Alfred Hitchcock (41 page)

What were his thoughts as Hitchcock peered out the window at the American landscape streaking by? The Super Chief made only one fleeting stop in Kansas City during its transcontinental trip, and future Hitchcock films would for the most part—like the Super Chief—also bypass Middle America (This neglect would make the rare stops—the desolate highway in
North by Northwest
or Mount Rushmore in the same film—all the more memorable.)

Train travel was different in America, Hitchcock mused in later interviews. The trains were spacious and air-conditioned, and first-class passengers rode in roomy private berths. There was little of the forced crowdedness and social intermingling of English trains. The new highspeed diesel engines also seemed less cinematic than the old locomotives, he reflected; he said he didn’t think he could ever make a film like
The Lady Vanishes
on an American train. (Yet he did find ways to create high drama on American trains, several times.)

“Palm trees! Sunshine! Lovely!”—that’s how Marlene Dietrich describes California in Hitchcock’s
Stage Fright.
Yet it wasn’t all sunshine and loveliness for him on this first visit.

As was customary for Hollywood celebrities, the Hitchcocks were met at the Pasadena station by his agents, Myron Selznick and Dan Winkler. Winkler, the junior agent who would drive the English director to some of his appointments, was also an expert on Los Angeles restaurants and nightclubs, having formerly partnered with
Hollywood Reporter
publisher W R. Wilkerson in the operation of the Trocadero.

But when the Hitchcocks visited the local clubs and eateries on this first trip to Hollywood, it wasn’t to sneak their names into the gossip columns. There was little of the press clamor that characterized their New York visits; Hitchcock gave no interviews from his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. There was no Gaumont publicity. This leg of the trip was all business, and the secretive, Machiavellian Myron Selznick took charge.

The summer of 1938 was dry and hot in Hollywood, and warmhearted films were the fashion. Among the films being produced around town, Frank Capra was shooting the Kaufman-Hart play
You Can’t Take It with You
over at Columbia; MGM was making
Boys Town
, with Spencer Tracy in priest’s robes; Bette Davis, Anita Louise, and Jane Bryan were playing siblings with husband troubles in
The Sisters
, which was under way at Warner Bros.

David O. Selznick was busy producing
The Young in Heart
, a wacky comedy cowritten by Hitchcock’s old friend and collaborator Charles Bennett. The casting of Clark Gable as Rhett Butler had just been announced for
Gone With the Wind.

Some accounts have contended that DOS was the only Hollywood producer who seriously courted Hitchcock (one account reports Selznick’s subsequent boast to Frank Capra, that Myron “could not get bids for [Hitchcock] at the time I signed him”). But that is an oversimplification. The agents who worked for Myron were accustomed to navigating the gray zone that existed between the brothers. They knew how Myron liked to lord it over his younger brother, parry and thrust with David until he drew blood; then, only then, would he triumphantly deliver the goods.

The agents had done their best to set up meetings at all the studios. And while DOS was understood as the main target, some agents felt that Hitchcock was an attractive client who could be peddled to other producers, to everyone’s greater benefit.

Myron’s brother came first, however, and Hitchcock’s introduction to the producer was set for June 15, the day after his arrival. That summit meeting was so anticlimactic that afterward the director didn’t know what he ought to think. In person, the producer was nothing like his bulldog brother. DOS was a bookworm in thick eyeglasses. He was warm and solicitous; his ego was diffuse. Most important, Hitchcock liked him.

DOS was harder to pin down, even, than his brother. The producer
seemed in no hurry to decide the things that mattered most to Hitchcock. He tended to bulldoze or derail the conversation. He rambled. He equivocated. He chain-smoked—taking phone calls, and talking to Hitchcock and the caller at the same time. He startled the director by appearing to wave off the “Titanic” project, which the director had crossed the Atlantic to discuss. Instead, he said, he had been thinking Hitchcock might excel at directing an Edward G. Robinson vehicle. The producer had always wanted to make an Edward G. Robinson picture. But there was no script, DOS felt obliged to add—no script, no story, and come to think of it, no Edward G. Robinson.

There was one bright bit of news: the producer had just consolidated the option for
Rebecca
, which he knew would tantalize Hitchcock.
Rebecca
, DOS mused, might very well become the second Selznick-Hitchcock film … after the first one … which might or might not be “Titanic.”

