Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  He replaced Hunter with Jay Presson Allen, who began work at the end of May. She was not at all bothered by the director’s insistence, and in fact believed that he had purchased the rights to the book for that scene alone. She told Hunter at a later date that, as soon as Hitchcock realised Hunter was not going to write the rape scene, he had purchased his ticket to New York. She herself managed to get past him a scene noticeable for its restraint.

  Hitchcock and Allen were well suited. They shared a similar sense of humour and, from June to September, worked amicably. Allen said in an interview that “he gave me a feeling of total freedom. My feeling was that I could write anything in the world I wanted to write and that I could violate something that he had said he’d like with impunity.” That was not of course the experience of Evan Hunter. It was perhaps a question of personalities.

  Allen recalled also that “we became very, very good friends. I lived with Hitch and Alma for a good length of the time I was in California. They were unbelievably generous and fun.” They all went out to dinner, visited the concert halls, and spent weekends at Santa Cruz. Allen recalled that they would “talk endlessly” in the first few weeks about plot and character. She said that “characterisation escaped him more than he would have wished it to.” He was always more interested in images. She noticed, too, that Alma “had a marvellous sense of narrative.” He also relied on his wife for stability and security. While they were discussing the psychological aspects of the film Hitchcock told Allen of a recurrent dream he had in which his penis was made of crystal, a fact which he was obliged to conceal from Alma. Allen laughed and told him that the obvious interpretation was that “he was trying to keep his talent separate and safe from Alma.” There may be other interpretations but, like most dreams, it may not require one at all.

  Before filming began he made his usual meticulous preparations. He was always concerned about the costs involved, and was as thrifty in his art as he was in his life. James Hubert Brown, the assistant director, said that he “felt obligated to Universal and to himself to make pictures that were successful.” “Back projection” was to be used for most of the external locations. This gave an oddly old-fashioned style to the film, but he did not mind that in the least. Costume designer Rita Riggs said that “even during the making of Marnie I felt a certain sadness. It was a very manicured form of film-making.” There were occasions when she felt “frozen in time.”

  He was reassured by Sean Connery’s professionalism as well as his ability, but he was more intent upon Tippi Hedren. Everything had to be perfect—the hair, the make-up, the costume. Hedren herself recalled that “many times before filming started, we had gone through the character, feeling by feeling, reaction by reaction…with me especially because Hitch was not only my director but also my drama coach, and I could have had no one better than Alfred Hitchcock.”

  The filming of Marnie, from October 1963 to February 1964, progressed well. Connery recalled that he gave “very little direction, didn’t even look through the viewfinder.” Once he trusted an actor, Hitchcock left him or her alone. Connery added that “I saw he didn’t wish to over-discuss things, and any discussion was ‘over-discussing.’ ” Hitchcock offered only what might be called technical advice: pause after each sentence; keep your mouth shut while other actors are talking; “Smile,” he told one actress, “as if you have a mouth full of broken china.” He started at eight, and finished at six. He had coffee for breakfast, read the newspapers and was then driven to the studio. One of his assistant directors, Hilton Green, said that “he was really demanding to work with because he expected everyone to be professional and know their job. But as long as you did it, you knew ahead of time what he expected on the schedule, there were never any surprises with him.” Rita Riggs added that “things just ran smoothly, and there was ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ ”

  This was not the case with Tippi Hedren. Once more she sensed that he was trying to get too close to her. A fellow actor, Diane Baker, recalled that “as the film progressed, I became more aware that Hitch’s and Tippi’s working relationship was coming to an end. Feelings were raw, tinged with innuendo.” He purchased for her a luxurious trailer, complete with bathroom and bar, which was placed beside the bungalow from which he worked. He sent her champagne each day and according to one of his best biographers, Donald Spoto, he told her of a romantic dream or fantasy in which she played the central role. Diane Baker said that “I never saw Tippi enjoying herself with the rest of the cast and crew…She was never allowed to gather around with the rest of us. And he demanded that every conversation between her and Hitch be held in private…nothing could have been more horrible for me than to arrive on that movie set and to see her being treated the way she was. I had never seen that. I didn’t expect it, and I didn’t understand any of it.” In an interview Hedren said that “he was almost obsessed with me, and it’s very difficult to be the object of someone’s obsession.”

