Hitch (26 page)

Hitch, naturally, gave as good as he got. One day, on the pretext that Carole Lombard, the most professional of screen actresses, had fluffed a line a couple of times, he insisted on having all her lines chalked up on an ‘idiot board' out of camera range for her to read while she acted the scene—a procedure which threw her completely, so that she forgot all her lines. She got her own back, though, when it came time for Hitch to shoot his traditional walk-on in the film, a little scene in which he appears as a panhandler trying unsuccessfully to hustle Robert Montgomery for the price of a drink. Lombard insisted on directing this herself, and then did take after take after take, instructing the make-up man meanwhile to ‘Powder Alfie's nose', until she was finally satisfied enough to say, ‘Cut. Print it.'

As for the film itself, Hitch says that he did very little, not knowing the background or the characters at all, but follow the finished script by Norman Krasna, expert deviser of dozens of such agreeable diversions (
Bachelor Mother, It Started with Eve, Dear Ruth
). All the same, it does seem that the film shows in certain areas the mark of Hitch's personality and preoccupations. In particular, the story (of a couple who find that they are not married as they supposed and play a very intricate game of jockeying for position before they get together again) is given a particularly ruthless tone. The retort to that might be that it is all in the script, but one need only think of many similar subjects in 1930s Hollywood comedy and how they came across on screen. Something like
The Awful Truth
, for example, has the heroine behaving just as monstrously in a comparable situation, but Irene Dunne's performance and Leo McCarey's directorial angle of vision seem to take it for granted and project to the audience that she is quite charming, the ladies are like that, God bless ‘em, and that's why we love them. Hitch, aided and abetted by an unsparing, hard-edged performance from Carole Lombard (no
sentimentalist ever in her films), makes it quite clear that the woman is a monster, and the film leaves a sharp, bitter after-taste in the mouth.

Also, there is one little scene in which the heroine and her substitute boy-friend get trapped on a broken-down Ferris wheel at the New York World's Fair which is developed in such a way, beyond anything the script seems to call for, that one does wonder if Hitch himself suffers from the horrors of vertigo. He says not particularly, but then there is always
Vertigo
itself as further indirect evidence on the subject, not to mention many a literal or near-literal cliff-hanging sequence as in
North by Northwest
or
Saboteur
. And what is one more fear for Hitch to admit to among so many?

So here, at the beginning of 1941, we have what seems to be a typical picture of the Englishman abroad. Settled, like some tea-planter in the sub-tropics, far from home but still preserving the amenities of English life as closely as possible—living in an English-style cottage (or what passed locally for one), reading English papers, even if they were sometimes weeks out of date, surrounded by his family and of course, very important, his dogs, which rejoiced in such names as Philip of Magnesia and Edward IX (after the abdication, naturally), wearing invariably English, invariably formal clothes, in defiance of the climate and that noonday sun to which only mad dogs and Englishmen are impervious.

And yet, this was no colonialist set down among the simple natives in some remote part of that empire on which the sun still, in those far-off days, never set. He had come from what was, in cinema terms, very much a backwater—hardly better, itself, than an American colony—and conquered the most sophisticated centre of his craft in the world. His first American film had established him, in the only terms absolutely everyone there understood, as a leading director in Hollywood because a leading box-office director. From then on he might have his ups and downs, his more or less commercially and critically successful films, but his commanding stature was never again to be seriously challenged. He could certainly, had he wished to, have gone home—not, perhaps, immediately, but as soon as things had normalized a little in Britain, as soon, possibly, as America had entered the war. But he developed a taste for the life in southern California, and if at the outset he sometimes talked and dreamed of going back to Britain, it gradually became a remote fantasy, like that of many colonials who paid lip-service to the idea of retirement in the old country from which in practice they became with the passing years increasingly distant and estranged.
Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again, but a number of the émigré film-makers populating Hollywood in the war years proved him satisfyingly wrong—the French like Renoir and Clair went back to even greater triumphs in France after the war; Herbert Wilcox was back in England as soon as possible and only the Germans for the most part stayed put in Hollywood. Hitch, obviously, enjoyed playing the Englishman abroad. He also enjoyed working with the resources of the American film industry, and soon developed an abiding love of America and the Americans, however much he might choose to hide it behind his true-born Englishman disguise.

All the same, he continued to do his bit, not only for beleaguered England but also, as he saw it, for the land of his adoption. He had another anti-Nazi thriller in the offing, and from time to time received visits from old friends in England now prominently involved with the war effort. Sidney Bernstein came over on one such trip, and Hitch has a vivid recollection of Bernstein sadly moderating Walter Wanger's cinematic enthusiasm for the fight against fascism by pointing out to him that alas, he could not have exclusive rights in the invasion of Britain. Before Hitch could get on to
Saboteur
, though, he had one more completely apolitical film to get out of the way,
Before the Fact
, eventually retitled
Suspicion
, which brought him together for the first time professionally with one of his favourite stars, Cary Grant, and reunited him with the star he had made in
Rebecca
, Joan Fontaine. He and Grant had met once or twice socially in Hollywood, but it was a purely routine business deal when Grant's agent called him one day and told him that Hitchcock wanted to talk to him about a role in his forthcoming film. Hitch and Grant met, Hitch simply told him the story of the film, and that was that. Grant remembers him at that time as still an eager young man, younger-seeming certainly than his forty-two years, but quietly precise, exuding warmth and friendliness, spreading confidence all around. He always whistled to work, and Grant says he thinks they got on so well right away because they both remembered liquorice allsorts.

