It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (31 page)

“Alfred Hitchcock was always a gentleman, and I would like to have done another picture with him, and to have known him better, but our paths didn’t cross again.”

Hitchcock did not do his usual cameo appearance for
The Wrong Man.
It was a true story with an element of tragedy, so the humorous reaction his appearance would have elicited was deemed inappropriate. Instead, he spoke seriously in an introduction to the film.

“R
OMANTIC OBSESSION
has always obsessed me,” Hitchcock said. “Obsessions of all kinds are interesting, but for me, romantic obsession is the most fascinating.”

For Hitchcock, the ideal setting for a story of romantic obsession was San Francisco. “The first time my father saw San Francisco,” Pat Hitchcock told me, “he fell in love with it, and throughout his life, he only fell more deeply in love with it. He thought it was very like Paris. He always wanted to make a picture in San Francisco.” Until
Vertigo,
however, the closest he had come was Santa Rosa for
Shadow of a Doubt
and the Monterey coast for
Rebecca.

Whenever the Hitchcocks were in the vicinity of San Francisco, which was as often as they could manage, Alma indulged in the luxury of having her hair done, with a manicure, at the chic red-doored Elizabeth Arden salon. Afterward, she enjoyed having her husband meet her so she could see the look on his face as she walked out with her fresh coiffure.

While he waited, Hitchcock would look at Gump’s, buy some cigars at Dunhill, and visit the nearby Williams-Sonoma store, which offered the ultimate in French cooking tools, pots and pans, and kitchen appliances. Hitchcock enjoyed searching for ways to enhance food preparation in their kitchen, and usually bought more than he had intended.

Since he enjoyed the immediate gratification of taking his purchases away with him rather than having them sent, he and Alma carried all of the pots and pans, copper and otherwise, they could manage.

Vertigo
was based on the French novel,
d’Entre les Mortes
(“Between the Deaths”) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Their earlier novel,
Diabolique,
had been successfully done by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1952, and was one of Hitchcock’s favorite films. Both stories concern a man and his mistress conspiring to kill his wealthy wife in a way that doesn’t appear to be murder.

The first title considered for
Vertigo
was “From Among the Dead,” and the setting was changed from Paris and Marseilles to San Francisco.

When I spoke with Clouzot about Hitchcock, the French director said: “He is very attentive to logic, but it is the logic of his characters, which is not everyone’s logic. I admire him very much and am flattered when anyone compares a film of mine to his.”

Maxwell Anderson, who had written
The Wrong Man
screenplay, wrote a treatment of the Boileau and Narcejac novel that he called “Listen, Darkling.” Hitch and Alma found it unsatisfactory and brought in Alec Coppel, who had written
The Captain’s Paradise.
Coppel’s treatment included the opening chase across San Francisco rooftops and the livery stable in the background of the final revolving seduction scene. Finally, Samuel A. Taylor, who had grown up in San Francisco, wrote the definitive screenplay. He had written the successful Broadway play
Sabrina Fair,
and collaborated with Billy Wilder and Ernest Lehman on the movie version,
Sabrina.

The character of Scottie’s old college girlfriend Midge was Taylor’s idea. “She saved Stewart the embarrassment of having to talk to himself, and added some depth and detail to the character of Scottie,” he said.

Billy Wilder, who had made
Sabrina
with Taylor, particularly liked the film
Vertigo.
While in his nineties and suffering from vertigo, he told me, “Vertigo without Kim Novak is no fun.”

In the novel, the hero’s acrophobia is less important, and he continues to believe that Madeleine has been reincarnated even after he understands her part in the conspiracy and is responsible for her real death.

“What fascinated me about
Vertigo,
” Hitchcock said, “was the idea that the man is obsessed with turning the girl into what she
is
and is trying
not
to be.”

Visitors to Mission San Juan Bautista are disappointed not to find the
Vertigo
bell tower. It had been removed in 1949 because of dry rot. The bell tower seen in the film is actually a process shot superimposed on the real building.

An additional ending, never used, was filmed in case the studio insisted on Elster being brought to justice.

In her apartment, Midge is listening to a radio news report about Elster’s imminent capture in France. When Scottie enters, she turns off the radio. Without speaking, he walks to the window while she pours him a drink. As Scottie contemplates Russian Hill at night, she brings him the drink, then moves away, understanding his mood.

Vera Miles was to have played Madeleine and Judy, but there was a delay in filming because of Hitchcock’s gall bladder operation. When he was ready, Miles, who was having a baby, was not. Kim Novak was Hitchcock’s second choice.

I talked with her after the premiere of the restored version of
Vertigo
at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater in 1996.

Kim Novak was under contract to Columbia, and Harry Cohn was the head of Columbia. She remembered being called into his office.

“He threw a script at me. ‘Alfred Hitchcock wants you on loan-out,’ he said, ‘and I’ve agreed. I thought it would be good for your career.’ Then he added, ‘It’s a terrible, terrible script.’