  Hitchcock himself was not well. He was drinking more than ever, and often fell asleep after lunch. He had a general sense of ill health, and often seemed disturbed or anxious. He was tired all the time, and complained of various pains and ailments. He called in specialists, who could not find any specific cause for his problems, and he went for a medical examination twice a week. He told his associate Norman Lloyd that “you might have to finish this one for me.” It seems that he started receiving injections of cortisone, which can induce insomnia, sweating and sudden changes of mood.

  Towards the end of January 1964, Tippi Hedren had been invited to accept the Photoplay Award for the most promising actress of the year, to be televised on the Tonight show, but he refused her permission to fly to New York. He did not want her to be taken out of the character which he had so slowly and meticulously created for her. They were, after all, still filming. This led to a violent row on the set, in which she made a disparaging remark. Hitchcock said that “she did what no one is permitted to do. She referred to my weight.” In some accounts she is supposed to have called him a “fat pig.” They became more distant on the set, and communicated with each other through third parties.

  It has been widely reported and believed that, shortly after this incident, he made some kind of sexual proposition to her which she rejected in disgust. Everything was said, nothing was done. He is supposed to have asked her to “touch me” in a certain place. She walked away. It was a bewildering minute. Diane Baker has also reported that he came unannounced into her own dressing room and “kissed her on the mouth.” Eventually Baker became so sick with tension that she called a doctor.

  Spoto reports that in March 1964, just as filming was coming to an end, Hitchcock called Tippi Hedren to his office and again asked her for sexual favours. Hedren told Spoto “that was the limit, that was the end.” At the time she told Hitchcock that “I can’t put up with another day—I want to get out of this contract.” He is supposed to have replied, “I’ll ruin your career. You’ll never work again anywhere. I’ll destroy you.”

  Others dispute this account. Jay Presson Allen has stated that “I was there throughout all that time and the problem that ‘Tippi people’ have talked about over the years was not that overt. Not at all. Hitch was only trying to make a star out of her. He may have had something like a crush on her, a crise de coeur, but there was nothing overt. Nothing. Nothing. He would never in one million years do anything to embarrass himself. He was a very Edwardian fellow.” Joan Fontaine believed it to be likely that “knowing that pretty young actresses wanted to feel that he was a dirty old man, he would play it up.” It may be recalled that on the set of Rebecca Hitchcock had also tried to isolate and manipulate Fontaine as a way of shaping her performance. It is at least possible that his threats and advances were designed to create the threatened and confused character of Marnie.

  Yet it is also true that towards the end of his life, under the influence of drink or medication, he sometimes made improper suggestions to the female members of his staff. It
may of course have been the habit of a lifetime, and was not to be taken very seriously. He was simply behaving like an old fool, and a drunken one at that.

  He and Hedren met several times in 1964 to arrange public appearances for the promotion of Marnie, and he stated to one of the distributors that “I feel that her performance in the picture is so impressive that I’m going to have her interviewed only by journalists who have seen her performance in the film.” This may of course have been a subtle way of limiting her media coverage. Hedren never worked for Hitchcock again, although she remained on the payroll for a few months. When she refused to appear in one of the episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on television, the contract was finally dissolved.

  Marnie was released on 8 July 1964 in London and a fortnight later in New York. He had wanted the film to impress the more serious critics as an exercise in psychology and sexual drama, but he failed in his purpose. The reviewer of the New York Times noted that “a strong suspicion arises that Mr. Hitchcock is taking himself too seriously—perhaps the result of listening to too many esoteric admirers.” It failed at the box office too, where the absence of suspense and the unruliness of the plot made the film unpopular even among Hitchcock enthusiasts. It was his first outright failure in ten years.

