Hitch (45 page)

Afterwards she cheerfully observed that at least she had the sense and taste to have it in one of the world's best hotels, on the principle that if these things have to happen, they might as well happen in comfort. But at the time there was nothing funny about it. A doctor was immediately summoned, she was carried off for examination, and it turned out that one arm was paralysed, her walking was affected, and to a lesser extent her speech. It seemed possible that she might become an invalid, though happily her mind and sense of humour remained as clear and incisive as ever, and she was soon busy comforting those around her. Hitch was of course distraught, but insisted on continuing with his preordained routine: the very day of the stroke, their granddaughter Mary was scheduled to arrive at London Airport in the afternoon, and naturally he went out himself to meet her, as arranged. In general, though, he stayed with Alma for as much of the time as he could. Right away they started therapy, and Alma, who had considerable native stubbornness as well as courage going for her, responded amazingly to treatment.

Hitch's first reaction to the shock of her illness seemed to be to start neglecting his own carefully guarded health, abandoning his usual regime and eating and drinking with more freedom than for many years—almost as though he felt he was only taking care of himself for Alma, and the possibility of life without Alma was not to be contemplated. But by the summer of 1972 Alma was sufficiently recovered to be able to accompany Hitch on a gruelling tour of western Europe publicizing
Frenzy
, only a little the worse for her experience. And Hitch began seriously to look for another subject, for another film.

I cannot now remember exactly when I first heard that Hitch was preparing a new film. But it must I think have been towards the end of 1973. I was having lunch with him in his office-bungalow up at Universal, and he mentioned that he had spent the morning working on the script of this next, as yet unnamed, project. It was based, he said, on a Victor Canning novel called
The Rainbird Pattern
(‘but we certainly shan't call it that'), published a year or so before. I confessed ignorance, even though the book had apparently received excellent reviews, and been a good, if not a best, seller. Well, he said, we're really not keeping that much of the book—as usual, it's the idea and a few possibilities that we pick out of it. And so he began to describe what the book and/or film was about.

What he proceeded to tell me seemed to me complicated but quite comprehensible. I stress this because I know from people who have encountered Hitch during the preparatory stages of a film that he tends to use anyone and everyone as a sort of preview audience, employing his famous skills as raconteur to construct the film for them in their mind's eye and observe their reactions as some guide to how this or that will play. I gather that in the case of ‘Alfred Hitchcock's 53rd film,' as it was cryptically known right up to the start of shooting, he got quite a lot of puzzled or downright unfavourable response early on—one famous producer told me that when Hitch recounted the story to him he could not make head nor tail of it, and frankly said so. Be that as it may, the story seemed to me clear enough: there were these two separate plots involving two separate groups of characters whose paths keep crossing; a fake medium and her taxi-driver boy-friend who helps document her clients for her, who are set on the trail of an heir who has vanished in childhood; and a master-criminal kidnapper who is simultaneously, with the help of his girl-friend, pulling off a series of spectacularly successful jobs, strictly for the ransom money.

Finally, you discover that the connection between these two strands is that the master criminal is the long-lost heir; hence the irony of the investigators getting nearer and nearer to him for quite the wrong reasons, or at any rate for reasons quite different from what he supposes when he gradually becomes aware of their presence. The scene in which his suspicions crystallize into a certainty was the only one Hitch specifically described at this stage, in great detail and with obvious enjoyment. It is the kidnapping of the Bishop of San Francisco in Grace Cathedral in the middle of mass. The kidnappers drug him and drag him off before the eyes of the congregation, depending of course on the slightly embarrassed sense of decorum which possesses those in church and makes them hesitate to act in what would otherwise be a natural fashion, for fear it will seem out of place or irreverent, to give them the necessary time to make a getaway. All goes according to plan, except that ‘that man' is there again—the taxi-driver, who as it happens is there for quite a different reason, trying to make an appointment to see the Bishop, who, it transpires, was the parish priest thirty years before in the village where the heir was last seen.

We know Hitch's propensity for being turned on by particular scenes or visual ideas for his films, and working outwards from these until the threads join up into as coherent as possible a story line. Hitch himself put it succinctly to me some years ago: ‘First you decide what the characters are going to do, and then you provide them with enough characteristics to make it seem plausible that they should do it.' So it seemed probable that this scene he so lovingly described had been the grain of sand in the original book from which he would build up the pearl of his finished film.

What was my surprise, then, to discover that the scene does not exist at all in the book. The book's plot is in outline as Hitch had described it, but with some important differences. First, it takes place in England, and a very quiet rural England at that, setting up a (very Hitchcockian, one would say) dislocation between the crimes going on and the mild, well-mannered circumstances in which they occur. Then, the characterization is more extreme and peculiar than he described it: the medium is a largely genuine medium, though not above reinforcing her psychic powers with a little help from her friend; the kidnapper is actually a homicidal maniac (rather than there being some faint hint that he may have been responsible for the fire in which his foster parents died and he
managed to disappear at the age of twelve), and though his crimes catch up with him he has a son, probably just as crazed, who will inherit the money instead and unleash heaven knows what on the world in his turn. And thirdly, there is no kidnapping of a Bishop in the middle of mass. A Bishop is kidnapped, to be sure, but it is in the middle of a solitary country walk which he takes every week-end.

The next time I saw Hitch, I asked about these differences. The first one was merely practical: he did not want to make a film in Britain this time, and so had transferred the action right away to San Francisco and round about. Though, he added, he was now wondering about San Francisco, because it was so hackneyed a location—‘I think if I see one more car chase bouncing over those hills I shall scream.' Maybe somewhere on the East Coast instead, but anyway in America. The second he readily agreed to. He did not want this film to be too heavy and serious, so he was reworking the characters in an altogether lighter vein. Anyway, he thought the supernatural was always difficult to accommodate in a story that was not centred on it, since it tended to remove the characters concerned from normal human sympathies and make them too special.

