Alfred Hitchcock (43 page)

One day later in the schedule, they worked for hours to get a close-up of Laughton viciously tying up O’Hara, her hands behind her back. Hitchcock couldn’t get the expression he wanted from the actor, however, and at one point Laughton sat down in a corner and began to weep. Hitchcock went over and consoled him, patting him on the shoulder. Laughton looked up and said, “Aren’t you and I a couple of babies?” (“I wanted to use a Goldwynism and say, ‘Include me out,’” Hitchcock recalled, telling the anecdote, years later.) After a few more takes, Hitchcock finally got what he wanted. “You know how I got it, don’t you?” asked Laughton proudly. “No, Charles, how?” “I thought of myself as a small boy of ten, wetting my knickers.” (“That’s inspiration for you, isn’t it?” Hitchcock liked to top off the story, a smile spreading across his face.)

Laughton exasperated everyone. But “I think to be fair to Laughton,” Sidney Gilliat recalled, “none of us had a completely clear picture of the squire.” The star, explained Gilliat, “could be very fine indeed when he trusted his instinct, but as soon as he got a scene right by instinct—and
knew it—he would then try to repeat it by intellect. Now his instinct was sounder than his intellect, but he distrusted the one and cultivated the other.”

It was a torturous production, with Laughton torturing himself, and the entire cast and crew tortured by the torrents of machine-blown wind and water that sent everyone home at night suffering shivers and colds.
^*
Hitchcock perfected his standing-against-the-wall routine, which could be as deceptive as his catnapping habit: sometimes it was a feint, other times it was exactly what it seemed—abject retreat. The director stood against the wall a lot while directing Laughton in the J. B. Priestley scenes, according to Gilliat. And he grumbled more than usual to the press: “Directors can’t direct a Laughton picture. The best they can hope for is a chance to ‘referee.’” Or: “The hardest thing to photograph are dogs, babies, motor boats, and Charles Laughton. Motorboats because they never come back for take two.”

All things told, though,
Jamaica Inn
was surprisingly well refereed.

Under Hitchcock, Maureen O’Hara gave a fiery performance that established her as a rising star. The director found tenderness in the relationship between Leslie Banks and Marie Ney, and encouraged mugging and colorful behavior from the gang of pirates.

Hitchcock found a surprising tenderness in Charles Laughton’s character, too. At the end of
Jamaica Inn
, Sir Humphrey has gone mad. Kidnapping Mary, he tries to escape; mumbling like a lunatic, he climbs a ship’s mast surrounded by gawking crowds. As constabulary swarm, he leaps to his death—another Hitchcock villain who dictates his own confessional fate. Besides his softhearted niece, the only person who grieves for him is his much-abused manservant, Chadwick (Horace Hodges). The eerie coda of the film is a final shot of this dazed retainer, Sir Humphrey’s shrill “Chadwick!” still ringing in his ears.

The announcement that Hitchcock had signed a contract with Selznick International may have provoked mixed feelings in England, but the long article about the director in the
New Yorker
stirred up a real hornet’s nest, and caused permanent repercussions in his relationships with writers.

“A Hitchcock picture is, for better or for worse, about 99.44 per cent Hitchcock,” wrote Russell Maloney. “Hitchcock selects all his stories, and
is the leading figure in the adaptation, writing of the dialogue, and preparation of the shooting script.”

At the outset of each project, according to Maloney, Hitchcock “engages a writer, preferably an extrovert who is prolific in ideas and situations rather than in fine writing.” Then he convenes daily story conferences for a couple of months around the dining-room table of his flat, attended by the writer, Mrs. Hitchcock, and Joan Harrison.

“First they reduce the story to a bald half-page outline, which sets forth the main situation and the principal characters. Hitchcock next asks himself (and his colleagues), ‘What are these people? What is their station in life? What do they work at? How do they act when they are at home?’ The outline is expanded into a treatment of sixty or seventy typewritten pages. This covers the story scene by scene and action by action, but without dialogue. The dialogue is done by a second writer, who takes over each installment of the treatment as fast as it is turned out by Hitchcock and his idea man. Then Hitchcock and his wife convert the dialogue into the final shooting script, a task for which Hitchcock gallantly allows her exclusive program credit, under her maiden name.”