Hitchcock retained his composure. But Noll Gurney, the senior Selznick agent who accompanied him to the meeting, picked up on the Englishman’s crushed reaction. He took the director to dinner in an effort to cheer him up: DOS’s plans were necessarily elastic, Gurney explained, and Hitchcock “should not take David’s ambiguity as emanating from a source of disinterest in him.”

Gurney was one of the cabal of agents (Winkler was another) who unequivocally admired Hitchcock, and wondered if he was being delivered too easily into the arms of Myron’s brother. “I have personally felt for a long time that Hitchcock is about the only director in England who can in any way match our ‘A’ directors here,” Gurney explained in one memo, “and it must be remembered that he has had to work under conditions in England which have been most difficult. … I would like to see Hitchcock get an opportunity here comparable to that given our average top director—I am confident he would not fail.”

Sam Goldwyn had been lined up to share a possible two-picture contract with DOS, and to Gurney and others he seemed the more appreciative customer. Again escorted by Gurney, Hitchcock met Goldwyn face-to-face on his second full day in Hollywood. Goldwyn expressed eagerness to split a two-picture deal with Selznick International; he already had a subject and title—“Scotland Yard,” exploiting Hitchcock’s Englishness and crime-film reputation. Goldwyn was raring to go: “Scotland Yard” could be produced first, if a decent script could be thrown together and the arrangement was okay with DOS. “Or of course David’s picture might come first and Sam’s second,” in Gurney’s words.

Gurney knew, however, that DOS wasn’t likely to launch a Hitchcock project in earnest until after
Gone With the Wind
was completed. That was a problem because Hitchcock was in a hurry for a commitment. The director wanted assurances that he could go to work on his first American
film immediately following
Jamaica Inn.
But the Goldwyn film couldn’t be scheduled first without offending DOS, so the diplomacy became knotty.

“Sam wanted to talk deals immediately,” Gurney said. “I told him that Hitchcock did not want to do anything definite until he was convinced, first, that he wanted to do ‘Scotland Yard,’ and secondly, he was confused about the situation with Selznick International.”

After his initial encounters with Selznick and Goldwyn, Hitchcock was confused indeed. He was slated to meet with other producers, but now said he was embarrassed to be “hawked about town” like a bargain from the bin, without being able to tell possible employers when he was available for work. Gurney managed to coax him to appointments with Adolph Zukor at Paramount, with executives at Warner Bros., and with Walter Wanger at RKO, but the Englishman was increasingly restive in these situations, since he got the clear impression that everyone was waiting for clearance from DOS.

To a certain extent, Gurney was operating at cross-purposes with his boss. Myron had rock-solid faith in an eventual agreement with his brother. More than once the superagent had to rein in his subordinates before they pushed Hitchcock too hard with other prospects. At one point, a Selznick agent was tracked down by Myron’s secretary while en route to RKO to promote Hitchcock for a deal there, and ordered to return to the office and “hold off on discussion until they finish with DOS,” according to an agency memo.

Such labyrinthine maneuvering, during Hitchcock’s first week in Hollywood, opened his eyes. It made him feel less secure and prompted him to review his demands. He had been asking fifty thousand dollars per film; now, recognizing that working in Hollywood would put him at the whim of whimsical producers, he suddenly upped his price to sixty thousand, taking the agency by surprise. He also asked for additional expenses, elevating the total price to seventy-five thousand. “He quite realizes that at one time he felt he was able to get through on fifty thousand dollars,” Gurney explained sympathetically in a memo, “but on refiguring his taxes and expenses sixty thousand dollars is the only figure that will give him the net that is the equal of what he now gets in England, and he intends to ask more there after the Laughton picture.”

The Selznick Agency was forced to advertise a new figure: Hitchcock’s requirements were now sixty thousand dollars for sixteen weeks of production, with fifteen thousand extra for expenses over the same time span. Hitchcock took pains to point out that “for this figure he intends to give a good deal more time than is usual,” in Gurney’s words. The English director promised to supervise all preliminary work and research, free of charge. He wouldn’t take money for any preproduction work he performed before January 1, 1939, when his contract and salary would begin.
Mrs. Hitchcock’s involvement, he continually reminded everyone, came free of charge. He overoptimistically vowed to start photography on his first film by March 1, 1939, and to launch preproduction of the second “not later than between June 1st and 15th.”

