Alfred Hitchcock (42 page)

An extremely disappointing offer: the proposed contract would guarantee only one Selznick-Hitchcock production, along with four years of option clauses permitting the producer to extend his supervision of Hitchcock films, one per year, through 1943. The arrangement would begin, at the producer’s discretion, between January 15 and April 15, 1939. Preliminary language specified the first project as “Titanic,” although DOS had the right to substitute any other film. (The final language would delete any mention of the ship-disaster project, fast disappearing from DOS’s radar screen.)

Moreover, the offer was for only fifty thousand dollars for the first Selznick picture, encompassing at least twenty weeks of production (the other weeks of the year would be free and clear to Hitchcock). Only after he had directed four additional films for Selznick International, over four years, would Hitchcock’s salary rise to seventy-five thousand dollars. “All of the time that Hitchcock devotes to the story between now and the actual starting date is to be gratis,” the offer stipulated.

In his book
Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers
, Leo Rosten researched the earnings of Hollywood filmmakers in 1938, listing
thirty-four directors (out of sixty-seven voluntary respondents) making salaries of $100,000 or more, and sixteen who earned over $150,000.
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The latter group included such studio contract journeymen as Roy Del Ruth, Norman Taurog, Archie Mayo, and Wesley Ruggles.

Not only did Hitchcock’s proposed contract rank him below Del Ruth, Taurog, Mayo, and Ruggles, but it tucked all of his and Mrs. Hitchcock’s scriptwork into his salary (other directors were routinely paid extra for any scriptwork). Plus, it made no allowance for sharing of profits or of gross revenue, which was gradually becoming standard for top directors. No allowances were made for coproducing, which also boosted other directors’ income. There were travel and relocation set-asides, but even these were less than Hitchcock had wanted. And DOS did agree to pick up the moving expenses and salary of Joan Harrison.

Myron assured a disconsolate Hitchcock that it was the best contract he could get under the circumstances; that DOS was superior in every way to Goldwyn; that it was a matter of cachet to work for Selznick International, and this cachet would help Hitchcock obtain a higher salary on his loan-outs. He could direct his one Selznick production a year, and then feel free to direct one or more additional pictures for other Hollywood producers—including Sam Goldwyn if he wanted. In other words, the contract was an open door to America.

Hitchcock accepted. On July 6 Myron hosted the Hitchcocks for a celebratory dinner at his house, with Dan Winkler, Clark Gable, and Carole Lombard the only other guests. Selznick clients both, Gable and Lombard were the uncrowned (and yet unmarried) king and queen of Hollywood. The screwball comedienne was a down-to-earth “Hitchcock blonde” who delighted in risqué humor. Gable laughed hardest whenever the apple of his eye was laughing.

Hitchcock, charmed by Lombard, was also in a laughing mood. Ever the practical artist, he was convinced that everything was probably for the best. And with his high-spirited dinner, Myron sent his client home from Hollywood on a high note.

Furiously left out in the cold was Sam Goldwyn, who had waited patiently for Hitchcock to conclude a deal with the Selznicks that ultimately locked him out. Determined, the producer made one last-ditch effort to contact the Englishman and sign him for at least one Goldwyn production, sometime—anytime—in 1939. Because DOS’s calendar was so “elastic,” Myron knew better, and ordered the agency not to facilitate any communication.

On July 8, the Hitchcocks returned by train to New York. The director finished off an extended sit-down with Russell Maloney for the
New Yorker
, and spoke on WNYC radio about “The Making of Melodrama” with
New Republic
film critic Otis Ferguson. Hitchcock “held forth about the possibilities of enterprising B-features as a field for experiment,” reported John Russell Taylor, “using offbeat stories by writers such as O. Henry or Edgar Allan Poe—a curious anticipation of what he was going to do with his television series years later.”

Then the Hitchcocks sailed on the
Normandie
back to England, and again the director sprawled in a deck chair, basking in the blue skies, watching the people, and catching up with his reading. He carried with him, according to London’s
Daily Telegraph
, “a trunk full of books, articles and contemporary illustrations” about the
Titanic
disaster. This time his fellow passengers included novelist Theodore Dreiser, actor George Sanders,
New York Post
entertainment columnist Leonard Lyons, and William Paley, the head of CBS radio—who would one day air
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
on his television network.

