Alfred Hitchcock (77 page)

At the start of the summer, Hitchcock envisioned the soulful Granger as Phillip, the rising star Montgomery Clift as Brandon, the mastermind of the murder, and Cary Grant as Rupert Cadell, the former prep-school master who introduces the students to Nietzsche—“the one man alive,” says Brandon in the film, “who might have seen this thing from our angle, that is, the artistic one.” Rupert is the story’s pivotal character—obviously another homosexual, thought Laurents—“probably an ex-lover of Brandon’s.” The trio would amount to “dream casting,” from the writer’s point of view.

As their meetings progressed, Hitchcock slyly began inviting Granger to join him and Laurents for dinners. “It was very Hitchcock,” explained Laurents. “It tickled him that Farley was playing a homosexual in a movie written by me, another homosexual; that we were lovers; that we had a secret that he knew; that I knew he knew—the permutations were endless, all titillating to him, not out of malice or a feeling of power but because they added a slightly kinky touch and kink was a quality devoutly to be desired.”

Transplanting the setting and characters was an underrated Hitchcock move. It was laborious, tricky business, even in this simple story with its handful of characters and single setting. (It was more heroic with
Vertigo.
) The transplant had to be seamless and credible, and with every scene the director intended to block out the action and his camera work as never before, mapping out each of the uninterrupted takes. Hitchcock, now rid of David O. Selznick, seemed in no great hurry. He met with Laurents regularly over the summer, endlessly talking it over.

Thus the summer of 1947 passed slowly and pleasurably. In early June, the Hitchcocks celebrated Pat’s high school graduation with a party at Bellagio Road—a lavish affair for them, with more than fifty guests. Among those congratulating Pat were Alida Valli and her husband, composer Oscar de Mejo; Whitfield Cook and his writing partner, Anne Chapin; Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy; Arthur Laurents and Farley Granger; and Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant.

Sidney Bernstein was still in London, but he and Hitchcock had begun speaking at length by phone every Sunday morning, a habit that waxed and waned over the years. Sometimes they talked business, other times they traded gossip or family stories. Alma was a doting godmother to Sidney’s son David.

It was Bernstein’s job to build the future, and he went about entreating other talented people to join the fledgling Transatlantic operation. Hooks were baited, but the fish swam by. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, by now a highly successful writing, directing, and producing duo, met with Bernstein and considered signing with the company. According to Caroline Moorehead, when Launder asked Bernstein who had “final say” over major decisions, he or Hitchcock, the producer replied, “I do … because otherwise we could find ourselves in a situation where nothing got done.” After which Bernstein forthrightly added, “But I’m well aware of the fact that the moment I exercise it, it’s the end of our partnership.” Launder and Gilliat declined. Bernstein tried hard to attract other luminaries, but while the Hitchcock name may have pleased bankers, fellow filmmakers were wary, suspecting Transatlantic was a one-man show.

In late summer Bernstein moved his family to Beverly Hills and rented a house on Palm Drive, overseeing the final stages of preproduction for the maiden Transatlantic production at Warner Bros. The partners—often augmented by Victor Peers, a universally liked production manager who was their chief lieutenant—had an office at the studio, but also held informal meetings at Hitchcock’s house. Between their planning sessions the two friends managed to have “a great deal of fun,” according to Moorehead’s biography. “When Sidney was told by an employee that Jack Warner, the more tycoonlike and aggressive of the brothers, with his small mustache and dapper appearance, received a copy of every Western Union telegram dispatched from his studios, he and Hitchcock started inventing joke ones calculated to perplex and tease him.”

The partners often worked all day and into the night. One evening, taking a dinner break at the Bel Air Hotel, they encountered the caustic novelist Evelyn Waugh, who had “a ferocious and inexplicable hatred for Hitchcock,” in Moorehead’s words. “Let’s pretend we’re having a really
funny time,” Bernstein suggested. “Whatever I say, you laugh and I’ll do the same.” Once started, they couldn’t stop laughing, and from a nearby table, Waugh, “his face purple with loathing, sat glaring at them, in silence,” according to Moorehead.

