pictures with the Englishman. The director told Skirball that a color remake of
The Lodger
was his first preference, and after that, he could deliver a Hitchcock original. The Universal producer told Myron Selznick he’d meet any fair price for Alfred Hitchcock.

The English atmosphere, the fragile wife cringing in dread of her husband’s secrets, the suicide-murder twist ending: it was as though Hitchcock were
trying to remake
Rebecca
, without Selznick’s arch embellishments and concessions.

Once again, the director drew his supporting players from the British colony, many of them already Hitchcock alumni: Cedric Hardwicke would portray General McLaidlaw, the father of Lina; Dame May Whitty from
The Lady Vanishes
would be Mrs. McLaidlaw; Nigel Bruce from
Rebecca
was Beaky, Johnny’s old crony who dies a mysterious death; Isabel Jeans from
Downhill
and
Easy Virtue
was the flirtatious Mrs. Newsham; and Leo G. Carroll from
Rebecca
was back as Captain Melbeck, from whom Johnny embezzles funds.

The know-it-all mystery writer Isobel Sedbusk, who befriends Lina, was a character who required special Hitchcockian casting. A onetime leading lady of the English stage, now the director of John Van Druten’s plays, Auriol Lee would make her only American film appearance in the role—depicted in the novel as a pinprick parody of Dorothy Sayers.
^*

One happy byproduct of Lee’s casting was that it led to Pat Hitchcock’s Broadway debut. Lee had plans to direct Van Druten’s new play,
Solitaire
, in the fall of 1941, and she was looking for a youngster to play one of the leads—the neglected daughter of well-to-do parents, who forms a friendship with a middle-aged tramp. Twelve-year-old Pat, who had performed in school plays, was the right age and type.

At the center of Hitchcock’s English cast for
Before the Fact
, meanwhile, was one of Hollywood’s sexiest Englishmen—who, as it happens, had just taken American citizenship. Rising steadily in talent and popularity throughout the 1930s, Cary Grant really began to spread his wings when cast as a darkly humorous romantic lead in comedies for directors Leo McCarey, George Cukor, and Howard Hawks. A driven and enigmatic man offscreen, Grant wasn’t complacent in his stardom. When in the mood—and he was exceedingly moody—he enjoyed taking risks with his image, and his career.

Grant arrived for the first day of filming, on February 10, 1941, thrilled at the opportunity of starring as a cold-blooded killer—a seductive creep. Johnny’s twinkling eyes, his “infectious, intimate smile” on a face “the merriest” ever seen (according to the novel), evoked nothing so much as Grant’s own screen persona.

Hitchcock knew Grant socially, but this was the first time the two had contrived to work together. Grant was the biggest Hollywood name yet to appear in a Hitchcock film. A complex performer, Grant was equally credible as a lover or a bully (in
Notorious
he does a convincing job of punching Ingrid Bergman in the face). By agreeing to star for Hitchcock—where, for example, Gary Cooper had balked—Grant once again displayed the instincts that shaped a remarkable career. And by helping himself, he helped Hitchcock, validating him in Hollywood’s eyes.

And in Grant the director found the first leading man since Robert Donat with whom he felt a profound connection. Grant was the same general type as Donat, as attractive as he was entertaining. Yet Grant also had a bitter, ruthless streak, ordinarily suppressed on the screen, that set him apart from a Donat—or, say, a Joel McCrea. Those other stars told audiences all about themselves; with Grant, there was always ambiguity. Grant withheld information, struck a distance, kept people guessing, off and on camera. Like Hitchcock, he kept guarded the doors to his psyche.

When asked about the star of
Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief
, and
North by Northwest
, Hitchcock often described him in familial terms. “One doesn’t direct Cary Grant,” he liked to say. “One simply puts him in front of a camera. He enables the audience to identify with the main character. He represents a man we know. He’s not a stranger. He is like our brother.”

Although this was a cliché for interviewers, there was also a degree of truth to it: Grant felt like family to Hitchcock, but he also served as an alter ego, someone the director could like and admire, and a dashing rake with whom he could vicariously trade places. With Grant (and later, with James Stewart) the heroes began to deepen in Hitchcock films, and the films deepened with them.

If Hitchcock and Grant had a fast but edgy rapport (Grant “whistled to work,” wrote John Russell Taylor, “and Grant says he thinks they got on so well right away because they both remembered licorice allsorts”), the director had a different relationship with RKO’s appointed leading lady.

