It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (41 page)

“We’re all standing around these tombstones, and Hitch is pouting. I’m pointing up to where the sun should be, but there’s no sun. I had to go get a painter to paint the names on the tombstones so you could read the names without the sun.”

“M
Y YOUNGEST DAUGHTER
, Pamela, when she was about twelve,” Hilton Green told me, “wanted to come in and watch Mr. H. shoot. I said, ‘No, he doesn’t want kids.’ But she insisted. And I said, ‘Well, if you promise to stay in the back all the time, and not make a whimper.’ So, I brought her in and stood her over in the corner in the dark watching. This was especially serious, because it was for a feature.

“I went over and talked with him. And he says, ‘Who’s the young lady that you won’t let come in?’ He knew everything.

“I told him she’s my daughter, and he says, ‘Why is she over there?’

“‘Because I don’t want her to disturb you.’

“‘But that’s your daughter. Bring her over here.’ And he called the prop man and brought a chair, and Mr. H. had it put right beside him. I introduced them, and he says, ‘Hilton, you can go.’ And he sat there the rest of the day with her. He directed the movie and talked, and explained things to her. I just couldn’t get over it.”

T
HE FILM OPENED
to mixed reviews on the negative side. Some were generous reviews by critics who respected and even revered Hitchcock. Most were routinely poor reviews. A few were excessively cruel.
Family Plot
was not a financial success.

Rumors circulated that Hitchcock was drinking too much at this time. Howard Kazanjian, who was working closely with him, wanted to refute these rumors.

“I never saw him drink, even wine. Only towards the very end, maybe six months before he passed on. In his top drawer, he would have a little bit of vodka, and he’d start that maybe at four in the afternoon, just about the time he went home. And that’s what irritates me so much, when people say that he drank heavily. If Hitchcock had a drink, he had it late in the afternoon.”

In spite of his physical problems, Hitchcock maintained his professional reserve, which extended to his dress code.

“Mr. H.’s dress code contrasted sharply with what we know now in Hollywood,” Hilton Green recalled. “Many people took him by mistake as very stuck-up and felt he wouldn’t talk, and that wasn’t true.

“He was an introvert, very shy around new people. People would feel he was aloof, but he wasn’t that. He was very reserved. He stuck with the same crews. If you did your job, he wanted you back.”

“One cannot become too familiar with the people with whom one has to work,” Hitchcock had told me. “One can’t take the risk of exposing oneself as just an ordinary man.”

“He was a gentleman,” production manager Doc Erickson told me, “but he couldn’t afford to be palsy-walsy with everyone, or he wouldn’t have had time to make his pictures.”

“What Hitchcock enjoyed most was planning his own films,” Green continued. “When he wasn’t doing that, he enjoyed seeing films in his own projection room. I would sit with him by the hour, running films. How he loved to run films! He saw everything that would come out.”

One of the films Hitchcock enjoyed watching was
Animal House,
the work of a young director on the Universal lot, John Landis.

“Hitch loomed large in my psyche,” Landis told me. It was almost like meeting a mythological figure. He was already elderly and walked with some difficulty. He wasn’t very tall, but he was very large. He was heavy and had huge hands.

“I’d heard that he was a practical joker. My own experience with him was that he was absolutely charming, although he could be vulgar in a way that was unexpected. He had a saucy postcard sense of humor. He liked the risqué.

“The way I met him was, I was preparing a movie I ended up not making called
The Incredible Shrinking Woman.
I had an idea to do a teaser promo to go out in theaters, literally almost a year before the picture would. The idea was that you’d start with the famous silhouette and dissolve to Hitch sitting in a book-lined study, behind the desk, his hands folded on the table. He says, ‘Good evening. I’m Alfred Hitchcock, and it is my great pleasure to announce to you that production has begun on perhaps the most important picture of all time,
The Incredible Shrinking Woman,
starring Miss Lily Tomlin.’ Then, he would open his hand, and a three-inch Lily would wave.

“People at MCA liked the idea, but how do I get to Hitch? I can’t just walk up to him. So I called Lew Wasserman and said, ‘Lew, I’d really like to meet Hitch.’ And Lew said, ‘Sure. We eat lunch all the time. We’d love to have lunch with you.’

