Hitch (41 page)

More interesting seemed to be an idea which came to Ernest Lehman at this time. Disneyland had been open for four or five years, and was receiving an enormous amount of publicity. One day Lehman visited it, and the bank hold-up they were staging then had somehow fused with another idea he had, that of a man blind from birth who is given sight by some sort of eye transplant only to discover that the donor, supposedly killed in an accident, was really murdered and has transmitted to him through his eyes a visual memory of the murderer. Perhaps while visiting Disneyland the hero (call him Jimmy Stewart for the sake of argument) finds himself ‘recognizing' someone he could never have seen, then have a recollection set off by the fake gun fight. Perhaps the whole movie could be made in Disneyland. Hitchcock in Disneyland! Hitch was at this time in Copenhagen with Alma on their post-
Psycho
holiday, but Lehman told Peggy Robertson, she was excited enough to tell Hitch about it on the phone, and Hitch was sufficiently excited to talk to Lehman himself. When Hitch got back he and Lehman began working on the idea as they had worked on
North by Northwest
, and for a while everything went swimmingly. Then something appeared in the trade papers about the project, Walt Disney read it, and promptly made a statement that in no circumstances would Hitchcock,
maker of that disgusting movie
Psycho
, be allowed to shoot a foot of film in Disneyland. Hitch and Lehman began to change things around again, this time placing the action on a round-the-world cruise (Hitch had a sudden, disconnected vision of a chase in Carcassonne), but turn it as they might, they never seemed able to lick the problem of too many coincidences, or find a natural-seeming way of getting all the characters in the right place at the right time.

Hitch's next project took up even more of his time, to no satisfactory outcome. For almost a year he worked with various writers on a story entitled
Frenzy
—no connection with the film of that name which he made ten years later except that both of them concern psychotic killers of young women. The initiation of the project brought about a curious reunion. Hitch had scarcely seen the British playwright Benn Levy since 1932, when they had had their falling-out over
Lord Camber's Ladies
. Now, thirty years later, he invited Levy out to work on this new script. Hitch himself went to New York and spent three months researching locations: there was to be a murder in Central Park, another action scene in Shay Stadium (where Hitch undertook, improbably, to explain the mechanics of baseball to Peggy Robertson), and a pursuit across the mothball fleet. Somehow the action seemed to keep coming back always to water in one form or another. ‘Don't you think there's rather a lot of water in this story?' Hitch asked Levy at one point. Levy said he should use his old principle of making a virtue of necessity: emphasize it and call the film
Waters of Forgetfulness
or something of the sort. After Levy had spent several months in America working on the script, he returned to Britain, and Hitch proceeded to go through a lot of other writers, bizarrely assorted, including Howard Fast and Hugh Wheeler. But though there were great sequences in the story as worked out, they just could not get over the ‘third act' problem—however it was developed, it always ended in the cliché of the policewoman decoy to capture the killer. ‘No, no,' said Hitch, ‘that's the way they do it in the movies!' There seemed no more to be said, and the project was shelved, like the other four.

On a more personal level, Hitch was also active, though to little ultimate effect, in the years following
Psycho
. The television series was still going strong, and for the one season, 1961-2, it expanded from half an hour to an hour's length, and was retitled
The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour
. By this time, though, his connection with it was largely formal. After
Psycho
he directed three half-hours and one hour show, the last featuring, some way down the cast list, one of his new discoveries, Claire Griswold. His disappointing experience with trying to turn Vera Miles into a Hitchcock woman had not deterred him. In the early 1960s he put three young women in succession under personal contract. The first was Joanna Moore, a pretty girl but an improbable choice anyway, one would think. Certainly no one could have been less co-operative in the required making-over process: she did not like the clothes, she did not like the hair styles, and she did not seem to like anyone she came into contact with at the studio. Finally, Hitch gave up, and instead contracted Claire Griswold—largely it would seem because after putting her through the grooming process and shooting extensive tests of her in scenes from
To Catch a Thief
and others of his movies, he did not like to disappoint her. Not, probably, that she would have been very disappointed: she seemed to have little professional ambition, and was quite content being what she was, Mrs. Sydney Pollack.

The third actress put under contract worked out a lot better. Early in 1962 Hitch and Alma were watching television and were much struck by the cool elegance and style of one of the models in a commercial. What particularly drew Hitch's attention in what he saw was one reaction: the commercial was for a dietary drink called Sego, and in it the girl was required to turn and respond when an eight-year-old boy whistled at her in the street. Inquiry established that she was an aspiring New York actress called Tippi Hedren (or ‘Tippi', with single quotes, as Hitch was to insist she always be billed). Through MCA she was contacted—she turned out to have moved recently to Los Angeles—and she was asked to come round to the agents with any photographs and film she had of herself. Her first appointment was on Friday the thirteenth. No one told her who exactly was interested, though the office was full of pictures of Hitchcock. On the Monday she went back and was shunted from person to person, still with no information. On the Tuesday she met another agent, Herman Citron, who told her that the producer interested in her was Alfred Hitchcock, and that he wanted to put her under a personal contract. If she and her agent were agreeable to the terms of the contract they would go over and meet him. The contract was more than fair, and was accepted at once.
What a considerate way, Tippi Hedren thought, to approach the matter: if she had known it was Hitch, she would have been terribly nervous and over-eager to say and do the right thing, while as it was she had no way of knowing whether anything of any importance depended on this series of apparently routine interviews, so she could just comfortably be herself, without exaggerated hopes or fears.

