Alfred Hitchcock (90 page)

The quick script (polished and done by the end of July), the streamlined casting, and rapid preproduction—all these not only served the budget, but allowed Hitchcock to intersperse what he called intense “bouts” of preparation for the project that was being quietly lined up as his next film—another intended “breather” before
To Catch a Thief.
Lew Wasserman closed a $40,000 deal transferring Cornell Woolrich’s short story, which would become the film
Rear Window
, from Leland Hayward and Joshua Logan to Hitchcock: $25,000 for the rights, $15,000 for Logan’s treatment. After
Dial M for Murder
, Hitchcock would direct the Woolrich story for Paramount, with James Stewart as his star. In return for certain distribution rights, Warner Bros. agreed to loan Hitchcock out to the rival studio, where Stewart had a multipicture deal and a window of availability in the fall.

At their first meeting, Hitchcock looked Grace Kelly up and down, and proceeded to lecture her on what she would wear in
Dial M for Murder.
He had one of his color-coded ideas: initially, Margot would be clad in a bright wardrobe; then, gradually, as she is victimized by events and indicted for murder, she’d go to “brick, then to gray, then to black.” Except for the red lace dress she wears in the first scene, they would buy everything off the rack of department stores.

Kelly listened politely until Hitchcock told her she would wear a velvet robe for the scissors-stabbing highlight. At which point the young actress disagreed; her character wouldn’t don a fancy robe in the middle of the night, she said, just to answer a ringing telephone.

“Well, what would you do?” Hitchcock asked. “What would you put on to answer the phone?”

Kelly said she wouldn’t put anything special on. She’d be wearing her nightgown. She had trumped him, and that was part of their bond. A nightgown it was.

Born to wealth and connections in Philadelphia high society, a former model who had studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Kelly was the Hitchcock fantasy woman come to life—a dream blonde as ladylike as Madeleine Carroll, but as earthy and wanton as Ingrid Bergman. Kelly didn’t mind Hitchcock’s abruptness, or his despotism, which amused her. She wasn’t shocked by his oft-crude sense of humor. Having attended a girls’ convent school, she had heard every conceivable crudeness before she was thirteen.

A naughty girl herself, Kelly juggled two or three affairs during the filming of
Dial M for Murder
, much to the director’s delight. “That Gryce!” Hitchcock was wont to exclaim privately. “She fucked everyone! Why, she even fucked little Freddie, the writer!” Her hand-holding with the playwright (and screenwriter) appeared in the entertainment columns, and her dalliance with Anthony Dawson was also grist for the rumor mill. And published accounts agree that Kelly and Ray Milland carried on an especially torrid affair, which almost broke up Milland’s long-secure marriage.

Hitchcock the voyeur couldn’t have been more delighted. And as
Dial M for Murder
was being shot, he was already shaping his next film to showcase this prepossessing young actress.

“All through the making of
Dial M for Murder
,” Kelly recalled, “he sat and talked to me about it [
Rear Window
] all the time, even before we had discussed my being in it. He was very enthusiastic as he described all the details of a fabulous set while we were waiting for the camera to be pushed around. He talked to me about the people who could be seen in other apartments opposite the ‘rear window,’ and their little stories, and how
they would emerge as characters and what would be revealed. I could see him thinking all the time.”

“I could have phoned that one in,” Hitchcock liked to say about
Dial M for Murder
, making a bad pun out of his modesty. He insisted that he did very little with the film, creatively. He merely cast the film well, turned on the cameras, and documented a taut, well-made play.

But in spite of its humble reputation (Robin Wood refers only briefly to the film in his book, and in the Truffaut book Hitchcock cursorily dismisses it),
Dial M for Murder
ended up as more than just another photographed play. The script was intentionally laced with Hitchcock’s “familiar ironic humor,” as Peter Bordonaro noted in his definitive article in
Sight and Sound
; and on a thematic level the adaptation introduced “subtle shifts in Knott’s characters and in the arrangement of dialogue in order to express” Hitchcock’s own ideas about “the nature of human relationships” and “sexuality in general.” Scene after scene was made cinematic, with editing, high-angle shots, and recurring motifs (including the phallic implications of certain household objects).

And with Grace Kelly’s affecting performance at the heart of its suspense,
Dial M for Murder
drew crowds, grossing $5 million worldwide—the fourth hit in a row for Hitchcock and Warner Bros.

“Palaces are for royalty,” Francie (Grace Kelly) tells John Robie (Cary Grant) in
To Catch a Thief.
“We’re just common people with a bank account.” Kidding with friends, the film’s director put it another way: “We can all be millionaires, and still only eat two lamb chops.”

The financial shortfalls and anxieties Alfred Hitchcock had experienced during the 1930s and 1940s were over and done by 1954. His salary was rising steadily, and had been augmented for the first time at Warner Bros. by profit-sharing arrangements on
Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train, I Confess
, and
Dial M for Murder.
Yet it wasn’t until he signed a contract with Paramount that he truly began to make dizzy money.

