It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (25 page)

“‘You know,’ he said, ‘like you were doing the limbo.’

“He said, ‘Okay, action,’ so I leaned back and back and back and back, and I get so far, I go
rap!
onto the cement floor. He would cut and say, ‘Laura—
float
to the floor,’

“About the seventh take, I literally floated all the way down to the floor. Don’t ask me how. All he said was ‘Cut. Next shot.’ He didn’t say, ‘Oh, that was wonderful,’ or ‘That was good.’ It was just, ‘Cut. Next shot.’”

Elliott, who enjoyed a long, successful career in films and on television, sometimes under her real name, Imogene or “Kasey” Rogers, recalled being cast as Miriam.

“I was under contract to Paramount, which is why the name Laura Elliott. They always gave you a movie star name, and I thought it was lovely, so I did twenty-eight films as Laura Elliott, and one of them, a loan-out to Warner Brothers, was, of course,
Strangers on a Train.

“I remember there was another girl under contract to Paramount who three or four months before came in and said, ‘Oh, I just read the most wonderful role, and you’re perfect for it.’ I looked at her, and thought, she and I are so different. She’s a song-and-dance girl, I’m not, so I thought there’s certainly nothing there for me. Then my agent called and said go and audition for this role. I told him, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna be right for it,’ and he says, ‘You go
anyway.
’

“I read this scene, and I thought, ‘This is just wonderful. I just love this.’ So I read with the casting director, he liked it, and he decided that I would test with six other girls. We all did the same scene in the music store there, same stage, same everything, same crew, and we had no direction. What we brought in is the way we interpreted the role. I had never met Mr. Hitchcock. I did the test, and I got chosen.

“I was elated. I mean, I was
thrilled
to work with Hitchcock, and it was an unusual role, because usually I’d do the little ingenue thing. I guess he liked what he saw in the tests, because he didn’t change anything.

“I met him after I had been told I would get the role. I remember, I dressed very conservatively. I think I had a gray suit on, and a little hat. We wore hats in those days.

“He was very cordial, but he said, ‘Why do you dress so severely?’ because I had my hair pulled back.

“He said, ‘I want you to get some glasses. I want you to wear glasses for this role. Just pick out any frame, anything you think would be fine.’ He told me where to go, the place where they make the glasses, and we got six pair of glasses. We had two pair that were so thick that I literally could not see my hand in front of my face. These are the ones I wore in the movie.

“I could not see anything. So, when I’d look at Farley, I couldn’t see him. When I tried to ring up a cash register sale, I couldn’t see the cash register. To jump on the merry-go-round, I couldn’t see the merry-go-round. He said, ‘I want your eyes to look very little, pig-eyed, very small like little pigs.’

“We got two big lenses, two medium lenses, and we got two with clear glass that supposedly I could wear in the long shots. But I never had them on. When we got out at night to do the merry-go-round, all this stuff, the exteriors, he had me wear the same thick glasses. I don’t know why. I was only twenty-something years old. I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Hitchcock, yes, Mr. Hitchcock.’

“The next time you look at the film, you’ll notice when I come out of the little booth chasing Farley, I run after him yelling, into a big close-up. I had already counted my steps to where the counter was. Then I turned and had my hand on the counter and ran along yelling at him, and when I came to the end of the counter, I stopped because I knew I had hit my marks. I was in place for the close-up, and that’s where I yelled the last line, ‘You can’t throw me away like an old shoe,’ or whatever.

“When the two boys come to pick me up, you’ll notice all the time one’ll always hold his hand out, and I trip down the stairs. Then one will help me up to the bus. It works wonderfully. I couldn’t see the bus. I couldn’t see the merry-go-round, but I liked the challenge.

“The traveling amusement park was one they brought to an exterior location. I think it was at Chatsworth Lake in the San Fernando Valley, but it’s drained now. It was a thirty- or forty-minute drive from the studio.

“It was freezing cold out there. All the crew had on these big furry parkas, and as soon as they’d say ‘Cut,’ I’d say, ‘Give me my jacket!’

“There are people who believe that you are the roles you play, that if you are playing a character who is bad, there must be bad in you.

“When it was in release, I remember making a great charity type of tour. It was a busload of celebrities, and of course nobody knew the name Laura Elliott.

“So I said to the guy who was producing it, ‘You know, I’m just currently out of
Strangers on a Train.
I played Miriam.’ He announced it next time, and the entire audience gasped and looked at me like, ‘Oh, you terrible person.’ And I loved it! Because I had convinced them. It’s fun to be a bitch. That’s a witch gone bad.

“After I got excellent reviews from the
Reporter
and
Variety,
Paramount didn’t acknowledge anything, and they had me holding up color swatches for the camera crews to test color film.

“Hitchcock was always ‘Mr. Hitchcock,’ and if you saw him on his television show, that was who he was. One of the things he did, I think, was he saw in an actor or actress the qualities he wanted for a specific role. He usually picked people who had done more than I had, you know. I was a newcomer. But he would see what he wanted and cast them, and just let them do their thing. I didn’t see him giving direction to Robert Walker or to Farley or to me. We just went into the scene, and he said, ‘Walk here,’ ‘Walk there,’ ‘Okay.’

“He never said it to me, but I’ve always heard that he considered the most boring part of a film was the shooting of it, because he’d story-boarded, written, and done it in his mind, but I personally found that he was deeply interested in everything on the set. Believe me, he didn’t miss a thing.

