Alfred Hitchcock (60 page)

“[In America] I was turned down by many stars and by writers who looked down their noses at the genre I work in,” Hitchcock later explained. “That’s why it was so gratifying for me to find out that one of America’s most eminent playwrights was willing to work with me and, indeed, that he took the whole thing seriously.

“It was an emotional gesture,” Hitchcock said of the unusual credit. “I was touched by his qualities.”

Coming off his positive experience with Thornton Wilder, Hitchcock was in an unusually upbeat mood when he lunched with an emissary from Myron Selznick’s agency on July 9, shortly before filming began on
Shadow of a Doubt.
Sig Marcus reported back that Hitchcock was “most affable and pleasant.”
Saboteur
had already earned 170 percent of its gross, and a check for 10 percent was being processed as a bonus to the
director. And now the head of Twentieth Century–Fox, Darryl Zanuck, was knocking on the door, eager to give Hitchcock a studio contract after he completed his Universal obligations.

Zanuck had met with Hitchcock several times since his very first visit to Hollywood, and wouldn’t give up on trying to find a niche for the Englishman. The stumbling block was always a matter of the right material—Hitchcock had his pet projects, Zanuck had his—but there also was the dodgier issue of creative control. An intelligent, sometimes courageous producer, Zanuck gave leeway to important directors, but he also kept a firm hand on the creative elements of his studio’s product.

Hitchcock was still pining for his
Lodger
remake, but Zanuck, after thinking it over, finally said a firm no. Even this news, delivered by Marcus, couldn’t deflate the buoyant director.
Shadow of a Doubt
amounted to a kind of American
Lodger
anyway, and despite the time, money, and emotion he’d invested in the idea of a remake, Hitchcock now announced he was ready to give up his interest in the property. He told Marcus he would be willing to sell his half share of the rights to
any
other producer, and urged him to mention the newly available project to Jack Skirball’s partner, Frank Lloyd. But Lloyd only sniffed, “No, thanks, that’s not for me—that’s something suited to the peculiar talents of Mr. Hitchcock.”

The Lodger
seemed a lost cause. But Zanuck was bent on bringing Hitchcock to Twentieth Century–Fox.

While back east, before the script or casting for
Shadow of a Doubt
was final, Hitchcock was nonetheless shrewdly looking ahead. His friend Sidney Bernstein was in from London; when they met up (Bernstein finding his old friend “fat as ever”), Hitchcock agreed to travel to London later in 1943 and direct two films for the Ministry of Information.

With certain scenes of
Shadow of a Doubt
already clear in his mind, Hitchcock called in Universal’s newsreel division again, leading a crew to Newark, New Jersey, where he shot the opening sequence—though he still didn’t know who would play Uncle Charlie, the film’s central character. In June he had spoken with William Powell, the comic gentleman whom Hitchcock was still eager to lure into darkness. Powell had always hesitated before, but now Hitchcock’s string of successes helped convince him to say yes. However, MGM was feeling protective of Powell’s good-guy image, and the studio refused to lend him out, insisting he was all booked up.

As usual, David O. Selznick urged Hitchcock to borrow someone under contract to him. Joan Fontaine would make an appealing young Charlie, DOS said. Hitchcock agreed, and early script treatments even described the niece as a “Fontaine type.” By late May, though, the director had
turned his eye to Fontaine’s older sister. Over dinner with Olivia de Havilland, Hitchcock regaled the actress with the story, and a hypnotized de Havilland said yes. But she had already signed to start shooting
Princess O’Rourke
for Warner’s in midsummer, and wouldn’t be available until September. Though he tried several times, Hitchcock never managed to work with de Havilland.

With shooting looming, Hitchcock was still without his Charlies, old or young. So Hitchcock shot the film’s Hackensack River backgrounds and other New Jersey setups with Actors’ Equity day players. He staged the Hemingway-inspired opening on a residential street, with two detectives staking out the boardinghouse where Uncle Charlie is cornered. Among the footage he captured was a series of high, haunting long shots over empty lots and dark deserted alleys: a bleak urban setting to contrast with the first image of Santa Rosa—an avuncular cop spreading his arms to shelter local citizens who are crossing the street.

To cover all contingencies, Hitchcock shot the sequence, showing Uncle Charlie multiple times, using “three different men: tall, medium and short,” as the director later told journalist Charles Higham. “So when Cotten was cast I used the shots with the tall man.”

