High Society

by Donald Spoto

  As a great visual storyteller, Hitchcock had a vivid fantasy life, as his writers, designers, crew and actors attested. He frequently shared fabulous ideas for movies he made and never made, and told the bawdiest jokes about sex and the most horrific tales about murder—simply to monitor his listeners’ reactions. As a mastermind of the movies, Hitchcock deserved all the respect he commanded and which was invariably rendered; but he was also a lonely, complex man, “frightened of everything,” as he said. Gregory Peck, who starred in two of the director’s movies, said that “something was ailing Hitchcock—throughout his entire life, I think.” That “something” had at least partially to do with deeply repressed desires and emotions and a feeling that he was doomed to isolation and romantic abnegation.2* Those elements are the common currency of his most deeply felt films.

  Hitchcock was born in the East End of London and felt himself to be a marginal person from the beginning. As a Catholic and a Cockney, he did not hail from polite, acceptable society; and although his father was a prosperous greengrocer and fishmonger, that occupation meant Joseph Hitchcock was “in trade” and therefore not a gentleman. In addition, young Alfred was creative, clever, and gifted with a prodigious memory; he was also restricted by a lifelong tendency to morbid obesity. “Hitch” (as he called himself) had mastered the art of film as a storyteller, designer and assistant director before he was permitted to direct his first silent picture, in 1925; from then to 1953, he directed more than three dozen movies that made him both celebrated and wealthy.

  After leaving England in 1939, he directed, during his first dozen years in America, some of the finest movies ever to come from the old Hollywood studio system—among them Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and Strangers on a Train. He then continued to produce and direct movie masterworks until a few years before his death in 1980. That June morning in Burbank, Hitchcock told Grace that he had a multi-picture deal with Warners, and after rummaging for a year in search of the right subject or property for his next movie, at last he had found one he could make in fulfillment of his contractual obligation.

  Dial “M” for Murder, by the English writer Frederick Knott, had originated as a BBC television thriller early in 1952. On June 19 that year, it was staged as a full-length play in London, and on October 29 it opened on Broadway, where it was still selling tickets for every seat, every night. Even before the West End premiere, the Hungarian-British filmmaker Alexander Korda had snapped up worldwide film rights to the play for a modest £1,000. Hitchcock saw Dial “M” and believed that, in the absence of any obvious alternative, he could make a film of it for the brothers Warner, who then had to come up with Korda’s asking price of £30,000. With its single set and few characters, it seemed an easy task to transfer the play to celluloid: Hitch was, as he later said, “running for cover.”

  There was, however, a major condition in the sale of movie rights: any motion picture of Dial “M” could not be released as long as the play was running. (Indeed, it had 552 Broadway performances, from October 29, 1952, to February 27, 1954. The movie was finally released three months later.) In addition, for Hitchcock, there was another, more troublesome condition: Warners required him to make the movie in the three-dimensional format.

  By 1953 there were 25 million TV sets in America. To entice audiences out of their living rooms and into theatres, Hollywood came up with a variety of gimmicks that television could not offer: the wide screens of Cinerama and Cinemascope, huge historic epics, flimsy costumes and sexual innuendo, stereophonic sound, and even a mercifully short-lived contraption called Smell-O-Vision. Flashiest of all were 3-D movies: Bwana Devil and House of Wax had already roped in audiences, and Warners wanted to continue the technique with Dial “M”—even though Hitchcock accurately predicted that 3-D was an unwieldy fad that would quickly die. The process did not interest him at all: “It was essentially anti-cinematic,” he told me during one of our many conversations. “3-D constantly reminded the audience that they were ‘out there’ and not drawn visually and emotionally into the story. Until I met Grace, I just wanted to get through with this thing as quickly and unceremoniously as I could. Then I realized that here was a girl I could really do something with, despite the problems of the 3-D camera.”

