Alfred Hitchcock (117 page)

Someone like …

“Well, Grace, of course,” the director sighed. “But she’s in Monaco, isn’t she? Being a princess. And Cary [Grant] for the man, of course, whoever or whatever the character may turn out to be. But why should I give Cary fifty per cent of the movie? The only stars in this movie are the birds and me.” Almost as an afterthought, Hitchcock cast a wicked glance at his writer and added, “And you, of course, Evan.”

In lieu of the princess, Hitchcock studied the field of up-and-coming actresses. On September 26 he tested Pamela Tiffin, who had been adorable in Billy Wilder’s
One, Two, Three.
He also screened footage of Yvette Mimieux, Carol Lynley, Sandra Dee. It wasn’t until October 16—still only a month after the script had started—that the director sat in a projection room and watched 16 mm footage of an obscure ash-blond model.

So obscure that the director’s appointment book misspelled her name: “Hedron,” instead of Hedren. Born Nathalie Hedren in Minnesota, the model went by the professional name of “Tippi”—an affectionate Swedish nickname meaning “little girl.” Tippi Hedren had established herself first with the Eileen Ford agency in New York before moving to California to try acting; once married, now divorced, she was the mother of a little girl, four-year-old Melanie—who would grow up to be the actress Melanie Griffith.

The Hitchcocks had seen Hedren in a commercial for Pet Milk on the
Today
show—nothing much, but it had a cute moment where Tippi whirled to acknowledge a boy’s wolf whistle. Hitchcock asked MCA to track her down.

The agency contacted the model, asking her to come in for an interview, and bring along photographs and film footage of herself. “No one told her who exactly was interested,” wrote John Russell Taylor, “though the office was full of pictures of Hitchcock.” After a few days passed (while Hitchcock digested the photographs and footage), she came again, met with Herman Citron, and was offered a seven-year, five-hundred-dollar-weekly personal contract with Hitchcock. No mention was made of
The
Birds;
she signed the contract, assuming it was for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Still, Hedren didn’t meet Hitchcock until lunch on October 24. Typically, the director kept the young model in the dark with idle talk of travel, food, clothing—“almost everything but” why he had engaged Hedren, as Taylor wrote. What he was doing was sizing her up. He liked her attentive face, her sophisticated manner, her statuesque looks. “Hitch always liked women who behaved like well-bred ladies,” explained Robert Boyle. “Tippi generated that quality. He was quite taken by the way she walked.”

Besides Hedren, at least two other young actresses boasted current contracts with Hitchcock: Joanna Moore and Claire Griswold. They all were put through the same regimen: wardrobe fittings, hair makeovers, long discursive lunches with the director, and tutorial viewings of his best-known films. Each made camera tests, reenacting scenes from Hitchcock films. Moore appeared in only a couple of Hitchcock TV shows before leaving to make her mark independently, while Griswold stayed on salary, simultaneous with Hedren.

For several weeks, as Hedren underwent this crash course, she had no idea that she was being considered as the possible leading lady of
The Birds.
She watched
Rebecca, Notorious
, and
To Catch a Thief;
then, at home with the Hitchcocks (Alma was usually in the room, observing but saying little, according to Hedren), she rehearsed the very same scenes Hitchcock had famously directed with Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman, and Grace Kelly. The week before Thanksgiving, Hitchcock scheduled an expensive color screen test. Martin Balsam flew out from New York to be her leading man for the occasion, and Robert Burks was behind the camera for the three-day shoot, which cost in the neighborhood of thirty thousand dollars.

Still no one mentioned
The Birds
, until one night Hedren was invited to join the Hitchcocks and Lew Wasserman for dinner at Chasen’s. There, Hitchcock presented her with a pin with “three golden birds with seed pearls, in flight” and asked her to play Melanie, the young woman whose visit to Bodega Bay coincides with the murderous onslaught of birds. “Well, I cried,” Hedren recalled, “and Alma, Hitch’s wife, cried—even Lew Wasserman had tears rolling down his face. It was a lovely moment.”