“I can’t
tell
you how excited I was. I’m meeting Alfred Hitchcock!

“So I go to his bungalow, and he had this small dining room. It was probably built as an office, and it had a table which could sit maybe four or five people, a round table, and not much else.

“Framed on one wall in his office was a marvelous cartoon of two goats in a junkyard chewing on reels of film. One goat is saying to the other, ‘I liked the book better.’

“He would have lunch there, every day, the same thing from the commissary, a small New York steak, French fries or mashed potatoes, and sliced tomatoes.

“He was very Buddha-like, and I was
awed
to be there. We were sitting, and he’s looking at me with these sort of benign, calm, stern eyes.

“We were talking, and he said, ‘I understand you want me to be in a promo. Tell me the idea.’

“I pitched the idea, and the first thing Hitchcock says is, ‘Who is Lily Tomlin?’

“Well, Lily Tomlin’s an actress and comedian, and quite a celebrity,’ I said. That was at the height of her fame.

“Hitch said, ‘Well, can we change her name?’

“‘Well, Mr. Hitchcock, she’s kind of—’

“That’s when he said, ‘Call me Hitch.’

“‘Well, Hitch, she’s very well known and established as Lily Tomlin.’

“‘I’ve never heard of her.’

“I’m dying! I don’t know what to do. I’m a deer in the headlights.

“He was teasing me. He was totally teasing me. But it must have been three minutes of torture. Then he laughed. We all laughed. He’d really fooled me. Of course he knew Lily Tomlin.

“Anyway, we didn’t do the promo, but I ended up having lunch with him, maybe ten times in a year before he stopped coming to work.”

Until he stopped going to his office at Universal, Hitchcock enjoyed inviting people to have lunch with him. When Elliott Gould called him to make a date, Hitchcock sang to him over the phone, “It won’t be a stylish luncheon, we can’t afford a muncheon” to the tune of “A Bicycle Built for Two.” Gould remembered they had “Plebeian Steak.”

When they met, he told Gould, “I’m perfect, from the waist up.”

“At lunch,” Gould said, “he commented that some people thought he was anti-actor, but it wasn’t true; however, if one person thought he had to make himself more outstanding than the rest, it was distracting.

“‘Take Beethoven’s Ninth,’ Mr. Hitchcock said. ‘You realize one person wrote every note for each instrumentalist, but that they have to play all together in concert. That’s how it is for me on the set to make a picture.’

“Hitchcock said that what counts is not how the actor feels, but how the audience feels. What he wanted from his actors, he said, was ‘motion, not motivation.’”

David Brown detected in Hitchcock’s extreme reserve a kind of suspicion of Hollywood. “Although well rewarded by Hollywood, he was an outsider in the Hollywood sense. I don’t remember him milling around at Chasen’s. He remained seated at his table, enjoying his dinner, and though he was in the front room through which everyone entered, he didn’t make eye contact with the people passing through.

“I didn’t see him at the usual functions. Of course, he was part of Hollywood, but he never felt, in my opinion,
really
part of Hollywood.”

Tony Curtis, who knew Hitchcock socially with his then-wife, Janet Leigh, remembered when Hitchcock was told by his doctor to give up smoking.

“Mr. Hitchcock loved to smoke those handsome Monte Cristos. They looked like torpedoes. Beautiful. He knew I liked cigars then, and he gave me six boxes of them.

“I wanted to thank him. I like to draw, and I always liked to draw hands. I’m right-handed, so I’ve always drawn left hands, because I use my left hand as a model.

“I wanted to do something special, so I drew my left hand in the mirror, so it could pose as a right hand, and I had it making the A-OK sign with the thumb and forefinger. Then, since I had done the movie
Houdini,
I drew the right hand with a card popping out of it that said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock—Tony Curtis.’ I never called him Hitch.

“It was quite simple and, if I may be so bold, quite beautiful. I sent that to him, and he loved it. You know, I won’t say it was abstract, but it was just abstract enough for him to enjoy it.

