It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (32 page)

“For two or three years after that, everybody came into Ernie’s, and they wanted to sit where Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart sat. No matter where they were put, they thought they were sitting at the same table.”

After
Vertigo
was edited, Hitchcock was dissatisfied with an important shot in Ernie’s. “Kim Novak passes Jimmy Stewart for the first time,” associate producer Herbert Coleman told me. “She sort of glances at him as if she knows why he’s there. That would’ve given the whole plot away. Hitch was going away on vacation, so he told me to reshoot it. This meant rebuilding the Ernie’s set and bringing back Kim Novak and some background people in to reshoot the scene.

“Not all of the set was there, so I had to shoot in on a longer lens to hide what was missing in the background. When Hitch returned, he said, ‘You shot it on the wrong lens.’ He knew right away.” The second shot of Novak at Ernie’s was used in the film, but the first shot, with Novak smiling at the camera, can be seen in the original trailer.

A scene to which Hitchcock gave great consideration and one of the few about which he was ever indecisive was Judy’s voice-over admission, that she is Madeleine and an accomplice to the murder of Elster’s wife. Persuaded by Joan Harrison that the scene should be deleted in order to maintain the mystery until the end, Hitchcock ordered the film be released without it. An important theater chain owner, Barney Balaban, had seen the original version, and he liked it so well that he insisted the missing footage be restored. So did Alma, and the scene returned.

Henry Bumstead told me that Hitchcock specified Scottie’s apartment should be in view of Coit Tower, a San Francisco landmark, both for interiors and exteriors. Bumstead designed it without asking any questions. Years later, when he was working on
Family Plot,
he asked Hitchcock why.

“Coit Tower is a phallic symbol,” Hitchcock explained.

Hitchcock obtained composer Norman O’Neill’s manuscript score from the original London stage production of
Mary Rose
and gave it to Bernard Herrmann as a guide to the emotional mood he wished to create through music in
Vertigo.
Both stories shared the theme of a beautiful woman apparently returning from the dead.
Vertigo
resembles the Orpheus legend, with the hero unable to resist looking back at his beloved Eurydice, even at the price of her second life.

When
Vertigo
opened, it received some unfavorable reviews and audience attendance was disappointing. The picture was not rereleased until 1984. By that time, the film had begun to deteriorate noticeably. Universal Pictures began a meticulous restoration project directed by James C. Katz and Robert A. Harris. They produced a new “mint” version of the film which cost more than $1 million to restore. Their contribution is so great that they head closing credits, wedding them to
Vertigo
forever.

Since its original release in 1958,
Vertigo
has, in a sense, itself returned from the dead, to become one of Hitchcock’s most beloved films.

As work on
Vertigo
was being completed and promotion about to begin, and Hitchcock was thinking about
North by Northwest,
Alma was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her chance of survival was viewed pessimistically by her doctors, and Hitchcock’s world was in turmoil. The operation, however, was completely successful.

H
AVING COMPLETED HIS
five-picture deal with Paramount, Hitchcock accepted an offer from M-G-M to develop a property they owned,
The Wreck of the Mary Deare.
Hitchcock, however, had other ideas.

Without informing M-G-M, Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman began working on what would become
North by Northwest.
When M-G-M found out, they were delighted. They believed they would be getting two Hitchcock pictures instead of one.

For years he had wanted to use Mount Rushmore as a setting, and
North by Northwest
was the picture that could accommodate it. Since he envisioned the climax as a chase across the carved faces of the presidents, the screenplay was at first called “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose.”

This ending was considered pornographic to Hitchcock.

Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance at the end of the credits when he rushes to catch a bus and misses it. The beginning of the credits, designed by Saul Bass, is over a crisscrossing grid of lines that become the glass skyscrapers of Manhattan. This was inspired by the opening credits of F. W. Murnau’s
Sunrise,
which begins with crisscrossing lines that become a European train station.

Mount Rushmore is located in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The sixty-foot-high faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt were carved from granite one and a half billion years old, older than the Alps or the Himalayas. The carving took fourteen years with about four hundred workers led by the artist Gutzon Borglum, who designed, promoted, supervised, and sculpted this extraordinary work. His vision was made possible because the idea had been born in the 1920s boom, when anything seemed possible, and completed during the 1930s Depression when nothing seemed possible, but the U.S. government was anxious to provide money for public works projects that created jobs.

Himself a person of innate talent as both an artist and an engineer, Hitchcock admired the massive sculpting achievement of Mount Rushmore’s faces and the prodigal engineering feat it involved. He said that he particularly respected the concern for the safety of the four hundred workers, with only two accidents resulting in minor injuries during the entire fourteen years the work required.