All the script sessions began with Hitchcock adopting the manner of a boy hearing installments of a favorite bedtime story. He would come into the office every morning, recalled Evan Hunter, “and he would sit down in a big wing-back chair, and his feet scarcely touching the floor, and he was always dressed in a very dark blue suit and a tie and a white shirt and black shoes and black socks. And he would sit there and he would say,
‘Tell me the story so far.’ And in the beginning that was easy. But as it went on and I had to tell him the story from the beginning, it got to be a rather lengthy exercise and he would pick holes in the story so far, and say: ‘Why does she do this? Why does she do that?’ ”

Musing about the lead characters, they jokingly dubbed them “Cary” and “Grace,” or “the Girl”; though they eventually renamed Hedren’s character Melanie, after Hedren’s daughter. Hitchcock had initially sketched Melanie in as a San Francisco socialite who visits “a strange town which is attacked by birds shortly after her arrival,” in Hunter’s words. There she encounters “Cary,” who lives in the strange town, as does “Cary”’s ex-girlfriend, a schoolteacher, a tad frowsy, still pining for him—just as Barbara Bel Geddes pines for James Stewart in
Vertigo.

Why does Melanie decide to visit the strange town? As Hunter tells it, after their daily lunch he had the habit of taking a walk while Hitchcock napped. One day on his digestive stroll the writer came up with the idea for which he took “full credit—or blame, as the case may be.”
The Birds
, the writer decided, ought to begin with “Cary” and “Grace” meeting cute, so the audience is lulled by a seeming “screwball comedy that gradually turns into stark terror.”

Some critics think a number of Hitchcock films—from
The 39 Steps
to
Strangers on a Train
to
North by Northwest
—qualify as almost-screwball comedies. Didn’t Hunter’s idea prove that Hitchcock still had the knack for picking writers who reached for the spot that itched?

Before Hunter ever met Tippi Hedren, Hitchcock was already shaping scenes for the newcomer, his latest “personal star.” As Melanie, Hedren would make her entrance precisely the way she had in her TV commercial, crossing a San Francisco street and coolly acknowledging a wolf whistle. Then, on a visit to a pet shop, Melanie encounters “Cary”—renamed Mitch Brenner in the film. A lawyer, Mitch enters the shop to order lovebirds for his young sister; Melanie pretends to be a clerk knowledgeable about birds. Although he recognizes her as a socialite notorious for practical jokes, he plays along—a light scene, until a caged bird escapes and foreshadows the strange events to come.

After putting the bird back in its cage, Mitch tells Melanie, “I’m putting you back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels,” a sentence Hitchcock said he added “during the shooting because I felt it added to her characterization as a wealthy, shallow playgirl”—and because it corresponded with the later scene where she is trapped by gulls in a glass telephone booth. “Here the human beings are in cages,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut, “and the birds are on the outside. When I shoot something like that, I hardly think the public is likely to notice it.”

Each time they met to discuss the story, Hitchcock “would ask questions about it, and I would try to answer them, and then accommodate
them,” recalled Hunter. “In this way, he edited the script before any of it was actually written, commenting on character development and comic effect in these early scenes of the film. We knew that once the bird attacks started, the audience was ours. But would we be able to keep them sitting still while a Meeting Cute romance between an impetuous young woman and a somewhat staid San Francisco lawyer developed?”

How staid? Why was “a man of Mitch Brenner’s age,” in Hunter’s words, “still effectively living at home with his mother and kid sister”? To explain this away, the script noted his father’s recent death, and then Annie (the frowsy schoolteacher) described “the mother’s possessive behavior in a heart-to-heart talk with Melanie, who at this point in the script seemed to be in more danger from Lydia Brenner than from any of the still quiescent birds.”

From the outset, Melanie was the main, subjective character through whose eyes audiences would experience the horror of
The Birds
, and from the outset Hitchcock and Hunter struggled with her characterization. Neither the director (“True, I wasn’t too keen on the girl’s story”) nor the writer (“I realize now that I was uncomfortable with the character of Melanie Daniels from minute one”) ever felt quite satisfied with their creation.

Also from the outset, they debated the impetus behind the bird attacks. In du Maurier’s story there is a “complete absence of explanation,” in Bill Krohn’s words; as the novella ends, the birds are regrouping for another strike. Hunter initially favored some attempt at a logical connection. “Do the townspeople have something to hide?” the writer mused, seeking the solution. “Is there a guilty secret here? Do they see this stranger [Melanie] as a messenger of revenge? Are the birds an instrument of punishment for their guilt?”

