Alfred Hitchcock (100 page)

Besides directing a handful of shows, Hitchcock was contracted to introduce each episode, and at the conclusion provide a wrap-up. He also agreed to hawk for the advertisers, which was standard practice on television in the 1950s. But it was clear, from the very first discussions, that this was no burdensome requirement: Hitchcock relished the opportunity for these mischievous cameo performances.

His brief appearances called for a ghostwriter uniquely attuned to his sensibility. MCA once again rode to the rescue, with James Allardice. Born in Ohio, Allardice was a former newspaperman who had drawn on his war experiences for his first Broadway play, later adapted into the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy
At War with the Army.
He then wrote a Francis the Talking Mule picture as well as other vehicles for Martin and Lewis. Having drifted into television, Allardice had just won an Emmy, in 1954, as part of the team who wrote monologues for the highly rated
The George Gobel Show.

Allardice and Hitchcock were a perfect match. At their first meeting, Allardice told Hitchcock about a high school play he had written, in which he displayed an electric chair under which hung the sign: “You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse.” “Hitchcock loved this,” according to John McCarty
and Brian Kelleher in their book on
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
“and accepted Allardice enthusiastically, putting him under exclusive contract.”

It was also standard practice for a television series to have a recurring title sequence with theme music. For the underlying music Bernard Herrmann suggested “Funeral March of a Marionette,” written by Charles Gounod in 1872, a classical novelty Herrmann had used on
Suspense
and later recycled as a temporary sound track for
The Trouble with Harry.
Hitchcock, who matched up songs with Marlene Dietrich and Doris Day, finally had his own trademark music. “Even when people hear the music today,” wrote McCarty and Kelleher, “what they usually think of is Hitchcock’s silhouette countenance merging with the odd little line drawing that he had sketched of himself for the show’s logo.”

After the titles and “Funeral March,” the curtain metaphorically rose, and the host appeared to greet the viewers. Hitchcock’s first costume was ordinary, the speech concise:

But after the premiere, it was off to the races. The voyeur was also an exhibitionist. Sensing Hitchcock’s eagerness to perform—his willingness to show off and poke fun at himself—Allardice wrote wildly. By the third episode Hitchcock was twirling a gun; his weight was already a running joke; and, most astonishing, he had begun to skewer advertisers:

The cameos were sometimes vignettes of low comedy; other times they were extremely witty. Hitchcock was willing to take any Allardice dare: he donned a mustache to play his own twin brother, impersonated a genie lurking inside a bottle, became a scarecrow in a cornfield, even affected a mop top as one of the Beatles. The host set the tone as much as the stories
themselves, commenting on the absurdity of what audiences were about to witness, thereby ameliorating its subversive excesses.

The tone was also set, that first season, by first-class actors. They included familiar faces from Hitchcock films (Joseph Cotten, Barry Fitzgerald, Patricia Collinge, Robert Newton, Isobel Elsom, Thelma Ritter) and edgy newcomers (including, in the first season, John Cassavetes, Charles Bronson, and Joanne Woodward). The casting was often heavily English, and Hitchcock favorites abounded. John Williams, from
The Paradine Case, Dial M for Murder
, and
To Catch a Thief
, might hold the record. The dapper, self-effacing Englishman “was the definitive Hitchcock actor,” recalled Norman Lloyd. “Everything in his style served Hitchcock’s purposes: the underplaying, the subtle humor, the indirect approach he had.”

The directors were likewise topnotch. Hitchcock and Joan Harrison recruited many old acquaintances dating back to England—among them Robert Stevenson, Ida Lupino, and John Brahm. Robert Stevens, who guided more episodes than anyone (he was the only
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
director to win an Emmy, for the second season’s “The Glass Eye”), was another Englishman—and a veteran of
Suspense.

But the show was also open to up-and-comers, and young Americans like William Friedkin, Robert Altman, and George Stevens Jr. (the son of the well-known director) held their first important jobs on the series. Hitchcock was as closely involved in choosing the directors as he was with the stories and stars. Paul Henreid, the stalwart Warner Bros. actor known for his roles in
Casablanca
and
Now, Voyager
, was surprised one day by a call from Hitchcock himself, complimenting the only film he had directed—
For Men Only
, a low-budget college drama—and inviting Henreid to join the roster.

“But—but the blacklist …,” stammered Henreid, who believed that his left-leaning politics had gotten him “graylisted” in Hollywood.

“I think that’s over, Mr. Henreid,” said Hitchcock, “and high time.” Indeed, it was: Henreid thereafter got steady work directing episodes of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Bottom-billed in the cast of
For Men Only
was a beautiful blonde named Vera Miles, who had represented Kansas in the Miss America contest of 1948. After spotting the actress in Henreid’s 1951 film, Hitchcock ordered up a more recent John Ford film, and was impressed by Miles as Jeffrey Hunter’s pining sweetheart in
The Searchers.
He originally hired the actress for just one episode in the first season—a particularly audacious episode that involved fragile sanity, an implied rape, and a mistaken-identity murder.

