It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (3 page)

Before dinner, Hitchcock had enjoyed his then-favorite drink, a Mimosa. Both Hitchcock and Langlois ate rapidly. Since both of them seemed to enjoy food and be so interested in it, I would have expected them to savor the experience more and make it last.

A waiter brought out a splendid multi-layered cake, frosted in butter cream, with pink and yellow flowers and the message
Bienvenue
spelled out on top. The chef came out, too, wearing his toque blanche and an impeccably white apron. He was glowing as he told Hitchcock that the cake was being presented with the compliments of the Plaza Athénée, and then, in a sort of aside to Hitchcock in French, he whispered that he was a great fan of his films and that it had been such an honor to work on this cake for him. As if embarrassed by his own audacity in daring to speak for himself to the great director, the chef rushed off. As he left, Hitchcock, who spoke French rather well, called out after him, thanking him for the beautiful
torte.

The captain then ceremoniously carried the cake away. After a few minutes, the waiter returned with four slices of chocolate cake and a slice was served to each of us.

Hitchcock turned to Langlois and said, “My films, you know, aren’t slices of life, but slices of cake.”

He said he was reminded of the first film he was supposed to have directed in Hollywood,
Titanic.
It was to have been his first American project for David O. Selznick.

“My favorite scene was in the ship’s great kitchen where the pastry chef is decorating an extraordinary cake. It has many layers, and with a flourish of his pastry bag, he is putting the final petals on a butter cream rose of which the cake has many. Then, the pastry chef writes out
Happy Birthday.

“The chef is smiling slightly with pride as he works. He is
so
pleased with his creation. He is tasting it in his mind.

“But we all know everything he’s doing is for nothing. Nobody will ever eat the cake. The cake is going to a watery grave and maybe the people who were supposed to be eating it, too. Maybe also the chef we have come to know.

“The audience is thinking, ‘It’s no use.’ They want to scream out, ‘Stop! Run to the lifeboats!’”

The maître d’ asked Hitchcock if he would like to have the rest of the cake kept for him for the next day. Hitchcock declined, telling us that the waiters and the people in the kitchen, the chef included, would be disappointed if they didn’t have the chance to taste the cake.

“I want to ask you,” Langlois said, “what was it like going from working in London to suddenly working in Hollywood?”

“It wasn’t as different as I had expected it to be,” Hitchcock explained. “The technical possibilities, because of the bigger budgets and better equipment, were dazzling. On the other hand, everything in America seemed a bit less spontaneous and, of course, more complex
because
of the bigger budgets and the need for more careful planning.”

“In America, were you conscious of making films for a different audience?”

“No. When we make films in America, we are automatically making them for the world, because America is full of people from everywhere.

“Selznick had wanted to buy an old American merchant ship that was being scrapped to play the title role
.
He was going to sink it in Santa Monica harbor, but we burned down Manderley instead.”

“I am glad,” Langlois said, “because
Rebecca
is one of my favorite films. It was brilliant never to show
Rebecca
except as a painting. She was so beautiful there was no
actrice
who could have played the part. There could not have been a Rebecca.”

“But there
was
an actress to play Rebecca,” Hitchcock said. “A perfect Rebecca. And she even wanted to be in the film, only she wanted to play the wrong part, that of the cringing, meek girl with rounded shoulders who was totally lacking in self-confidence.

“The actress was Vivien Leigh, who was born to be Rebecca, as she was to be Scarlett O’Hara. Scarlett shared many characteristics with Rebecca. Vivien Leigh had the requisite beauty. She and Rebecca were both uniquely strong women who knew what they wanted and how to get it, if not how to enjoy it. They were not girls; they were women.

“Vivien Leigh was absolutely right to play Rebecca, but Rebecca never appears in the film, so neither does Vivien. And for people who knew about the real-life affair between Olivier and Leigh, that would have intruded on any illusion.

“Joan Fontaine was rather outside the little clique of British actors on the set, and that worked well for her character, who was supposed to be alone and apart.”

As we were served coffee, Hitchcock suggested
“a divertissement.”

“Let’s play a little game of Murder,” he said. “We’ll choose a victim, and then try to find the murderer.”

He looked around and chose as victim the fattest man in the room, saying he could best identify with him. “Now we need a villain.” Looking around again, he selected a good-looking man with blond hair and blue eyes. In a room full of well-dressed people, this man stood out as
exceedingly
well dressed. “A villain cannot look villainous or no one would let him into their house,” Hitchcock told us.

A man and a woman sitting at a table near us who were deep in conversation caught Hitchcock’s attention. Her earrings were next to her plate. Observing the couple, Alfred Hitchcock pointed out that they knew each other well. “You can tell she is comfortable with him or she wouldn’t have taken off her earrings, which were bothering her.

“See that man? He’s wearing very expensive shoes. You can tell a great deal about a man by his shoes,” Hitchcock said. Langlois pulled his feet farther back under the table.

Hitchcock then asked Langlois to choose a victim for our little game of Murder. He selected a very thin man at a nearby table who was enjoying a chocolate mousse, saying, “Look at the chocolate mousse he’s eating and see how thin he is. That is enough reason for me to hate him.”

Hitchcock accepted that as logical. “I understand. I am an expert on losing weight. I have lost hundreds of pounds in my lifetime, and I represent the survival of the fattest.”

His weight was unearned, Hitchcock claimed, since he ate so little. “Journalists often ask how much I weigh. I tell them, ‘Only once a day, before breakfast.’ The number of pounds, though, must remain a mystery.”