  ON JULY 22, 1953, the Hollywood trade papers announced that Grace Kelly had been borrowed from MGM for the role of Margot Wendice in Alfred Hitchcock’s 3-D movie version of Dial “M” for Murder, scheduled to begin filming on July 30. Frederick Knott had written the scenario after making one or two minor cuts in his play, and Hitch was ready to go. “I was determined not to do the usual pranks with 3-D,” he said, “because I felt that it was a trick that was already on the wane. Therefore, I told Bob Burks [the cinematographer] that we would not have knives or fists flying out at the audience, and no one would fall from a great height into their laps. In other words, I made it as if it were a normal movie.”

  The complicated plot concerns a retired tennis champion, Tony Wendice (played by Ray Milland) who concocts a plan to murder his wife (Grace) in order to get his hands on her fortune. Resentful of her affair with an American crime novelist named Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), Wendice arranges what appears to be the perfect crime. To commit the murder, he blackmails a man named Swann (Anthony Dawson), a former classmate with a criminal record. However, the plan goes wrong when Margot resists the killer, reaches for a pair of scissors and stabs him to death. Tony then decides to take his scheme in a different direction, trying to convince Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams) that his wife killed Swann because he was blackmailing her. The inspector, however, reasons otherwise, and with the help of Mark and Margot, a situation is set up that reveals Tony as the villain.

  As much as possible, Hitchcock filmed the play chronologically, and the opening sequences reveal his background in silent film. At breakfast in their London flat, Tony kisses Margot—no dialogue. Then we see her glance at the morning paper reporting Mark’s arrival on the Queen Mary—still no dialogue. Cut to Mark’s arrival by ship—no dialogue. Then Hitch cuts to another kiss, between Mark and Margot. All this occurs in silence (but for the Dimitri Tiomkin score). The story proceeds smoothly and the plot is set in motion calmly—until the violence of the attempted murder by strangulation, ending with Margot’s stabbing of Swann. The would-be killer then leaps up and around in his death agony, and the scissors become lethally embedded in his back as he collapses on the floor.

  The murder scene remains one of Hitchcock’s most violent sequences, even more shocking because it was filmed like an attempted rape. The director inserted shots of Grace’s legs, pushing against Dawson as he falls on her in a parody of sexual writhing as attempted strangulation. There is a kind of frenzy in the scene, requiring the intricate editing of many separate shots for the final effect, which, decades later, has lost none of its power to terrify and to repel. Eventually, Hitchcock had to trim the sequence and reduce the violence in order to satisfy the Motion Picture Association of America and Joseph Breen, vice president and director of the Production Code Administration. As Hitchcock said with witty ambiguity, “The best way to do it is with scissors.”

  “That sequence took an entire week to shoot,” Grace said, “and it was very, very difficult for Anthony Dawson and me. Each of the shots had to be carefully set up, because Hitch wanted it to look as if the only light source was the blaze from the fireplace. That was especially complicated—everything had to be shot brighter because the lenses on the 3-D cameras tended to pick up colors oddly. So we had to stop, the lights had to be fixed, then we started again. Then Tony Dawson wrapped the scarf around my neck and we had to make it look as if he was really strangling me. Then I had to twist around on the desk—I remember the assistant director warning me that I had to fall just so, or I would have broken my back.

  “Then Tony Dawson had to fall on top of me on the desk, and we stopped again—and then the shot was set up with my feet kicking against him. Then we stopped, because
something went wrong with the 3-D camera—and then we began again, and Hitch told me to reach out for the scissors, behind me on the desk. Then we had to stop again—and that’s the way it was, for a week. We tried to keep everything cheerful during the breaks, but frankly, it was all awkward and difficult. This was my first leading role in a movie, and I tried to give Hitch what he wanted. But after three or four days of work on this sequence, from seven in the morning to seven at night, I went back to my hotel covered with bruises.

  “Hitch wanted the costume department to make a velvet robe for me—he said he wanted the effect of light and shadow on the velvet during the murder. I had a fitting for it—and it seemed right for Lady Macbeth in her sleepwalking scene, but not for me in this sequence. So I told Hitch I didn’t feel the robe was right for the part. I said that if Margot gets up in the middle of the night to answer the phone and there was no one in the apartment, she would not put on this great velvet robe. Hitch’s face went slightly red—it always did if he was upset—and he asked me, ‘Well, what would you put on to answer the phone?’ and I told him, ‘I wouldn’t put on anything at all—I would just get up and answer the phone in my nightgown!’ And Hitch replied, ‘Maybe you’re right.’ And that’s the way we shot it. After that, I had his confidence as far as wardrobe was concerned, and he gave me a very great deal of liberty in what I wore in his next two pictures.”

