Alfred Hitchcock (87 page)

Forever after, Hitchcock reflected that this two-month vacation in 1951 was one of the most sensible things he ever did—and in the years ahead, he made room annually for similar long vacations and world travel between films. As a parent, he also knew he would never again spend as much concerted time with Pat, for on the crossing to Italy their twenty-two-year-old daughter met and fell in love with a young man named Joseph E. O’Connell Jr.

O’Connell, from Newton, Massachusetts, was educated at Georgetown Prep in Garret Park, Maryland, and served in the navy during World War II. He was the treasurer of the Thomas M. Dalby Mills for children’s clothing, part owned by his family—an entrenched, well-to-do Catholic family. Indeed, Pat’s beau was the grandnephew of Boston’s late Cardinal William O’Connell.

In London, Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein had finally settled on another Transatlantic project: a 1948 novel called
The Bramble Bush
by David Duncan. At its core this was another wrong-man story, about a fugitive from police who is forced to adopt the identity of a murder suspect. But the intriguing thing about
The Bramble Bush
is that it signaled a political shift for Hitchcock. The wrong man of
The Bramble Bush
is a disillusioned Communist agitator; increasingly in the coming years, as the international political climate changed, Hitchcock would leave behind Hitler and Germany as his reference points for evil, and find a new villain in the Soviet Union.

It had been almost three years since
Under Capricorn
, and Bernstein was itching to produce another film.
The Bramble Bush
was intended to follow
I Confess
; but since both required development, whichever script developed fastest would be the next Transatlantic production.

Hitchcock decided to work simultaneously on both projects during the second half of 1951, while Sidney Bernstein in London aggressively optioned other properties for the future. The director took Bernstein’s advice to stay away from the office and indulge in “a spell of living at home”—at Bellagio Road, but also as much as possible up in Santa Cruz.

When the Hitchcocks made up their minds, they moved like the wind, and at home the most important business was planning for Pat’s wedding. Friends say that Hitchcock was initially taken aback at the whirlwind romance, but always supported his daughter’s decisions and grew fond of his prospective son-in-law. Mrs. Hitchcock took the lead in organizing the nuptials, and the wedding took place in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, on January 17, 1952. Afterward, a breakfast reception was held on the roof of the St. Regis. As tradition dictated, Hitchcock was the first to dance with his daughter, and after the celebration the newlyweds left for their honeymoon in Havana.

Two writers—whose collaboration involved working closely with Hitchcock but never actually with each other—worked on
I Confess
and
The Bramble Bush
simultaneously.

William Archibald, born in Trinidad, had sung and danced professionally before turning playwright. His play
The Turn of the Screw
, an adaptation of Henry James’s novel, was one of the hits of the 1950 season. (It later became the 1961 film
The Innocents.
)

George Tabori, born in Budapest, was a journalist in London before serving in the British army during World War II. His fiction was suffused with European history, and often fixated on the German national character. His novel
Original Sin
was a crime story and when Hitchcock found him, his first play,
Flight into Egypt
, about concentration-camp refugees, was about to open on Broadway.

I Confess
was Hitchcock’s personal priority, and therefore, much to Warner’s chagrin, the wronged-priest project achieved momentum. First Archibald worked on a new story line; then, in the late winter of 1951–52, Tabori followed up with a dialogue draft that finally satisfied the director. According to Tabori, throughout their several months of close association he and Hitchcock got along splendidly. They held fruitful discussions, and then Hitchcock “left me alone,” he said, to write the script. It was only after Tabori had finished the revisions to Hitchcock’s apparent satisfaction that the director went ahead and “changed the whole thing,” for reasons the writer never understood.

It wasn’t because of the Catholic Church. In April 1952, Hitchcock, Tabori, and Sidney Bernstein visited Quebec to receive assurances of local cooperation, soak up the atmosphere, and recruit Quebecois actors for secondary roles. Bernstein took the lead in talks with religious authorities, seeking their approval; and surprisingly the Canadian Church found
I Confess
profoundly Catholic—for the priest, in spite of his illegitimate child and execution, was greatly ennobled by the script. The Transatlantic partners wisely employed a local priest with a doctorate in theology, Father Paul La Couline, as “technical consultant”; and Father La Couline bridged the discussions with the Church, reading the script to authenticate the ecclesiastical reality and recommending trims to avoid censorship.

It was Warner Bros. that finally rebelled. For years Hitchcock had staved off the studio’s nervousness, hoping somehow to slip his ideas onto the screen. But as the midsummer start of filming loomed, Hitchcock was forced to circulate the latest script by Tabori, and studio officials were shocked to discover that the wrong-man priest
still
had an illegitimate child in the story—and
still
was destined to be executed at the end of the film. In late April, the studio put its foot down: it couldn’t produce such a film, which was bound to provoke an overwhelming outcry in America.

James Stewart was no longer being touted by Hitchcock as the major star who could make the priest film palatable to the studio. Trying to find maneuvering room, Hitchcock now floated the possibility of Laurence Olivier, but Warner’s said no, thank you. Even after the objectionable elements were purged from the script, the studio insisted on having an American lead.

In April, Hitchcock for the first time suggested a refugee from
Rope
—Montgomery Clift. Clift was at the height of his popularity; having just completed
A Place in the Sun
(for which he garnered his second Best Actor nomination), he would have a brief availability for
I Confess
before appearing in
From Here to Eternity
(which would bring him his third). Clift was willing to play the wronged priest, named Father Michel in the Tabori script (later renamed Father Michael Logan, as one of the
Boys Town
touches Warner’s demanded). Clift even looked like a priest, possessing, his costar Karl Malden observed, “the face of a saint but when you looked
into the eyes you saw a tortured soul trying to make its way out of utter bewilderment.”

