City of Nets (46 page)

One predictable outcome of Selznick's involvement with psychoanalysis was that he decided to make a movie about the subject, a movie that would simultaneously dramatize it, explain it, and proselytize for it. Selznick's desire made him vulnerable to the serpentine intrigues of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the few people in Hollywood who could out-Selznick Selznick. Hitchcock persuaded the producer that he had found exactly what was wanted. This was a peculiar novel called
The House of Dr. Edwardes,
originally published in 1927 by a pseudonymous Francis Beeding, a murder mystery that involved witchcraft and satanic cults in a Swiss mental clinic. Hitchcock told Selznick that this story would portray psychoanalysis both as a cure for mental torment and as a means of solving a murder. He also told him, in due time, that he, Hitchcock, had acquired all rights to the novel, available for resale. He even extracted from Selznick a substantial advance for a nonexistent screenplay. Selznick kept snapping at the bait. “I'd like to stress,” he said in one of his myriad memos “that I'm almost desperately anxious to do this . . . psychiatric story with Hitch.”

Hitchcock's customary method of devising a movie script was to consult for hours on end with his chosen writer, then send the writer to his typewriter for a day or two, then consult some more. This suited the needs of Ben Hecht, who was also in the throes of psychoanalysis and who liked to talk out a story while he wrote it. Hitchcock, he later observed, “gave off plot turns like a Roman candle.” At the end of a month, the two of them had concocted an implausible but dramatic script, to which one of Selznick's secretaries later gave the title
Spellbound.

It involved a psychoanalyst who had come to take charge of a mental hospital but soon showed himself to be on the verge of a breakdown. He couldn't bear the sight of parallel lines; he couldn't stand whiteness. The marks of a fork drawn across a white tablecloth drove him frantic, and when in a frenzy, he was apt to faint dead away. In such phobias Hitchcock found what he liked to call the MacGuffin.
*
Then it turned out that the phobia-ridden doctor was only impersonating the doctor who was supposed to take charge of the clinic, and that the real doctor was dead, and that the impersonator might have murdered him. But there was another psychiatrist at the clinic, a woman, who would fall in love with the mysterious stranger and solve all his problems. “Just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis,” Hitchcock said with a shrug.

Selznick had grandiose ideas of luring Greta Garbo out of retirement to play the heroine, and when he turned to Ingrid Bergman, whom he already had under contract, she at first refused him. “I won't do this movie,” she said. “The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply.” Talked out of that odd misjudgment, she made a splendid effort to portray an intellectual woman falling in love with the rather wooden Gregory Peck. It was a struggle, though. Hitchcock wrote for his two stars a series of psychiatric explanations that now sound platitudinous but also sound like Hitchcock's effort to confess and explain his own obscure sense of guilt. “I'm haunted, but I can't see by what,” Peck said at one point. “People often feel guilt over something they never did,” Miss Bergman reassured him. “It usually goes back to their childhood.” And so on. “I had the feeling that something ailed him,” Peck later said of Hitchcock, “and I could never understand what it might be.”

The most striking novelty in
Spellbound
was Hitchcock's attempt to dramatize Peck's guilt-ridden dreams by hiring Salvador Dali to design them. “I felt that if I was going to have dream sequences, they should be vivid,” Hitchcock said. “I didn't think we should resort to the old-fashioned blurry effect they got by putting vaseline around the lens. . . . I used Dali for his draftsmanship. I wanted to convey the dreams with great visual sharpness and clarity, sharper than the film itself. . . . Chirico has the same quality, the long shadows, the infinity of distance, and the converging lines of perspective.”

Dali arrived in Hollywood with his customary fanfare, produced more than a hundred sketches and five paintings to be filmed (at a thousand dollars apiece). Eyewitness accounts of the result vary. “It opened with four hundred human eyes glaring down at [Peck] from black velvet drapes,” according to Miss Bergman. “Then a pair of pliers fifteen times taller than Peck chased him up the side of a pyramid.” The most spectacular effect was a vision of Miss Bergman as a Greek statue, which slowly cracked apart, enabling a stream of ants to pour forth from her face. Selznick hated the whole thing. “The more I look at the dream sequence in
Spellbound,
the worse I feel it to be,” he declared in one of his memos. Hitchcock, too, was less than enthusiastic, and so a twenty-minute sequence of Dali nightmares shrank to a few brief visions. The only regrets came from Miss Bergman, who thought the original Dali sequence had “many wonderful things” and “could have been really sensational.”

