Alfred Hitchcock (139 page)

All the press attention had boosted Hitchcock’s spirits, and he and Alma felt strong enough to travel to St. Moritz for Christmas. Speaking to reporters before the release of
Family Plot
, Hitchcock said he was optimistic about the new film’s prospects. He said his wife no longer skied. “We spend most of our time sitting comfortably in the Palace Hotel,” he said, “watching it from behind the window.” They couldn’t have known it would be the last time they would visit St. Moritz—indeed, their last time in Europe.

Before the film’s national release, Universal sponsored a lavish premiere at FILMEX, the Los Angeles International Film Festival, replete with fireworks, dancing bears, and the film reels delivered in a hearse. In the theater they showed a clip of Hitchcock arriving at the theater and coming to the door; then, when the clip ended, the man himself strolled onstage. James Stewart was on hand to present him with a career achievement award. Although it was a black-tie event, bags of popcorn were handed out along with soft drinks.

One hundred journalists and movie critics congregated in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Dallas for a closed-circuit press conference, just before Easter, 1976. “The general tenor of questioning was highly respectful,” wrote Joseph McBride in
Variety
, although Hitchcock was subjected to “repeated, and sometimes silly, questions from critics about symbolism in his work.” Asked, for example, if wall smudges around a light switch in
Family Plot
suggested any implied meaning, Hitchcock responded, “A switch is a symbol of light.” But the train-tunnel ending of
North by Northwest
was consciously symbolic of intercourse. “I think that comes under the heading of pornography ahead of its time,” Hitchcock gamely told the press, in a line he had used in numerous interviews over the years. Asked if
Family Plot
was his final film, he said no—no, he “definitely” had a fifty-fourth in the works.

When the reviews for
Family Plot
were toted up, they fell into three distinct categories. The older, more gentlemanly (and ladylike) critics found the new Hitchcock picture benign and entertaining; Vincent Canby of the
New York Times
, for example, described the film as “thoughtful, measured in tone and so courtly that we are well into the performance before we realize just how high he’s sent us up, and with what good humor.”

Younger, more aggressive reviewers generally thought
Family Plot
“vulgar, lifeless and maladroit,” in the words of Jay Cocks in
Time
, or “less pretentious and preposterous than
Torn Curtain
and
Topaz
, less ludicrous than
Marnie
and less offensive than
Frenzy
,” while “still late Hitchcock and not very good,” according to
New York
magazine’s John Simon—who also, incidentally, dismissed Ernest Lehman as a “glorified hack.”

The auteurists and cineastes who had grown to revere the director, and who saw nuances and symbolism in the least of his films (even when none was intended)—these scribes saw a pure, Hitchcockian
Family Plot
, “a marvelously fluid light comedy with scarcely a slack moment,” in the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in
Sight and Sound.
^*

Today most find it a slight film, although its value to Hitchcock fans and scholars has only increased over time. Bill Krohn in his book described
Family Plot
as Hitchcockian precisely
because
the director rubbed out his usual realism and identifying marks while defying all expectations. “An exhilarating experiment in mise en scène from beginning to end,” Krohn rhapsodized. “His characters, played by a new breed of actors, are freed from the often suffocating constraints of his highly composed frames, enabling them to move around in front of the camera and invent their lives in a visual universe made up of medium shots and medium closeups. (Hitchcock had never made a film with so few real closeups.)” In his last film, Krohn wrote, “Hitchcock overturns the principles of his cinema and makes a film that belongs to the cinema of the eternally young, along with
Seven Women
(1966),
A King in New York
(1957), and
La Petit Théâter de Jean Renoir
(1971),” late films by John Ford, Charles Chaplin, and Jean Renoir.

Shortly after
Family Plot
was released, Alma Reville suffered a severe stroke, crippling her and confining her to the house, under the care of round-the-clock nurses and several kinds of therapists. Although for a few months Hitchcock made the effort to take her to Chasen’s once a week, she could not walk without strong aid, and he himself could no longer
walk easily or far. Writing to intimates, Hitchcock was frank about Alma’s condition, if uncomplaining about his own. There wasn’t room in the house for all the nurses and a cook, so Chasen’s began to deliver, and Hitchcock himself took over the cooking three times a week. “Little did I believe that after all these years and the accumulation of a little wealth that I should approach my 78th year being a cook in the kitchen!” he wrote Michael Balcon.