Hitchcock’s original plan was for Cary Grant to be chased up into Lincoln’s nostril. Then Grant would sneeze. Theoretically, this would have been possible, since the nose is twenty feet long. “The humor was too full-blown for the studio executives,” Hitchcock quipped.

The great success of
North by Northwest
caused renewed interest in Mount Rushmore, and brought millions of new visitors to the area. Many wanted to climb the presidents’ faces, as had Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. They didn’t realize that the actors had never climbed the carved faces in South Dakota, but rather a meticulously reconstructed scale-model Hollywood set. The Department of the Interior would not permit a chase on the real Mount Rushmore, not just because it could be interpreted as disrespectful, but because the faces had to be safeguarded from any possibility of damage.

Hitchcock was not disappointed; he always preferred the studio. Eva Marie Saint preferred the safety of the studio as well, and Cary Grant told me that he did, too, though adding, “I was grateful that it hadn’t become necessary for me to take a stand for cowardice.”

Saint recalled injuring her arm on M-G-M’s Mount Rushmore.

“It was made of some kind of rubberized material that made it look like rock. It was very, very high, but I had no problem with heights. I went up to the top, and then I got a little nervous. I saw them putting these mattresses all around in a circle where we were climbing. I looked down. ‘My God! One of us could fall.’ So, boy, did I hold on to Cary Grant’s hand! I still have a tiny, tiny little mark I got on my left arm.

“I’m always fascinated by what they’re able to do in the studio. When I’m running away from that house on Mount Rushmore, and I think they’re going to take me in the plane, I look back at the house, and it wasn’t the house at all. It was just a scrim with a light.”

“The first script I got was called ‘The Man in Lincoln’s Nose,’” Martin Landau told me. “Usually, the script comes to you with a letter that says, ‘Check out this role.’ This one just said, ‘Read this. Alfred Hitchcock wants to have a meeting with you.’ So, I read it, and I knew it wasn’t the Cary Grant part nor the James Mason part. It could have been one of the henchmen, but I had no idea what role I was going for when I went to see him.

“I went over to M-G-M. We had a chat, and he walked me around and showed me the storyboards of the movie. I literally saw the movie before I
did
it.

“Leonard was written as a henchman, but I chose to play him as a gay character, because Leonard felt the need to get rid of Eve Kendall. I felt it would be very interesting if he were jealous of her beyond just being a henchman. But this was 1958, so I played it very subtly.

“Hitchcock had seen me in a play,
Middle of the Night,
in which I played a very macho, egocentric jerk, and he cast me as Leonard. It’s something that impressed me, and one day I drummed up the courage to say, ‘How in the world did you see me in that play and think of me for this role?’

“He said, ‘Martin, you have a circus going on inside of you. Obviously, if you can do that part in the theater, you can do this little trinket.’

“I remember going up to him after he whispered something to Cary Grant, and to Eva Marie, and to James, and he passed me by. I’d been working on the film for several weeks, and I walked up to him and said, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me, Mr. Hitchcock?’ In the theater, directors told you a lot. He had never said a word to me about my performance, and I felt a little left out. He said, ‘I’ll only tell you if I don’t like what you’re doing.’

“I felt he loved what I was doing. The only one who didn’t love it was James Mason, who thought I was casting a kind of aspersion on his character.

“I never discussed it with anybody, but I chose to think that James’s character was bisexual, and that my character was gay, but I think James didn’t like what I did. There was a line that was added for me by Ernie Lehman. I say, ‘Call it my woman’s intuition.’

“At first, Hitchcock asked me to wear my own clothes for the picture. I said, ‘The clothes
I
wear are not the clothes
Leonard
would wear.’ To Hitchcock directly I said this. We got along very well.

“Then, Hitchcock wanted me to be better dressed than Cary’s character, well tailored and neat. So, who does he take me to? A tailor on Wilshire Boulevard where he had the suits I wore in the film made to Cary’s specifications, unbeknownst to Cary.

“We picked out fabric together. There was a blue suit. There was a gray suit.

“We’re in Chicago, shooting the film, and I’m not working that day. I’m at the hotel. Hitch calls me from the La Salle Street Station, and he tells me he wants me to wear one of the suits to see how it looks in the environment. So, I put on the suit that I wear in the scene and go to the La Salle Street Station.

“There’s a huge area of the station cordoned off. I wait my turn behind the barricade.

“I get tapped on the shoulder by Cary Grant’s man, an English guy with a cockney accent. He says [cockney accent], ‘Excuse me, but Mr. Grant would like to know where you got that suit.’

“I had not met Cary Grant up to now. He’d spotted this suit in the crowd. He said, ‘There’s only two tailors in the world that make a suit like that. One’s in Beverly Hills and one’s in Hong Kong.’

“Now, I’m aware of what’s going on. He thinks I’m an extra from Chicago, and he spotted the suit. Obviously, no one in Chicago is as well dressed as Leonard.