“He once told me a story, which I’m going to share with you.

“He says, ‘There’s a guy flying in an airplane with a pilot, and they’re flying over a city. At one point, the guy opens the door and jumps out of the plane. He’s got a parachute, and as he jumps out, he pulls the ripcord, and it opens. He floats delicately down into an area. He undoes his jumpsuit he’s wearing, takes off the parachute, and there, underneath, is a tuxedo. He puts on white gloves and walks one block into the back door of a restaurant, goes in, and emerges as the maître d’.’

“I said, ‘Okay, what?’

“He said, ‘I haven’t got the rest of it yet.’

“Anyway, he was a wonderful man. Charming, very erudite. I think that would be the word. Very articulate. His films are all, every one of them, intricately woven and beautifully done. You know that movie with Gregory Peck and the lines on the bed? Oooo! Wonderful. You know, one of my wives worked in one of them,
Psycho,
and it was an excellent film.”

M
ARTIN
L
ANDAU
spoke with me just before his appearance at the commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of CBS in 2003. He recalled the fiftieth anniversary, in 1978, when he and Hitchcock were there.

“At the fiftieth anniversary of CBS, Hitch and I spent an hour and a half talking, and that was the last time I had a lengthy conversation with him. We had a long talk about life. His wife had had a stroke, and we were talking about getting old. I mean,
he
was talking about it. He was very worried about her. She outlived him, but at that time it didn’t look as if that was going to happen.

“The conversation was a lament in a way about the difficulty of doing things that were once simple. Everything had grown harder. The essence of it was—and I never had felt this before with him—I felt a very depressed man facing old age.

“But he was still talking about making films and he was going to his office at Universal.”

“I
’
M TOYING WITH
a new film project now, but I don’t know if the audience wants my fantasies anymore,” Hitchcock told me in the late 1970s. His new project was
The Short Night,
a novel by Ronald Kirkbride that he had bought for the screen in 1968. After
Family Plot,
he was ready to start on it, with spirit and enthusiasm, though not with physical well-being.

“I’m a very lucky man,” Hitchcock said, looking back on his life. “I began very early doing the thing I wanted to do. And I was able to continue doing it. I met the perfect companion for my life. We had the perfect child, our daughter, Pat. I wouldn’t change anything about my life, except that it has to end.

“It all went so fast. I was a chubby little boy. I was going to the movies. Then, I was
making
them. Now, I don’t know if I’ll make any more. I’d like to.

“I’ve made many pictures for a long time. I’m proud of some of them. I’m not ashamed of any of them.

“Movies are my life, but even if I can’t make any more, I would like to be alive—as long as the Madame is. I could never have a well day with her sick.

“Our life together is now as close as yesterday, as far away as tomorrow.”

T
HE
S
HORT
N
IGHT
is a film that never was. Hitchcock had wanted to make the film for ten years, and Universal did everything they could to make it possible. Thom Mount, who was assigned to help Hitchcock, found the director’s working methods unconventional.

“I’m a young executive on the rise at Universal and having this relationship with Mr. Hitchcock for about a year, looking after him and his film and making certain that everything is as easy for him as possible. Then, the company is sending me to London to meet with a lot of our foreign sales and distribution people to bring them up to speed on the slate of pictures coming from the company next year. Mr. Hitchcock, hearing this over our customary lunch, looks at me for a long beat.

“He pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket. He writes down a name and number. He says, ‘When you get to London, you call this gentleman, and it will be an educational experience.’ I say, ‘Great. Thank you.’ I put it in my pocket, and go to London.

“I call this guy from the hotel. He says, ‘Oh, yes. I understand that we’re going to have lunch on Thursday.’ I said, ‘Great.’ He says, ‘Here’s the address.’

“I don’t know anything about London, so I get a car and driver. We get in the car and go, and we go and we go. Finally, I say, ‘Where are we going?’ And he says, ‘Well, you know—this is Wormwood Scrubs, the prison.’

“I go to the prison, and the director of the prison is a friend of Mr. Hitchcock’s. We have lunch in his office. And he describes to me the nature of the criminal mind. Over lunch!

