Hitch (40 page)

During the shooting, every possible television short cut was taken to cut costs. Everything was shot on the back lot at Universal apart from some second-unit stuff on the freeway. As in his television shows, Hitch picked out the crucial scenes and shots for special attention, and let the rest fall into place around them. The scene in which the insurance investigator is killed at the top of the stairs, for example, needed some expensive special construction so that the camera could get up high enough to leave us in doubt about the identity of the ‘mother', but here it was worth it, because the resultant scene is one everyone remembers. The lead-in to this murder, incidentally, was shot twice. Saul Bass, the brilliant graphic artist who did the credits for
Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo
and other Hitchcock films around this time, had drawn out a story board for the detective's ascent of the stairs. Hitch was ill one day, so he told his assistant to shoot the scene according to the story board. When he saw the result he realized he had to re-do it completely, because though it was pictorially fine, when cut together it conveyed that the investigator was the menace rather than the menaced.

Joseph Stefano was on set practically every day of the shooting,
and sometimes found himself landed with some rather odd jobs. One day Hitch said to him, ‘Mr. Gavin would like some changes in the script of this scene. Will you talk to him about it?' Stefano could not believe that Hitch was serious, but clearly he was, so Stefano went to find out what the trouble was. After some equivocation it turned out that John Gavin, who plays Marion's lover, was embarrassed about playing the first scene with his shirt off. Stefano remonstrated with him—he had a great body, after all, and had been bare-chested in
Spartacus
. Yes, but that was different: here it was just embarrassing to play an intimate contemporary scene that way. Finally Stefano persuaded him by encouraging him to use that very embarrassment as part of the scene, to play it that way, recognizing that the character he was portraying would also feel embarrassed and vulnerable, particularly when having an argument while half undressed. This in fact was the sort of detailed psychological direction of actors Hitch was not interested in: they should do something just because he or the script told them to, and he did not have the patience to fiddle around with psychological niceties—particularly with men, whom he hardly seemed to notice on set, in contrast to the great deal of trouble he would sometimes go to with his ladies.

He went to a considerable amount of trouble with Janet Leigh over the notorious scene of the murder in the shower. She was needed for close-ups, of course, but Hitch would not permit her to do the nude scenes, even such flashes as ended up on the screen—it did not sort with his ideas of what was and was not proper for a star. Instead he got a model, someone whose profession it was to be seen in the nude. Stefano has a vivid memory of Hitch up on the platform above the shower, directing this beautiful naked girl, he in his suit, shirt, tie, a model of correctitude and composure. One sensed that Alfred Hitchcock does not stand in front of naked women, and that he has precisely this feeling about himself, so that for him she was not naked, and that was that.

Hitch also took great care to show no actual details of violence—you never see the knife touch the girl's flesh, and the main reason
Psycho
was made in black-and-white was to avoid a wash of Technicolor blood. Despite which the sequence has been traumatic for many. There are those who swear that the film goes into colour at that point, or that you see the knife tearing the flesh, all of which is in their own imaginations. Hitch once got a sad letter from a parent asking advice. After seeing
Les Diaboliques
his daughter had refused
to have a conventional bath. Now, after seeing
Psycho
, she refused to take a shower either. What should he do? Have her dry-cleaned, replied Hitch cheerfully. The one person clearly not traumatized by the shower scene was Alma. As usual, she was the last person Hitch showed the film to before shipping it out. After seeing it, her first comment was, ‘Hitch, you can't ship it. Janet Leigh gulps after she is supposed to be dead in the shower.' And sure enough she did—just in one or two frames, so little that no one else, shaken by the shock of the scene, had noticed.

Before things got to that stage, though, a number of other processes had to be gone through. And Hitch was, for him, amazingly indecisive and lacking in confidence. Perhaps because a major investment of his own money was involved, even though he had brought the whole film in for a mere $800,000, he was hard to satisfy. At one point, having put the rough cut together, he decided he didn't like it, it wouldn't work, began to talk about cutting it down to an hour and using it on television. Among those who thought he was crazy was Bernard Herrmann, who was composing the music for it. Hitch had planned on having the whole shower sequence silent except for the actual sounds of the water, the shower curtain and so on. Herrmann begged Hitch to try it with the music he had composed, and Hitch had to admit that he was right—the sequence was transformed and enhanced to an incredible degree, and his fears began to die away.