Published in the September 10, 1938, issue, the article was made available earlier for publicity purposes. It came at an embattled time for screenwriters in England and the United States. In both countries, film writers were busy organizing guilds to demand fair payments and accreditation, and to unite their profession against the high-handed practices of producers.

While Hitchcock was quoted sparsely, and most of the phraseology was Maloney’s (calling the director “the leading figure” in the script development, for example), the
New Yorker
account was relatively accurate. But the slant in favor of Hitchcock cast his writers in a diminished light, and suggested that sentiment orginated with the director himself.

It is unclear whether Charles Bennett, busy trying to reposition himself in Hollywood, learned what Hitchcock had told Sam Goldwyn about him—that he was primarily a constructionist. At least this remark, which Bennett’s agent—Myron Selznick—also wished he could expunge from the record, was made in private. Now the able scenarist of
Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage
, and
Young and Innocent
read, between the lines of America’s most prestigious magazine, that the director did not think he was a truly “fine writer,” and that Mrs. Hitchcock, Joan Harrison, and sundry dialogue specialists were required to bolster Bennett’s scripts.

A deeply dismayed Bennett wired Hitchcock: “
APPARENTLY HARMLESS STATEMENT YOU MADE TO NEWSPAPERS WAS ACTUALLY NOT PLEASANT FOR ME … IN ALL INNOCENCE YOU NEARLY PUT YOUR FOOT IN IT FOR ME.

Although Hitchcock swiftly wired an apology for the misunderstanding, the writer felt mortally wounded. Almost certainly the combination of
what was said to Goldwyn and what appeared in the
New Yorker
torpedoed any likelihood that Bennett would write Hitchcock’s first American film.

Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who were militant in support of writers, were doubly outraged—on Bennett’s behalf, but also their own. They, not Hitchcock, had “selected”
The Lady Vanishes.
Their initial script, which the director had praised, was written without any input from him. They regarded the article as self-aggrandizement at their expense.

Even before the
New Yorker
hit newsstands, Hitchcock must have realized that the article overstepped some bounds, because he tried a preemptive maneuver. One day he and Gilliat were discussing the
Jamaica Inn
script at Cromwell Road, according to Gilliat, when Hitchcock mentioned with elaborate casualness that a forthcoming publicity profile of him in an American magazine cited him as claiming that he wrote “99.44 per cent” of all his scripts. Hitchcock assured Gilliat that “that doesn’t apply to people like you and Frank, who I regard as real writers.” That ham-handed compliment bothered Gilliat all the more.

But Hitchcock himself gave a copy of the magazine to Gilliat, and no more was said for the time being. Controversy was stirred anew in December, however, when snippets were recycled in Viscount Castlerosse’s widely read column in the
Sunday Express.

The occasion was the opening of
The Lady Vanishes.
The new Hitchcock film had begun to collect rhapsodic reviews, and Gilliat couldn’t help but feel that critics were giving the director what he and Launder regarded as undue credit for
their
screenplay. Upset by the reviews and by Castlerosse’s exaggerations, Gilliat told Hitchcock, “I think you ought to cover us over that.” The director pleaded, “It’s not my fault.” Gilliat insisted, “I’m not saying it is your fault, but I’d be terribly grateful if you would correct it with regard to
The Lady Vanishes.
”

But the director issued no public corrections, even after the recently formed Screen Writers Association wrote him a formal letter protesting the now widely published assertion that he was the closet writer of all the Hitchcock films. Launder sent him a caustic telegram: “
I DON’T LIKE
OUR
0.8
PER CENT BEING BELITTLED.
” The director then tried to make light of the whole brouhaha, sending back a series of joking telegrams signed by his mother, pointing out the dubious origins of the statements and how his words had been widely distorted. Launder struck back with another barbed telegram, this one addressed to Emma Hitchcock, saying, “
MY SON FRANK SAYS THAT HE WON’T PLAY WITH YOUR SON ALF ANY MORE BECAUSE HE’S A BIG BULLY WHO STEALS ALL THE MARBLES. SIGNED ETHEL LAUNDER
.”

Although he made jokes himself about being a “big bully,” Hitchcock detected the veiled reference to his weight, and the barb stung. According to Gilliat, Hitchcock was “very insulted,” and the issue was dropped with
bad feelings all around. Hitchcock subsequently offered Gilliat a chance to come to Hollywood with him and write
Rebecca
, but Gilliat declined—partly, he said later, because he disliked the book, partly because he nursed a grudge. (In any event DOS said no to paying for some chap named Gilliat he’d never heard of.)