It wasn’t until the waning days of summer that the
Rope
casting bubble burst. Although the sexuality of the three leads had not been explicitly defined by Hitchcock, in script or production meetings, there were clear implications in the script. (Brandon wears cologne; his mother is mentioned pointedly.) Both Cary Grant and Montgomery Clift understood, and both were leery. “Since Cary Grant was at best bisexual and Monty was gay,” recalled Arthur Laurents, “they were scared to death and they wouldn’t do it.”

Hitchcock and Grant got into a heated argument, and the star of
Suspicion
and
Notorious
backed away not only from
Rope
but also from plans to formalize any association with the director. “Hitch swore he would never work with Cary again,” recalled screenwriter Bess Taffel, who never finished “Weep No More,” the script intended to launch a Hitchcock-Grant partnership.

Losing Grant and Clift was a terrible letdown, but Hitchcock didn’t have to look far for his new Brandon. He kept running into John Dall at Chasen’s and Romanoff’s. Dall was Columbia-educated, with experience at the Pasadena Playhouse, and in his first screen role, as the coal miner taught by aging spinster Bette Davis in
The Corn Is Green
, he had been nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. While not as popular or magnetic as Clift, Dall was a powerful actor—and a homosexual willing to play it subtly that way.

Granger was signed on as the other killer, but that left Rupert, the third focal character. With Clift and Grant out of the equation, Hitchcock needed a star of a certain magnitude, and he now cast his eye in a very different direction.

The casting of James Stewart as Rupert is still a matter of debate among critics of
Rope
, but the normally folksy actor had endured a grim firsthand experience of World War II and returned a changed man. “Stewart was in fact thinking of quitting Hollywood and going back to Pennsylvania to run his father’s hardware store,” wrote Joseph McBride in
Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success.
During the making of
It’s a Wonderful Life
, Stewart told Lionel Barrymore that after what he’d seen in the air force, he wasn’t sure acting was a job for a man. Hitchcock picked up on this new, disillusioned Stewart, now looking for meatier roles.

Their go-between was Lew Wasserman, a man as important as any other in Hitchcock’s life story. After the death of Myron Selznick in 1944, Hitchcock had stayed wary of, even hostile to, the idea of formal representation.
Since his next long-term contract was with Transatlantic—an equal partnership with his best friend—Hitchcock had no urgent need for an agent.

After Myron’s death, the Selznick Agency had been purchased by Leland Hayward, the New York-based talent and literary agent who had roomed with Myron and David during their salad days in Hollywood, and who had longtime business ties with both Selznicks. Kay Brown switched over to the new Hayward agency, and so did most of Myron’s remaining clients; the Selznick agents who joined the new entity included Nat Deverich, who had been one of Hitchcock’s champions behind closed doors. Deverich became manager of the Hollywood office, which became known as the Hayward-Deverich Agency.

The newly constituted Hayward-Deverich Agency represented the crème de la crème of Hollywood, including Billy Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, Myrna Loy, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart. The agency represented Hitchcock only nominally, but Hitchcock and Hayward (who was married to the actress Margaret Sullavan) moved in the same circles, and the two men were quite friendly. In 1945 Hayward quit the agency business to become a Broadway producer; he and Deverich sold out to a rival, the Music Corporation of America, and MCA absorbed their rolls—including James Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock.

Wasserman was one of the rising lights of MCA, a company that had its origins in the popular music field. Originally from Cleveland, where he had started out in the 1930s booking nightclubs and doing low-level publicity, Wasserman had developed into one of show business’s most committed go-getters. Transferred first to New York and later to Hollywood after MCA branched out into the motion picture business, Wasserman had unmatched energy, and devotion to his clients. Tall, thin, bespectacled, always immaculately tailored, he had “an air of complete confidence with a penumbra of wisdom and assurance,” in the words of Dore Schary, one of his clients.

Hitchcock sized up Wasserman as someone like himself, a son of modest beginnings who was reinventing himself as a man of the future. Unlike most agents, Wasserman was as good a listener as he was a talker, eyeing people intently as he listened to them; he had built a reputation as a sensible man who talked big but nonetheless delivered. He was a visionary in his field, a powerful figure whose power was still growing.

