It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (28 page)

Production manager C. O. “Doc” Erickson added: “It was all shot on Stage 18 at Paramount. “Mac” [Joseph MacMillan] Johnson built the set, and we had to rip up the floor and use the basement portion of the stage, which became the courtyard of the apartment building. It was my first job as production manager and the first time I worked on a Hitchcock picture. We didn’t get credit in those days.” Erickson worked as production manager on five Hitchcock films, from
Rear Window
to
North by Northwest.

“We had three sets of lights,” Darcy continued. “You just pull one switch and all the lights, the entire place changed. You had the daytime, the late afternoon, and night.

“It was one total set. You didn’t have to go from room to room and break things down and put them up. I lived in my little apartment. I had a refrigerator that was plugged in. It was a complete little village. The only thing I didn’t have was running water. It was an incredible set. It was his dollhouse, and we were his dolls.

“When they were restoring the film, I filled them in on a lot of the technical things, like the lighting, which no one really seemed to know about, which is extraordinary.

“It was funny, because they were asking me questions like, ‘What color were Jimmy Stewart’s pajamas?’ That I couldn’t tell you, but I certainly could tell you what color Grace’s dresses were. And I still have the shorts from the movie. My little pink shorts. The men restoring the film turned the cuffs down, and you could see the original color. They kept them a long time because they were the key to the colors that had faded so badly on the film. It was wonderful the role my shorts played in restoring the film.

“Interviewers came here and talked with a lot of people, including myself for television. They kept trying to get me to say things about Hitchcock. ‘Was he salacious? Was he mean? Was he gay?’ You know, things like that, and I wouldn’t do it. I knew what they wanted. You know, I’m not a little girl anymore.

“I thought, ‘The man is dead. He was a genius. It’s his hundredth birthday, and this is the way you celebrate his life? Looking for garbage?’ I would not do it, and I ended up on the cutting room floor, with only two seconds of me. Tippi Hedren was the one who was quoted.

“I hate gossip. I saw him through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old. He never did anything that was out of line with me.

“He was unique. I mean, how many geniuses come along? And the junk that they’re putting out. I mean, you go to the movies now, and it gives you a headache.
Rear Window
really has held up, hasn’t it?”

“T
HE KISS IN THE HALLWAY
is as if she unzipped his fly,” Hitchcock said of
To Catch a Thief.
“The fireworks scene is the orgasm.” He described Grace Kelly’s character as “Ice that burns.”

“Of all the pictures I’ve ever worked on,
To Catch a Thief
is my favorite,” costume designer Edith Head told me. “And it was also the most difficult. From Grace Kelly’s pièce de résistance gold ball gown to shopping for bathing trunks that would please Cary Grant, who was even more difficult to please than Hitch was. Cary knew exactly how he wanted to look, but he also wanted to be comfortable. He didn’t want a tight elastic distracting him. He selected most of his clothes for his films. Grace was much easier to work with, but I never had a free moment to see the Côte d’Azur.”

Hitchcock had specially requested,
insisted,
that Paramount send Head to Cannes to work on location with the wardrobe design and fittings, so important did he consider the costumes in this film.

“This was not the regular routine,” Head went on, “but I was in costume designer’s heaven. Can you imagine? Grace Kelly playing one of the richest women in America so she can afford the most elegant clothes and most fabulous jewels. Then, a fancy costume ball with hundreds of extras dressed as if they were in Marie Antoinette’s court. Hitch told me to dress Grace ‘like a princess,’ and I did. Of course, I had no idea I was dressing a
real
princess-to-be!”

One of Grace Kelly’s favorite anecdotes involved the gold ball gown.

“I was wearing the gold evening dress that was cut really tight, to show everything. Hitch walked up to me and sort of peeked down my dress and said, ‘There’s hills in them thar gold!’

“I found it especially amusing, because Hitch was always so decorous and dignified with me. He treated me like a porcelain doll.”

Hitchcock was concerned that the settings for
To Catch a Thief
not appear
too
beautiful, according to assistant director Herbert Coleman. “While the screenplay was still being written, Hitch sent me and a group of us to Cannes to scout for locations along the Côte d’Azur. The last thing he said to me before we left was, ‘I don’t want picture postcard locations. I want people to see the French Riviera the way it really is.’ The trouble is, that’s the way it really
is,
the way it looks on picture postcards.”

David Dodge’s 1952 novel,
To Catch a Thief,
had been purchased by Hitchcock on publication. The screenplay was to be written by John Michael Hayes. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly were Hitchcock’s first choices, his only choices, but he had to coax Grant out of a sort of retirement to take the part.

Dodge’s novel, supposedly based on a series of jewel robberies that took place on the French Riviera after World War II, was more complex than the film, which eliminated subplots, a necessity imposed by the medium. “The motion picture is more related to the short story than to the novel,” Hitchcock said.