When they did finally meet, Hitch and Tippi did not talk at all about films—they talked about travel, about food, about clothes, almost everything but. She found him very charming and easy to get along with. He brought in Edith Head immediately to design a wardrobe for her, and then they went into making three days of colour tests—scenes from
To Catch a Thief, Notorious, Rebecca
—some of which had to be destroyed right away after screening, as Hitch did not have the rights to the material. Martin Balsam was flown in specially from New York to act with her, and no expense was spared to have everything just right. No particular property was mentioned for her debut, and it came as a complete surprise when, a few weeks later, Hitch and Alma invited her to dinner at Chasens'. There at her place was a small package, beautifully wrapped, which contained a pin of three seagulls in flight, made of gold and seed pearls, and Hitch said, ‘We want you to play Melanie in
The Birds
.'

The Birds
was one of the two films Hitch had definitely in the works at this time. The other was to be based on Winston Graham's novel
Marnie
, which he had bought and got Joseph Stefano to write a treatment of with Grace Kelly in mind for the title role of the compulsive thief. At this time Grace Kelly had been married to Prince Rainier of Monaco for six years, had two children, and was apparently willing to consider the possibility of a return to acting. Having informally sounded her out on the question, Hitch offered her
Marnie
, and the idea of working with him again was too much to resist. But then unfortunately some busybody went to the trouble of actually reading the book. And all at once a big controversy was cooked up about whether it was proper for a princess to be playing a criminal on screen, even for the great Alfred Hitchcock. The upshot of this was that a referendum of the princess's subjects was called for, and by a considerable majority they voted against her returning to the screen. Regretfully, she bowed to this show of public disapproval. Hitch was annoyed, and upset, and promptly put
Marnie
away, apparently for keeps, to concentrate all his attention on
The Birds
.

The original short story by Daphne du Maurier came from a collection published in 1952, which had been brought to Hitch's attention as a possibility for adaptation as a half-hour television show, and included in one of his anthologies. The story, as so often with Hitch, provided no more than a nugget, the germ of an idea about a sudden, inexplicable, unmotivated attack by the birds of the world on humans. This appealed to Hitch's constant idea of finding menace in the bright sunlight, in the most unlikely circumstances. We might accept the possibility of attack from a giant squid, or mutated ants the size of houses, but who would think that the little feathery creatures we see around us all the time could constitute a serious threat to civilization as we know it? From that one thought the whole screenplay by Evan Hunter (author of
The Blackboard Jungle
) was elaborated. In the process it acquired a location in Bodega Bay, a small fishing village north of San Francisco, and what appears until some way into the film to be an innocent, light-comedy love story between a spoilt San Francisco socialite and a somewhat unresponsive lawyer.

And this was where Tippi Hedren came in. Though Hitch admitted, ideally he would rather have had bigger stars than Tippi and Rod Taylor—say, Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant—to ensure immediate audience identification, the very long shooting schedule required for all the special effects and trick photography in the film would make them far too expensive. And anyway, he felt that his new discovery was ready for the role—or would be by the time he was ready to shoot. With this end in view he began to prepare her with unparalleled intensity and thoroughness. Strangely for him, with his reputation of never having much to say to actors, never going into psychological explanations, he took a great deal of trouble to involve her in every stage of the film's preparation. She sat in on script conferences, meetings with set designers, the director of photography, the music supervisor, and had explained to her the colour planning of the film, the motivation of the characters and the structure and purpose of the whole picture, its periods of intensity and of relaxation, in the most minute detail before they ever started shooting. Hitch gave her an education in film-making it would otherwise have taken her fifteen years to acquire, always supposing she could have acquired it any other way.

Even during the shooting he never hesitated to help her along, to discuss all aspects of her role with her. On only one occasion did he
put his foot down. She wanted to know, reasonably, what ever possessed her character, Melanie, to venture out of her room at night and up to the attic when she must be certain something terrible was waiting there. Of course, there was no reasonable answer except, ‘Because I told you to.' And that, she felt, was for once in a picture fair enough. Though she would certainly rather have avoided what was waiting for her at the top of the stairs: an attack by birds which had to be shot with live instead of mechanical birds, as originally intended. The trouble with mechanical birds was that they just did not look lifelike. So for a whole week she had to suffer daily having live seagulls thrown at her in very narrow confines, and then later to lie on the floor with frantic birds tied with elastic bands and nylon threads to her arms and legs. It was, she says, the worst week of her life, but she went through it without complaint, and only became hysterical when a bird nearly clawed out one eye.

For a film of such extraordinary technical complexity, the shooting of
The Birds
went remarkably smoothly. It contains some 1,400 shots, about twice as many as the average Hitchcock film, 371 of them trick shots of one sort or another, mostly in the latter half, when the birds have begun to attack. Many of them had to be worked over and over with superimpositions and optical combinations to give the desired effect: the very last shot in the picture, in which the human characters seem to leave the world to the birds, combines no fewer than thirty-two different pieces of film. The secret, as usual, was all in Hitch's meticulous pre-planning. From the earliest stage in the film's preparation he had working with him not only his usual cinematographer Robert Burks, but Ub Iwerks, for years Walt Disney's right-hand man, as special photographic adviser, Lawrence A. Hampton on special effects, Ray Berwick as trainer of the birds and his old friend and associate Al Whitlock, the accredited genius of matte work, as provider of ‘pictorial designs'. (Whitlock turns up in various capacities on the credits of a number of Hitch's films, and some years later, when Hitch found that Universal, who had him under contract, were hiring him out at enormous profit to other companies in need of a matte-shot expert, he offered to finance him in the setting up of his own independent studio, well aware that this threat would persuade Universal to come up with a fairer remuneration for the relatively unbusinesslike Whitlock's services.) This time the preparation went, of necessity, much farther than Hitch's usual set of sketches indicating camera set-ups: the whole
film was laid out as a story board, shot by shot. Throughout, Hitch carefully avoided ever asking of anything, ‘Can it be done?' Instead he merely stated what they were going to do and set his team of expert technicians to work out how.