Wasserman was the matchmaker between Hitchcock and Stewart. It wasn’t an easy match: disappointed at the loss of Cary Grant, the banks refused to lend Transatlantic as much money as the company hoped for, mindful that Stewart couldn’t match Grant’s international box-office draw. Still, Stewart was one of America’s leading box-office stars, and his price
tag was almost as daunting as Grant’s; to broker the deal, Wasserman had to persuade Stewart to waive his preferred fee in lieu of a percentage of box-office returns.*
^*
It was high-level matchmaking—and a breakthrough for Wasserman, who proved himself a man Hitchcock could trust.

In the original play, however, Rupert is a poet (read: homosexual). In the film, he would become a publisher of philosophical texts. The script, written with Cary Grant in mind, required few changes after Stewart took his place. But with the folksier American playing Rupert, any implication of a homosexual triangle among the three leads was lost—first of all on the star. “John Dall and Farley played Brandon and Phillip’s sexuality truthfully and that took courage,” Laurents reflected. “I don’t know whether it ever occurred to Jimmy Stewart that Rupert was a homosexual. Hitchcock didn’t say anything but it wouldn’t have mattered if he did.”

During the fall Arthur Laurents completed most of the script back east. Although critics then and now rotely refer to the first play Hitchcock had filmed in fifteen years as a faithful adaptation, the stage version was altered markedly—enough that when Patrick Hamilton finally saw it in London he felt bamboozled, and privately denounced Hitchcock.

The locale switch from London to New York entailed both reupholstering the plot and changing the cast of characters. Hitchcock replaced the play’s too subtle incriminating clue (the theater ticket) with Rupert being handed the wrong hat—the victim’s monogrammed fedora—when he leaves the party; the hat bolsters his hunch that the missing man has been murdered. At the end of the play Rupert fends off the two killers with a sword concealed in his walking stick, but in the film Rupert grabs a gun away from Brandon and fires it out the window to alert police.

Hitchcock and Laurents also altered the play’s guests, who congregate for drinks around a storage chest concealing the dead body of David Kentley. Onstage, these include Kentley’s father, the father’s sister, and a vapid young man and woman with only a passing connection to the victim. A French-accented manservant is around to serve food and drink.

The only character from the play to survive relatively intact was Mr. Kentley, a role earmarked for Hitchcock’s friend Cedric Hardwicke. His dialogue, updated from the play, made him the conscience of the film. When Brandon sneeringly decries “inferior beings whose lives are unimportant anyway”—a line that linked Nietzsche with Hitler—the senior
Kentley angrily rebukes his “contempt for humanity.” In more than one postwar film, Hitchcock scattered such reminders of something he never forgave: the evil of Nazi Germany.

In Hitchcock’s film, Mrs. Kentley is reported to be ailing in bed. So Mr. Kentley has brought along an uninvited guest, his visiting sister-in-law, Mrs. Atwater—who becomes one of those showboat females prevalent in Hitchcock’s world. She offers astrology and comic relief, sparking a conversation in which the guests discuss a handful of movie stars and try to recollect the titles of recent pictures they all have seen … “the wonderful something” (a nod to Stewart’s recent showcase,
It’s a Wonderful Life
).

The lines are similar in the play; Hitchcock simply replaced the names of 1920s stars such as John Gilbert and Joan Crawford with those of his Hollywood friends. Donald Spoto cites the film’s mention of Ingrid Bergman as evidence of Hitchcock’s hopeless crush on the actress (“Oh, I think she’s lovely!” one guest comments), but it’s really an excuse for self-advertisement on the director’s part; the guests are trying to recall the title of her most recent film:
Notorious
! (A female guest declares “I’ll take Cary Grant myself”; and though Mrs. Atwater concurs, she says she likes Errol Flynn just as much.) Hitchcock counted on his friend, actress Constance Collier—who made her screen debut as
Lady Macbeth
in 1916 and later cowrote
Downhill
with Ivor Novello—playing Mrs. Atwater to the hilt.