“Revenge” would feature Miles as former ballet dancer who, after suffering
a nervous breakdown, moves to a trailer park with her husband (Ralph Meeker). One day, while the husband is at work, she is attacked by an unknown assailant. The attack leaves her traumatized. The police, as usual in a Hitchcock story, are clueless, so her husband vows to get revenge himself. Driving through a small town, the wife suddenly spots a man walking on the street and cries, “That’s him!” The husband pulls over and follows the man into a hotel, surprising him in his room and bludgeoning him to death. Getting back into the car, the husband reassures his wife, and they drive on. Then she spots another man walking. “That’s him!”

Hitchcock tried to draw a line between his television and film companies. They were supposed to be distinct operations, even headquartered in separate locations—the film offices at Paramount, the television shows produced on Revue stages at Universal. But inevitably the two spilled back and forth, and during the making of “Revenge” Hitchcock grew so excited about Miles that he signed her to a five-year contract, making her exclusive to him, for television
and
film. Miles was not only a shapely knockout (she photographed suggestively, ripe to burst in a sunsuit, in “Revenge”), but her acting was subtle and sensitive. With Ingrid Bergman off in Italy and Grace Kelly being a princess in Monaco, Hitchcock wanted Miles in his future.

The director’s enthusiasm for Miles, and for “Revenge,” led the host to make a last-minute decision: he made her episode the series debut—bumping “Breakdown,” with Joseph Cotten, which was rescheduled for later. Both were quintessential Hitchcock stories—anthologized together in Hitchcock’s 1949 collection,
Suspense Stories
^*
—but “Breakdown” was a minimasterpiece, with all the “pocket universality” of
Lifeboat
or
Rear Window.

Cotten starred as a ruthless businessman finishing a Miami vacation. Firing an employee by phone, he expresses disgust at the weak emotions of the man, who pleads and weeps for a second chance. While driving back to New York from Florida, his car, which has stopped for a prison road gang, is smashed into by a construction vehicle. He awakes to find himself pinned under the steering wheel of his wrecked car, completely paralyzed except for the ability to wiggle one finger. The escaped prisoners come and strip away his clothes and belongings, and when the police arrive everyone interprets his shocked stare as a mask of death. Ending up in a morgue, he is desperate to let people know he is alive. Just as a coroner is about to zip him into a body bag, he starts to weep, and someone finally notices his tears.

The main dialogue in the twenty-two-minute segment is Cotten’s interior
monologue, delivered as a voice-over. Most of the episode is composed of close-ups of his face, his immobility emphasized by extreme camera angles. It was “frozen film,” according to Hitchcock; “you optically repeat the last frame—that’s how you get a still.” It was also extraordinary television, a taste of pure cinema for the small screen—in critic Robin Wood’s words, a parable of “a systematic stripping away of all the protective armor of modern city man.”

Of the four episodes Hitchcock directed for 1955–56, “Revenge” and “Breakdown” were the best. The other two were “Back for Christmas,” with John Williams burying his nagging wife in the basement, then vacationing in California; and the oddball “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” with Tom Ewell as a man whose doppelgänger gradually takes over his identity.

Although the series would take a year to build its regular audience and climb into the top ten, it was an instant hit with television critics—and more than one thought that “the best thing about
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
,” in the words of John Crosby of the
New York Herald Tribune
, “is Alfred Hitchcock presenting.” Leo Mishkin, writing in the
New York Morning Telegraph
, agreed: “That wide-eyed innocence he displays on the twenty-one inch screen, that pudgy physique with its hanging lower lip, those soft accents of his speech all but annihilate the very image of suspense and terror he has tried so carefully to build up.”

He was already a star among moviegoers, but it’s no exaggeration to say that television provided a quantum leap in the magnitude of his celebrity. Or that 1955 was another very good year for the director:
To Catch a Thief
was a hit in theaters, he finally achieved his remake of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, and his name adorned a suspense series.

The Hitchcocks liked to vacation at Christmas, but it hadn’t always worked out that way. The holidays had meant mass firings at Islington, Gaumont, and Gainsborough. Christmas was dodgy during the Selznick years, too; the producer used to drive Hitchcock crazy, giving him his annual bonus in war bonds that couldn’t be immediately cashed in.

But a grateful Paramount gave him the Christmas present of a world tour at the end of 1955. Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock departed on the
Queen Mary
, on December 12, for a monthlong itinerary including Tokyo, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay, Cairo, Rome, Paris, and London. At each stop Hitchcock visited studio outposts and conducted publicity for his films, spreading his name and face around the globe. He was never happier than when he stood on the Ginza in Tokyo, gazing up at a billboard with his giant face painted on it. He chortled at what he saw: a Hitchcock with Asian eyes.