Even so, neither Hitch nor anyone else could have guessed the fantastic commercial success in store for the film. Hitch and Alma went off to Europe on holiday and were away when
Psycho
opened. The critical reception was mixed. Many of the critics were alienated by being required to see the film with an ordinary audience, and being refused admission if they arrived late (it was a rule Hitch had insisted on, that the movie had to be seen from beginning to end); others were shocked by the film's violence and felt it was unworthy of its maker. His old friend Charles Bennett saw a preview in Hollywood and afterwards told Hitch he was a ‘sadistic sonofabitch'. Hitch mildly replied that he thought the film was funny, and feigned surprise when Bennett said that only made matters worse. But the public loved
Psycho
right from the start. On its first release it made some $15 million in the United States alone, and shortly after Hitch's return Paramount presented him excitedly with a cheque for $2.5 million, far and away the largest amount they had ever paid an
independent producer, as his personal share of the first quarter's returns. It was a climax in his career. Now in his early sixties he was famous, more famous than ever before, and he was rich. He had made a string of masterpieces, one fast on the heels of another. The only problem was, where did he go from here?

Shortly after completing work on
Psycho
Joseph Stefano invited the Hitchcocks to a party. Nothing, one might think, very remarkable about that. Except that Stefano had been suitably terrorized, like most of Hitch's short-term professional associates, by Hitch's tales of the inefficiencies and solecisms committed by those who had invited him to drinks or dinner—people like the up-and-coming executive who had a waiter serve wine in a napkin when it was not even chilled. Hitch had so scared others, like Ernest Lehman, that they never dared invite him to their homes, no matter how well they knew him. And then he wondered why he was so seldom asked anywhere. But anyway, Stefano was made of sterner stuff, and though the party was to be a big, very mixed one such as he knew Hitch particularly disliked, he thought he might as well invite him all the same. To his surprise Hitch accepted; to his even greater surprise Hitch and Alma came early and, instead of making a token appearance, stayed all evening. Alma, as usual, darted round talking to everyone, and had a great time. Hitch found an equally characteristic solution. The main room of Stefano's house was L-shaped, with a grand piano at the angle, the only place it would fit, and therefore in full view of the entrance. Here, in the bow of the piano, like Helen Morgan, Hitch placed himself and held court—more precisely, he stood there all evening, the first thing one saw on arrival, and little by little everyone circulated enough to speak to him.

It was an unusually expansive moment. In general Hitch, who had always kept himself to himself in Hollywood, dedicated to his work and his family, was becoming increasingly isolated from the world around him. Professionally, he liked to be surrounded by people he knew and had worked with—new people brought risks and uncertainties, and there were those in the world who might not understand or share Hitch's hatred of confrontations. By now he had
assembled his own little group, which included his cinematographer Robert Burks, his camera operator Leonard J. South, his television cameraman John L. Russell, his editor George Tomasini, his composer Bernard Herrmann, his personal assistant Peggy Robertson, his costume designer Edith Head, and a number of actors with whom he felt thoroughly at home. Inevitably the actors changed depending on the nature of the project and on various outside factors—Grace Kelly had married and retired; Hitch was not to work again with Cary Grant or James Stewart—and he seemed to have a high wastage rate of writers, but in general he was surrounded by a charmed circle of the tried and true. Within it he was able to command extraordinary personal loyalty and understanding; he did not have to worry too much about the world outside.

Which is just as well. For Hitch, by his own admission as well as the observation of others, is and always has been a frightened man: frightened of the police and authority, frightened of other people, frightened of his professional and financial position, frightened of his own emotions. His ivory tower has been built as a necessary protection for himself. Even so he has retained his sense of terror, beleaguered within it. When pressed from the outside to do this or that in his films, especially to cast in a certain way, he has always had the greatest difficulty in saying no, and has had to find all kinds of devious ways of doing it—if he succeeded in doing it at all. Often the people he worked with have asked him what he is frightened of, what can ‘they' do to one in his position. His answer is always a variation of ‘You don't know. They can do terrible things.' The most terrible being, presumably, that they could somehow stop him working.