For
To Catch a Thief,
Hitchcock wanted a beautiful thrill-seeker with perfect confidence. “The Kelly character is disappointed that Grant’s cat burglar character really
is
retired,” Hitchcock explained. “It isn’t as thrilling for her with him being innocent.

“Francie has a ‘don’t-muss-my-hair’ quality,” Hitchcock explained. “Ingrid [Bergman] had a ‘muss-my-hair’ quality. Francie doesn’t have Ingrid’s kind of vulnerability nor her warmth.

“She’s accustomed to getting what she wants. She acts differently at the end when she
is
getting what she wants. She and her mother are ready to take over our hero’s house and life.”

In an earlier draft, Francie was married, but hopes to be divorced soon so she can return to Monte Carlo and marry Robie.

M
ANY ACTORS HAVE COMPLAINED
that Hitchcock gave them little direction, while others have been grateful to be left alone to develop their own performance, as was Cary Grant. Hitchcock knew that Grant knew how to play Cary Grant better than anyone else. “I didn’t have to direct him,” Hitchcock said. “All I had to do was put him in front of a camera.”

Grant told me he understood that he was sometimes regarded as being self-obsessed about his character’s wardrobe and every detail of his performance. “I’m the only property I have, so I have to watch over it. You might say I have a vested interest.”

Doc Erickson, the unit production manager, talked with me about what it was like working with Cary Grant.

“He could be a little obstreperous. Cary always wanted something, or he
didn’t
want something, and he would let you know about it and become sort of a nuisance in that regard. Eventually, you just let it roll off your back.

“We’d brought down a new Lincoln limousine from London for him. I said, ‘That’s your car, Mr. Grant.’ The chauffeur who came with the car was holding the rear door open for him.

“He acted like it was a big surprise and said, ‘Now, that’s really thoughtful of you, Doc. But you shouldn’t have gone to all the trouble.’

“‘The studio told me it’s in your contract, Mr. Grant,’ I said.

“‘Please call me Cary, Doc. I want everybody to call me Cary.’

“A couple of weeks later, he came up to me and said, ‘Doc, I don’t like riding around in that limousine. Everybody gawks at me, and I don’t like it. I’d rather have a little open car with a driver who doesn’t look like someone out of a Mae West movie. This one won’t take his cap off.’

“So, I got him a convertible and a younger driver without a chauffeur’s uniform, and shipped the limousine back to London.

“A few weeks passed, then Cary said, ‘Doc, I’m not happy with my car and driver. Why can’t I have the limousine that’s in my contract?’

“I had to bring the Lincoln back by air.

“I wondered what next. But for the rest of the shoot, he was just like the Cary Grant you see on the screen.”

A
T THE
L
ONDON OPENING
of the film, Alfred and Alma Hitchcock were presented to Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip at the Tenth Royal Film Performance at the Odeon Theatre in Leicester Square, the same day Princess Margaret announced from Clarence House that she had decided not to marry Peter Townsend. Everyone knew this wasn’t what Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister had wanted. The news spread through the theater. By the time
To Catch a Thief
began, everyone in the audience knew that Princess Margaret had placed duty before love.

Hitchcock and Alma, being romantics, sympathized. They had been hoping Princess Margaret would marry the man she loved, and much of the audience shared their feeling. They wondered how this would affect the audience’s response to the movie. Would they be too distracted?

The audience received the film enthusiastically.

“T
HE FIRST TROUBLE WE HAD
with
The Trouble with Harry
was autumn 1954 in New England,” production manager Doc Erickson told me. “We went to Vermont to get the fall foliage and so forth, but it was one of those years when the leaves didn’t turn, and we had a lot of rain, so we had to shoot inside. We built our sets in a gymnasium in town, and then came back to Los Angeles to build a huge set on Stages 12 and 14 at Paramount with the backing and trees and foliage.

“So, we did the outdoor scenes on the stage and the indoor scenes on location.”

Another “trouble” was when the huge Technicolor camera fell from its crane in the gymnasium of East Craftsbury, Vermont, grazing Hitchcock, but fortunately not causing any injury.

Yet another “trouble” was the unavailability of the actor who played Harry, Philip Truex, whose body had to be replaced for some scenes with a stunt double.

The worst trouble with Harry was that it was the only Hitchcock Paramount film that didn’t earn a profit. “It lost, I suppose, half a million dollars,” Hitchcock told me. “So that’s an expensive self-indulgence. I didn’t think enough about the audience. Or the producers, for that matter. Here we come to the question of ethics—with other people’s money.

“I think it was outside of what was expected of me. It was a little comedy of the macabre. I feel it is a true example of British humor, black humor, termed gallows humor. Do you know the old joke about a man being led to the gallows? When he saw it, he was alarmed. His reaction was, ‘I say, is that thing safe?’