It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (27 page)

Once when he was convalescing from an injured ankle, Logan told me he had amused himself by looking out of a courtyard window, watching his neighbors, “just like [James] Stewart in
Rear Window.
Do you know that I was responsible for Grace Kelly’s character in that film?”

Leland Hayward, Logan’s agent, had been trying to interest Hitchcock in stories by mystery writer Cornell Woolrich, one of which was “It Had to Be Murder.”

“Leland asked me if I’d write a short treatment of it for the screen to help sell it to Hitchcock, so I read the story and made some changes. A few of them actually got into the movie, though I didn’t get any credit. Or money.

“I started out with the audience knowing Jeff’s leg is in a cast. In the short story, it’s the last thing the reader learns, but my most important addition was the girlfriend. There wasn’t any romance in the story, and I never saw a Hitchcock picture without it. Even
Lifeboat
has a love story. In Woolrich, there’s only a male servant and a friend who’s a police detective to help Jeffries [the Stewart character]. I kept them, changing the male servant into a female servant, and the girlfriend became his most important helper.

“Nedda [Logan’s wife] had the idea for her to be an actress. In the movie, Grace Kelly is a fashion model. Close.”

Hitchcock told me: “I always say
Shadow of a Doubt
was my personal favorite, but I am very proud of
Rear Window.

“It’s a movie about a peeping Tom, to be blunt. I think it’s human nature. People love to peek, or they would if they weren’t afraid of getting caught. The tabloids are a kind of peeking.

“A great advantage of the cinema is you can show a state of mind. In
Rear Window
I wanted to show the claustrophobia of Stewart’s situation and the extent of his boredom. It brings him to the point where the ordinary lives of his neighbors have to replace the intensity of his own adventurous life. His neighbors at least are in motion. His confinement must be conveyed, but not in such a way that the audience feels so bored it runs out of the theater. It must be heightened, dramatic boredom.”

“At the end, Stewart is caught with his plaster down,” Hitchcock said.

Grace Kelly was proud of “a character contribution” she had made to the plot. She told me that she had pointed out to Hitchcock the importance to a woman of her purse, which represents “her security, taking her private world with her wherever she goes.” It was a prop that played an important part in pointing suspicion at the already suspicious-seeming husband who had his wife’s purse, but not his wife. “Personally, I wouldn’t go anywhere important without my own favorite Hermès black bag,” Grace Kelly said. “I have my jewelry with me in case something happens and I suddenly have to dress up. For me, going out without that purse would seem almost like going out naked. Well,
almost.
”

When the American Film Institute premiered the restored version of
Rear Window
in 1998, they wanted to invite the members of the cast, but they could locate only Georgine Darcy, who played Miss Torso, a dancer who was one of the neighbors James Stewart’s character watches. Still looking very much Miss Torso, she talked with me in 2002 about
Rear Window.

“I was in Las Vegas, doing an act there, and I received a letter from Paramount. They wanted me to come for a screen test. I was really a dancer, originally with the New York City Ballet, and I was not interested in the screen world. I didn’t actually know who Hitchcock was. I had a three-month contract, and I didn’t want to go to Los Angeles to do an audition. So I just didn’t bother.

“Finally they sent me the script, and I read it. The truth of the matter was, I was finishing up my time in Vegas, anyway. So I came back to Los Angeles, and I went to see Mr. Hitchcock. I had never been on a soundstage before, and they were saying things like ‘Kill the baby,’ you know, the light, and I was looking around for a baby.

“Mr. Hitchcock was just watching me. It was almost like the beginning of
Rear Window.
He was watching every move I made. Then he called me over and said, ‘You have the job. Come into the office with me.’ I still didn’t know who Hitchcock was!

“I went into the office, and he said, ‘Now, Georgina’—he called me Georgina—‘do you have an agent?’ I said no, and he said, ‘There are a lot of men outside who would be
happy
to represent you. And you’ll get a lot of money. If you don’t have an agent, you’re going to get scale.’

“With an agent, I would have made $750, which was considered a lot of money in those days for a very small part. But I told Hitchcock I couldn’t do that, because I’d already told someone I’m going to give him 10 percent. Scale was $350, and that’s what I was paid. I was seventeen. Funny how you think when you’re little.

“I was dating a director, and we went out for dinner that night. I said, ‘I got the part,’ and he said, ‘Who’s directing?’ I said, ‘Gee, I don’t know his name. A short little man, a bald-headed man with a cockney accent.’

“He looks at me and says, ‘You don’t mean Alfred Hitchcock, do you? He’s only about the most famous director in the world! And don’t ever call him “Hitch.” You show him respect and call him “Mr. Hitchcock.”’ So, I never did call him Hitch.

“We were across the courtyard from him, and we all had little ear-pieces so he could direct you. The only time he ever came over was to personally direct someone. He’d ask you to put your earpiece in, and he’d talk to you.

“I remember one day he called me from the dressing room to watch a scene with the couple that lived on the fire escape, Frank Cady and Sara Berner. They slept on the fire escape, and they had their mattress out there. He asked Frank to put his earpiece in, and for Sara to take hers out. And he gave Frank instructions. Then he told Frank to take his out, and asked her to put hers in. And he gave her instructions. Then he said to me, ‘Now watch this.’