David O. Selznick announced his prize acquisition on July 12, the eve of Hitchcock’s departure for England. The news was carried in the
Los Angeles Times
and film columns nationwide, but the items were brief—partly because DOS couldn’t elaborate on “Titanic,” reported as the first Selznick-Hitchcock project (“Quite obvious what the last two reels will be,” Hitchcock told one New York newspaperman. “Beyond that nothing”), and partly because Hitchcock’s name meant almost nothing to the general public in America.

In England, the loss of this “national institution,” in C. A. Lejeune’s words, was bigger news. As long feared, England’s onetime boy wonder, its greatest director, was joining the Lost Legion of Hollywood. The applause was tinged with bitterness.

For one thing, the Gaumont films, which had stirred deep admiration from some critics, also added others to the anti-Hitchcock club. Graham Greene was one who detested the illogic and Macguffins of some of Hitchcock’s greatest English films. Commenting on
Secret Agent
in the
Spectator
, for example, Greene wrote, “How unfortunate it is that Mr. Hitchcock, a clever director, is allowed to produce and even to write his own films, though as a producer he has no sense of continuity and as a writer he has no sense of life.” John Grierson was another well-known critic who rarely lost an opportunity to accuse Hitchcock of squandering his talent.

Noting that Hitchcock intended to leave London as early as January 1939, after finishing
Jamaica Inn
, Herbert Thompson, the editor of the fan magazine
Film Weekly
, wrote: “I do not always applaud these Hollywood
captures, but in Hitchcock’s case I am sure experience of Hollywood’s mass-production methods will improve his work. Hitchcock, still probably Britain’s most talented director, certainly the most individualist, has suffered for too long from being unchallenged in his own field and from being allowed to make his pictures almost exactly as he pleases. There is a strain of willfulness in Hitchcock, which has become more and more apparent with every picture he has made.

“He is a man with a cold and sardonic eye. He sees the grotesque side of his fellow men. And he is always more than ready to include one scarifying, impish touch, even at the risk of sacrificing the mood of a scene or a whole picture. He pleases himself.”

In spite of all that, Thompson arrived at a hopeful conclusion: “There is a suggestion that Hitchcock may decide to remain in America after he has made his ‘Titanic’ film. I doubt the truth of that. Hitchcock is one of our few directors who can be called essentially British.

“When he returns he will, I predict, be a finer and more popular director than ever.”

Hitchcock didn’t care a fig about
Jamaica Inn;
he had agreed to direct it largely out of desperation. But he did have an affectionate regard for Charles Laughton, and thought he would enjoy directing the oft hammy, always charismatic actor, whose physical bulk rivaled his own. Hitchcock and Laughton had known each other since the late 1920s, when they lunched together occasionally. A frequent guest at Cromwell Road and Shamley Green (he had his own cottage in the vicinity), Laughton was as chimerical in private life as he was flamboyant and arresting on-screen (he had already played Claudius, Rembrandt, and Henry VIII, winning the 1933 Oscar for
The Private Life of Henry VIII
). Hitchcock found him to be “a very charming man,” in his words, “very nice and also very troubled.”

Laughton’s partnership with Erich Pommer, who in Berlin in the 1920s had supervised the Ufa masterpieces of Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and G. W. Pabst, had been launched with fanfare. Pommer’s résumé certainly commanded respect, but Hitchcock knew the producer only glancingly from his time in Berlin and “hadn’t seen him since.” Now a refugee from Hitler, Pommer was in many ways an edgier man. Reduced to supervising one film at a time, not several simultaneously, Pommer was no longer as laissez-faire in his approach. He hovered over all the decisions, feeling the need to reestablish his reputation outside Germany. He and Hitchcock renewed their acquaintance with instant mutual dislike.

