It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (36 page)

“We got along very, very well,” Allen remembered. “The first day, instantaneously, we began to have a good time. I took the job. It was my first Hollywood job, and the Hitchcock family just kind of took me in.” She had passed “The Alma Test,” as Pat Hitchcock called it.

“Mostly we had dinner in their kitchen,” Allen continued. “Alma cooked, and afterwards Hitch put on an apron and washed the dishes. When I offered to replace him at that job, he was insulted. He said that’s what he did, and he did it better than anyone in the world. And I said, ‘Well, I’m very good, too.’ So he said, ‘I’ll give you a shot.’ I did a little bit, and he said, ‘Well, we can work together.’

“Alma was a superb cook. Very simple food. Hitch didn’t eat anything fancy.

“Hitch and Alma, they were a pair. They practically read each other’s minds.

“Alma was very, very, very bright. She kept everything going for him. Everything just moved according to what was good for what he wanted. She had a wonderful sense of humor. She was very unpre-possessing-looking with reddish hair, very small.

“She was a great housekeeper. If you ordered up a perfect wife, she was it. Hitch was a perfectionist, and she’s what he ordered up. She was a pro about everything.

“The house was very, very simple, not like a Hollywood house in any way.

“She wasn’t around on the set, because that wasn’t her style. She never, never, never spoke directly with me about what I was writing, although I’m sure she read every word.

“
Marnie
didn’t turn out the way I hoped. I think Tippi was not up to it, and probably my script wasn’t up to it.
Marnie was
written for her. It’s not a terribly accomplished script. It was just the best he could do with the time he had with a first-time writer. I was never told there was another script.

“The film followed my script, but I never thought it was as good a movie as I could have done later. I’d never have gone out there for anybody but Hitch.” In 1972, Allen’s
Cabaret
screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.

“I’m a very swift writer. I don’t think I could have worked on the script itself more than six weeks. I worked hard when I worked, but not long hours. And then, some of the time we played and called it work.

“He storyboarded everything. The storyboard was right up there in the office for anyone to see.”

The scene that caused the breakup between Evan Hunter and Hitchcock, the honeymoon “rape,” wasn’t a problem for Allen. “I found out much later that it had been a problem, but not for me. I remember the rape scene now because it’s what everybody wants to know about.

“The casting of Sean was amusing. We didn’t know who to get for the part, an upper-class Southern man. I had changed the setting in the novel. One day he said, ‘They’re making one of those Bond books, and I hear the guy who’s doing Bond is worth looking at. Let’s get some footage.’ So we got all this footage of this incredibly handsome young man with that thick Scottish accent. We looked at each other and just burst into laughter. ‘Let’s take him anyway.’ We had no regrets about that. He was darling.

“On the set, Hitchcock was always absolutely, totally, completely in control. No upsets of any description.”

Toward the end of
Marnie,
Hitchcock and Hedren were rumored not to be speaking directly to each other.

“I was there throughout all that time,” Allen continued, “and the problem that ‘Tippi people’ have talked about over the years was not that overt. Not at all. Hitch was only trying to make a star of her. He may have had something like a crush on her, a
crise de coeur,
but there was nothing overt. Nothing. Nothing. He would never in one million years do anything to embarrass himself. He was a very Edwardian fellow. Hitch loved his family. I would say that he was possibly a little carried away by Tippi, how attractive she was, but that was all there was to it.

“Hitch was a fantasist. I think he might have had fantasy romances with his leading ladies, and, if so, Alma accepted this. It’s kind of normal for a man, and they were, after all, fantasies.

“Hitchcock and I thought we would do a lot of scripts. We wanted to do
Mary Rose,
but Lew Wasserman just absolutely would not do it.”

“Connery, like Mark,” Hitchcock told me, “was the kind of man who had always been handsome and had never seen anything but a look of adoration in the eyes of women. They said ‘Yes’ before he asked them, even if he didn’t. If Mark found a woman who didn’t want him, it was a challenge, a red flag for a bull.”

When Hedren had asked Hitchcock, “How could any woman be frigid with a man like Sean Connery?” Hitchcock gave her his stock answer:

“Fake it, Tippi.”

Goldfinger,
with Sean Connery as James Bond, was released at the same time, and it out-drew and out-grossed Hitchcock’s film. At the Film Society of Lincoln Center gala tribute to Sean Connery, he told me: “James Bond was a bigger draw than I ever was. I tried, but I couldn’t compete with him. Well, tonight they’re honoring me here—not Bond. At least I
hope
so.”

In
Marnie,
Hitchcock once again uses a long, slow combination dolly-crane shot that moves from a wide overhead view of a social event to one small detail, the really important element in the whole scene, as with the twitching eye of the drummer and the key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand. In
Marnie,
it is the face of Strutt, the man from whom Marnie has stolen money.

The scene opens wide and high above the chandelier in the entrance hall of the Rutland mansion. Guests are milling around as others arrive. From a distance a butler can be seen opening and closing the front door each time new guests arrive. Near him, watching with interest, is Lil. Diane Baker, who played that character, described the scene for me.

