Alfred Hitchcock (73 page)

Can anyone watch Bergman talk about the director, the night of the American Film Institute Life award in 1979, one year before his death, without feeling the love between them?

Whatever happened off the set of
Notorious
, Bergman described the filming as the “happiest experience” of her three Hitchcock credits, and that happiness—for all of them—translated into one of the director’s greatest films: richer, more seductive, psychologically and politically darker than the far more commercially successful
Spellbound.

Notorious
was completed in January, the same month Sidney Bernstein visited Hollywood for his first talks with studio heads about Transatlantic Pictures. With both Transatlantic partners making such a confident impression in business meetings, getting American banks behind the new company was almost a snap. The partners struck up a fast relationship with Security National Bank in New York City and Southwest Trust and Savings in Los Angeles. Both were financial institutions with farsighted loan officers, Alex Ardrey in New York and George Yousling in California, who took the lead in investing in postwar independent production.

Ardrey and Yousling were not only reasonable about financial policy;
both were Hitchcock fans. The director grew particular close to Ardrey, sometimes phoning the banker after hours just to chat, relating scary bedtime stories to be passed on to Ardrey’s children. When Hitchcock received the Irving G. Thalberg Award at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1967, his brief acceptance speech mentioned Ardrey, probably mystifying the audience—possibly it was the first time a banker had ever been thanked from that podium.

Bank loans made Transatlantic more attractive, but still, some studio had to share the risks. Which would offer the best combination of gross and profit percentages, office and studio space—and, not to be underestimated, the highest degree of creative autonomy?

From the first, Jack Warner at Warner Bros. emerged as most likely to succeed. The fact that Hitchcock had never worked at Warner’s was an advantage; the head of the studio, eager to sign a three-time Best Director nominee, was like a suitor who’d waited all evening for a dance. Warner wanted Hitchcock to direct one Warner’s picture for every Transatlantic film. Though Warner insisted on script and casting input on studio
and
Transatlantic productions, Transatlantic could develop its own packages autonomously—once the subjects were approved.

Warner was eager to get Hitchcock working on a Warner’s film right away, but naturally the partners wanted to launch Transatlantic with a Transatlantic production, a property that gave them the advantage of ownership. Although all the stories were subject to approval by the banks and Warner’s, it was up to Transatlantic to find its own material.

The time and expense typically involved in that process were extraordinary. MGM, for example, held weekly staff meetings at which a dozen story and production officials discussed between ten and twenty possible subjects that had been submitted by a wide array of scouts, agents, and editors. These stories—originals as well as adaptations, older books and plays as well as newly published ones seen before publication—were presynopsized, rated, and ranked by readers. Only if they passed muster were they read in their entirety by experienced in-house story editors. Each was then analyzed in terms of potential box office, critical or awards value, budget liability, and appropriate contract actors, writers, and directors. This laborious process could consume weeks before a decision was made—a tentative decision, and always subject to reevaluation, starting the process all over.

In the case of Transatlantic, Hitchcock had big eyes at the start, and once again he began rhapsodizing aloud about the kind of big-canvas, slice-of-life picture he’d always dreamed of making. “Whenever I have used New York in a picture,” he told the
New York Herald Tribune
in 1945, “I have been licked by it. It’s too big, too hard to get at with the camera. It would be wonderful to do a story entirely about New York in
color. What I mean is not the New York as it exists to the tourist or the casual observer, but inside New York, a behind-the-scenes, backstage New York, something that would show the inner life of the city, like the things that go on in the kitchens of big hotels.

“I would begin the story at four o’clock in the morning and end it at two the following morning,” he continued. “I’d like to open with a scene in the Bowery showing a bum drowsing in a saloon, a fly walking on his nose: starting with the lowest form of life in the metropolis. And I’d end up, ironically of course, with the highest form of life, a scene the following morning in a swank nightclub, with well-dressed drunks slouching over their tables and passing out. I don’t know what the story would be in between. That’s the problem.”

