Alfred Hitchcock (85 page)

At the peak of Chandler’s oration, the director simply stood up, opened the door, and left the house. Keon hastily assembled her belongings and raced after him to where his car was waiting, the door held open by a driver who had been alerted to stand by. An amazed Chandler followed, shouting at Hitchcock. The director paused to let Keon plunge into the backseat of the car first, then tried to squeeze his bulky body into the vehicle as fast as possible.

In an uncontrolled stream of invective Chandler called Hitchcock a fat bastard, and worse, as they drove off. The remarks “were personal,” recalled Czenzi Ormonde, who heard about the incident from Keon, “very personal.” Hitchcock kept his poker face until they had safely escaped; even then, he gazed out the window for a long time as the limousine clocked the miles. Halfway back to the studio he finally turned to Keon and said simply, “He’s through.”

It wasn’t Chandler’s finest hour. But in his alcoholic haze, the writer seems not to have realized the damage he had done. He settled down to five weeks of scriptwriting, griping to his agent, the head of the Warner’s story department, and anyone who would listen that Hitchcock never again spoke to him. “Not even a telephone call,” he complained to Warner Bros. “Not one word of criticism or appreciation. Silence. Blank silence.”
Hitchcock never even acknowledged receipt of Chandler’s script, which arrived at the studio at the end of September.

In late August Hitchcock had to shoot the first backdrops back east before the script and cast were finalized. He personally supervised the second-unit work, including at the Davis Cup competition in Forest Hills, where they amassed footage of every imaginable backhand and serve. (“I remember asking them would they mind moving that Davis Cup out of the way, please?”)

He would make use of this footage in two splendidly staged tennis matches in
Strangers on a Train.
The first contains the unforgettable image of the spectators swiveling their heads from side to side as they follow the intense volleys, while Bruno’s head (and gaze) remains conspicuously fixed on Guy.

The second match is the one Guy must win—as fast as possible—in order to slip away from police and foil Bruno’s attempt to frame him with evidence planted at the fairgrounds. (The Hitchcockery included doubles as well as newsreel footage, and a specially created machine that shot the balls just under the camera, to make it look as if Guy is hitting straight into the lens.) This second tennis match is magnificently intercut with a “game” every bit as tense: Bruno “playing” inside a storm drain, reaching and stretching his fingers as he struggles to retrieve an initialed cigarette lighter (the significant trifle which will incriminate Guy).

Back east, Hitchcock also shot establishing footage of Penn Station and the national monuments of Washington, D.C. He had to use a stand-in for Bruno, who posed as a shadowy figure on the distant steps of the Jefferson Memorial—symbolic, wrote Donald Spoto, of “a malignant stain … a blot on the order of things.” The second-unit footage was precisely the kind of sightseeing scenes that Raymond Chandler, busy writing an irrelevant draft, most vehemently opposed.

Chandler’s version was delivered in late September, and filed away. The new writer Hitchcock then hired, in October, was not a famous author but a Hollywood stooge—not even famous among other stooges. If there is a perfect example of Hitchcock’s instinct for finding compatible writers, it is this unfamous lady with an exotic name: Czenzi Ormonde.

Ormonde was American-born, of Dutch and Bohemian ancestry; she and Hitchcock had met during his first month in Hollywood, and their paths continued to cross over the years. Ormonde had been working for David O. Selznick, doing research for
Gone With the Wind
, and she ended up in Barbara Keon’s office, helping writers with script drafts. Later, she went to work as a dialogue writer for Sam Goldwyn. “I wrote on many, many pictures, for which I received no credit, just probing and sharpening the dialogue,” Ormonde recalled.

Publicity photographs show her to be a fair-haired beauty with long shimmering hair. In interviews the director sometimes obliquely referred to Ormonde as “Ben Hecht’s assistant,” leading other books about Hitchcock to describe her as one of Hecht’s “ghostwriters.” In truth, she assisted Hecht on research for
Gone With the Wind
(hence Hitchcock’s remark) and then stayed close friends with the Hecht family, taking over the lease on Hecht’s house whenever the writer was east. But it would be more accurate to call her Keon’s assistant.