  With impeccable manners, Grace continued to disagree with her colleagues when she thought they were wrong. “I got into quite a fight with the makeup man, who wanted to keep putting more and more rouge on me—even in the scene that takes place after Margot has spent a long time in prison. When I objected, he said that Mr. Warner likes a lot of rouge on his actresses. I told him, ‘Well, let me call Mr. Warner,’ and he replied that Mr. Warner was in the South of France. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you tell Mr. Warner that I refuse to wear all this rouge, and if he’s angry with you, tell him I threw a fit and wouldn’t wear it!’” When the makeup staff reported the incident to Hitchcock, he knew that his new leading lady had a mind of her own and was not to be prevented from using it.

  This was indeed Grace’s first leading role in a movie; she was the only woman in the cast; and she was acting under the direction of the legendary Alfred Hitchcock, who disliked and rejected interference from mere actors (“cattle,” as he puckishly termed them) and only rarely took their suggestions. But with Grace, he had found his muse, and he told everyone that she was the best leading lady he had since Ingrid Bergman, who had appeared in a trio of films for him (Spellbound, Notorious and Under Capricorn); Grace would match that record.

  “The subtlety of Grace’s sexuality—her elegant sexiness—appealed to me,” Hitch said. “That may sound strange, but I think that Grace conveyed much more sex than the average movie sexpot. With Grace, you had to find it out—you had to discover it.”

  Which he did—not only the sexiness, but also the vulnerability and the strain of melancholy that existed alongside the passion in Grace Kelly’s image, as it did in her own authentic character. In this regard, it was surprising that few critics, in 1953 or since, noted the deeply affecting and fragile portrait she created for the last sequences of Dial “M.” As Margot, she returns to her flat after her stay in prison—a day before her scheduled execution—and is, to her surprise, drawn into a scheme to unmask her husband as her intended killer. Grace conveyed a heartbreaking directness here, her voice thin, her manner that of a woman who has lost touch with her innocence and who now gazes, resistless and uncomprehending, at death. Even Hitchcock was astonished at her performance, for he did not request repeated takes. “From the Taxi test,” he said, “you could see Grace’s potential for restraint. I always tell actors not to use their face for nothing. Don’t start scribbling on the paper until you have something to write.”

  THE DIRECTOR and cast had to have complicated rehearsals because of the enormous 3-D camera in a single set.3* “Hitch felt very encumbered and frustrated by having to do the picture in 3-D,” Grace maintained. “But it was the policy of Warner Bros. at the time, because Hollywood had been hit by television. This was the first picture shot at the studio after a six-month hiatus, and here we were—this small cast, rattling around on this big stage. Hitch told us the picture would never be shown in 3-D, that it would be released ‘flat,’ that 3-D was just a passing fancy that wouldn’t last. And he was right. The machine was the size of a room—it was enormous—and when Cary Grant visited us one day, he pointed to the camera and said, ‘Well, Hitch—is that your dressing room?’ It was just gigantic, and Hitch had a terrible time with it.”

  The technical challenges angered Hitchcock. He could not vent his wrath against his male actors, who had years of experience and would have responded appropriately. Therefore, as filming continued that summer, Hitchcock took out his irritation on his leading lady. “We were blocking a scene,” Grace recalled, “and I was standing there, a little bewildered. Then I heard a voice calling me, ‘Miss Kelly, what do you think you are doing?’ I called back to him, ‘I’m trying to figure out where Margot would glance, and where she would go at this moment.’ And Hitch said, ‘Well, Miss Kelly, if you had read your script properly, you would know that she is to look in this direction and go over here. Don’t you ever read stage directions?’ So I was called down on that.” She had been embarrassed in front of the cast and crew, and Hitchcock had successfully exerted control over someone in lieu of something on the production.