As for the homicidal maniac: ‘People always think villains are extraordinary, but in my experience they are usually rather ordinary and boring—certainly less interesting and peculiar than most of the ordinary, law-abiding people you meet. In this story, the way I see it, the villains are actually rather dull characters, they are the straight men, if you like, their motives are very simple and mundane. Whereas the more ordinary couple are actually very peculiar. And you see, each is moved some way in the direction of the other: the criminals are made to have much more of the ordinary in them, while the good guys have more of the criminal in them. It makes it less melodramatic, lighter and more believable—almost a comedy thriller. I think I'll keep a bit of ambiguity about the kidnapper's background in infant mayhem and the possible genuineness of the psychic's powers, just for fun, but that's all.'

And the kidnapping of the Bishop? The book had given him the idea for it, because he had always been fascinated by the special attitudes of people under some kind of social constraint, such as being part of a church congregation, and had wanted to stage a crime in the middle of a church service just to work out the possibilities of the situation. The kidnapping of a bishop seemed like the perfect opportunity, but what would be the point of doing it as it was done in the
book? ‘Kidnap him in ordinary clothes alone in a wood and he might as well be a stockbroker. If you are going to kidnap a bishop, you want to do it at the moment when he is most evidently being a bishop—in the middle of mass, in front of a crowded congregation.' Though in the script the denomination of the Bishop is carefully unspecified, one can hardly doubt from the way he describes it that the idea of snatching a bishop in the midst of High Mass, before the eyes of a crowded congregation, has for Hitch the special appeal of breaking a taboo.

At this time Hitch was already working every day with Ernest Lehman on the script, and he showed me the actual physical script they were working on. It was a large loose-leaf book of double foolscap size, each left-hand page containing Lehman's first full draft and on the facing page, typed up and then further annotated by hand, Hitch's comments and glosses—often far more copious than the script itself. The comments varied from a brief query on the wording of a line of dialogue to very elaborately thought-out arguments about the dramatic logic of a particular turn of events: all of them a basis for discussion rather than an instruction to change. And discussion was what was going on: each morning, regular as clockwork, Lehman came to the studio and they would talk over as much as they could get through before lunch, maybe only a line or two sometimes, sitting comfortably side by side on a large sofa with the script between them. Then Lehman would go off to make the modifications they had agreed on and come back the next day for more. (When I asked excitedly if he had scripts like this for his other films, Hitch said no, he had only just thought of this layout.)

Why Ernest Lehman? Because, obviously, they had got along very well on
North by Northwest
, and also because Lehman was between assignments at this time. I wondered whether the routine of working with Hitch had changed at all in the fifteen years since
North by Northwest
. I remembered Hitch had said afterwards that originally he thought of
North by Northwest
as much more abrupt and disjointed, like an early Nevinson painting, all jagged, angular shapes; then had felt he had to fill in the gaps to make it smoother-flowing, so as not to distress a modern public used to having everything spoon-fed them. Perhaps changing times, changing assumptions about plotting based on television conventions, would have loosened things up a bit? But Lehman found that if anything Hitch had become even more tight and meticulous in his script preparation—before,
he had wanted things worked out sufficiently to give him a reliable working basis, but on the new film he wanted all the cracks to be neatly and convincingly papered over and everything set in script terms and dramatic logic (or the appearance of it) before he set foot on a sound stage.

All the same, the collaboration with Lehman was not entirely without problems, any more than it had been on
North by Northwest
. Again Lehman toyed from time to time with the idea of resigning, and was persuaded back, grumbling but still fascinated. He ended incredulous at all the agony which had gone into the creation of such a slight picture, and amazed that so little of it showed. Finally, his main difference of opinion with Hitch was over the ending, which Hitch eventually wrote himself and submitted to Lehman, listened to his objections (mainly that the medium is shown throughout as a complete fake, so to suggest at the last that maybe she has a touch of psychic power is disturbingly inconsistent), discussed his alternative solutions, and then went right ahead and used his own version.

So the preparation went on, and already by late spring of 1974 they had begun to hire the crew, though starting dates were vague—this autumn, the New Year, next spring …—and no casting definite, though Hitch went through an intensive series of screenings of films currently around the studio (Universal, of course) to look over the work of possible actors or technicians. I once encountered him quite mystified about Goldie Hawn after seeing
Sugarland Express
and wondered for a wild moment if someone had suggested she might be a possible successor to Grace Kelly, you know, cool with a sizzle of sexuality underneath. To be fair, though, she would have been conceivable casting, as in a very different way would Angela Lansbury, whom Hitchcock went to see in
Gypsy
at this time, for the role eventually played by Barbara Harris. The studio's most enthusiastic suggestion, Liza Minnelli, he just could not see in the part.

The script completed, more or less, Hitch started work with his sketch artist, Tom Wright, who had worked on one or two other Hitchcock films in this capacity, and who was this time to be second-unit director as well. I was out of the country at the start of this stage of the preparation, and by the time I got back Hitch himself had had a succession of health problems which put him in and out of hospital for most of the autumn—first, he had a heart pacer
fitted, which he delights to show with gruesome details of the surgical processes involved. Then, as a result of a bad reaction to the antibiotics he was given, he got colitis, and once over that he had a kidney stone removed (‘Of course, they don't cut you any more, they go in through the front, if you see what I mean,' he added with relish). He noted with fascination the instant banking of heart data in Chicago, and insisted that all the surgery be done with local anaesthetics so he could watch how it was done. I had the feeling that what turned most listeners green even in description might well sometime become more grist to his mill.