  Contradicting his own statement before the film’s release, Hitchcock seems to have blamed Hedren. She had not been “the volcano” he had wished for. “It had wonderful possibilities, or so I thought,” he told one interviewer. “I thought I could mould Miss Hedren into the heroine of my imagination. I was wrong. She couldn’t live up to her character.”

  This was wholly unfair. Marnie lacks clarity of purpose of which the inconclusive ending is proof. Hitchcock’s own feelings are perhaps too overt, to no good purpose. At one point Mark says to Marnie, “I’ve tracked you and caught you and by God I’m going to keep you.” The director could have whispered the words as they were spoken. The fact that Tippi Hedren invests her role with an almost continuous note of barely controlled hysteria may be a tribute to her skills as an actress but it may also be the consequence of bullying or tension on the set. It was sometimes said that she was too “stiff,” but that was precisely what she was supposed to be; her rage beneath her apparent composure is beautifully conveyed. Yet although the film brings many troubled feelings to the surface, it fails to make them cohere.

  Marnie also has an air of vivid unreality in its use of matte painting and backdrops as an aid to setting and to scene. It is not clear whether Hitchcock used them as a deliberate device to emphasise the artificiality of the film, or as a measure of economy. In one scene a ship is seen at the bottom of the street in the port of Baltimore; this was from a recollection of Hitchcock. “I was fascinated as a kid in London to go down to the docks—there was an ordinary street and right across the end was a huge liner with a smokestack.” Yet the effect did not quite work on the screen; it looked like what it was, a badly painted backdrop. In an interview at the National Film Theatre one of the audience suggested to him that the distorted image of a ship was “presumably symptomatic of her [Marnie’s] tortured childhood.” “No,” he replied, “we had a lousy scene painter.” The fact is that he let it pass. By the end of the film, he did not seem to care.

  Truffaut has suggested that, after the critical and commercial failure of Marnie, Hitchcock “was never the same…its failure cost him a considerable amount of self-confidence.” But the fact that he never ventured again into the sphere of psychological cinema, if it may so be called, was the result of official as much as private pressure. Universal Studios wanted him to revert to the formula of thrill and suspense that he had used so successfully in the past. He was required to employ stars to bring in the audience. He was expected to devise much tighter narratives. He pondered. He was at a loss what to do. He was unsure of himself. He may not have wanted to go back to the old formulae, but he had no choice in the matter. It was expected of him.

  . . .

  At the end of 1964 he took a holiday with Alma to St. Moritz and Italy, where he could contemplate the future. First thoughts of a comedy thriller began to emerge. He met two Italian scriptwriters with whom he discussed the idea of a New York hotel entirely staffed by the Mafia, but it came to nothing after rattling around in a few conferences and meetings.

  Hitchcock already had another idea. The global success of the James Bond franchise set him thinking about the possibilities of spies and espionage as the basis for a successful film. In November 1964 he had written to Vladimir Nabokov outlining the plot of a scientist defecting with his secrets to Eastern Europe; his wife supports his defection but soon realises that he is in fact a double agent working for the Americans to elicit East German secrets. It is a convincing story that Nabokov might have rendered even more intriguing. Hitchcock told the novelist that his previous writers “usually adapt other people’s work. That is why I am bypassing them and coming direct to you—a storyteller.” Nabokov did not bite.

  Hitchcock’s damaged self-confidence, if such it was, was partly healed by the recognition he received in the early months of 1965. On 18 January he was asked to host the inaugural gala for President Lyndon Johnson. His sense of humour did not desert him. Of one performer he said, “I always thought that Woody Allen was a national park.” Two months later the Screenwriters’ Guild presented him with their Milestone Award for his “historic contribution to the American motion picture.” He adopted his television demeanour and delivered a number of sly and acidulous remarks. “The invention of television,” he told the audience, “can be compared to the introduction of indoor plumbing. Fundamentally it brought no change in the public’s habits. It simply eliminated the necessity of leaving the house.” The American Society of Newspaper Editors then invited him to address their annual dinner in Washington. He had by degrees become a cultural icon, an intrinsic part of the American imaginative landscape.