  Grace remembered another incident when he tried to tease her. “Hitch always had a fund of naughty stories,” she recalled. “One time he turned to me after telling Ray Milland a very raw joke, and he said, ‘Are you shocked, Miss Kelly?’ I smiled and replied, ‘Oh no, Mr. Hitchcock, I went to a girls’ convent school—I heard all those things when I was thirteen.’ He loved that answer.”

  Hitchcock was always a good mentor—until he became emotionally involved, and then he demanded too much private time with his young trainee and turned into a benighted lover manqué. However, Grace kept the tone light, appreciating the time Hitchcock took to help her develop precisely the right accent for the role—that of a young English wife, wealthy, stylish and refined but sufficiently amorous to engage in an extramarital affair. John Ford had told Grace that he didn’t care “what the hell you do” when she had played Linda Nordley, and Grace’s voice and tone were often inappropriately strident in Mogambo. “With Hitch, it was different,” she recalled. “He had endless patience with me.”

  Hitchcock’s coaching required no intensity. “All I had to do was encourage her to lower the voice,” he said. “Once she had it down, it was no trick for a girl as clever as Grace to keep it there.” His technical frustrations during production were much relieved by the cooperation and good humor of his leading lady, and soon it was evident to everyone on the production that Hitchcock had developed a schoolboy crush. He instructed and rehearsed Grace, teaching her the elements of acting and moviemaking for which Zinnemann and Ford had neither time nor inclination.

  Halfway through production, Grace and her costar, Ray Mil-land, were thrown into turmoil by gossip-column innuendoes that their occasional dinners à deux were more than friendly encounters during his wife’s visit to England. How much was true and how much not is impossible to establish, but Ray’s wife Malvina was sufficiently sensitive about the matter to take with absolute gravity the buzz about her forty-eight-year-old husband and the actress less than half his age. Then and later, there were various tales: (1) that Mal threatened divorce because of Ray’s affair with Grace; (2) that Milland told Grace he would divorce his wife to marry her; and (3) that a torrid affair continued until the end of filming, when they calmly agreed to terminate the relationship.

  Just as with the Gable “affair” (if such it was), no one connected to Dial “M” for Murder was aware of or spoke about any intrigue; neither of the principals ever alluded to a romance; and the stories emerged only later—fueled by the gossips but not seriously regarded
except by Mrs. Milland. Hitchcock, who loved to gossip about his leading ladies, never had a word to say about it. If there was indeed more than a flirtation, it was conducted with the utmost discretion and secrecy—not a simple achievement in Hollywood. In any case, Ray Milland was never separated (much less divorced) from his wife. When he died in 1986, he had been married to her for fifty-four years.

  The rumor that Grace very nearly destroyed the Milland marriage is based on the sexist notion that a beautiful young woman can easily reduce a man to nerveless idiocy, hypnotizing him, annihilating his will and poisoning a solid twenty-one-year marriage. The real Grace was neither an ice maiden nor a scheming profligate.

  Contrary to later tales that Grace spent time on the set of Dial “M” flirting with everyone, Robert Cummings recalled that “she disappeared into her dressing room the moment a scene was over,” and there she studied her lines for the next sequence. “I kissed her a lot in the movie,” Cummings added, “but I don’t think she said more than fifty words to me outside the script. She was very private.”

  “ALL THROUGH the making of ‘Dial ‘M,’” Grace recalled, “the only way for Hitch to preserve his sanity in the midst of 3-D chaos was by preparing for his next picture. He talked to me about it even before I knew I was going to be in it. He discussed the plans he was making—he was going to build the biggest indoor set in the history of movies, which was going to be an entire four-story apartment building, with people in each unit, and he described them and what they would be doing. I could see him thinking—thinking all the time while we waited for that enormous 3-D camera to be pushed around. He didn’t tell me I was going to be one of the leading characters in the story. I was just an interested listener, and because I was under contract to MGM, I didn’t even think about whether there was a role for me in it. Anyway, he was going to direct it at Paramount. At this point, I still didn’t know if I was pleasing Hitch or not. During that summer, we filmed Dial ‘M’ for Murder—but talking about Rear Window was his real delight.”4*