“The cameras start to roll, and it starts to rain. He’s pulling his mattress one way, she’s pulling hers the other way, and they’re fighting. You can hear them bickering. As it turns out, Frank fell into the window upside-down. And it was a perfect scene, just exactly what Mr. Hitchcock wanted, uncut.

“Well, the actress was furious when she found out that Mr. Hitchcock had given them different directions. But these are the kind of things that he did that I didn’t see anything wrong in, or think it mean-spirited. There was a logic behind it. He was very much, in a strange way, into improvisation.

“I remember when he said to me, ‘You’re getting the only close-up in the entire movie.’ It was when the little doggie was strangled. I said, ‘I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to act. What am I supposed to do?’ Now, there’s no dog, no basket, nothing. Nothing to look at. He said, ‘I want you to look over there and throw up.’ That was his direction. I didn’t need to throw up, but I guess I looked like I was going to throw up. And that’s the kind of thing he would do.

“He loved Judith Evelyn, who was Miss Lonelyheart. He said, ‘Now, watch this actress. She’s really good.’ Then, there were people he just didn’t bother with. The worst thing that he could do was ignore you.

“He used to tell jokes, lots of cockney jokes. Some of them were off-color. He told them when he had Herbie [Herbert Coleman, the assistant director] and a lot of guys around, but no women. He called me, and he started this joke, and it was really endless! He went on and on and on. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. They were all laughing their heads off. He finished with the punch line, and they were hysterical!

“And he looked at me. He said, ‘Georgina. You didn’t laugh. Didn’t you think my joke was funny?’ I said, ‘I didn’t get it.’ He looked over to Herbie, and he said, ‘Herbie, explain it to her.’ And, of course, there was no joke.

“Once he asked me, ‘What kind of pie do you like, Georgina?’ I said, ‘Oh, I guess apple pie, maybe cherry pie. But I hate pumpkin pie. Ugh!’ He got pumpkin pie, and he did the scene several times. I had to eat this pumpkin pie, and I’d told him I hated it. But those were his little tricks, his private jokes.

“He was always kind of teasing me. I remember another time when I came back from lunch, and he said to me, ‘Georgina, did you mast…’ Just the beginning of the word, my eyes bulged out of my head. He said, ‘Did you mas-ticate your food?’

“James Stewart was very sweet, nice to be around, but a very private man. I took a picture sitting on his lap, with his cast on, sitting in the wheelchair, and he said to the photographer, ‘That’s just for Georgine.’

“Grace [Kelly] wanted to be a ballet dancer, you know. She was always impressed with my ability as a dancer. I remember one day, Ross Bagdasarian, who wrote a lot of songs that he ultimately had published, came into my dressing room with Frank Cady. And he’d pound out these songs, and you’d hear all this noise coming from my dressing room. I remember Grace knocked on the door once and said, ‘What’s happening? Can I come inside and play?’

“Grace was very sweet. Without makeup, you wouldn’t know it was Grace Kelly. She wore glasses, and she was a little pigeon-toed. Very unassuming, very much a lady. Very quiet.

“Afterwards, I ran into the killer, Raymond Burr. A darling man. I was doing a movie in New Orleans, and we were on the same plane. He was going to play King Bacchus at the Mardi Gras, and he asked me to call him at his hotel. He wanted to do a second
Rear Window.
Isn’t that crazy?

“I think I worked six weeks on the movie, and we finished January 14th, the day of my birthday. I had my long hair in big curlers, and all my makeup off, and I was hot to trot. I had one foot out the door. And there’s a knock on the door, and it’s Herbie Coleman. He said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock would like to see you on the set.’ So I threw on my slacks and went over.

“And
everybody
—Grace Kelly, Jimmy Stewart, and all the rest—they were all there to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, and the photographers were there. Mr. Hitchcock called me over, and he said, ‘Georgina, would you please go back into the dressing room and take the curlers out of your hair.’ So I ran back and took the curlers out of my hair, but no makeup on at all. I looked like a sheet. And he had a cake made for me. It had the breasts, the torso—a headless torso. It was my eighteenth birthday and it said, ‘Happy Birthday, Miss Torso.’

“I was like his mascot. He’d always call me to hear his jokes. He would pull little tricks on actors, and he’d want me to be there. He told me about his career, and I really liked him. I thought he was cute.

“After the movie, I called him at work, and we’d just chat. The secretary always put me through. When he was doing
Alfred Hitchcock Presents,
one time he asked me would I like to be in it.

“While we were doing the movie, he said to me, ‘Georgina, if you would go over to Europe and study with [Michael] Chekhov for a couple of years, when you come back, I would make a big star of you.’ I thought, ‘Ha, ha, ha, isn’t that funny.’ I never took him seriously, but he actually meant it, I found out later on, because he really loved blondes, and he loved molding people. He didn’t like ‘actor’ actors, he liked people like Tippi Hedren, people he could mold to do just what he wanted them to do. I wouldn’t say not thinking for themselves, but almost.

“I was a kid; I didn’t know, I didn’t care, and he
knew
that. He asked me if I wanted to be in one of the television episodes. And what do you think I said? ‘Oh,
no,
Mr. Hitchcock! I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.’ Well, I must have been really stupid. He really
wanted
to put me in a part.

“People came from all over the world to look at the
Rear Window
set. They dug the bottom of the floor out and dropped it so that they could have the Greenwich Village set down below and the apartment up higher. You didn’t have to go anywhere.”