In 1950, Ormonde had just published
Laughter from Downstairs
, a collection of her short stories culled from
Cosmopolitan
, depicting the life of a Bohemian-American family from the point of view of a nine-year-old girl. (The dust jacket said “parts of it were written with the aid of a flashlight tied on the end of a belt before the advent of electricity at her farm.”) But although she had recently finished an assignment for Twentieth Century-Fox, Ormonde couldn’t boast a single big-screen credit.

Hitchcock liked Ormonde, though, which automatically ranked her ahead of Chandler. She was a young free spirit who preferred to live away from Hollywood on a ranch. Through the years she had been an occasional dinner guest at Bellagio Road (“An exchange I heard between Mrs. H. and the daughter Pat Hitchcock proved to me she was a wonderful, clear-thinking and tender mother,” Ormonde recalled). Furthermore, Ormonde, who came inexpensively, was ready to go to work. Dispensing with Chandler was awkward, but ruffled feathers were smoothed by the fact that Ormonde was also a Ray Stark client. (That really annoyed Chandler; “it’s bad enough to be stabbed in the back without having your agent supply the knife,” he wrote.)

At their first conference, Hitchcock made a show of pinching his nose, then holding up Chandler’s draft with his thumb and forefinger and dropping it into a wastebasket. He told the obscure writer that the famous one hadn’t written a solitary line he intended to use, and they would have to start all over on page one, using Cook’s treatment as a guide. The director told Ormonde to forget all about the book, then told her the story of the film himself, from beginning to end.

Hecht had less than Chandler to do with the final script of
Strangers on a Train
; the true credit belongs to Alma Reville, Whitfield Cook, Barbara Keon, Czenzi Ormonde, and—of course—Hitchcock. The director knew Ormonde was the right choice after she wrote a handful of informal try-out pages for the first scene between Bruno and his daffy mother—a scene that finds Bruno lounging in a silk robe in the family mansion, getting a manicure from his mother before his father arrives to rail in the background. The chirrupy Mrs. Anthony appears ignorant of her son’s vices. She is blithely devoted to her hobby of painting badly—“such a soothing pastime.” (Former St. Ignatians might have gotten an extra chuckle out of the portrait Bruno’s mother is painting: a grotesque modern-art smear that
she insists is Saint Francis.) Under Ormonde, Mrs. Anthony had emerged as an ultimate Hitchcock mother.

As the director read over Ormonde’s first pages he grew excited: the character brought to mind a certain actress. He got on the phone to England and arranged to hire Marion Lorne, an American stage actress managing theaters in London with her husband. Lorne, making her screen debut, would make Mrs. Anthony one of the film’s memorable characters—both touching and absurd.
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Ormonde was one of many people who witnessed a Hitchcock performance that attested to his fear of policemen. So many similar anecdotes have been told about him that they amount to one of two things: either evidence of a bona fide complex, or a lie so smooth and practiced that no one ever saw through it. One day, according to Ormonde, the two were driving to the studio through heavy traffic, when a motorcycle cop suddenly appeared behind them, following their car (a scene, incidentally, echoed in several Hitchcock films). Ormonde—who of course was doing the driving—assured the panicked director that she had been proceeding legally, under the speed limit. Then, at a traffic stop, the motorcycle cop swerved up ominously beside them. “I saw you and Mr. Hitchcock leave the studio,” the policeman exclaimed, pushing his helmet up with a grin, “and want to tell him I never miss a Hitchcock film. They’re the greatest!”

Ormonde glanced over at Hitchcock, who wasn’t responding. He seemed to be in a trance. “He did not care what was said, perhaps had not heard it,” Ormonde said. “Fists were clenched, face was pale, his eyes stared ahead. Visibly this was a very frightened man.”
^**

Mrs. Hitchcock once explained that her husband was “afraid of any brush with the law,” not merely because of the boyhood incident in which he was briefly locked in a jail cell, but because the director once “swerved slightly over the white line in England and was stopped by an English bobby who took down the particulars. Hitch drove everyone around him crazy for days, worrying whether or not he was going to get a summons.”

