Hitch (23 page)

At least Alma liked the weather. Hitch was not so sure, but it did not make that much difference to him, since he had never been much of a one for the outdoors anyway. And he did not have much time for appreciating or deprecating the hot summer in still smog-free Los Angeles, since virtually from the moment he arrived he was deep in the project to hand,
Rebecca
. They moved into the first reasonably comfortable apartment that was readily available, in the Wilshire Palms on Wilshire Boulevard, right above Franchot Tone and one of the Ritz Brothers. It had palms and a pool, and was conveniently placed so that Pat could wander out by herself and take a bus up to Hollywood to see a movie or just explore. In Los Angeles, much to her relief, she was going to a day school, Marymount, a smart Catholic girls' school on the edge of Bel Air. Though Hitch pretends to have given up driving altogether when he arrived in America, from total paranoid fear of the police, in fact this is not quite so. He did own a car in Los Angeles, and though Alma, intrepid to a fault, did most of the driving, he would regularly and without fail drive Pat to church every Sunday for mass—indeed, church soon became the only place he would drive to, perhaps with some faint notion that since he was, after all, doing God's work He would not let anything too bad happen.

Such speculations were strictly incidental to the serious business of getting his first Hollywood film under way. Selznick, as was his habit, had been bombarding Hitch with letters, cables and memoranda across the Atlantic ever since he had seriously considered him for the property. In September 1938 he was planning to hold the picture for Hitch, and later in the month was casting around for writers, suggesting to Hitch Ben Hecht, Clemence Dane and John Balderston. Hitch was not happy with Clemence Dane because her first script on
Jamaica Inn
had had to be completely rewritten, but
was otherwise open to suggestion, though he inclined towards an English writer and proposed Sidney Gilliatt. In January 1939 Selznick was pressing Hitch for some decision on the matter of who should play the important role of Maxim de Winter, suggesting that if Ronald Colman remained hesitant they should definitely sign Leslie Howard. By June 1939 Hitch was ready to submit a first treatment, written by Joan Harrison and Philip MacDonald; in a lengthy memo dated 12 June Selznick proceeds politely but firmly to take apart everything they have done and castigate them, with some reason, for needless and vulgarizing departures from the book.

This was a new experience for Hitch. He had dealt with obstructive, philistine producers like C. M. Woolf and John Maxwell, who were really businessmen interested only in the money. And he had worked with Michael Balcon, who was in general a good person to work with, not uncomprehending and genuinely interested in films as such, but hampered by being at this stage in his career a man in the middle, between the ‘intellectuals' on the one hand and the C. M. Woolfs on the other; Balcon believed in letting his film-makers have as much freedom as possible to do their own things in their own way, and did not often interfere, though he could not be counted on in a crunch to prevent interference from others. But this kind of detailed, closely concerned supervision by a producer was very different. Hitch could see the advantages of it, since Selznick was undoubtedly bright and many of his contributions were good ones. But it was also a trial, since it seemed to mean that Hitch had to defend his position and prove himself all over again. Still, that, he supposed, was the Hollywood system, and he would just have to accept it for what it was.

As much as anything, it was a challenge to his ingenuity. How far could he appear to play the producer's game and yet end up doing exactly what he wanted? In this battle of wits, he and Selznick were pretty evenly matched, and each fascinated and somewhat mystified the other. When he got to know Hitch a little better Selznick wrote to his wife that he had spent a social evening with Hitch after a preview of
The Wizard of Oz
, and had decided that he was ‘not a bad guy, shorn of affectations, although not exactly a man to go camping with.…' Professionally, he treated Hitch very much as an equal, reserving the right to criticize what he was doing as one pro to another, but at the same time ready to be resisted and, if necessary, proved wrong. Hitch tended to resist him by sheer inertia: if he said
yes, or maybe, let's consider it some more, then went about things in his own way, there was little Selznick could do except fire him, and that, obviously, he was not about to do.