Hitchcock’s tall man was Joseph Cotten, the Mercury Theater player whose debut in
Citizen Kane
had made him a household name. (Cotten had just finished his second Orson Welles film,
The Magnificent Ambersons
, which Hitchcock ordered up and watched before release.) A Virginian by birth, Cotten was a new addition to the Selznick stable; he boasted the refinement of William Powell without the latter’s permanent air of bemusement. Casting Powell might have given Uncle Charlie a different coloring and a certain shock value, but Cotten was a strong second for the character Wilder had described as in his mid-forties, “very well-dressed,” wearing “a red carnation in his buttonhole. His face is set in fatigue and bitterness.”

Cotten was eager to work with Hitchcock, but he worried about playing a man “with a most complex philosophy, which advocated the annihilation of rich widows whose greedy ambitions had rewarded their husbands with expensive funerals.” He asked for the director’s advice. How did the character think and behave? Off they headed to talk about it over lunch at Romanoff’s, with Cotten behind the wheel. (Hitchcock was still playing his old I-don’t-drive game: “Matter of fact, taught my own wife and my daughter to drive,” he told Cotten, “but inside my own private driveway. Whenever I see a policeman, I simply go all to pieces.”)

Cotten wondered what would go through the mind of a habitual criminal like Uncle Charlie when he spotted a policeman. Fear? Guilt? “Oh, entirely different thing,” answered Hitchcock, warming to the subject, though even in private he was more likely to be flippant than deeply philosophical.
“Uncle Charlie feels no guilt at all. To him, the elimination of his widows is a dedication, an important sociological contribution to civilization. Remember, when John Wilkes Booth jumped to the stage in Ford’s Theater after firing that fatal shot, he was enormously disappointed not to receive a standing ovation.”
^*

After parking the car, Hitchcock suggested they stroll along Rodeo Drive. He told Cotten to let him know when he spotted a likely murderer. “There’s one with the shifty eyes,” Cotten said, “he could very well be a murderer.” “My dear Watson,” Hitchcock countered, “those eyes are not shifty, they’ve simply been shifted. Shifted to focus upon that pretty leg emerging from a car.” With that, the director’s glance shifted too, as his camera might in a film, anatomizing his target. “The rest of Claudette Colbert,” Cotten noticed, as he wrote in
Vanity Will Get You Somewhere
, followed “the pretty leg to the pavement.”

A light went on in Cotten’s head. “What you’re trying to say is, or rather what I’m saying you’re saying, is that a murderer looks and moves just like anyone else.”

“Or vice versa,” Hitchcock dryly returned. “That completes today’s lesson.”

They proceeded to Romanoff’s, where Hitchcock ordered a steak and the actor an omelette. (“Never ate an egg in my life,” Hitchcock dead-panned. Well, he amended himself, “I suppose eggs are in
some
of the things I eat, but I never could face a naked egg.”)

As Cotten drove the director home afterward, Hitchcock mentioned—almost as though he had just thought of it—his plan to use a snippet from Franz Lehar’s well-known “The Merry Widow Waltz” as a leitmotif in the film. A recurring image of spinning dancers, underscored by this familiar melody, would subtly remind the audience of Uncle Charlie’s true nature (the press has dubbed him “the Merry Widow Murderer”).

Getting out of the car at St. Cloud Road, Hitchcock offered Cotten one last bit of serious advice. “I think our secret is to achieve an effect of contrapuntal emotion. Forget trying to intellectualize about Uncle Charlie. Just be yourself. Let’s say the key to our story is emotive counterpoint; that sounds terribly intellectual. See you on the set, old bean.”

The actress finally cast as young Charlie also received a director’s pep talk—though of a different sort. Gracious-mannered, soft-spoken Teresa Wright, a Goldwyn contract player, had been nominated for an Oscar for her screen debut as the young daughter in
The Little Foxes.
Just as important, however, may have been understudying Emily in the Broadway production
of
Our Town
; Thornton Wilder had rhapsodized over her sensitivity as an actress. With Olivia de Havilland out of the running, Wright rose to the fore, and Sam Goldwyn agreed to loan her out to Hitchcock.