But that was all irrelevant to the basic message of
Spellbound,
which was the basic message that everyone consciously or unconsciously wanted to hear in 1945: It's not your fault; you didn't do it. Skiing over hill and dale—all those parallel lines! all that whiteness!—Peck seemed to be going madder and madder, helped along by the feverish music of Miklos Rozsa,
*
until he finally fell, and thus relived the forgotten moment in which his younger brother had slid down a snow-covered stairway and impaled himself on a fence. It was all an accident, Miss Bergman assured him, not a killing, not your fault.

But what had happened to the original Dr. Edwardes? In another message for the atomic-bomb year 1945, but as old as
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
not to mention
Frankenstein,
it soon turned out that it was kindly old Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), another psychiatrist, who had hoped to become head of the clinic, and then had murdered the destroyer of his ambitions. So even though psychoanalysis can almost magically cure us of our ills and our guilt, not all psychoanalysts (or other scientists) can be trusted. Some of these magicians are insane, homicidal. To dispatch the menacing Dr. Murchison, Hitchcock invoked an idea that he had wanted to use for years. Dr. Murchison, who had been threatening Miss Bergman, finally turned the gun on himself, and on the camera, and thus on the audience, and, with one red burst of flame, fired.

Selznick did his best to interfere with Hitchcock's creation, but Hitchcock was too clever for him. “When Selznick came down to the set,” Miss Bergman recalled, “the camera suddenly stopped, and Hitchcock said the cameraman couldn't get it going again. ‘I don't know what's wrong with it,' he would say. ‘They're working on it, they're working on it.' And finally Selznick would leave, and miraculously the camera would start rolling again.” Selznick presumably guessed that he was being deceived (other headstrong directors, like John Ford and Howard Hawks, used similar tactics against meddling producers), but he departed without complaint. Emotionally involved as he was in
Spellbound,
he was far more involved in a far more grandiose and far more demented project,
Duel in the Sun.

When Selznick originally bought the novel by Niven Busch, he assigned it to King Vidor as director and said he wanted nothing more than “an artistic little Western.” Soon, however, he was making announcements like “I want to shoot the works on numbers of horsemen, wild horses, cattle, etc.” By the time he had spent more than twenty months on various stages of production, he had invested more than five million dollars, more than the cost of
Gone With the Wind.
Selznick not only indulged in a producer's whims, paying Walter Huston forty thousand dollars for four days' work, for example, but he also wrote the script himself, and so indulged in writer's whims, rewriting scenes that had already been shot and insisting that Vidor reshoot them.

The main reason for all this eccentricity was that
Duel in the Sun
was to star Jennifer Jones as a half-caste in love with the evil hero, Gregory Peck. This was counter-typecasting of the most extreme sort, the hyper-respectable Peck as a killer and Saint Bernadette as a slut. The odd thing was that Miss Jones, perhaps precisely because of the demureness of her previous roles, did have a strangely erotic quality, and Selznick took an almost perverse pleasure in bringing it out of her and putting it on display and having it photographed. “It was on the love scenes especially . . .” Selznick said when a dispute later arose over directorial credits, “that I was on the set morning, noon, and night, redirecting the actors, the camera, and even the lighting.”

This constant interference, in which Selznick took such pride, eventually infuriated King Vidor, particularly when the whole crew was sweltering on location in the desert near Tucson. At one point, Selznick began shouting at Vidor about something he wanted changed, and Vidor grimly said, “Don't do that, David. I won't have you doing that in front of the company.” Selznick apologized, but he could not stop interfering and domineering. Occasionally, he insisted in playing the grandee, as when he took a band of his employees to a seedy gambling house so they could watch him play roulette at 5
A.M.
and lose thirty thousand dollars at the wheel. Then back to work in the desert.