  He was still considering a film of espionage, despite the disinclination of Nabokov, and brought to the project an Irish novelist, Brian Moore, who had a reputation as a writer of thrillers. Hitchcock wrote to Truffaut in October 1965 that “in realising that James Bond and the imitators of James Bond were more or less making my wild adventure films, such as North by Northwest, wilder than ever I felt that I should not try and go one better. I thought I would return to the adventure film which would give us the opportunity for some human emotions.”

  Brian Moore quickly realised that, despite their amicable relationship, “we were in for trouble. I found that he had absolutely no concept of character—even of two-dimensional figures in a story. He kept switching from the woman’s to the man’s point of view, and the original story idea began to shift and fade uncontrollably.” Moore also realised that in the absence of an inspired or creative imagination the film—to be called Torn Curtain—was becoming a ragbag of old effects and old devices. Moore added that “the film is little else than a Hitchcock compendium.” He even went so far as to tell the director that, if it had been a novel, it would have to be dumped or completely rewritten.

  Hitchcock did not take kindly to this advice, and Moore found himself relieved from duties. In his place Hitchcock invited Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall—English screenwriters who had gained deserved popularity for their stage adaptation of Waterhouse’s novel Billy Liar—to rewrite Moore’s script, but in the event they seem to have made only minor adjustments and alterations. The script would remain the major problem of the entire production.

  Universal Studios had insisted upon employing star names for the project. So the binary galaxy of Julie Andrews and Paul Newman was introduced into the equation. Hitchcock invited Newman to dinner at Bellagio Road. It is said that the actor offended the director by taking off his jacket and by drinking beer rather than wine; Newman himself recalled that “when Hitchcock first invited me to his house and described the story in detail, it sounded like an exciting story, so I agreed to do it.” Andrews has said that “I accepted for the chance to work with Hitchcoc
k, and he taught me more about film and lenses than anyone.” Yet there was no true response on either side, and Hitchcock still entertained the illusion that she was a singing star who had inadvertently found herself in film. John Russell Taylor wrote that “Hitch speaks politely of her. She speaks politely of him. But obviously there was no spark of communication between them.”

  It is perhaps not surprising that the high hopes originally harboured for Torn Curtain soon began to falter. The script seems to have been a dead weight. Hitchcock went into production even before it was finalised, and Newman stated that “I think I could have hit it off with Hitchcock if the script had been better.” The actor sent the director a long letter outlining all of the faults he perceived in the writing, a gesture that Hitchcock regarded as an affront to his competence. Newman has also stated that “all during the shooting we all wished we didn’t have to make it.” Andrews herself believed that the atmosphere on the set deteriorated. Neither she nor Newman were accustomed to a director who rarely, if ever, commented upon their performances or gave them any indication how they were to proceed.

  Samuel Taylor, the scriptwriter who had remained in touch with him ever since their days on Vertigo, recalled that “he just lost heart during the shooting. He had been told by the studio that he was getting the two biggest stars of the day, and he discovered that they didn’t fit the Hitchcock mould or the Hitchcock method. He just couldn’t get a chemistry going with them, and he got very depressed, and just went through the motions.” It has been claimed that he spent most of the time complaining about them, out of earshot, and berating their joint cost of $1.8 million. He also did not appreciate Newman’s style of “method” acting. When the actor questioned whether he should be wearing a particular pair of shoes, Hitchcock told him that “we are cutting at the second button of your coat, so don’t worry about your shoes.” When he queried Hitchcock about his motivation, the director gave his usual reply: “Your motivation is your salary.”