Alfred Hitchcock (91 page)

The dizzy money began in 1954, courtesy of Lew Wasserman, MCA, and Paramount.

Sidney Bernstein’s advice helped Hitchcock build his art collection, but Wasserman and MCA did wonders for his stock portfolio. By 1954, thanks to Wasserman, Hitchcock was well invested in oil, and the animals to which he often compared actors: cattle. His in-laws guided him to aluminum and metals. His investments profited him so considerably that he could joke about occasional losses. “The hell with new in-laws!!” Hitchcock wrote to Bernstein in late 1953 after taking a twenty-five-thousand-dollar hit on Canadian shares.

Wealthy by most measures, Hitchcock would be made immeasurably richer by his new contract with Paramount, which Wasserman masterminded. The contract had begun as a simple single-picture loan-out from Warner Bros., but swiftly evolved into a long-term agreement with the Hollywood studio whose parent company had run Islington, where Hitchcock first entered the business in 1921.

One of Wasserman’s many talents was his ability to sense when the revolving door of Hollywood might present a fresh opportunity for MCA clients. During the early 1950s Paramount underwent a sweeping change in management; now, prodded by Wasserman, the new bosses offered Hitchcock a lucrative and innovative multiyear package that the thriftier Jack Warner didn’t even try to match.

Paramount was in the process of switching over from a traditional system, built on salaried producers who operated under strict studio management, to outside production units, dominated by a director, producer, or star lured to the lot by promises of independence and profit sharing. Don Hartman and Y. Frank Freeman were the two men spearheading the revolutionary transition, which had demonstrated early success.

A former Wasserman client, Hartman had worked as a screenwriter and then an associate of Dore Schary at MGM, before joining Paramount as an executive in 1951. The courtly, soft-spoken Freeman, a former Georgia exhibitor, was the New York boss. While Hartman, in the words of
Variety
, “gave exclusive thought to the ‘art’ values” of Paramount films, Freeman supervised the budgets and profits, concerning himself with “the ‘art’ as an inherent part of the commerce.” Despite the industry’s early-1950s malaise, Paramount was prospering because of this “click combination.”

Paramount had always been a “country club” studio, snobbish about its pictures and willing to spend more to uphold its prestigious reputation. And now directors George Stevens, William Wyler, and Cecil B. De Mille had units at the studio. Producer Hal Wallis had just moved over from Warner Bros. The offices of Bob Hope, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and James Stewart were on the lot. Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin had Paramount contracts, and Elvis Presley would arrive in 1956.

Hartman and Freeman were unabashed fans of Hitchcock’s films, and from the start Wasserman had them eating out of his hand. Wasserman had been forced to accept the basic terms of the Transatlantic-Warner Bros. deal, which predated his relationship with Hitchcock. But the Warner’s contract stretched back to 1947, and the years since had been fruitful for the director. With Paramount, Wasserman was able to escalate all the terms, protecting Hitchcock’s independence and autonomy; improving his salary, expenses, and perks; and implementing profit and (finally) gross percentages that put Hitchcock on a par with any director in Hollywood.

Wasserman was a secretive operator, and the full details of the Paramount
contract have never been made public. The contract covered nine pictures: five directed and produced by Hitchcock, and four produced by the studio, with Hitchcock simply directing. Hitchcock would earn a reported $150,000 salary for each studio project, with 10 percent of the profits after twice the budgetary costs; presumably he took a lesser salary but a higher gross percentage for the films he produced
and
directed. And he was paid substantially more for the first four films specified in the contract:
Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry
, and
The Man Who Knew Too Much
—stories whose rights Hitchcock controlled.
^*

But Wasserman’s real coup passed almost unnoticed in 1954: a pioneering reversion clause that gave Hitchcock
ownership
of the five pictures he produced and directed, eight years after their initial release. The future implications of this clause would be astronomical.

Mrs. Hitchcock had consulted on the script of every Hitchcock film up through
Stage Fright
; even thereafter, she helped develop
I Confess
, and assisted in the crucial brainstorming stages for
Strangers on a Train.
Starting in 1954, although Alma could be coaxed into advising her husband on a scene-by-scene basis, she walked away from her traditional daily involvement in his films.