Most of the second half of 1976 was taken up with arranging Alma’s medical care, so Hitchcock cut back on his office routine. By early 1977, Hitchcock was forced to accept that she was more or less permanently housebound, and he began to talk serously about getting started on a fifty-fourth film.

It was peculiarly ungratifying to him that the amorphous
Family Plot
had found its main audience among auteurists and cineastes. Hitchcock had always taken pride in his box-office numbers, yet
Family Plot
was his least successful picture since
The Trouble with Harry
, another bent comedy to which the fifty-third Hitchcock bore a fleeting resemblance. Its number twenty-six box-office ranking was an embarrassment, and to go out on top—with an audience winner—was one reason behind his seeming iron resolve to make yet one more film.

For a while he alighted on Elmore Leonard’s
Unknown Man No. 89
, a hard-boiled crime novel set in Detroit. But after thinking it over, Hitchcock returned to his idée fixe of shooting a realistic James Bond to wash away the stain of his previous failures. He took up another Cold War novel Universal had acquired for him almost ten years before—a story that, like both
Torn Curtain
and
Topaz
, involved a double agent with a conflicted wife. Ronald Kirkbride’s novel
The Short Night
, published in 1968, was loosely based on the true story of George Blake, a double agent who had worked for the British Foreign Office while betraying British agents; after being caught and convicted, Blake had made a daring escape from Wormwood Scrubs Prison in 1966, fleeing to the Soviet Union.

In the novel, the fugitive, while en route to Moscow stops at a secluded island in Finland, where his wife and children await him. An American agent, intending to avenge his brother (one of the double spy’s victims), arrives first, and falls in love with the traitor’s wife.

The Blake case had fascinated Hitchcock in real life, and to help with the authenticity of the film the director bought the rights to a second book, a nonfiction account of the prison escape called
The Springing of George Blake
by Sean Bourke, one of the accomplices.

In the first week of May 1977, Hitchcock launched into scriptwork with a writer Universal had recommended. James Costigan was a native Californian, and author of
Love Among the Ruins
(1975) and
Eleanor and Franklin
(1976), both Emmy-winning television films. (
Love Among the
Ruins
particularly intrigued Hitchcock, as it starred Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn, and was directed by George Cukor.) Costigan entered the usual regimen: long talks, steak and coffee lunches, screenings of Hitchcock films, all of it at Universal, as Bellagio Road had become a virtual hospital ward.

In June, Hitchcock wrote to Balcon to decline an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in England, explaining, without alluding to his own health problems, all the reasons that kept him from traveling overseas: Alma, the pending project, the troublesome writer. Although Costigan was highly regarded, Hitchcock explained that he had agreed to a contractual first payment of $150,000, which forced them to get along even if they didn’t harmonize. Costigan, the director complained, is “non-cinematic, in addition to which he is extremely obstinate, if you attempt to guide him away from the overemphasis on the verbal.” Moreover, their “difficulties” involved “the interesting part of the story,” the romance between the American revenge seeker and the escaped spy’s wife. “He doesn’t like the woman in the story,” Hitchcock plaintively reported, “because she is married to Blake, even though she has two children by him. What about Philby? What about Burgess and Maclean? Didn’t they have wives?”

Hitchcock’s preferred way of making films (starting with a blank slate and painstakingly weaving in his ideas over a series of writers and drafts) had always been a function of the available time and money. But now the director was facing hard questions: Did he have enough time to start over with a new writer? Could he afford to alienate the studio by simply paying Costigan off?

Reviewing his personal dilemma, Hitchcock in his letter also reviewed the industry’s. MCA, he noted, had $150 million in the bank at $40 a share, “higher than anyone else.”
Jaws
had lifted Universal’s stock, and now
Star Wars
was elevating Twentieth Century–Fox. “It seems like in making pictures we have to play a kind of roulette and hope that the balls fall in #35 instead of Zero, because that’s how chancy the whole business has become,” he observed. “You can see by the picture I draw,” he stated glumly, “that it is one of preoccupation.”