Almost from Bernstein’s first visit to Hollywood, though, the partners were forced to scale back their ambitions. The real problem was that the partners didn’t have the time or money to develop such an artistically ambitious film, when Warner’s was clamoring for something commercial and modestly budgeted. Reluctantly, they decided to inaugurate a Transatlantic story department, although they could afford to hire only one person, in Hollywood, to sift through a pile of properties and submit reports. Their limited resources gave them little choice but to concentrate on obscure or first-time authors who might have been overlooked by the aggressive major studios. They gravitated to English novels in part because such books were more affordable and less likely to have already been sold to the Americans.

When Hitchcock wasn’t dreaming of grand-scale epics, he was recalling past ideas that had eluded him. One story that intrigued Hitchcock harked back to his boyhood, and the inn in Leyton that had once been a hideout for famous highwaymen. Off and on over the years he returned to the notion of filming the saga of Jack Sheppard, the eighteenth-century English highwayman whose numerous jailbreaks made him a folk hero. He also talked over the years about mounting a version of
Lorna Doone
, the oft-filmed romance between a farmer and rebel’s daughter, set in seventeenth-century England. Both of these projects were presented to Bernstein, who reminded the director of his vow to avoid costume pictures; but Hitchcock wasn’t easily dissuaded—in fact, the challenge of overcoming his Achilles’ heel seemed to tempt him all the more. The partners usually compromised by commissioning an inexpensive treatment, though the scope and expense of these costume subjects generally relegated them to the back burner.

One of the first books Transatlantic tried to option was
The Dark Duty
by Margaret Wilson, a novel Hitchcock had coveted since its publication in 1931. Its story concerned the harrowing hours leading up to the hanging of a murderer in England, and the injurious effects of the death sentence not only on the falsely accused man, but on the governor of the penal institution
and his wife. An aficionado of the grisliest murder cases, Hitchcock was also an aficionado of executions—though he opposed capital punishment, and always thought that
The Dark Duty
, a propaganda novel about the execution of a wrong man, offered a welcome platform for his views.

But Transatlantic learned an early lesson in economics when the agents for Wilson, an Iowan transplanted to England who had won a Pulitzer Prize for
The Able McLaughlins
in 1924, learned that the film’s director would be Alfred Hitchcock. The forgotten fiction’s price went up, up, and up, until it was almost out of sight. Once again the partners compromised, throwing a pittance at the project, taking the shortest-term option, and authorizing a treatment—several steps ahead of real money, or a real commitment.

Among the authors the partners discussed was Helen Simpson, the cowriter of
Enter Sir John
, who had also helped out on the script for
Sabotage.
Simpson had died during World War II when German planes bombed the hospital where she was recovering from surgery. One of her admired novels,
Under Capricorn
, struck Hitchcock as a possible vehicle for Ingrid Bergman—even though, as Bernstein pointed out, it was yet another costume drama, set in Sydney, Australia, in the mid-nineteenth century.

Remakes were always on Hitchcock’s mind, and the partners mulled a new version of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, and discussed the possibility of expanding
Bon Voyage
or
Aventure Malgache
into features. While the partners read material and searched for the right property—at the right price—to use in launching their company, Jack Warner waited. Sorting things out would take time, and Transatlantic would need to have not just one project, but a whole roster of story material, before it could cement the best extended terms with the studio.

Meanwhile, David O. Selznick had been galvanized into action. With Hitchcock spending so much time in meetings at other studios, his prize director appeared to be slipping away from him. Anxious not to lose Hitchcock, the producer made an unexpected offer to renew his contract. It was an offer unheard of in Selznick annals: the director would remain under contract indefinitely, but
nonexclusively
, as long as he agreed to direct one Selznick production per year, at a guaranteed one-hundred-thousand-dollar salary plus a percentage of gross and profit receipts.

Hitchcock was tempted, if only momentarily. He had only one Selznick film left on his eternally amended contract, and now the onus was on the producer to decide what that film would be. Now, finally, it was Hitchcock who could afford to bide his time. Selznick was paying him five thousand dollars weekly to while away his time planning the future of Transatlantic.

Digging frantically into his sorely depleted story files, Selznick came up with a 1933 novel by English author Robert Hichens, purchased by MGM years before as a possible vehicle for Greta Garbo. Among the prolific author’s many other books was the well-regarded
The Garden of Allah
, which had been adapted for stage and then filmed twice—once as a silent, and in 1936 as one of the first Selznick International pictures.