In the bombastic climax to the film, when Peck and Miss Jones shot each other but kept crawling toward each other through the sand, Selznick abruptly decided that the doomed lovers didn't look sufficiently doomed, so he stepped forward and sprinkled some more blood on them. Vidor couldn't stand it any more. “You can take this picture and shove it,” he said to Selznick, then stalked off the set, climbed into a black limousine, and told the driver to head for Los Angeles. It happened that the desert road stretched eight miles westward without a bend. The whole
Duel
company, including the perspiring Selznick and the blood-spattered Miss Jones, watched in silence as Vidor's black limousine sped toward the horizon, growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared into a distant row of hills. “Well, that's all for today,” said Selznick.

The producer eventually hired William Dieterle to come and clean up the odds and ends, and so his “artistic little Western” was finally finished. The critics laughed at it, laughed at Orson Welles's thunderous off screen narration and at Dimitri Tiomkin's
shtump
music, and at Jennifer Jones crawling through the sand and calling out the name of her lover/murderer, “Lewt! Lewt!” Perhaps the cruelest judgment came from Charles Brackett, the writer who had collaborated with Billy Wilder on such elegant screenplays as
Ninotchka,
and who now compared Selznick's new epic to the famous saga of Billy the Kid, which Howard Hughes had finally exhumed from his vault and released.
Duel in the Sun,
said Brackett, was “
The Outlaw
in bad taste.”

Selznick was unnerved, but by Hollywood standards,
Duel in the Sun
was a big hit, Selznick's last. On its first release, pushed along by a two-million-dollar advertising campaign, it made seventeen million dollars, more than three times its production cost. (
Spellbound
did very nicely too, earning more than $7 million on an investment of $1.5 million, plus an Academy Award nomination as the best picture of the year.) But Selznick was still haunted by demons, and so was Jennifer Jones (it was not until 1949 that they finally married). Mrs. Selznick, who had moved to New York and established herself as a theatrical producer, heard that Miss Jones was repeatedly calling her. She refused to take the calls. Miss Jones then pretended to be Dorothy Paley, the wife of the CBS chairman, and said she was calling on a matter of life and death. Mrs. Selznick came to the phone, found that it was Miss Jones calling again, and tried to turn her away. Miss Jones took to waiting outside the theater where Mrs. Selznick was rehearsing a new play.

“There was no ducking it,” Mrs. Selznick said of her eventual meeting with her successor. “I told my driver to take us through Central Park. She was distraught about David's unhappiness—he claimed his life was ruined and she blamed herself. She was bad for him. His career was over. He didn't love her, he loved me. . . . She grew hysterical and tried to throw herself out of the car—I only just managed to pull her back. We drove round and round the park. As I quieted her down, I told her David was bad for himself and nothing she did or didn't do could change that. . . .”

 

After a lifetime of failure, Raymond Chandler found the success of his late fifties rather bewildering. For years, he had sat at home and cranked out pulp fiction, and now he was the coauthor of Billy Wilder's
Double Indemnity,
and Paramount paid him a thousand dollars a week, and the Writers Building was well stocked with liquor, and people told funny stories at the writers' table in the studio dining room (“You mean to say she's a nymphomaniac?” somebody asked about some ambitious actress, and Harry Tugend said, “Well, I guess she would be, if they could get her quieted down a little”). Chandler's wife, Cissy, was now seventy-three, and John Houseman noted that “the presence of women—secretaries and extras around the lot—disturbed and excited him.” Houseman, just starting out as a producer at Paramount, worked with Chandler on a minor thriller called
The Unseen
and claimed that Chandler regarded the two of them as bound by the tie of having both gone to English public schools, two gentlemen adrift in the horse latitudes.

When Chandler signed a new three-year contract at Paramount and reported for work at the start of January 1945, the studio was in considerable disarray. Buddy DeSylva, the chief of production, had just suffered a heart attack and never returned to the studio; his right-hand man, Bill Dozier, departed for RKO. The official studio boss, Y. Frank Freeman, was primarily a hand-shaker who knew little about making movies, so the surviving executives were going around in circles. In the midst of this, the word spread that Alan Ladd, the studio's biggest star, was due to be drafted in three months and that nobody had prepared any films to entertain Ladd's fans during his imminent absence. General manager Henry Ginsberg, who seemed to be in charge of the confusion, told a meeting of Paramount executives that anyone who could concoct a Ladd movie that could go into production within a month would, as Houseman recalled it, “earn the eternal gratitude of the Studio.”