He and Costigan worked together just a short time, before Hitchcock gave up and paid the writer off; then followed a summer of chest colds, backaches, and cortisone shots (now applied directly into his knees), even as Hitchcock was coping with a sadly diminished Alma. Then, in mid-October, Ernest Lehman inherited “The Short Night.” Better the devil you know, Hitchcock had decided, and so their previous disagreements over
Family Plot
were set aside.

Lehman gave this fifty-fourth Hitchcock a needed injection of hope and vitality. Now Hilton Green, Robert Boyle, Albert Whitlock, and Norman Lloyd began to show up for preproduction meetings, and Boyle, Lloyd,
and others flew to Finland to photograph settings. Hitchcock talked about filming part of “The Short Night” on location, but people wondered how he could possibly manage it, and indeed whether he could ever bring himself to leave the country without Alma. Lloyd was expected to fill in, directing the second unit.

Ever loyal, Princess Grace came to see the Hitchcocks in November, and again in February, but office visitors were discouraged because of the work, and most days the schedule simply read: “11 A.M., Ernie; 12:30, lunch.” The first storyboards were executed, depicting a complicated crescendo at the end of the film, with the vengeance seeker chasing a train with the spy aboard. That would be arduous to shoot, and the prospect of it finally decided Hitchcock against going to Finland. So Lloyd agreed to direct the train scenes, too.

The talk turned to casting. Clint Eastwood, who had left Universal for a deal at Warner Bros., was a star the studio wished to lure back. Hitchcock had lunch with Eastwood, and the actor raised an eyebrow on hearing about a pending Hitchcock film with a Clint-type lead: an American on a revenge mission. But Eastwood was busy, involved with his own projects; in time the American intelligence agent would become a Scot, with Sean Connery penciled in to play the lead, and perhaps Liv Ullmann as the traitor’s wife.

Hitchcock and Lehman got along well for a time, before optimism faded. The director had one sharp disagreement with Lehman over a scene in the novel, in which the Blake character rapes and murders a woman. Hitchcock wanted to retain the scene, but Lehman resisted writing it. (Later, at Hitchcock’s behest, David Freeman would put it in.)

Then Hitchcock decided the script needed another writer—though he might have been stalling. “He couldn’t lick the story,” said Lloyd. “Nobody could lick the story. Nobody knew better than Hitch that it was old hat. He’d had it on his shelf for eleven years, and interestingly enough, while we were talking about doing it, we kept looking for something else.”

In July 1978 Lloyd took over, meeting with Hitchcock on a daily basis to revise Lehman’s draft and plot a fresh continuity, incorporating fresh research and location ideas. But Hitchcock’s ailments were steadily mounting: lung congestion, dizzy spells, repeated falls. Some days, Lloyd recalled, Hitchcock could barely make it down the hallway to his office, lurching in pain, holding on to the wall. But still he refused to use a cane. One day Lloyd and Joseph Cotten spirited the director away for a rare lunch outside the studio, and it struck both of them that he wasn’t eating like his old self. His appetite had vanished, and he’d even lost his taste for cigars, taking just two puffs of one before he set it down.

One day the director surprised Lloyd by saying, “You know, Norm, we’re not ever going to make this picture.”

“Why do you say that, Hitch?” Lloyd protested. “You’ve got a bungalow,
you’ve got a driver, you’ve got a cutter, you’ve got a staff, you’ve got Bob Boyle working on sketches … why do you say that?”

“Because,” Hitchcock answered flatly, “it’s not
necessary.
”

“He had reached a point in his life when he looked the fact right in the face,” Lloyd recalled.

Even so, the script talks continued. But they had gotten only two-thirds of the way through a lengthy continuity when, in late September, Hitchcock surprised Lloyd by announcing they should launch into the actual script. It was as though that day Hitchcock suddenly realized that “The Short Night” might in fact never be made with such slow progress. Panicked, Lloyd said quickly, “Not me. I don’t think we’re ready”—and then he couldn’t mistake the betrayed look in Hitchcock’s face. “He just cut me off like I’d never known him,” recalled Lloyd. “He had a right to.”