Alfred Hitchcock (81 page)

“I watched him once, during a ten minute take,” Cardiff remembered. “He had his back to the actors, aimlessly looking down at the floor, and at the end, when he had said ‘Cut,’ he made only one comment to my camera operator Paul Beeson: ‘How was that for you, Paul?’ On Paul’s nod, he would signal his acceptance of the whole reel.”

Pained by such pressures and problems, Hitchcock got his only “pleasure out of doing those camera tricks,” according to Ingrid Bergman. One filming anecdote is curiously poignant: Hitchcock was guiding a quiet interlude between Bergman and Wilding, watching them intensely as they were photographed, when suddenly he let out a howl. Then, in a gentle tone, he said, “Please move the camera a little to the right. You have just run over my foot.” The enormous camera had indeed broken Hitchcock’s big toe.

The camera afforded pleasure and pain to the director—but only pain to the cast, Bergman especially. “The prop men had the job of moving all the furniture while the camera was rolling forward and backward, or from this side to that,” remembered the actress, “and the walls were flying up into the rafters as we walked by, so that huge Technicolor camera could follow us. It just drove us all crazy! A chair or a table for an actor appeared the minute before a cue. The floor was marked with numbers and everybody and every piece of furniture had to be on the cued number at the right moment.

“What a nightmare! It’s the only time I broke down and cried on a movie set.”

Her last Hitchcock film,
Notorious
, had been pure joy. But now, even more than on
Spellbound
, their first film together, Bergman questioned Hitchcock’s judgment, his authority. “The other day I burst,” the actress
wrote to a friend. “How I hate this new technique of his. How I suffer and loathe every moment on the set. My two leading men, Michael Wilding and Joe Cotten, just sat there and said nothing, but I know they agree with me.”

One day, frustrated by a long-take scene in which she traipsed around the mansion, trying to recall pages of dialogue as the huge camera crane relentlessly pursued her, she erupted with expletives, telling off Hitchcock. “I said enough for the whole cast,” Bergman said. “Little Hitch just left. Never said a word. Just went home … oh dear …”

“Later on,” Hitchcock told Truffaut, confirming the incident, “someone called to inform me that she hadn’t noticed my departure and was still complaining twenty minutes after I’d gone.”

There was one other confrontation—although “confrontation” is the wrong word, for Hitchcock had perfected his disappearing act. One night after a particularly rough day of filming, the director was sitting having a drink with his three main players in a restaurant. Bergman started in with her griping. Once her back was turned, Hitchcock simply rose from the table and left. “That’s the trouble with him,” she told her fellow actors; “he won’t fight.”

Cotten was as miserable as Bergman. He was no less intimidated by the perpetual-motion camera (which he dubbed “the Monster”), and by the Irish accent that permanently eluded him.
^*
Like Bergman, he too was having personal troubles; during the filming, his wife actually tried to commit suicide after learning of Cotten’s affair with an actress back in the United States. The incident was hushed up by Transatlantic.

Hitchcock, who hadn’t really wanted Cotten, tried to be sympathetic, and at one point went so far as to summon James Bridie from Glasgow to address the actor’s concerns about specific dialogue (“no word, no punctuation of which was ever changed” without Bridie’s “conference and approval,” the actor recalled). Although he hated London, Bridie boarded a train to meet with Cotten, Hitchcock, and Sidney Bernstein at the studio.

“I hear you are having trouble with the speech about your background,” Bridie began, lighting up one of the flat Turkish cigarettes he preferred.

“Oh no, not at all,” replied Cotten reassuringly. “It’s a beautiful speech, a pleasure to learn, and I look forward to reciting it.”

“Well, exactly what are we talking about?” asked Bridie, glancing with puzzlement at Hitchcock and Bernstein.

“It’s only the first five words,” said Cotten. “I simply find it impossible to say them with any conviction.”

“What are the first five words?” prodded Bridie.

“I was born in Dublin.”

“Where
were
you born?” asked Bridie.

“Virginia,” said Cotten hesitantly.

“Well, change the line to read, ‘I was born in Virginia,’ ” declared Bridie.