Fortunately, during the preparation and shooting of
Rebecca
, Selznick just did not have the time to interfere much, beyond the usual barrage of memos. At the forefront of his mind and in the centre of his activities was the completion of his biggest production yet, and most famous production ever,
Gone With the Wind
. It was still shooting principal photography till the end of June 1939, and thereafter there were a thousand jobs in which Selznick himself was deeply involved, what with the cutting, the scoring, the previewing, and all the little last-minute revisions right up to the day of the film's premiere on 15 December 1939 in Atlanta. If he had been concentrating exclusively, or even mainly, on
Rebecca
Hitch would have had a much harder time. As it was, inspired by the tremendous amount of publicity garnered by the search for the screen's Scarlett O'Hara, Selznick first interested himself principally in trying to make equal publicity mileage on the search for the nameless heroine of
Rebecca
. Hitch was convinced that he had determined from the start on his first choice, Joan Fontaine, who did by fairly general consent seem ideal for the role. But a big air of mystery was built up, negotiations were begun with other, more prominent actresses as well as with unknowns, and tests were shot by Hitch of at least six actresses, Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine, Margaret Sullavan, Anita Louise, Loretta Young and the sixteen-year-old Anne Baxter. Vivien Leigh was involved at all only because she was desperately eager to star with her husband-to-be, Laurence Olivier, who had already been signed to play Max de Winter, but Hitch and Selznick thought from the outset she was totally unsuitable. The three serious candidates were Joan Fontaine, Margaret Sullavan and Anne Baxter, and when Joan Fontaine was finally contracted it came as a surprise to no one closely connected with the production.

Once a script had been completed more or less to Selznick's specifications, adhering as closely to the book as the Production Code permitted (Max could not be allowed to have killed his first wife and got away with the crime, so the shooting had to become accidental death), Hitch began filming in his own way, at his own pace, hurried occasionally by messages from Selznick that the rushes seemed too slow, or that the budget was building up because he was taking such a long time to shoot. Selznick was particularly disturbed by Hitch's
method of shooting just what was in the script and no more—no master shot of a whole scene, no variations of middle-shot and close-ups which could be cut together in different ways and allow the film to be remade at the producer's whim in the cutting room. Hitch's material was a jigsaw which permitted of only one solution: his. There was a strict limit to what Selznick could do afterwards, without getting the stars back and rebuilding the sets for expensive reshooting.

Selznick hazily realized this during the course of shooting, and tried to argue Hitch into a more Hollywood method of proceeding, on the grounds that it was quicker and cheaper. But Hitch stuck to his guns, and such was Selznick's degree of preoccupation with
Gone With the Wind
(on 2 December he complained that he had been so busy he had not been able to look at a foot of
Rebecca
for a week) that he let him. It was a gamble on Hitch's part that
Rebecca
would turn out all right and thus all such irritations would be forgotten. And so it proved—the first preview, even very roughly assembled, was sensational, audiences loved the film, it won the Oscar for the ‘Best film of the year', and it presented Selznick with an important new star in Joan Fontaine. Hitch was vindicated, and in after years Selznick would say that Hitch was the only director, absolutely the only director, whom he would trust completely with a picture.

For the time being Hitch was slowly acclimatizing himself to Hollywood studios and Hollywood ways. He and Alma lived very quietly, and he soon made it clear that they were not about to join any Beverly Hills party set. In a curious way, this helped his assimilation into Hollywood: producers and stars might not understand him, but at least they knew where they stood, they could pigeon-hole him. He was a bit weird, obviously foreign, but serious and dedicated—not the man to go camping with, but he did not screw around, he was totally honest and reliable; he was, as one big producer said, ‘the kind of a guy who restores your faith in this whole lousy business.' If Hollywood did not feel totally at home with him, at least it could respect him. And anyway Hitch rapidly got to feel totally at home with Hollywood. He could keep Hollywood guessing, which was just the way he liked it.