“Mr. Hitchcock’s sense of humor—just fabulous. I get in the car and go back to work.

“There was more to it, however, because Wormwood Scrubs was an important setting for one of Hitchcock’s favorite scenes in
The Short Night.
The film was to open with a prison break, and the prison was Wormwood Scrubs.

“The Short Night
was the last screenplay that Mr. Hitchcock developed at Universal. We did a location scout in Helsinki, and we prepared generally to make the movie, knowing that Mr. Hitchcock’s failing health might preclude his making it. But Mr. Hitchcock was game, and he prepared it, as he always had, knowing, in an unspoken way, that he probably couldn’t make it. Mr. Wasserman’s instructions were very simple.

“Mr. Hitchcock had been an enormous asset to this company and a great friend of Lew’s, and we would treat him with dignity as long as he wanted to keep working. Even if the film has no potential for going forward, the company would support him in his work.

“It was fun, it was inspiring. We hoped. It was sad, too.

“Mr. Hitchcock worked on scripts like a madman. When we developed
The Short Night,
we did an Ernest Lehman draft. At this point, I had sort of graduated to being the executive in charge of everything, with Mr. Hitchcock. Every time I had lunch with him, which was about once a month and more often when we were on a script, I would make a report to Mr. Wasserman.

“Mr. Wasserman was
extremely
interested in Mr. Hitchcock’s well-being. I would listen at these lunches to try and interpret Mr. Hitchcock’s kind of left-handed sense of criticism.

“He would never say, ‘This is awful.’ He would say, ‘Well, perhaps there’s something lacking in that approach.’

“He was this fountain of wisdom about the art and craft, and yet, curiously, unapproachable. I know sometimes he was tough on me as a young idiot trying to be his servant.

“On the other hand, once you got past the protective membrane, which was the sort of cynicism and perverse delight in terrifying you, he became a very wise counselor, and his advice was always brilliant.

“For me, the central and most admirable thing about Mr. Hitchcock was his deeply passionate personal commitment to the work. Whatever his age, whatever his condition. He could barely walk at a certain point; it didn’t matter, his mind was nimble as ever. His sense of humor was as astonishing as ever, and his angle of attack on material, always fresh.

“I’ve always been an avid reader of newspapers. I read several every day. I try to pay attention to the world around me. Mr. Hitchcock did the same thing. I’d walk in, and he’d say, ‘Did you see the story about the teenager who cut her parents up with the buzz saw? She sealed the bodies in the family sedan while she drove to the prom. And all in the quiet San Fernando Valley.’ He loved these aberrations, the unexpected nature of life and crime, and he would see a movie in these incidents.”

Hitchcock had always liked to read. “One of the most enjoyable experiences Alma and I shared was reading separately, together,” he told me. “We read in each other’s presence. We each had a book, and an hour or more could go by without either of us saying a word. But I was totally conscious of her there, and her comforting presence. We did not need to speak.

“Usually, she read fiction, books from which we could make a film. I read mostly fiction books in my early days, and later nonfiction, especially about crime. I have always read the newspaper, particularly crime stories. which are the equal of fiction, or better. Even those which cannot be used in their entirety have wonderful kernels.”

Ernest Lehman was selected as the writer for
The Short Night,
because, Mount explained, “We had him under contract at the time, they knew each other well, and Mr. Hitchcock liked him.

“
The Short Night
had been adapted from a book which had no third act. It had a wonderful opening, and an interesting second act.

“Mr. Hitchcock had one scene in the book that he loved, the sort of raison d’être for pursuing
The Short Night.
That was the sequence he mapped out very clearly even before we got a first draft. The killer is on this small island in Scandinavia.

“Our hero-victim is hiding there from the killer and submerges himself in the water on the reed-lined banks of the island. He plucks a dry reed and is breathing through the reed underwater. As the murderer is looking for this person, knowing he’s somewhere in close proximity, a wind comes up, and all of the reeds blow to the left. One stands straight up. The killer looks at it for a beat, and we see the reed; and we see the killer’s eyes. He does not make the connection and moves on.