Hitchcock presented another fresh stipulation: Joan Harrison was his “secretary and script girl,” and he wanted her $150-$200 weekly salary etched into any deal. “Hitchcock says that this girl has worked for him for years,” explained Gurney, “and is invaluable to him in connection with his ‘peculiar system’ of writing, his shooting schedule, camera angles etc.”

Unlike some Hollywood producers (an RKO official took his studio out of the Hitchcock bidding with the words “You will have trouble with us at that price”), Goldwyn didn’t fret over the escalating demands. He continued his avid pursuit of the English director, and they shared a long lunch on June 23. Goldwyn liked Hitchcock, and was impressed that a man of such stature was paying his own way to America to apply for a job.

The second Goldwyn-Hitchcock meeting went swimmingly—even better than the first. “Goldwyn put on his usual act with Hitchcock,” Gurney reported back to the agency. “I mean that first of all he established himself as the director’s greatest friend on earth and then proceeded in an attempt to make an office boy out of Hitchcock. In other words, to tell him step by step what he should do in connection with preparing a story on ‘Scotland Yard,’ but Mr. Hitchcock quietly upset all of Mr. Goldwyn’s ideas and Goldwyn then became very praiseworthy of Hitchcock’s great ability and attainments.”

Hitchcock thought it would help if he did what he often did in England: employ the same writer on both his first, presumably Selznick, production and his second, presumably for Goldwyn. To save time and money, one or more writers could work on both scripts simultaneously, consulting with him while he was filming
Jamaica Inn.
“Hitchcock says there must not be any apprehension about his ability to assist these writers whilst he is making the Laughton picture,” Gurney explained, “because outside of actual shooting, the Laughton picture is so well prepared that it is more or less a mechanical procedure now to ‘get it into the camera.’”

Who ought to be the main writer? Goldwyn wondered aloud. Hitchcock “stressed the importance of his having an English writer and one with whom he could work,” in Gurney’s words. Goldwyn was the rare Hollywood producer who encouraged compatibility between a writer and director; he was the sponsor, for example, of the long partnership of Lillian Hellman and William Wyler. Goldwyn suggested that Hitchcock might reunite with Charles Bennett, who was presently under contract to DOS and therefore could be easily integrated into the bargain. Hitchcock awkwardly explained that “Bennett would be ideal for him on the story construction, but that later on he would have to have a dialogue writer,” Gurney reported.

Goldwyn wasn’t going to lose sleep over details. They “came to the
point of discussing a deal,” said Gurney, before Goldwyn again invoked the protocol. “He could go no further until David Selznick ‘cleared the way,’ as DOS had the first call on Hitchcock.”

But Gurney knew the agency was flirting with Goldwyn primarily to arouse DOS, who the cabal believed was less likely to share Hitchcock with Goldwyn—his equal or even his better as an independent producer—than with anyone else in Hollywood. So the Goldwyn talks ground to a halt while everyone waited for a signal from DOS.

Three weeks after Hitchcock’s arrival in Hollywood, everyone was still waiting. The director had been wined and dined. He had done a modicum of sightseeing, but he was too distracted to enjoy himself. He spent most of his time on the sidewalks between the hotel and the agency in Beverly Hills. And still there was no firm word from DOS.

And by the end of June, Hitchcock was apoplectic. He found himself somehow tied to the indecision of his agent’s brother, without any guarantees, schedule, or definite project on the table. On June 30 the director spent two hours at the agency, irately complaining that he appreciated DOS was having some difficulty arriving at a final decision—but “still he would rather have the answer of ‘no’ than none at all, so that we may know how to proceed with Goldwyn or any other producers who might be interested in him,” according to Gurney.

Myron, though, could be as charming a bulldozer as his brother David. He convinced Hitchcock to stay calm just a little longer. DOS was about to see the light. After talking with Hitchcock, Myron took command; he visited his brother and delivered an ultimatum. Sure enough, on July 2, Selznick International finally made Hitchcock an offer.