Starting on
Rear Window
, Hitchcock was challenged to fill a daunting void—and he met the challenge, quite unexpectedly, by altering his practice of relying upon multiple writers and third Hitchcocks, and handing over his trust to a single man. In doing so, it might be said, he was putting his trust in himself above all. With almost a full decade of films mapped out before him, he charged ahead with increased confidence and maturity: the clarity of his vision resulted, in the 1950s, in some of his deepest scripts and greatest Hitchcock films.

John Michael Hayes was another pipe-smoking stooge who wasn’t yet especially well known in Hollywood. Hayes was in his early thirties, from Worcester, Massachusetts; after college, he worked on newspapers and radio stations, then spent time writing and editing daytime radio shows before World War II. After serving in the army, Hayes hitchhiked to California and found a niche at CBS radio, writing comedy for Lucille Ball’s
My Favorite Husband
and drama for Howard Duff’s
Sam Spade
, as well as other top programs. One show Hayes regularly wrote for was
Suspense
, the series Hitchcock had helped to originate (and still a favorite of his); Hayes’s name was mentioned frequently on the air.

Hayes knew Hitchcock’s work, some of it especially well. During the
war, while stationed in the Aleutian Islands, he projected films for servicemen, and he claimed to have seen
Shadow of a Doubt
some ninety times. By 1953 he had written several films himself, though his credits were modest. “I doubt if Hitch had gone to see
War Arrow
or
Red Ball Express
,” Hayes said in one interview. But Hitchcock would have seen
Thunder Bay
, written by Hayes, which starred James Stewart. Still, his most important job qualification was probably his work on
Suspense
—and the fact that he was represented by MCA.

The story that became
Rear Window
first appeared in
Dime Detective Magazine
in February 1942, under the title “It Had to Be Murder,” where it was credited to one of Cornell Woolrich’s pseudonyms, William Irish. Woolrich was a prolific writer of pulp thrillers that were frequent fodder for both Hollywood filmmakers and the producers of
Suspense.
Hitchcock kept up with everything Woolrich wrote. Joan Harrison had produced the Robert Siodmak film
Phantom Lady
in 1944, based on a Woolrich story, and as early as Hitchcock’s third book collection of crime stories Woolrich was already a regular contributor.
^*
The screen rights to “It Had to Be Murder” had been optioned shortly after publication by producer Buddy DeSylva, and sold after his death to Leland Hayward and Joshua Logan.

“It Had to Be Murder” told the first-person story of a man named Jeff, confined to the back bedroom of a hot and stuffy Manhattan apartment with a broken leg. With nothing to do all day and no one to talk with except a black houseman, Jeff stares out his bay window at his neighbors across the courtyard. They include a married couple, the Thorwalds, whom Jeff sees quarreling before Mrs. Thorwald disappears. Thorwald claims that his wife is on vacation, but Jeff convinces his best friend, a homicide detective, to investigate his hunch that Mrs. Thorwald has been murdered.

Hitchcock would retain much of Woolrich’s vision, but the genius of the script, according to Woolrich biographer Francis M. Nevins Jr., was to make explicit what was implicit, fusing “new and genuinely Woolrichian elements” into “not a patchwork but a beautifully unified film.”

Right from its inception, the director had ideas for transforming what was really a low-budget mystery into another
Lifeboat
—another “small universe,” in his words, evincing “a real index of individual behavior.” Although the story’s plot would remain more or less intact, Hitchcock began his makeover by building on the treatment Logan had written in a failed attempt to parlay the story into his directing debut.

In Woolrich’s original story, Jeff doesn’t even have a girlfriend. The girlfriend
first appears in Logan’s treatment as an actress, already deeply integrated into the story line: drawn into Jeff’s suspicions about Thorwald, she volunteers to snoop in his apartment, placing herself in harm’s way—an idea that would become a key element of the film.

Hitchcock began his script talks by focusing on the two main characters—or, more precisely, on the actors playing them. When the director first shook John Michael Hayes’s hand, at the Warner’s studio in the spring of 1954 as he was preparing
Dial M for Murder
, Hitchcock told the writer that James Stewart and Grace Kelly were going to play the leads. Before Hayes wrote a word of
Rear Window
, he knew that Stewart would be his man with a broken leg, and Kelly his girlfriend. Kelly “has a lot of charm and talent,” Hitchcock told Hayes, “but she goes through the motions as if she is in acting school. She does everything properly and pleasantly, but nothing comes out of her. You’ve got to bring something out of her, bring her to life. Would you spend some time with her?”