By the time Hitchcock returned from America, the
Jamaica Inn
script, which had been bequeathed to Sidney Gilliat and Joan Harrison, had come
under Pommer’s influence. With one eye on the U.S. market, the producer had sent the Clemence Dane version to the New York office of the Production Code Administration, which “had refused to allow a clergyman to be the villain,” in the words of Gilliat. Although that was the whole point of the novel, Pommer had taken the Production Code to heart, and insisted the clergyman be turned into a justice of the peace. On this and any other dispute, Laughton—concerned about his investment, loyal to Pommer, and insecure about his own judgment—sided with his partner, usually by making himself invisible. In Hitchcock’s absence, Pommer had cracked the whip on a revised draft that produced “unashamed characters who were melodrama,” in Gilliat’s words.

With a deep sigh, the director had to acquiesce when Pommer and Laughton now insisted on employing J. B. Priestley, widely revered for his prodigious output of plays and novels, to toil on the star’s part and dialogue, lending period flavor and “Regency touches,” in Gilliat’s words. Priestley churned out “scenes more or less straight out of Ashden’s
End of the 18th Century
, a famous source book,” according to Gilliat, while the resigned Hitchcock let Laughton develop them almost as apron speeches
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The film’s strangest scene takes place in a dining room and involves a horse. Donald Spoto blames this scene on the director—“the appalling exaggeration of a sadistic scene in which the deranged Laughton, protesting how much he is in love with Maureen O’Hara, binds and gags her”—but Priestley wrote it straight from the novel.

Hitchcock showed only a mild interest in the
Jamaica Inn
script anyway, according to Gilliat. On this film, almost all the pleasure was in the storyboarding. The director focused particularly on “the first scene which was the coach arriving at the Jamaica Inn—all raging surf, whistling wind and violent shadows,” in Gilliat’s words.

The Mayflower partners sought an unknown to play the lead female character, Mary, the young niece who opposes the pirates. Maureen O’Hara had apprenticed with the Abbey Theatre in her native Dublin before playing inconsequential parts in British films, but after an inconclusive screen test the redhead, just eighteen, met Laughton and bewitched him. O’Hara had signed for the role well before Hitchcock agreed to direct.

Leslie Banks, who played the father of the kidnapped girl in
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, was cast as Joss, the leader of the gang of rogues; his wife, the well-named Patience, would be portrayed by Marie Ney. Rugged Robert Newton was the government infiltrator, flushed out by the pirates and rescued by Mary. Among the gang of rogues, whimsically, the director planted two actors who had also served as writers of Hitchcock films, Emlyn Williams and Edwin Greenwood.

By the time filming began in October, Hitchcock felt he was in the clutches of a two-headed monster. It would be too strong to say he ceased to care, but he knew a futile struggle when he saw one, and he stepped back and let Erich Pommer and Charles Laughton dominate. Looking ahead to America, he had already left
Jamaica Inn
behind. “Realizing how incongruous it was,” he later told François Truffaut, “I was truly discouraged, but the contract had been signed.”

His detached attitude allowed him to preserve his friendship with the star. It was an unusual problem for Hitchcock: directing an actor he liked and admired, but who wouldn’t listen to him. Laughton was really the first Method actor he had encountered. One scarcely directed Laughton, other than telling him where to stand for the camera angle. “The difficult actor” (as he is dubbed in one biography) carried on most of the debate inside himself—to the exclusion of anyone else. “Laughton versus Laughton” is how the frustrated director described the process. “He frets and strains and argues continuously with himself. And he is never satisfied,” Hitchcock declared in one interview.

From the start of filming, Laughton was thwarted by his inability to deeply communicate what he felt was the core of his character, Sir Humphrey (to get as close as “the sweat in a whore’s bed,” as he declaimed one night at Ciro’s). Laughton insisted Hitchcock frame him only in close or medium shots, for example, until he learned how Sir Humphrey ought to walk. This lasted about a week, until he heard a snatch of the film’s score—from Weber’s
Invitation to the Dance
—being arranged by composer Eric Fenby. “I’ve found it!” Laughton yelped, whistling the waltz rondo as he proudly demonstrated his peculiar walk. Now, the actor declared, Hitchcock could open up his angles.