Be that as it may, the preparation and shooting of the film were not without their problems. For one thing there were character conflicts between the stars. Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier had not been too friendly on
Rebecca
, partly because he had wanted Vivien Leigh to play the role and partly, perhaps, because Hitch adopted a very obviously protective attitude to his female star, who was
visibly uncertain and ill at ease. (Joan Fontaine herself says, ‘He protected me, wouldn't let anyone near me. He kept me in a cocoon.') Through the enormous success of
Rebecca
Joan Fontaine had become a big star, but that did not seem much to moderate her nervousness or make her any easier to work with. She was set to play the role of a wife who comes to suspect that her ne'er-do-well husband is plotting to kill her, and Cary Grant privately observed at the time that this was very understandable, since anyone who knew him and knew Joan Fontaine would know also that he was very likely to strangle her right away.

Not all the troubles were with the stars, though—indeed, from the acting point of view the film turned out very successfully, and Joan Fontaine carried off an Oscar for her performance in it. There were troubles also with the front office at RKO, where the picture was being made. Some of the executives were not satisfied with the leisurely pace at which Hitch was working, and in April 1941 an inter-departmental memo observed brusquely: ‘Hitchcock does not appear to be giving as close attention to this picture as he should be—we have good cause to worry about the quality of this production. As a matter of fact, Fontaine has indicated that Hitchcock has not been so exacting in his requirements for her—as he was on
Rebecca
.' Undeterred by the sniping, Hitch continued to shoot, but when he finished the principal photography early in June there were still major problems to be solved.

Most of them concerned the ending. In the book, the husband is actually a practised wife-murderer, and the wife's suspicions become a certainty which she finally accepts and lets herself be murdered by the man she still loves. In Hitch's first statement of his intentions for the script, to be written by Alma and Joan Harrison with dialogue later supplied by Samson Raphaelson, he is quoted as saying ‘he will follow the novel as to story, persons, locale and sets, excepting only that he would tell the story as through the eyes of the woman and have her husband be villainous in her imagination only.' The first two or three drafts of the screenplay even go so far as to have the husband, exonerated, go off into the RAF to atone. (‘Only yesterday he fought off ten German fighters—downed three of them himself, disabled one, and chased the rest of them halfway across the Channel.') Though Hitch has often told of his idea that it would be interesting, because confounding to audience expectations, to make the character as played by Cary Grant guilty, let him succeed in
murdering his wife and then walk jauntily down to the postbox to post a letter which we know incriminates him, this notion never actually reached the script stage. But the ending as shot caused big problems—it was too complicated (the husband was going to try to kill himself instead of the wife), preview audiences reacted strongly against it, and possible revampings were being discussed throughout July. Finally, the present shortened, pointed-up ending was shot in a day or so, and the film was ready, though as late as October Hitch was complaining in a memo that the company's allowing knowledge of the indecision about the ending to leak out could make the public query the existing ending. Despite which, when the film finally opened it immediately became one of Hitch's biggest successes among his early Hollywood films.

Meanwhile, it had an unexpected influence on his private life. In the film was an actress called Auriol Lee. When she got back to New York she was talking to John Van Druten, an old friend of Hitch's from British days. At this time he was having a lot of trouble casting his new play,
Solitaire
, which was in effect a two-character piece involving an old man and a young girl of around twelve. Auriol Lee suggested he should consider Hitch's daughter Pat for the role of the girl. So, shortly afterwards, Van Druten was out in Los Angeles, apparently quite coincidentally, visiting the Hitchcocks. He led into the matter very gently, making up a story for Pat's benefit that he wanted her to help him by reading the lines for him so that he could better judge what could be cut. This informal audition was very successful, and Van Druten offered Pat the part, with her parents' blessing.

Up to this time Pat had taken an enthusiastic amateur interest in acting, at school and elsewhere, but the question of her becoming a professional actress had never seriously come up. Certainly Hitch and Alma were not dead set against it—despite a few vicissitudes their own experiences of show business had been pretty agreeable, and they had no reason desperately to warn their daughter off. On the other hand, it was still early days, and they had no desire whatever to push her into becoming some kind of precocious child star. They received the idea of
Solitaire
matter-of-factly, and she did the same. It rehearsed, opened on Broadway to respectful if unenthusiastic reviews (though Pat herself had an excellent press) and closed after three weeks. Hitch was not even able to get to see it, as he was tied up with
Saboteur
, and after the run was completed Pat returned to school at Marymount, not feeling much different
from when she had left. A projected picture-story on her and the production in
Life
never appeared when the play folded so rapidly, she had little taste of publicity to swell her head, and theatres and film studios had been a natural, unquestioned part of her life for so long that she was completely unimpressed with the glamour of this new experience. However, it did confirm her in her conviction that when she grew up she wanted to be an actress, and that she would became an everyday assumption for her and her parents, even though at this stage it made little or no practical difference.

Hitch was a strict but devoted father. He never raised his voice, at home any more than at the studio—his method was rather to lead in with a mournful ‘Do you know how much you have hurt your mother and me …?' As Pat moved into her teens regular financial meetings also became part of the pattern—with proper middle-class feeling, Hitch was determined that Pat should grow up with a clear appreciation of the value of money, and she always knew just exactly how much anything she did or wanted would cost. Another principle Hitch had as a parent—and has as a grandparent—was that everything in life must be done with a clear sense of aim. Pat's being an actress was all right if that was what she really wanted and would work consistently towards. Hitch could not understand or sympathize with young people who did not early on know what they wanted to be in life—even though he admitted that he himself had entered each phase of his own life from the age of fourteen by chance or on impulse rather than from following out a consistent scheme. When she left school Pat would have liked to go to college, but for no specific purpose other than to further her education. Hitch did not see the point. Drama school—now that he could see: ‘Learn your craft' had always been his motto. But it was as though his own insecurity drove him to require a greater show of confidence and purposefulness from everyone else than he had ever been called upon to demonstrate himself. That made him feel secure; indecisiveness did not.