The Hitchcocks didn’t live in a palace, and they never indulged in extravagant habits. Food, wine, and travel were luxuries the couple shared with friends and relatives. He arranged for his sister and other family members to visit him in the United States, hosting his cousin Theresa on several expeditions she made to Hollywood; on one trip she created a scene worthy of
Number Seventeen
, when she was accidentally left behind at a train station in the Southwest and had to jump into a taxi and race along the tracks to catch up.

Having failed to lure his mother to America, he took special care to provide
for other kin. (“There are precious few of us left!” his South African aunt Emma wrote him in 1956.) His account books indicate that he remained attentive to his family, and when his brother William’s widow entered a sanatorium in England fifteen years after her husband’s death, Hitchcock quietly instructed his accountant to pay her bills and provide a weekly allowance.

The Hitchcocks often received special shipments of gastronomic delicacies from England and Europe, and during filming had them delivered on location and served at the cast dinners Hitchcock grandly presided over. The director bought quantities of expensive wine for himself and for others as gifts, and prided himself on his vast collection of vintages; the one major addition the couple made to Bellagio Road was a wine cellar.

It was no accident that the stylish furnishings in his films were echoed in the aesthetic of his own homes: more than once he asked the art director of a film to suggest ideas for interior design. Visitors—to one of his houses, or to the homes of his screen characters—did double takes at the modern art on the walls. Hitchcock hated wallpaper, preferring walls of simple vanilla, with maybe a dash of color—a Utrillo here, a Picasso there.

Art was probably his most expensive indulgence, and Hitchcock’s small but noteworthy collection divided its loyalties between the English and the French. Especially at Bellagio Road, the walls were hung with postimpressionist favorites—Maurice Utrillo, Chaim Soutine, Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Amedeo Modigliani. He had three paintings by Paul Klee, the Swiss fantasist to whom he sometimes obliquely compared himself. “I’m not self-indulgent where content is concerned,” he once said. “I’m only self-indulgent about treatment. I’d compare myself to an abstract painter. My favorite painter is Klee.”

Two of his Klees—
Odyssey 1924
and
Strange Hunt
—are allegories of Nazi persecution, according to film scholar Bill Krohn, who has written definitively about Hitchcock’s art collection; the third,
Mask and Scythe
, is the one that Hitchcock told John Russell Taylor he wasn’t sure he could afford when he purchased it for six hundred pounds in 1938, to celebrate the success of
The Lady Vanishes.

The first image to greet visitors stepping into the foyer of Bellagio Road was Georges Rouault’s
La Suaire
, which depicts the face of the Redeemer as imprinted in blood on Christ’s burial shroud.
Eclipse of the Moon
by Darrel Austin, a campy supernaturalist, decorated the director’s study. Sprinkled around the house over the years were a number of drawings by Walter Sickert, a disciple of Degas known for his low-life subjects;
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the sensuous, semiabstract nudes of Claude Garache; and a variety of Chinese figurines.

The Jacob Epstein bust of Pat Hitchcock was displayed in the courtyard
entry of the house overlooking Monterey Bay, while the rose garden featured a mosaic by Georges Braque. The etchings, caricatures, and paintings of Thomas Rowlandson, known for his evocations of crime and punishment (especially London hangings), set a more satirical mood inside the house. Equestrian art in the entrance hall was complemented by a Rowlandson painting,
The Last Gasp, Toadstools Mistaken for Mushrooms
, described in one catalog as “a macabre scene of a doctor ministering to a family, whose tongues—long, swollen and white—are telling him that they aren’t long for this world.”

The dining room featured two Rowlandsons that spoke to Hitchcock’s brand of social satire.
Fast Day
shows clergymen “preparing to stuff themselves on a day of fasting and self-mortification,” in Krohn’s words, with a painting of Susanna and the elders on the wall behind them.
Sympathy
is an engraving of a prison guard about to flog a female prisoner at Bridewell, while a judge looks on sympathetically. Two of Rowlandson’s “wrestling women” hung in the dining room, while
Pigeon Hole
—showing a horde of poor patrons jammed into the gallery at the Drury Lane—was in the guest room.

Visitors didn’t get to inspect all the Hitchcocks’ art: A set of evocative drawings of a nude man and woman by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
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hung in the master bedroom. And appearances could be deceiving: matte artist Albert Whitlock told Krohn that Hitchcock asked him to forge several of the most famous paintings he owned, so that copies of the valuable works could be hung at his vacation home up north, as a safeguard against burglars.

Nevertheless, it was a modest collection by Hollywood standards. Others in the film colony owned enough paintings and sculptures to fill warehouses. Perhaps the most valuable work Hitchcock owned, the
Rue des Abbesses
by Utrillo, was appraised in 1970 at forty-five thousand dollars.