Playing a noble priest was a better career move than playing a homosexual killer: Clift said yes, and was happily accepted by Warner Bros. It so happened that the actor was friendly with a French monk who lived in a cloistered monastery in Quebec, and he was glad to spend a week there before filming. Unfortunately, it was the Tabori script that won Clift over, illegitimate child, wrong-man execution, and all. Only when he arrived in New York for camera tests—when it was too late to back out—did the actor discover that that version would never make it to the screen.

Hitchcock was finally forced by Warner Bros. to gut from the script the very ideas that had most interested him in the first place. The studio called on him to drop not only the out-of-wedlock child—his and Mrs. Hitchcock’s invention—but the wrong-man execution, which dated from the original play. He worked feverishly alongside the faithful Barbara Keon to create a new subplot: Father Logan (Clift) and his old girlfriend (the character eventually played by Anne Baxter) are blackmailed for having slept together one stormy night. True, it’s an extramarital fling for the girlfriend, but she doesn’t
tell
the priest that she is married—and he isn’t even a priest yet! That took care of the illegitimate baby (there just isn’t one), while the execution was removed in favor of the priest’s trial and acquittal, a last-reel chase, and cornering of the true villain.

Archibald polished the Hitchcock-Keon rewrite of Tabori’s ill-fated draft. Counting a Canadian writer recruited to hang around the set and contribute “Quebec atmosphere,” upwards of a dozen writers toiled on
I Confess
over the years; it was a dispiriting record for a Hitchcock film.

Back when his spirits were high, the director had courted Olivia de Havilland for the leading-lady role—that of the priest’s “girlfriend.” But as that role changed in the rewrites, it declined in credibility and actual screen time, and a star of de Havilland’s importance (and salary) had to be discounted. Hitchcock backpedaled with Warner Bros., arguing for a hitherto unknown actress. He proposed Suzanne Cloutier—Orson Welles’s Desdemona in
Othello
—or perhaps the German actress Ursula Thiess, who had not yet appeared in Hollywood films.

Jack Warner’s desire to reconquer European markets sealed off by the war was always part of the Transatlantic-Warner’s bond, and now it enabled Hitchcock to get away with signing Anita Björk, a protégée of the great Swedish director Alf Sjoberg. Björk had just given an intense performance as the title character of
Miss Julie
, Sjoberg’s masterful adaptation of Strindberg’s play which had tied for the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1951.

The filming of
I Confess
was scheduled to begin on August 21, in Quebec, and on July 23 Hitchcock traveled ahead to New York for camera tests with Clift and Björk. When Kay Brown greeted Björk at the airport, however, she found the Swedish actress accompanied by her lover—the poet, novelist, and playwright Stig Dagerman—and their illegitimate baby daughter. (Björk was estranged from her husband in Sweden.) Instantly aware that this spelled trouble, Brown alerted Hitchcock, who told Bernstein, who phoned Jack Warner.

On July 24, Hitchcock gamely went ahead and shot a day of wardrobe, makeup, and other tests with Clift and Björk, while Bernstein sparred with the head of the studio. Warner Bros. had just spent weeks expunging the priest’s girlfriend and his illegitimate child from
I Confess
; now the leading lady had shown up in America flaunting her own out-of-wedlock baby. “You simply can’t do this,” Jack Warner told Bernstein, “not again. Not with
another
Swedish girl.” Warner recommended that Björk obtain a quickie divorce and marry the child’s father, a proposal reportedly relayed to the Swedish actress—and hotly refused. Warner then insisted that Björk be replaced and simply paid off; Hitchcock protested, but was overruled.

Willing, under the circumstances, to assume all liabilities, the studio offered to buy out Transatlantic and make
I Confess
, at this eleventh hour, a 100 percent Warner Bros. production. All the fight went out of Bernstein; he had never felt comfortable with Warner Bros. (he had sued the studio over advertising rebates from
Rope
and
Under Capricorn
), and was aghast at the latest predicament. Bernstein “felt that there were too many compromises involved,” according to his biographer Caroline Moorehead, and resigned from the film.

Hitchcock had a different dilemma. He had spent years, including almost the entirety of 1951, preparing a film that was suddenly on the brink of cancellation. He was above all a professional; he had never quit a production, never at the last minute, or in the midst of shooting. He had thirty years of experience with studio vicissitudes; he had experienced and withstood worse indignities. Walking away from
I Confess
, Hitchcock knew, would cause an irreparable breach with Warner Bros. and inflict damage on his reputation in Hollywood.

Surrendering
I Confess
to the studio was the only course to take. Moorehead reported that Hitchcock and Bernstein parted “amicably,” and that Hitchcock was “far too deeply committed to the film to pull out.” Transatlantic intended to stay together for
The Bramble Bush
and future films, but for the moment the fledgling company was put on hiatus.

Hitchcock felt Björk was an extraordinary actress, and he wasn’t overjoyed by the phone call from Jack Warner informing him of her replacement—the more ordinary Anne Baxter. Baxter had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as a dipsomaniac in
The Razor’s Edge
in 1946,
and was nominated again for
All About Eve
in 1950. And Hitchcock knew her socially (her husband was John Hodiak). But he never spoke to the actress about
I Confess
before she arrived in Quebec a week before the start of filming. After ordering her bleached blond hair dyed even blonder (“I felt I wasn’t as pretty as he wanted a woman to be in his films, and as he wanted me to be,” Baxter told Donald Spoto), Hitchcock rushed the new leading lady before the cameras so fast that the costumes designed for Björk were simply altered to fit the Hollywood actress.

“When you compare Anita Björk and Anne Baxter,” Hitchcock said ruefully to François Truffaut, “wouldn’t you say that was a pretty awkward substitution?”