Joseph Stefano has another image of Hitch—the perfect symbolic image of a frightened man. One day during the shooting of
Psycho
Hitch asked Stefano, who lived not far away from him, for a lift home. Or, more precisely, to the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was directly on Stefano's route—from there he could get a cab home to Bel Air. Stefano remonstrated that it was hardly out of his way to run Hitch right home, only maybe another ten minutes, but Hitch would not hear of it. So they drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and as they approached there was a cab waiting at the taxi rank outside. Stefano dropped Hitch at the front, and as he pulled away he noticed that the cab had been taken and gone before Hitch could get to it. And there, in the rear-view mirror, he saw a picture of
complete terror. Alfred Hitchcock standing on a corner, looking for a cab. Evidently this was the sort of thing that just did not happen to him, ever. And now it had he looked totally lost, like a child who has mislaid his parents and does not know what to do to find them again. Stefano was so worried and guilty he drove round the block to make sure Hitch was all right and if necessary to insist on driving him home. Fortunately, when he arrived back Hitch had gone—that crisis was over. But his life was full of little crises, bouts of neurotic anxiety, irrational (or sometimes admittedly not so irrational) fears, which life and experience and success did little or nothing to abate.

And yet a long-time associate observes, completely without irony, that Hitch's great quality is his almost total satisfaction with himself. He is an intensely complicated person, but he never seems to have looked for the answer to his own conundrum. One can no more imagine his turning to psychoanalysis, at any stage in his life, than flying: quite correctly he supposes that he does not need it. Even his little self-explanatory anecdotes, like the one about his being locked up in a police cell at the age of six or so, often seem to have been suggested to him as revealing by other people: he has read commentaries on them, and now presents them like a visiting card, without any inner conviction that the explanations they offer are true, or that, if true, they really matter. He chooses to believe that he is incapable of anger, and so, as far as he is concerned, he is—he does not care or bother to examine himself further and find out what happens to the angry impulses he largely suppresses. Throughout his life he has been a model of sexual rectitude, and he is absolutely not interested in what effect, if any, his less avowable impulses may have subconsciously on his behaviour—his tendency, say, to be in certain cases unreasonably possessive and domineering. Indeed, the whole fantasy aspect of his life seems to be beautifully, totally taken care of by film, to the extent that he hardly needs any other outlet.

This means, of course, that he, and his profession, have to be more than ever shielded and protected, and fear of things going wrong through some outside force never leaves him. After the tremendous, unexpected success
oí Psycho
he was in a stronger position than ever before—which he proceeded to consolidate by moving his centre of operations yet again, ultimately to Universal, which belonged to MCA, his agents until 1962 when they had to give up their agency interests, and headed by one of his very few close friends, Lew Wasserman. Before that happened, though, he
did consider various other possibilities. For one thing, he was suddenly finding it difficult to decide on a project to follow up
Psycho. No Bail for the Judge
was still in his plans, despite the defection of Ernest Lehman from writing the script, but it was put off for
Psycho
, then put off again for two more properties to be developed first,
Village of Stars
and
Trap for a Solitary Man
, then finally, quietly dropped, as no satisfactory script could be got out of it. The other two projects also came to nothing.
Village of Stars
, which he was going to make for Paramount, was about the plight of a pilot with a bomb designed to detonate below a certain altitude when the defusing device fails to work;
Trap for a Solitary Man
, which was to have been for Twentieth Century-Fox, started as a successful stage thriller by Robert Thomas about a man whose wife disappears and then apparently reappears, except that only he insists she is not the right woman at all. Both straightforward thriller subjects, neither able to be scripted to Hitch's entire satisfaction, probably because they were so straightforward and mechanical. After
Vertigo, North by Northwest
and
Psycho
he needed to do something different, something more.