The Lina that Hitchcock originally wanted was Michèle Morgan, well known in France but newly arrived in Hollywood as a refugee from Nazi occupation. Her French accent didn’t bother him, but it worried RKO. The studio preferred Joan Fontaine for box-office insurance, and now the second Mrs. de Winter leaped at the chance to star in a second Hitchcock film. She scribbled a note after he sent her a copy of the book, vowing to play Lina “for no salary” if necessary.

After
Rebecca
, Fontaine had become one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood, but she still looked up to the director who had remade her image and guided her to her first Oscar nomination. This time, however, as she complained to RKO officials, Hitchcock seemed to pay her less attention during
filming. In fact, at times her old mentor seemed to neglect her altogether. Hitchcock surely realized, if Fontaine did not, that she was already well rehearsed for what was essentially a reprise of her role as the second Mrs. de Winter.

If Hitchcock was fond of Fontaine, Grant was not—which was all to the good. Behind the leading lady’s back, the star told close friends that he had a genuine impulse to strangle Fontaine—an enmity that informed his mercurial performance. The romantic chemistry between the two was perhaps the film’s greatest illusion. (One of Hitchcock’s signature camera movements—a hypnotic 360-degree pan—does most of the work for their most romantic kiss.)

Although Fontaine was in virtually every scene, the film was shaped more around Grant—and intended for Grant as
his
showcase. “My villain?” coos a disapproving Isobel Sedbusk when Lina interrogates her about the murderer in her best-seller. “My hero, you mean! I always think of my murderers as my heroes.” Just what Hitchcock might have said: with Grant, the director was hoping finally to cross a line that had long eluded him: dropping the standard monstrous villain, in favor of a handsome, grinning one with irresistible sex appeal.

Unfortunately, RKO was self-destructing even as
Before the Fact
was being shot, and all of Hitchcock’s clever strategies for gulling the studio and fooling the censors went awry.

Although Harry Edington had left Hitchcock pretty much alone during the writing of the script, the studio official never lost track of the censorship concerns. Besides the problematic ending, the novel is loaded with sex. Johnny (Grant’s character) is not only a murderer and philanderer in the book, but also the father of an illegitimate child conceived with the housemaid. The director knew he had to forgo this, and so he did, with the usual show of reluctance.
^*

What about the ending? Edington kept asking. The wife couldn’t end up dead. Cary Grant couldn’t end up a cheerful wife murderer. How was Hitchcock going to punish all the wrongdoing?

This conundrum was at the front of Samson Raphaelson’s mind as he wrote the script. He and Hitchcock toyed with different endings, which they hoped might appease the studio. Raphaelson wrote at least one “temporary” version, which neither he nor Hitchcock thought was quite right; Raphaelson preferred the ingenious one the director himself dreamed up, which did
not skirt the issue, but cheated it. Years later Raphaelson still remembered Hitchcock’s solution, without being sure whether it was actually shot.

Here is how it happens in the book: Lina, the suspicious wife, is brought to despair by the realization that Johnny intends to murder her—even though she is pregnant with his child. (In the film, of course, she
isn’t
pregnant—another bone tossed to the Hays Office.)

In the book
and
the film, Johnny brings Lina a glass of poisoned milk as she lies in bed. (The glass of milk was one of those novelistic details Hitchcock seized on; he had it lit from within by the effects specialists, highlighting its vile contents.) Then, just as in the book, Johnny is seen slowly ascending the long staircase to Lina’s bedroom.

Lina has two nicknames in the book—“Letterbox,” “in pleasant allusion to her mouth” (a nickname that didn’t make it into the film), and “Monkeyface” (which did). “Letterbox” must have given Hitchcock the idea Raphaelson so admired. In this version Lina writes her mother a letter revealing the truth about Johnny; when it is read after her death, Johnny will be caught and punished, and society will be protected from his future crimes. In the Hitchcock version, just before she drinks the poisoned milk, Lina would ask Johnny, “Will you mail this letter to Mother for me, dear?” “Fade out and fade in on one short shot,” as the director told François Truffaut; “Cary Grant, whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mailbox and pops the letter in.”

But the letterbox ending was nixed. At the eleventh hour, Edington, who had become a scapegoat for RKO’s downward spiral, was fired by studio president George Schaefer. Dan Winkler was also discharged, and with that the two men who had signed Hitchcock were gone. Then, against all common sense, Schaefer hired none other than the lord high censor of the Production Code, Joseph Breen, as RKO’s temporary production boss.