Later that day, however, Cotten, who had grown to dislike his character and the film intensely, made a slip of the tongue in front of Hitchcock and Bridie, referring to
Under Capricorn
as “Under Cornycrap.” Eyebrows were raised, but nothing said. Cotten later regretted the gaffe, and blamed it for the fact that Hitchcock never invited him to act in another film.
^*

Over time, the atmosphere gradually improved. Hitchcock did his best to spread cheer, reviving his old prankishness. He found kindred souls in Wilding, who was always laughing, and sound mixer Peter Handford, who had the difficult task of trying to record all the dialogue at the proper levels. Handford shared with Hitchcock a love of trains, which they discussed during the breaks. They had a set routine: Hitchcock tugged off the sound mixer’s headphones, whispering something obscene in his ears; then, when Handford broke into laughter, the director would announce huffily, “Well, when the sound mixer is
ready
, we’ll start shooting.”

As of old, Hitchcock found a court jester in stuffy assistant director Cecil Foster Kemp, who was the butt of his jokes for general amusement. But the jokes were mild, and tonic. Sidney Bernstein left the director to his own devices on the set, but after hours the producer was a helpful diplomat, smoothing ruffled feathers and holding a nightly open house (or, as Hitchcock called it, “open office”). Cotten served as bartender for the ice-cold martinis handed around.

Eventually the patience, the jokes, and the martinis won out. Bergman flew to Paris late in August, met Roberto Rossellini, and soon fell in love. Although this started her on a road that led deep into scandal and controversy, and away from Hitchcock and Hollywood, for the time being it left her feeling happier and revitalized. At last, Bergman too relaxed.

Early in the shooting Hitchcock had been unusually tentative with the actress, and in this, their third film, his camera work is the least intimate. But Mrs. Flusky’s “confession,” Bergman’s key scene, had been scheduled for late in the filming, in September. The confession was cursory in the novel—only a few lines, nothing more—but the script stretched it out into a cathartic scene, a showcase for the actress. This time Hitchcock stuck to
his guns and filmed the scene as one protracted take. It would be one of the few such takes to survive the final cut.

To her surprise, Bergman had grown accustomed to the camera stalking her. “I talked all the time,” she wrote to a friend. “The camera never left me and it worked fine. I must say much better than being cut up and edited.”

The result is one of the highlights of a film with few to recommend it.

The original plan had been to finish by early September. But Michael Wilding took ill with pleurisy, causing further delay. The problems plaguing
Under Capricorn
never really abated.

The delays and postponements sent Mrs. Hitchcock back to America in the third week of September, ahead of her husband, who had three weeks to go before wrapping up photography in England. A number of exteriors were then slated to be filmed at the Warner’s ranch. Alma returned alone, leaving her daughter in the care of her husband’s favorite spinster cousins, with whom Pat would reside while attending RADA.

It is impossible to know all we’d like to know about Alma Reville Hitchcock’s state of mind, then or ever. If Mr. Hitchcock was notorious among even close friends for guarding his innermost thoughts and the secrets of his heart, Mrs. Hitchcock surpassed him. Alma offered only one image to the world: that of a happily devoted spouse. She gave interviews, but they were almost entirely about her husband; she didn’t expatiate on her own feelings. His career was her career. His friends were her friends—and one of those mutual friends was Whitfield Cook.

If Hitchcock was sexually impotent, what about Alma? He could make wisecracks about his impotence, his lack of sexual activity, but how did Alma feel?

He could flirt with or try to kiss an actress, but what about Alma?

Wasn’t she a perfectly normal woman, with a sexual appetite that wasn’t being satisfied? Didn’t Mrs. Hitchcock entertain her own normal fears and desires?

Mrs. Hitchcock and Whitfield Cook had begun to meet for lunch and dinner at restaurants which, if not quite obscure or out of the way, nonetheless fell outside the regular beat of Hollywood columnists. For the next three weeks, she and her cowriter enjoyed quiet get-togethers at the Ready Room and LaRue’s, discussing the script they were developing.

Did Hitchcock believe that Cook was homosexual? It might have been reasonable for Hitchcock to assume as much; though Cook would later marry, at the time he was a bachelor with homosexual friends. Did Hitchcock believe Cook was therefore “safe” as a regular companion for his wife? Or did the director guess that the two felt an attraction, and sympathetically allow the flirtation to progress? Might Hitchcock even, under
the circumstances, have approved of the direction their closeness was taking? After Alma came home from England, she appears to have seized the opportunity of her family’s absence to open her heart to Cook. On the evidence of his journal, she said some thing to him on September 20 that took him by astonished surprise. If she told him of her feelings, he would have been astonished indeed, for according to his journal he spent as much time with men as with women.