“He moved the entire staircase. It just lifted up in the air, and the camera zoomed down to the front door. He had to do that many, many times, and that camera zoomed carefully right through the whole room, from high up, all the way from the second floor, through the second landing and then the stairs lifted up and everything parted, like the Red Sea, for him to move with his camera to the front door in a close-up of the Strutts. To watch this happen was fascinating, and many, many takes later, they got it. Sounds were creaking and things were moving. It was thrilling to be part of.”

Baker described Hitchcock’s directions to her for that complex scene in which she was a key player with no words.

“He said to me, ‘Diane, you are to be sitting here talking, as the Strutts come in to the party, and you are just talking seriously. We’re not going to be on you. We have no dialogue for you, just background chatter. But the camera will pan, and I want you to be smiling and having fun meeting these people, or chattering at the party. Then, the minute the door opens, and the Strutts walk through the door, and the camera’s pulling back, I want you to be in a state. You see them, and it’s a shock, even though you are the one that invited them to come.

“‘You have to show the shock, the surprise. So, I want you to start off laughing, and I want you to end up with the smile draining from your face. You’re dumbfounded.’ He demonstrated for me how it should look, and he demonstrated the wrong way to do it, too. His face wasn’t like mine, but he did it very well, and I got the idea perfectly.

“Then he said, ‘There it is, and you don’t have to do any faking. Otherwise, it would border on phony, false. You would overact and you would look like you were doing a horror movie, and we don’t want that.’ So, he was able to talk me through scenes.

“He said not to show too much, not to act. He once said to an actor who was overacting, ‘There’s so much writing on the face, I can’t see your expression.’

“I was terribly nervous for the tea-pouring scene. I was afraid my hand would shake and the tea cup would rattle in the saucer or that I would spill the tea pouring it. I knew I’d been very nervous in rehearsal because I was being directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but Hitch was especially kind to me.

“Then once, after a very difficult scene, I looked to Hitch for a sign of encouragement. He turned away as if he wasn’t paying attention to me. I was hurt. Later, I realized he did it to draw the right performance out of me. I was supposed to be a strong-willed young woman who was jealous and hurt.

“When I was listening at the window to what Marnie and Mark were saying, he would move my hair where he wanted it and put the curtain at a certain point in my face, where it covered my face just slightly so it gave a sense of the ominous or sinister. Then he would place the curtain exactly where he wanted it to hang, next to my face, so that it made me seem like someone listening secretly.

“He told me to think absolutely nothing. My face must register zero. It’s very difficult to have absolutely no expression. I suppose it was for a close-up, but he knew frame by frame how he wanted to see it.

“He knew exactly what he was going to do, but he was prepared to make a change that suited the scene or if something happened.

“I liked him when I first met him. I’d been under contract to Fox for almost five years when Hitchcock asked for me. He had seen me on television. I was invited to his home, and I met with him and his wife.

“I immediately felt that Alma was as important in my involvement as was Hitchcock. It seemed as if they were of one mind. They were rather united and talked to me very nicely. I felt immediately upon my arrival that they were eager to have me. They liked my look, and they indicated that they thought I had a resemblance to Grace Kelly, and they started to bring out photographs of Grace and magazines to show me. I was sort of stunned that they would be looking at me and comparing me to her. In retrospect, I think it was maybe a conscious effort on their part to look at someone new who might fulfill a need that they had to find a Grace Kelly for their movies.

“Then it became much more difficult as the picture went on because of the turmoil. I felt he was struggling a great deal. He tended to fall asleep on the set after lunch when he was shooting. I began to understand that he and Tippi were having trouble.

“I knew there was trouble, because he was becoming very solicitous of my interests, talking with me, and he spent a lot of time ignoring Tippi and paying attention to me, which really did disturb me. He was not talking much with her. I noticed he would always begin talking with me in front of her or around her dressing room. Something wasn’t quite right.

“I was caught right in the middle. After it became clear that Tippi wasn’t going on with her contract after
Marnie,
I was invited to join the lunch group in his bungalow. I was very flattered. He profoundly affected me.

“But sometimes he would embarrass me. A man who was a friend of my father’s dropped by to visit me on the set one day. He was head of transportation at Universal. When he left, Hitch said, ‘Another one of your boyfriends?’ so everybody could hear it. I was
so
embarrassed. I was angry.”

Hitchcock’s humor was better appreciated by Anny Ondra in 1929. During her sound test for
Blackmail,
he asked her in front of all if she had been “a bad woman” the night before. Ondra’s response was to giggle and pretend mock shock.

“When I saw
Marnie,
I wasn’t sure he fulfilled what he had in mind for our film,” Baker continued. “I’m pleased with my own work in some parts of it. My character was to come in and create havoc, and I was rather nicely evil, and also playful. I was disappointed that there was no dot at the end of the character. It wasn’t a fulfilled ending for my character. I just disappear.

“But who can say in the whole of life that you got a chance to work with Alfred Hitchcock?”

Hitchcock blamed himself for the film’s failure, referring to his disappointment when he felt he had lost Grace Kelly for a second time. The first time he had lost her to Prince Rainier, who offered the real-life role as Her Royal Highness of Monaco, beyond anything Hitchcock felt he had to offer.