In later interviews, Gilliat would consistently misrepresent this incident and blow it out of proportion, while disparaging Hitchcock as an odd, “very destructive character.” Bennett, who found it difficult to forgive Hitchcock, made similar comments. Because they both lived long lives and gave numerous interviews, they helped further the idea that the director thought all writers were cattle too—another persistent phantasm in the Hitchcock legacy.

Meanwhile, Joan Harrison, whom Hitchcock was cultivating as a writer, earned her first on-screen credit as coscenarist with Sidney Gilliat on
Jamaica Inn
—a gesture intended to pave the way for her to launch her career in Hollywood. Alma Reville also worked on the script, receiving her now customary credit: “Continuity.”

The postproduction of
Jamaica Inn
was left to Erich Pommer; Hitchcock certainly wasn’t sticking around for its release. Yet the film proved surprisingly successful with audiences, and even with critics—though more so in the United States, where Hitchcock was on a roll, than in England, where his departure for Hollywood left a sour taste with reviewers.

As with
Waltzes from Vienna
, the experience of
Jamaica Inn
reminded Hitchcock that at heart he was a poet of the present day who got lost whenever he tried to muck about in a make-believe past. He vowed never to make another costume film, though it was a vow he usually forgot whenever a new costume story came along to tempt him.

For the moment, Hitchcock was anxious to settle the question of his first American project. For a long time, David O. Selznick remained maddeningly undecided between the “Titanic” film or
Rebecca
… or a third tantalizing possibility that never quite formed on his lips. One bulletin from Selznick International had Hitchcock directing an adaptation of
The Flashing Stream
, a London play regarded as a likely vehicle for Carole Lombard. When Hitchcock cabled to ask what had happened to “Titanic,” DOS cabled back that he was postponing it, but that Hitchcock should not tell the press:
DO NOT WANT TO GIVE IMPRESSION THAT WE HAVE RELAXED PLANS FOR TITANIC LEST SOMEONE ELSE BE ENCOURAGED GO AHEAD WITH IT.”

Hitchcock had hoped to start work on the “Titanic” script as early as August, but Selznick’s vacillation forced him to tread water instead with exploratory research. As of September 21,
Variety
was still reporting
Rebecca
as Hitchcock’s
second
Selznick project, with “Titanic” probably the first; as late as November 2, Hitchcock was visiting the Board of Trade in London to assure skeptical officials (“they seem to think that if I recapture all the horror and violence of the situation it will stop people going on cruises”) that his “Titanic” picture would glorify British seamanship and heroism, and promote recent advances in lifesaving measures.

By the time DOS decided conclusively on the first Selznick-Hitchcock production, it was mid-November—and the decision was
Rebecca.
Although Hitchcock might have been happier with “Titanic,” by then he was glad for any go-ahead. After Gilliat recused himself, and before filming on
Jamaica Inn
was complete, Hitchcock put the initial continuity in the hands of Alma and Joan Harrison; they were joined by Michael Hogan, a onetime actor with Granville Barker’s and Tyrone Guthrie’s troupes, who was married to actress Madge Saunders.

Hogan was known for playing the father on
The Buggins
, the first, hugely popular “radio family” on English airwaves, and for collaborating with the show’s creator, Mabel Constanduros, on various radio and theater material. An actor attuned to dialogue and characterization, Hogan was the proverbial “extrovert who is prolific in ideas and situations” (in the words of Russell Maloney) whom Hitchcock liked to have as his sounding board. Hitchcock paid Hogan out of pocket at first, hoping to get the jump on
Rebecca.
Besides, the Hitchcocks liked the Hogans’ company; they all went out together to the theater and nightclubs.

Hitchcock also tried to push ahead with the casting, since knowing the actors would help with writing the characters. He thought Maureen O’Hara, fresh in his mind from
Jamaica Inn
, might be the right young actress to play the new wife whose existence is overshadowed by the dead Rebecca. But DOS had never heard of O’Hara, and the producer cabled Hitchcock:
MUCH TOO EARLY TO ADVISE CASTING.