“Robert Walker was absolutely brilliant. If I were a guy and had the choice of roles, I would have taken his role. Farley did a lovely job, but you know, it’s like a leading lady. If you’re a beautiful leading lady, that’s what you are, a beautiful leading lady, and everyone else gets the good roles.”

Among others in the cast were Marion Lorne, who played Bruno’s demented mother, and Norma Varden, who almost gets strangled by him at Senator Morton’s party, and a few years later
is
murdered by Tyrone Power in Billy Wilder’s
Witness for the Prosecution.
Laura Elliott later worked with Marion Lorne on the television show
Bewitched.

“I was the boss’s wife, and Marion Lorne was Aunt Clara. She was working in England, and Hitchcock knew her work. Actually, I didn’t know her on
Strangers on a Train,
because I didn’t have any scenes with her, but we worked together on
Bewitched
in a few episodes.

“You could see her quality of comedy in
Strangers on a Train.
She was brilliant as a comedian, absolutely brilliant. In fact, when I taught acting, I would always say to my students, ‘If you want to study comedy, you go study Marion Lorne.’ Her timing is perfect.”

Food frequently appears in Hitchcock films, and even when it seems not to serve a purpose, it helps define the characters.

“Preferences in food characterize people,” Hitchcock said. “I have always given it careful consideration, so that my characters never eat out of character.

“Bruno orders with gusto and an interest in what he is going to eat—lamb chops, French fries, and chocolate ice cream. A very good choice for train food. And the chocolate ice cream is probably what he thought about first. Bruno is rather a child. He is also something of a hedonist.

“Guy, on the other hand, shows little interest in eating the lunch, apparently having given it no advance thought, in contrast to Bruno, and he merely orders what seems his routine choice, a hamburger and coffee.”

When Pat Hitchcock spoke with me, she said, “There’s a story I want to tell you that’s gone around, so would you please tell everyone what
really
happened. It was at the amusement park.

“My father said how much would I want to go up on the Ferris wheel? I said, ‘I’m not going up. You know how scared I am of heights.’ He said, ‘I’ll give you a hundred dollars,’ and I said, ‘Okay.’ So, I went up with the two young men who were playing Laura’s two boyfriends, and I have a picture of us waving.

“As a joke, some electricians turned off the lights and pretended they were walking away. Obviously, they weren’t. I think we were probably up there two or three minutes at the outside.

“They turned the lights on, brought us down, and that’s the story of the Ferris wheel. They said Daddy left me up there all alone in the dark for two or three hours, and that’s the story that has persisted. They made a lot out of that because they were trying to make it a horror thing and make it fit my father’s character, but my father wasn’t ever sadistic. It just wasn’t true. The only sadistic part was I never got the hundred dollars.”

After
Strangers on a Train,
on a ship during a European holiday with her parents, Pat Hitchcock met the man she would marry, Joseph O’Connell.

Hitchcock told me that when he realized that she had grown up and was beginning her adult life, he was sorry that they had sent her away to boarding school. “It all went so fast,” he said. “One day I was holding her hand while she learned to walk, and the next, she was getting married.”

While she didn’t like being away from her mother and father for such long periods of time, Pat had come to understand. “It’s what British families do,” she told me.

I
N
1947, H
ITCHCOCK
acquired the screen rights to a stage play he had seen in England,
Nos deux Consciences
(“Our Two Consciences”), written in 1902 by Paul Anthelme. Hitchcock set the project aside until 1952 when, after many revisions, it became
I Confess.

When Warner Brothers was hesitant to make the film, Hitchcock offered to do another film for them without salary, working only for a percentage of the profits. The offer persuaded Warners, and that other film would be
The Wrong Man,
to be made later.

“Quebec was chosen as the location for
I Confess,
” Hitchcock said, “because it’s the only place in North America where the clergy still wear cassocks, and that is important to the story.”

In an early draft, Logan was found guilty and hanged before it is determined he is innocent. There was also a draft in which he had fathered an illegitimate child during his affair before he became a priest.

O. E. Hasse had acted on the stage for Max Reinhardt and was an extra for F. W. Murnau. Most of his career was spent in the German cinema. Hitchcock cast him in one of his few English-language roles as Keller, the ungrateful refugee.

Dolly Haas, the wife of artist Al Hirschfeld and a star of pre–Third Reich German cinema, talked with me at her Upper East Side New York City town house about
I Confess.
Like most actors, she was happy to have had even a small part in a Hitchcock film. Anne Baxter, however, was not happy after filming began.

Hitchcock had originally wanted the Swedish actress Anita Björk for
I Confess.
Björk had just scored a big success in Alf Sjöberg’s
Miss Julie,
and seemed perfect for the part of Ruth Grandfort; but when the unwed Swedish actress arrived in America with her lover and her child, Hitchcock was forced by Warners to release her. Baxter, who knew the Hitchcocks socially, replaced her.

“Anne believed that Hitchcock really hadn’t wanted her,” Haas said, “because she wasn’t blond enough, and she wasn’t beautiful enough. I told her it was just her imagination, but she was worried.

“Once, she asked Alma to go for a drive with her, and they got back late for dinner. Hitchcock was silently furious. He hated eating without Alma. He waited. Anne thought he blamed her, and she was more certain Hitchcock didn’t like her.