Not only did Hayes know his stars before he started writing, he knew their characters’ professions. Hitchcock wanted Lisa Carol Freemont (Kelly) transformed from an actress into a top fashion model. In a later deposition related to a copyright-infringement suit, Hitchcock said he based the character on a longtime friend—former cover girl Anita Colby, once among the highest-paid models in America. Colby had become a successful businesswoman, and she and her husband often dined with the Hitchcocks. (Hitchcock’s lead female characters were often actresses or models.)

At the director’s behest Hayes “spent off and on a week” with Kelly, and then modeled Lisa “partly out of Grace Kelly and partly out of my wife,” model Mel Lawrence. “I knew some of the patois of that business,” Hayes explained. Patois—or “sophisticated dialogue”—was his stock-in-trade. In radio, Hayes had learned to “move very quickly to set up your characters by what they say.” Dialogue was his admitted “strong point, rather than construction.”

Lisa was a wholesale addition. Jeff was revamped into a character more Hitchcock’s than Woolrich’s creation. In the original story, Jeff doesn’t have a stated occupation; in the Logan treatment, he is a sportswriter. But Hitchcock remade L. B. Jefferies (Jeff’s new name in the film) into a Robert Capa-type photojournalist, addicted to a restless lifestyle of covering hot spots and photographing celebrities for national magazines—making him all the more bored and frustrated by his immobility. Hitchcock introduces this conceit beautifully with a sweep of the camera across the walls of Jeff’s room, adorned with awards and glamorous magazine covers (including one of Lisa), ending with a shot of a racing car cartwheeling toward the camera—the shot that broke the photographer’s leg.

Making the character a professional photographer was a Hitchcockian masterstroke. Jeff could become a voyeur—as filmed by a voyeur director,
and watched by a voyeur audience. Woolrich actually described Jeff as a “Peeping Tom” in his story, but the long-lens Leica in Jimmy Stewart’s lap deepened and doubled the meanings—not only articulating the voyeuristic subtext, but providing the actor with useful stage business.

As always, Hitchcock also worked hard to improve the secondary characters. Forced to replace Woolrich’s black houseman (a character tinged with condescension in the original story), he thought of making the character a middle-aged woman, an insurance company nurse. He had the actress in mind: wisecracking Thelma Ritter, who was under contract to Paramount. Hayes did the rest.

“One of the things that I told Hitchcock,” Hayes recalled, “was that I always had the feeling that pictures did not work to unite the audience at the beginning. Hitch asked me what I meant, and I told him, ‘When people come into a theater, they’re all strangers. They don’t know each other. Somebody has your armrest, the lady in front of you is wearing a hat that’s too big, the man to your right has been eating garlic, and somebody behind you is whispering or crunching popcorn. You’d like to see the picture by yourself. …’ I said to him, ‘What somebody should do is to unite that audience right away, the way a great orator does.’ ”

Hitchcock asked, “How would you do that?” and Hayes supplied the right answer: “With comedy.” Stella was written to evince a “broad, coarse vaudeville kind of humor,” according to Hayes, and she also served as one of Hitchcock’s Greek chorus characters. After the audience “had laughed together,” Hayes said, “they could gasp together, they could clutch the seats together, and they could scream together. We have them working as an instrument.” Hayes was speaking Hitchcock’s language.

The Thorwalds were perhaps the least changed characters, but even with them Hitchcock added a host of small touches, for his own enjoyment and that of his eagle-eyed fans. In Woolrich’s story, for example, Thorwald has poured his wife’s body into a new cement floor; in the film he decapitates her and stores her headless body in a trunk (and her head in a hatbox). Hitchcock borrowed the decapitation from the Patrick Mahon murder case, and Thorwald’s saving his wife’s wedding ring for his mistress from Dr. Crippen.
^*

In his original story, Woolrich merely sketched in the other neighbors that Jeff spies on, which include a widow coping with a young child, and
newlyweds keen on jitterbugging. Hitchcock banished the widow in favor of a childless couple who dote on their pet dog (“The Dog Who Knew Too Much,” James Stewart quips after the animal’s mysterious death), and a lovelorn old maid on the verge of suicide. The newlyweds stayed basically the same, though the jitterbugging was handed off to another character; Hitchcock accented their lovemaking, however, and the new wife’s insatiable sexual appetite is one of the film’s running jokes.