When Hitchcock met with Wright in late June, however, he didn’t audition or interview her; nor did he analyze the character she would be playing. With actresses he was more likely simply to tell them the story of the film, at great length—watching their reactions and reveling in his audience of one. “To have a master storyteller like Mr. Hitchcock tell you a story is a marvelous experience,” Wright said. “He told me everything, including the sounds and the music. When I went to see the film after it was all over, months after it was completed, I watched it and I thought, ‘I’ve seen this film before.’ I saw it in his office that day.”

The rest of the cast coalesced during July. Up in Santa Rosa, Hitchcock had spotted ten-year-old Edna May Wonacott skipping down the street with her mother. Wonacott had a girlish look: freckles, pigtails, spectacles—a mirror of Hitchcock’s own daughter, Pat, at that age. It was probably mere coincidence that Wonacott was the daughter of a local grocer, a distinction she shared with the director, but Hitchcock brought her to Hollywood and tested her, asking her to read aloud and yawn like a bored schoolgirl. She won the part of Wright’s bookworm sister, an addition to Gordon McDonell’s original family.

Dublin-born Patricia Collinge, who would play young Charlie’s mother, was also plucked from
The Little Foxes
—not the last William Wyler film Hitchcock would watch for casting and other inspiration. Collinge was another distinguished lady of the stage, and Hitchcock had followed her career dating back to West End appearances before World War I.
The Little Foxes
, for which Collinge was also Oscar-nominated (in a role she first played on Broadway), had been her screen debut, too.

Inept police were fixtures in Hitchcock films, and Wallace Ford and MacDonald Carey played the two detectives added during script development. (Carey played the one nursing a crush on young Charlie.) Veteran character actor Henry Travers was cast as young Charlie’s father, the bank clerk who keeps up a Hitchcockian running conversation with his next-door neighbor about the latest gruesome murder cases, as juicily reported in the newspapers and pulp periodicals.

A
middle-aged
next-door neighbor: not an obvious part for Hume Cronyn, just thirty years old. Canadian by birth, married to the acclaimed English stage actress Jessica Tandy (who played Ophelia to Gielgud’s Hamlet, Cordelia to his Lear), Cronyn was destined to become a good friend and part of the director’s emerging brain trust in America. Although established on Broadway, Cronyn had not yet made any mark in pictures. But he had already been camera-tested by Hitchcock, and when the director spotted Cronyn at Romanoff’s one night, he was reminded of the test.

Cronyn was summoned to meet Hitchcock, who awaited him “with
arms folded, tilted back in his chair,” the actor remembered. “He wore a double-breasted blue suit; four fingers of each hand were buried in his armpits, but his thumbs stuck straight up. He weighed close to three hundred pounds and looked remarkably like a genial Buddha.”

Hitchcock began by extolling the splendors of northern California. Cronyn knew he was there to talk about a film role, but waited and waited for the director to get around to mentioning it. Finally, after apparently exhausting his spiel, Hitchcock stared out the window for what seemed a very long while, then looked Cronyn over and murmured, “We’ll have to mess around with a little makeup—some gray in the hair perhaps—and glasses. We start shooting in about three weeks. Will you stay here or go back to New York?”

Cronyn was in. So was cameraman Joseph Valentine, having passed muster on
Saboteur.
Dimitri Tiomkin, the Russian-born composer, would write the score, though his task was already circumscribed by Hitchcock’s choice of a “Merry Widow” theme. For this, the first of his four Hitchcock scores, Tiomkin distorted the familiar melody “into a sinister tone poem much in the style of Maurice Ravel’s ‘La Valse,’ ” in the words of film historian George Turner.

On July 30, 1942, less than three months after reading the six-page “Uncle Charlie” synopsis, the Hitchcocks, including fourteen-year-old Pat, headed off to Santa Rosa. Joseph Cotten’s wife accompanied the actor to northern California, and author Niven Busch, who had just married Teresa Wright, added to the familial mood with his extended location visit. “There was very much a family feeling,” recalled Wright. “When you are on location you are much closer to each other than when you are in the studio, coming from your own home to work. All of that lent itself to the film. A lot depends on things that go on behind the scenes.”

Behind the scenes, location work with a family in tow could also breed chaos. On location in Santa Rosa, Hitchcock was vexed by the weather, which played tricks with the light, and by curious crowds, who pursued the Hollywood folk everywhere. (Whenever possible, locals were hired for bit parts and extras.) Hitchcock had to change some day scenes into night; and as in the silent days in London, he sometimes had to work past midnight in order to close down and take control of the streets.