“I took it home and read it that night. Well, I totally disagreed with Harry Cohn. The next morning, I went to see him, and I was happy he didn’t give me a chance to speak. He just said, ‘It was lousy, wasn’t it?’” Novak was loaned to Paramount by Columbia in exchange for James Stewart appearing with her in
Bell Book and Candle.

“I never agreed much with Harry Cohn about anything, though I didn’t say much in the early days. He was really right about one thing when he said working with Alfred Hitchcock would be good for my career. It was great, working with Hitch and with Jimmy, and I knew it was a wonderful part and wonderful picture, but it didn’t have the immediate success I expected. Now, it’s not just a part of my life, but it seems to have become a part of so many people’s lives.”

Novak observed a difference in the attitude over the years of the fans who saw the film when it first opened and those who had seen it several times over the years. “People who had seen it when it first opened, and there were not so many of them, asked me simpler questions, about something in it they didn’t understand. Now, they don’t ask me, they
tell
me about it. They’ve seen it more times than I have.

“Once I made the mistake of asking Hitch about my character’s motivation, and he looked at me solemnly and said, ‘Let’s not probe too deeply into these matters, Kim. It’s only a movie.’

“I loved it. He allowed me to lose myself in the character, in
both
of the characters. He gave me the freedom to be creative. The only thing I couldn’t do was move away from that tree!

“Jimmy [Stewart] was the best. I thought of him as Scottie, because we were both so much in our characters. I liked playing two characters and finding both of them within me. I liked knowing their secrets, but I identified more with Judy.

“And who wouldn’t be great in that coat?” Though sometimes actors and actresses can keep the clothing they wear in films, she hadn’t asked for the white coat she wore in
Vertigo.
“Now it’s the most famous coat in the history of movies,” she sighed.

When I visited Edith Head at her home, I told her how much I liked the coat. She said that I was one of many, and that she received more fan mail for that coat than for any other design of hers in her entire career. Then, she gave me the original drawing of it.

Hitchcock specified that Madeleine should wear a gray suit. Novak told Head gray was not her color, not flattering to blondes. Novak wore that gray suit, however, which helps to define the character. Scottie tried to transform Judy into Madeleine by changing her brighter, tighter, inexpensive clothes to Madeleine’s classical, less obvious style.

“His pleasure,” Hitchcock said, “was dressing rather than undressing his love. Dressing Judy was really
un
dressing her. But Scottie can’t ever
really
possess the woman in his mind because she’s
only
in his mind.

“When Jimmy Stewart’s character undressed Madeleine, it’s not necessary to show it happening. The imagination of the audience goes into play when they see her garments hanging up to dry.

“I would, however, have preferred to make the image of his undressing even clearer, not by showing it, but by showing more specific undergarments drying—a brassiere here, a pair of panties there—but it wasn’t permitted.”

Judy’s loose hair contrasted with Madeleine’s upswept whirlpool coiffure, which incorporated titles designer Saul Bass’s swirling
Vertigo
effect. These hairstyles, which played a major part in the film, were the creation of Hitchcock with Nellie Manley, who had done Vilma Banky’s hair in the 1920s and was still working with Paramount.

Audrey Hepburn told me that a part she would like to have played was that of Madeleine and Judy. “It was very Pygmalion,” she said, “like Liza Doolittle in
My Fair Lady,
a cockney ragamuffin who’s taught to be a ‘Lai-die.’”

“Women don’t even
want
to be called ‘ladies’ anymore,” Hitchcock observed. “Have you noticed? Nowadays a lady is a woman who waits until she’s alone with you in the back seat of a taxi before she unbuttons your fly.”

Bernard Herrmann considered music an essential part of the film. “But the music can’t stand apart from the movie,” he told me. “Its function is to set the mood and give continuity to the separate strips of film.”

Hitchcock liked Elster’s office so much, he asked Henry Bumstead to design and build a room just like it in his Bellagio Road home.

“He wanted to do this
Vertigo
den for all of his electronic equipment,” Bumstead told me, “and I did it like the shipbuilder’s office. I did it in pico pine, and we put a carpet in there that came from Marrakech from when we were there for
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
I hoped he was pleased with it, but he never said so.

“One morning I was going to work, and a horn honked. It was Alma outside the production office. She was sitting there in their little Ford Mustang, and she thanked me for how wonderful the room turned out. She said, ‘Did Hitch ever say anything to you?’

“I said, ‘He’s never said a word.’ Well, I won’t tell you what she said.

“I said goodbye to her and got up to my office. The secretary said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock wants to see you, immediately.’

“I went down to the office, and he laughed about it, and made a joke of it, more or less, and he said it turned out beautifully. And it did.

“Whenever I went to his place in Santa Cruz, he carried my bag up to the room. Can you imagine? But then, the minute I left and drove away, I was an employee again.”

The interior of Ernie’s, the San Francisco restaurant that is featured in
Vertigo,
was rebuilt at Paramount. “Ernie’s was entirely a set,” Bumstead said. “I was able to find the same wallpaper, and we had their dishes sent down from San Francisco. Even the Gotti brothers that owned Ernie’s, they were in the picture.