Soon his day-to-day life settled into ritual. He made a rapid investigation of Los Angeles's gastronomic delights, and decided that of all the restaurants he liked Chasens' the best. The location, near the West Hollywood decorator belt, was unprepossessing, and the interior, standard pseudo-French plush-and-gold, was undistinguished.
But Dave Chasen and his wife Maude were totally devoted to the production of unpretentiously fine food, and they and the Hitchcocks soon became firm friends. So every Thursday, come rain or come shine, Hitch and Alma would dine at Chasens', always in the same booth, which through the years came to be decorated with little personal memorabilia like a portrait of Pat. Hitch's favourite meal consisted of a double steak (at $5.50) and a champagne punch made up to his own specifications.

That outing, and the Sunday drive to church with Pat, were the fixed points of his life. When he was filming he would turn up punctiliously at the studio every day disguised as an English businessman in the invariable dark suit, white shirt and restrained dark tie. In the 1930s the fact of wearing a suit and tie, even in the suffocating heat of a Los Angeles summer, was not so bizarre as it has since become, but in a world where many of the film-makers affected fancy dress—De Mille's riding breeches, Von Sternberg's tropical tea-planter outfit—Hitch's was the fanciest of them all by being the least suitable and probable. He would work regular office hours, come home, read the daily papers, relax with his daughter and his dogs, snooze for an hour or so on the sofa in their living room, eat a quiet family dinner prepared as a rule by Alma herself, then go early to bed. His physical surroundings were from the first determinedly English: chintzes and polished brass and dark wood. He imported English bacon and Dover sole himself, and stored them at the Los Angeles Smoking and Curing Company, until the war put a stop to this indulgence. And his way of life carried over entire the pattern he had established in England: he was a straightforward middle-class Englishman who just happened to be an artistic genius.

At work, too, he soon settled into a routine. Though his methods of making a film in advance on paper were peculiar by Hollywood standards, they could be quite readily accommodated to the Hollywood system. The secret was that they evidently worked, and anyone in Hollywood would go along with that. He, for his part, was immensely impressed by the sheer efficiency of the Hollywood studio machine. There was virtually nothing you could not do, no supplies which were too esoteric, no skills which could not be bought somewhere in the city. And there was the money to buy them.
Rebecca
was originally budgeted at around $950,000, and eventually hit the million mark. It was far and away the most expensive movie
Hitch had ever made, and the effect was tonic after the limitations of his tiny budgets in England. Of course, it was possible that this situation could also be stultifying, since the responsibilities were heavier, and there was not the outside stimulus to invention that severely limited money and resources willy-nilly provided.

Undeniably
Rebecca
, successful though it was at the box office, is a lot less personal than the films Hitch had recently been making in England. Hitch himself regards it as ‘not a Hitchcock picture: a novelette really.' He does not have any special dedication to the writings of Daphne du Maurier, such as might seem to be implied by his having made three films based on her work,
Jamaica Inn, Rebecca
, and
The Birds
, when he has never otherwise adapted the same author more than once. But
Rebecca
was certainly a subject that appealed to him from the moment of the book's appearance, and
The Birds
had at least that necessary nugget of a telling situation from which a Hitchcock film could come. He wonders how
Rebecca
would have turned out if he had made it in England, since after all the subject, the director and most of the cast were English, and only the producer and the final script-writer, Robert E. Sherwood, were American. Probably it would have been more realistic, less obsessive—the house at Manderley would have had more of a context, the details been more vivid, the whole thing less dreamlike and gothic, which might not, he admits, have been an advantage.

He did not have any major problems with Selznick over his treatment of the story, apart from their battle over the introduction of humour into it (which Selznick won, to Hitch's regret), and a determined tussle over the very last shot, when Manderley is finally burnt. Selznick came up with what he felt was a great idea: that there should be an elaborate process shot showing the smoke from the house curling up to form a gigantic ‘R' (for Rebecca) in the sky. Hitch thought that was really vulgar and silly, and anyway gave the opposite effect to what was needed, suggesting as it did that the malign presence of Rebecca continued to brood over everything instead of being at last dispelled. In place of this he quickly thought up and shot the sequence in which the flames consume Rebecca's room, ending with the detail of this same ‘R' embroidered on the pillowcase being reduced to ashes. Selznick accepted that, none too happily, but with the comforting thought that at least it was less expensive, so here for once his costly foreign director was showing himself willing actually to cut costs.