Critics had found
The Paradine Case
one of Hichens’s better books. The story concerned a Danish woman, Mrs. Ingrid Paradine, who is accused of poisoning her husband, a blind war hero. Mrs. Paradine’s lawyer, Keane, falls in love with her, jeopardizing his happy marriage and prosperous career. The judge hearing the case, Lord Horfield, is a bitter enemy of the lawyer, and Keane defends Mrs. Paradine too strenuously. When Mrs. Paradine reveals in court that she has had an affair with her husband’s manservant—which provoked her husband’s murder—Keane’s humiliation is complete. Mrs. Paradine is found guilty.

Hitchcock could have turned the project down, but he was ready to move on with his career, and didn’t mind the Hichens novel, with its heroine named Ingrid, its London atmosphere, and its Old Bailey climax. (Mrs. Paradine’s story reminded him once more of the Edith Thompson case, although the fictional murderess admits her guilt.) Clinching his interest, DOS agreed to let Hitchcock scout and conduct research and lead a second unit in London, where he could spend more time moonlighting on Transatlantic on Selznick’s dime.

Hitchcock wanted to tinker with the novel, though. One thing he anticipated changing was Mrs. Paradine’s fate. Rather than submitting her to the executioner, as Hichens did (a move the censors wouldn’t allow anyway), Hitchcock conceived of a different ending that would hint at her contrition while reflecting disapprovingly on capital punishment. Defeated in court and shamed by the truth, Mrs. Paradine would kill herself.

So the director said yes, and Selznick sent over the previous drafts of the
Paradine
script—a pile rising “eighteen inches high from the floor,” according to Hitchcock. In March he and Alma collaborated on a new “dialogue treatment for budget purposes,” working at home on Bellagio Road. Selznick’s proxy-on-the-spot was again Barbara Keon, although Selznick privately grumbled to Dan O’Shea that Bellagio Road had evolved into a “country club,” with Keon the latest “charter member.”

Another figure informally drafted into the long-term brainstorming sessions was MGM contract writer Whitfield Cook, who was becoming Alma’s sounding board when her husband wasn’t around. Up in Santa Cruz on weekends, while Mr. Hitchcock dozed in the sun, Mrs. Hitchcock took walks with Cook and discussed their respective projects.

The Hitchcocks had renovated their kitchen and dining rooms, adding an outside dining area with a heated tile floor, and a large wine cellar. (His vineyard he donated to a nearby Catholic seminary; the grapes were harvested
annually by priests-in-training.) Although their German cook sometimes came north, Alma supervised the important meals, while Hitchcock played the sublime host. Generous gifts followed guests home: a first edition, bottles of expensive wine, a box of Havana cigars placed on the seat of a departing car.

Ingrid Bergman and her husband, happy to escape the stuffiness of Hollywood, came for weekend stays. (“Both very nice and simple and fun,” Cook noted in his journal.) The standoffish Cary Grant was more likely to turn up at Bellagio Road, not Santa Cruz. Bergman had promised to star in at least one Transatlantic picture, but Grant always turned himself into the object of a campaign. During
Notorious
Hitchcock had talked with the star about forming a partnership, either independent from or in conjunction with Transatlantic. In a series of long lunches at Lucy’s, a Mexican restaurant across from RKO, they worked at developing a story called “Weep No More.” A young writer, Bess Taffel, was borrowed from the studio to organize the script, which originated in material Hitchcock had drawn from studio files. “But he could have taken anything out—it all revolved around Hitch’s ideas,” recalled Taffel.

After they had brainstormed “Weep No More” for several weeks, Taffel recalled, the director asked her one day to retell the story back to him. She did so, emphasizing, as she later realized, characterizations at the expense of the plot. The director listened impassively. “That’s all very interesting,” he responded dryly after she was finished. “But what I want to hear from you now is this: Let’s say the movie has opened, is a big success, and is playing at all the big theaters. And Mrs. Jones says to Mr. Jones, ‘Are you playing cards again tonight?’ He says, ‘Yes, I am.’ She says, ‘Then I think I’ll go to see a movie with Cary Grant.’ When she comes home that night, he’s lost a lot of money, and he doesn’t want to be asked about it, so he says—‘Did you see the movie?’ She says yes. He says, ‘What was it about?’ And … what she tells
him
is what I want you to tell
me.
”