Over the next week, meeting purportedly to discuss the script they were collaborating on, Mrs. Hitchcock continued talking. Although there may be other explanations, a fair reading of Cook’s journal suggests that she was pressing her case for a different relationship. Cook sincerely liked Alma; he liked her enormously. But he must have been torn. He counted himself a friend of Hitchcock, and wouldn’t want to jeopardize that friendship, nor the work relationship they shared.

What could Alma say to convince him? That if they planned everything out, her husband would never know? Or maybe that Hitch already knew, and it was all right with him?

It appears that, on October 1, after a cozy dinner at a restaurant, they began making love, probably at Bellagio Road. According to Cook’s journal, their sexual foray was “complicated by an overseas call.” A Hitchcockian scene: it must have been the husband himself, phoning at the most vulnerable, dangerous, inopportune time. Probably nothing was confessed; and it was perfectly normal for Cook to be keeping Alma company.

Whatever happened, though, must have reinforced Cook’s better instincts. Over the next week, the two saw each other constantly. They went to restaurants, and to dinner at Constance Collier’s. They drove to Santa Barbara for steaks at Talk of the Town. It appears from Cook’s journals that Alma wept during one of their meetings, perhaps bereft over her friend trying to distance himself. Whether she ever broached the idea of lovemaking again is unclear. But the two intensified their pace on the script, and Mrs. Hitchcock and Cook were inseparable for months to come.

Hitchcock wasn’t done in England until the first week of October. He returned to Hollywood to handle what shooting remained, a few exteriors and a handful of pickup and process shots. Sidney Bernstein would supervise the initial editing and postproduction in London.

On November 2, the Hitchcocks hosted Whitfield Cook and Hume Cronyn for dinner at Bellagio Road, and they crowned the evening by listening to the national election returns on the radio. The election was a cliffhanger, but all of them, politically liberal, rooted for the eventual winner, Harry Truman, who ascended to the presidency after President Roosevelt’s death and had pledged to continue FDR’s policies.

On Thanksgiving weekend, the Hitchcocks and Cook drove up to Santa
Cruz. The day was clear and beautiful, and the three Hitchcocks took long walks together.

If Hitchcock wrote off someone as a fool, that was one thing. But he wasn’t one to hold grudges against people he really liked, and Ingrid Bergman (still accompanied by her husband), the Joseph Cottens, and Arthur Laurents were invited to Santa Cruz for weekends in the fall of 1948. Pat returned to the United States for the Christmas holidays, and Bernstein flew in and out of the country, consulting with Hitchcock about the editing of
Under Capricorn.

Christmas Eve 1948 was celebrated in Santa Cruz with an excursion to midnight Mass. Cook and his mother were the only overnight guests. Christmas Day was rainy, and Hitchcock made a big fire in the hearth. Laurents and Joan Harrison arrived by plane about noon, and there was gift giving and champagne toasts followed by dinner. The next day it was still raining, and everybody played backgammon and Monopoly.

The following week, Cook threw a lavish New Year’s Eve party in Hollywood, and the Hitchcocks were among a star-studded guest list—the Chaplins, Arthur Laurents and Farley Granger, Sally Benson, Shelley Winters and director Joseph Losey—ushering in 1949. Thereafter the three Hitchcocks drove to Palm Springs, which had become a favorite winter getaway—a St. Moritz of desert and Joshua trees, where they mixed relaxation with script talks. The director knew many of the Hollywood holiday seekers who gathered at the Racquet Club, hosted by former silent screen star Charlie Farrell and his wife, retired actress Virginia Valli—who had played the lead in Hitchcock’s 1926 film,
The Pleasure Garden.

But the commercial failure of
Rope
had dealt Transatlantic a harsh blow, and now, in London, Sidney Bernstein struggled with the editing and post-production of
Under Capricorn.
Anticipating that Transatlantic would need to retrench, Hitchcock volunteered in the fall of 1948 to put the Selwyn Jepson novel, to be renamed
Stage Fright
, on the fast track for filming in London in the spring of 1949. That was great news for Warner’s, which was still wary of
I Confess.