After two weeks of meetings with Ormonde and Barbara Keon, Hitchcock switched to preproduction full-time, leaving the writing to the two women. “We were dominated by time, and time meant everything to us,” said Ormonde. Keon, who had already been through it once with Chandler,
guided the drafts through revision. The two women often worked until four in the morning, trying to make pages in time for the planned late-October start date. Keon knew “exactly” what Hitchcock wanted. “She’d take two or three scenes and condense them,” recalled Ormonde.

These two women wrote the script of
Strangers on a Train
—crafting all the famous highlights (the stalking and strangling of Miriam, the tennis duel, the carousel explosion), the crisscross and doppelgänger conceits, all the symmetrical touches that knit the film together. Hitchcock was absent for long stretches, and later he would complain to Truffaut that the final script evinced “weaknesses.” Ormonde wasn’t privy in any case to all his thinking; indeed, as she insisted in an interview for this book, she wasn’t aware of the slightest homoerotic undercurrent between Bruno and Guy; Hitchcock certainly didn’t mention it, and in her opinion it doesn’t exist in the script or the film.

The writing was left to Keon and Ormonde, while Hitchcock raced toward the start date. “When I took this assignment,” Raymond Chandler was still complaining to Warner’s, “I was told by Mr. Hitchcock that there was no hurry—no hurry at all; no pressure—no pressure at all. About halfway through it I heard from his factotum [Barbara Keon] that there was a shooting date of October 1, because Mr. Hitchcock had to go East before the leaves fall and he would have to have, or at least very greatly desired, the completed script some little time before that; and that there was even the possibility … that if a page marked ‘The End’ was not received by the studio by the end of October 1, then Mr. Hitchcock might not be allowed to begin shooting.”

The Ormonde-Keon version wasn’t completed until November. A courtesy copy was sent to Chandler, who angrily informed his agent that his draft was “far better than what they finished with.” He demanded that Warner Bros. remove his name from the credits. When it came to listing writers on the screen, Hitchcock usually included everybody, but in this case he agreed with Chandler. His preference? Drop the famous name, and credit only Whitfield Cook and Czenzi Ormonde.

But the studio wouldn’t budge. Just as with John Steinbeck and
Lifeboat
, Warner’s wanted Chandler’s name for its cachet, though inevitably his name overshadowed Cook’s and Ormonde’s. About the only thing Hitchcock ever said publicly about the hard-boiled novelist was that “our collaboration was not very happy.” Privately, the director always insisted that he had done everything possible to erase Chandler from
Strangers on a Train.
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Leading off the 1950s—the decade of his most sustained creativity—
Strangers on a Train
was a deceptive Hitchcock film: a run-for-cover that became one of his definitive masterworks.

Behind the scenes, Hitchcock now assembled a photographic unit that would anchor his films for years to come. Low-key, mild-mannered Robert Burks was a Warner Bros. cameraman in the Jack Cox tradition: a versatile risk-taker with a penchant for moody atmosphere. Burks was an especially apt choice for a film destined to be Hitchcock’s most Germanic in years: the compositions dense, the lighting almost surreal, the optical effects demanding.

As his editor Hitchcock once again called upon William Ziegler, who had proven himself on
Rope.
The climactic carousel explosion was a particular marvel of miniatures and background projection, acting close-ups and other inserts, all of it seamlessly matched and blended under Ziegler’s eye.

Dimitri Tiomkin, a favorite of the studios, was hired to compose another Hitchcock score (his first being
Shadow of a Doubt
). But the Hitchcock films are not Tiomkin’s best; the two simply never developed much of a kinship. Scenes without any music (or with handpicked songs) were still a more personal sound track for Hitchcock, and surely it was the director’s idea to insert into the first fairgrounds scene the calliope number, “The Band Played On,” as Bruno and his victim ride wooden horses. (“But his brain was so loaded it nearly exploded / the poor girl would shake with alarm …”)