“That sequence was the tone Hitchcock wanted for the entire movie. Mr. Lehman turned in a draft, but it wasn’t working yet.”

Ernest Lehman saw a problem.

“Hitch was obsessed with the idea of the leading man raping and killing a woman at the very beginning. What audience would have any sympathy for the hero after that? I argued. But Hitch was adamant until I convinced him that I could not go on with it that way, even though I didn’t want
Family Plot
to be his last picture.”

“In 1978,” Norman Lloyd told me, “Hilton Green, a person I respected and liked, and whom I knew Hitch respected and liked, who had worked with Hitch on TV and features, asked me about assisting Hitch on his new film.

“Hitch was determined to do
The Short Night
as a film, I think because he had no other project. This was in spite of the constant pain he was enduring from arthritis in his knees. His health was totally failing him.

“I was supposed to help especially with location shooting.

“When I arrived, there wasn’t a script that satisfied Hitch. I didn’t truly believe the picture would ever be made, and Hitch himself said to me, ‘This picture isn’t ever going to get made.’ I asked why, and he said, ‘Because it isn’t necessary.’

“The story was a potboiler. Hitch had been dissatisfied with the first script. I knew that pre-production activity was what he always liked, with his retinue of friends and technicians. It was easier to get characters on your storyboard to do what you wanted than it was with live actors, although an actor might lend some brilliance.

“We were working on continuity when he said the moment had arrived to go to the screenplay. I asked who would write that screenplay, and Hitch said, ‘You will.’

“‘Not me.’

“Immediately I knew those were words I wished I could take back.

“Hitch became cool, and he really never forgave me. I tried to speak with him, but I wasn’t able to get an appointment. Finally, I just walked into his office at Universal. He was there alone working on the script. He never liked the solitary life of a writer, and I don’t think he actually liked writing. He liked drawing his stories.

“He never allowed me to take back my knee-jerk words, because I believe he heard the truth in them, that I didn’t believe in his film. He took that as a betrayal.

“He did get someone to work on the screenplay, but the film was never made.

“I wished that I had gone on assisting him whatever way I could, though I don’t think it would have resulted in another Hitchcock film. But I would have been faithful to our thirty-eight-year friendship.

“I wasn’t allowed to change my mind because Hitch had too much pride for that. I knew I had wounded him.

“I believe he never let his guard down. Only with Alma. But it wasn’t understood even by Hitch’s closest friends how extremely sensitive he was or how personally he took everything. And for him everything was personal.”

Mount looked for another writer. “I happened to find David Freeman, who had written something for me, so he went to work on this. During this period, Mr. Hitchcock started getting sicker and sicker, weaker and weaker.

“We did send a location scout off to Helsinki. We did continue to make the moves that he always made in preparation for a picture. We talked about a cameraman. We broke the thing down on the storyboard and started talking about the cost, whether we really should shoot in Scandinavia or should duplicate the setting somewhere else.

“Mr. Hitchcock wanted to go to Helsinki. He wanted to shoot on these islands in the immediate region of the city. He had some other bits and bobs he wanted to do there, and we estimated that we could go there and shoot for three or four weeks, and then come back and finish the picture in the studio, which was very much his style. We began to talk about cast.

“Lew had spoken to Mr. Hitchcock’s doctor and said, ‘What can you do? Will it help if he doesn’t have a steak every day?’ and the doctor said, ‘Well, it might have helped years ago, but it’s not going to make any difference now.’

“So, we made the quiet corporate decision that we would proceed. If Mr. Hitchcock was well enough to get on a plane for Helsinki, we’ll start the movie. Lew was very clear. ‘If I have to lose a few million dollars making Hitch happy, it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.’ It was never a question.

“Mr. Hitchcock, however, was smarter than we are, as usual. He was well aware that he was getting to a point where it wasn’t possible.

“One day, he sent me a draft of the script, marked up with comments on it, and a little card that said, ‘Compliments of Alfred Hitchcock.’ He wrote all his notes on this card. It said, ‘If you think this project should be moved to another director, I give you my permission to do that.’

“Utterly unnecessary. We never spoke of it. That was the only thing that he said, and I simply called him on the phone.