“Can you believe,” Langlois said, “that when I was young I was so thin, women were always trying to
force
me to eat, my mother, my nurse. I ate chocolates and cake and an entire jar of marmalade in the afternoon. I thought it would
always
be that way. At that time, I never walked up stairs. I ran up.”

“Me, too,” Hitchcock said. “I was always heavy, but I was agile. I think the reason that I’ve never received an Oscar is that I don’t look like an artist. I don’t look like I’ve starved in a garret.

“But the real reason is that the suspense genre is not so highly esteemed. It’s treated like a switchback railway in an amusement park, just for thrills. Villains and heroes, hisses and kisses.”

“You should receive many Oscars,” Langlois said. “There is time.”

There wasn’t, however, much time remaining, and Hitchcock never did receive an Oscar as a director. He had been nominated as best director five times; for
Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window,
and
Psycho.
It was Langlois who was awarded a special Oscar, for his contribution to film preservation.

Langlois asked Hitchcock if he liked mysteries and melodrama best.

“Yes, I do. But I like to feel that I don’t do mysteries. I do mystifyings. That’s my brand of melodrama.”

“What is most difficult about melodrama?” Langlois asked.

“Casting. In melodrama, you lay out the plot, and only after you have the story, do you put in the characters. For that reason, I believe in typecasting.

“If you do it right, casting, you don’t need to do much direction of actors. The really good ones find their way, and you only need recognize if they are going astray.

“Stars do have an advantage when you are casting. When something is happening to a star, a Cary Grant or a James Stewart, the public feels it more.”

“Or Ingrid Bergman or Grace Kelly,” Alma added.

“Yes,” Hitchcock agreed. “There has been a lot of talk about the Hitchcock blondes and my heroines, you know. There was one very important factor in my selection of leading ladies, which isn’t mentioned. The heroine must please women. Women not only represent half of the audience for my films, but very often the man wants to please and impress a woman, and he asks her, ‘What film would you like to see?’ So
she
chooses.”

“Madeleine Carroll was
my
choice for
The 39 Steps,
” Alma said. “I saw her first, and told Hitch about her.”

As we spoke, Alma was quiet and reserved, a tiny person, pleasant, not eating very much. Hitchcock often looked at her for her reaction to what he had said.

“Do you know the proof of her love for me?” Hitchcock asked, indicating Alma. “She diets with me. She doesn’t have to, but to make it easier for me, she eats only what I eat. Then she loses the weight and I don’t. I couldn’t afford to stay too long on a diet, or the Madame might disappear entirely.”

“You are a fortunate man,” Langlois said.

“We were so lucky,” Alma said. “Our two imaginations met.”

“She’d been working in films when I met her,” Hitchcock continued, “and she knew more about it than I did. She taught me. I don’t know why she married me.”

Alma laughed. “Because I liked older men.”

“I was born on August 13, 1899,” Hitchcock said, “and she was born on August 14, 1899, so I am one day older.”

“That is
formidable,
” Langlois said.

Hitchcock agreed. “Yes, it is unusual.”

“No, what I mean is, it is the very same thing that is true of Mary and me.” Mary Merson was his close associate at the Cinémathèque Française.

“Our birthdays, Mary and me, are only a day apart. I was born on November 12, and she was born on November 13. We are Scorpios. And you are Leos.”

“You’re like Marlene Dietrich,” Hitchcock said. “She wouldn’t do anything on
Stage Fright
until she consulted her astrologer. He should have received a credit.”

Langlois asked Hitchcock if he would like to have any of his past films screened for him at the Cinémathèque while he was in Paris.

“Thank you, we don’t have time. If we had time, I would rather see someone else’s film, Fellini or Antonioni, one of those Italian fellows.

“I have a visual mind, and my past films are all storyboarded in my mind, if I choose to recall them. I do not, however, choose to resee my films in a theater, nor to rerun them in my mind.”

“I have heard,” Langlois said, “that after you see the script, you can visualize the entire film.”

“Yes. Definitely.”

“Could you do this when you began to make silent films in the early 1920s?”

“Yes. I believe it’s intuitive to visualize, but as we grow up, we lose that intuition. My mind works more like a baby’s mind does, thinking in pictures. I have vague memories of my infancy, all visual, none verbal. I can’t be certain, but I believe they are true memories.”

“I learned to do that from him,” Alma added. “Now I can’t read a book without dramatizing every scene, every camera angle, every word of dialogue. It takes me forever to read a book.”

Hitchcock said, “My life and the Madame’s are films. If that were not true, what would we have talked about all these years?”

I asked Hitchcock if it was true that he didn’t look into the camera when he was directing.

“I don’t have to,” he answered, “and I’ll tell you why.

“About 1923, before we worked together, young Miss Alma Reville asked me if I would mind shooting some inserts for a picture she was editing. Since it was lunchtime, I walked on the stage and just as I was looking through the viewfinder of a camera, a voice behind me said, ‘That’s my job. You stick to what’s in front of it.’ It was Jack Cox, who later became my cameraman on
Blackmail
and a lot of other pictures. From that moment on, I learned everything I could about cameras and lenses, what they did in terms of angle and perspective. I trained myself to see like a camera, so I never needed to look through a lens again. Now all I need to know is the focal length of the lens, and I know exactly what the cameraman is seeing.”

Langlois asked about Hitchcock’s often repeated quote that “actors are cattle.”

“I have been accused of saying that,” Hitchcock answered, “but I believe what I said is, ‘Actors should be
treated
like cattle.’ Of course, I was joking, but it seems I was taken seriously. If I had been speaking seriously, I would have said, ‘Actors are children.’

“I have always been available to my actors for reasonable help. ‘Reasonable’ is an actor who, when he walks through the door, does not ask me ‘why?’ but ‘how?’”