As usual, provocative ambiguity enticed Hitchcock more than stark explanation. But he brooded about the options. He and Hunter toyed with blaming the attacks on a Russian conspiracy (a dash of Cold War humor), or on ornithological revenge for human abuse. Eventually Hitchcock set the issue aside, leaving it for Hunter to grapple with as he wrote the first draft, without supervision, in his rented home.

The director left Hunter alone but phoned Mrs. Hunter every day, “and chatted with her on the phone, asking if she’d yet found a tennis partner or a good hairdresser,” according to the writer. “Never once did he ask her how the screenplay was coming along. Nor on our frequent social outings did he ever ask me how things were progressing.”

For Halloween, Hitchcock brought over signed copies of his new book,
Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful
, for the three young Hunter sons. The Hitchcocks and the Hunters often socialized after hours, and the two couples went to the racetrack together, at the director’s behest. (He tried
to hand them each a hundred-dollar bill for betting; taken aback, the Hunters declined.) The two couples dined out together, and more than once dined in at Bellagio Road, sharing Saturday night supper around the kitchen table.

“After he’d had too much wine,” Hunter recalled, Hitchcock “would take Anita’s hand between both of his and pat it, and tell her he was nothing but a big fat slob.” But Hitchcock and Hunter seemed to be enjoying their collaboration. And after he handed in his first draft, Hitchcock, in the glow of the moment, said perhaps Hunter could also write his next film—
Marnie.

Reviewing Hunter’s draft in a five-page letter dated November 30, 1962, Hitchcock listed his key concerns: Melanie and Mitch were still “insufficiently characterized,” and Hunter had written too many “no-scene scenes.” The director explained: “By this, I mean that the little sequence that might have narrative value but in itself is undramatic. It very obviously lacks shape and it doesn’t within itself have a climax as a scene on the stage might.”

Deemed expendable, and removed from the script, were “a scene between Melanie and her father in his newspaper office; two scenes in Bodega Bay, where Melanie goes to buy some temporary overnight clothes and later tries to rent a room at a fully booked hotel; and lastly, a scene inside the local church, where she runs into Mitch again,” in Hunter’s words.

“In a long and masterfully detailed paragraph,” according to Hunter, “Hitch went on to suggest how we could begin foreshadowing the bird attacks from the very beginning of the film. Lastly, he wondered whether we shouldn’t start thinking about giving the script a stronger thematic structure, and wrote, ‘I’m sure we are going to be asked again, especially by the morons, “Why are they doing it?” ‘ ”

In mid-December, Hunter handed in revised pages, including a new scene between Melanie and Mitch which at last spelled out a possible reason for the bird attacks. The scene began, in lighthearted fashion, with Melanie proposing “that this all must have started with a malcontent sparrow preaching revolution,” according to Hunter. After they both laugh at her little joke, an awkward silence descends. After more flat jokes, “there is the chill of horror to Melanie’s words when she says those finches came down that chimney in fury—as if they wanted everyone in the house
dead
,” in Hunter’s words.

Then, suddenly frightened, Melanie and Mitch fall into an embrace, kissing fiercely. “From what I understand,” wrote Hunter, “Hitch shot this scene. But he never used it.” He “suppressed” it, the director himself explained in later interviews, because it crucially slowed the momentum of
the story. Its absence (“sorely felt”) became one of the writer’s eventual grudges against the film.

Hitchcock responded to Hunter’s revised draft with four pages of notes, just before Christmas. Mindful of the approaching holidays, he joked, “Perhaps it would be nicer if you took this letter and put it under the tree and then on Christmas Eve you could pull it out and say, ‘Oo look, a present from Hitch.’ P.S. People are still asking, ‘Why did the birds do it?’ ”

Then Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock flew to St. Moritz for the holidays, where Marlene Dietrich was celebrating her birthday onstage at Badrutt’s Palace, and there the Hitchcocks greeted the star of
Stage Fright
after the show.

Hunter’s final draft, arriving in mid-January, tightened the dialogue and proposed several new scenes, including the conversation between Melanie and the schoolteacher about Mitch and his mother, and the scene in the Tides Restaurant, where the owner and patrons—Melanie, but also a traveling salesman, an amateur bird expert named Mrs. Bundy, a barstool drunk, and a mother and her children made increasingly jittery—discuss the growing crisis. This last, thought Hunter, was probably his best-written scene.