Authors: Patrick McGilligan
What really set
Flamingo Feather
back was a parade of logistical roadblocks: the idea of Princess Grace (a mirage), the politics (a turnoff for Paramount), and the budget (a potential sinkhole). And Hitchcock didn’t like what he heard in Africa about the available actors and extras and equipment. After touring the famed Valley of a Thousand Hills in Natal, he realized that the hills and valleys could be replicated outside Los Angeles. Why bother with Africa?
Up to this time, Hitchcock had fewer unrealized projects on his balance sheet than most major directors. It wasn’t until Warner Bros. and Paramount that he was even allowed to second-guess himself—allowed to write off the time and money he’d put into a project—whenever the situation proved “confusing,” the word he used when describing the fate of
Flamingo Feather
to François Truffaut.
By the time the Hitchcocks arrived back in America,
Flamingo Feather
was all but moot. Now “From Among the Dead” was moved up on the director’s schedule.
Nobody blamed Maxwell Anderson for the flaws of
The Wrong Man
, which he had written to order, and swiftly. Before Hitchcock went to Africa, he left in Anderson’s hands the task of working up the first treatment of what would become—almost two years and several writers later—
Vertigo.
In Nairobi, the director received a telegram saying that Anderson would have roughly fifty pages ready for him when he passed through New York. The two met for lunch, and Anderson handed his progress over to Hitchcock.
The Pierre Boileau-Thomas Narcejac novel was set in Paris and Marseilles during World War II. The story revolved around a forcibly retired detective whose shameful fear of heights has accidentally led to the death of a colleague. The detective is employed by an old acquaintance, a successful businessman he loathes, to follow around the man’s wife—who is said to be under an ancestral curse luring her toward suicide. As he follows the wife around, the detective becomes obsessively attracted to her. In the book and film, the wife’s name remains the same—Madeleine—as does her appearance: her hair in a tight bun, her figure wrapped in a “smart gray suit” cinched tight at the waist.
When Madeleine leaps to her death from a country church tower, the detective goes into a mental tailspin, unable to get the woman out of his mind or accept that she’s dead. After the war ends, while peering at faces in a newsreel, he spots a woman who resembles Madeleine. He tracks her down in Marseilles, and though she claims to be a complete stranger, he talks her into letting him re-create her as Madeleine—buying her a gray suit, changing her hair. Gradually it’s revealed that the Marseilles woman was the mistress of the Parisian businessman, and that her suicide was staged to cover up the man’s murder of his wife. Even though the detective succeeds in transforming the Marseilles woman back into Madeleine, he is driven insane by his confused love. The novel ends with him strangling her, convinced that only her death will bring the first Madeleine back to life.
Before Anderson wrote a word, he knew the major changes Hitchcock wanted from the novel. The decision had already been made to modernize
the story and relocate it to San Francisco. The location, as usual, was so basic to Hitchcock’s vision that two round-trip plane tickets for Anderson and his wife were attached to the writer’s June 1956 contract. The playwright was even instructed to visit specific sites, including San Juan Bautista and Mission Dolores; these had already been correlated with similar scenes in the novel. (Hitchcock had picked the Mission Dolores for its picturesque quality, even though the church didn’t have a bell tower. The way his mind worked, he was already planning simply to matte a tower in.) Hitchcock urged Anderson to preserve the spirit of the book, while transplanting its plot and characters.
The treatment Anderson handed over to Hitchcock in New York was formative. It was bookended with incidents of death on the Golden Gate Bridge, and portrayed Judy, the mistress who impersonates Madeleine, as a daughter of wealth who is haunted by her guilt. The dialogue was “awful” and the “set pieces overworked,” according to Dan Auiler in his book about the making of
Vertigo
, but that may be unfair to an early draft. Hitchcock certainly treated Anderson well, telling the writer in a subsequent letter that he was going to commission a new continuity, yet blaming himself for not following Anderson’s “original suggestion to have completed the structural layout even as far as a temporary script before you did the dialogue.”
For this all-important “structural layout,” he met again with his trusted compatriot Angus MacPhail. In August and September the two old friends talked over the Boileau-Narcejac story. MacPhail, according to some sources, was beginning to drink again; he was also feeling like a square peg in Hollywood, and wanted to return home to England. Although he recognized
Vertigo
as a “fascinating story,” in his words, MacPhail quit the project in September, telling Hitchcock the script needed “a real big imaginative contribution,” which he “simply couldn’t provide right now.”
Before MacPhail left, however, the two produced a new two-page outline, which began as the film does with the rooftop chase that introduces the detective and the
Vertigo
motif. Although this scene, absent from the French novel, was written in Hitchcock’s hand, Bill Krohn attributed the outline to the Hitchcock-MacPhail synergy. As Krohn wrote in
Hitchcock at Work
, MacPhail likely made “an important contribution to the film’s evolution.” (The American detective’s nickname, Scottie, lingers as a nod to the Scot—MacPhail.)
It was now imperative to bring in another “fresh writer,” and Joan Harrison suggested Alec Coppel. That was fine with the boys at MCA, as Coppel was also an agency client. In his mid-forties, Coppel was from England by way of Melbourne, and had been in Hollywood since the early 1950s. His name is absent from most reference books, probably because his work as a novelist, playwright, theater director, and writer of teleplays
and films spans three continents and so many different fields. By 1956, Coppel was familiar to Hitchcock: as an ongoing contributor to
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
he was already in the Bellagio Road circle, and internal memos suggest that he also did spot writing for
To Catch a Thief.
A superb dramatic constructionist, Coppel was also a jocular man whose novels, plays, and films tended toward light humor. During Hitchcock’s time at Gaumont, Coppel had adapted his West End success
I Killed the Count
into a 1938 film for the studio, with Ben Lyon and Terrence de Marney (brother of Derrick) among the cast.
*
The 1953 film
The Captain’s Paradise
, based on another Coppel play, was particularly successful, and it starred Alec Guinness as a skipper with a wife in two different ports, to match his split personality. Coppel’s original story secured him an Oscar nomination.
At their first meeting to discuss
Vertigo
, Hitchcock gave Coppel “four typed notes about key matters such as the opening rooftop chase, and dictated a list of the twenty-three sequences he already had in his head,” according to Bill Krohn. The two then met regularly through the fall of 1956, with Coppel charged first with developing a lengthy continuity consisting of “numbered paragraphs with no dialogue,” in Krohn’s words. This would be followed by a full script, hopefully in time to start filming in December 1956.
Besides ordering up a minifestival of Hitchcock films, the director screened
Diabolique
for Coppel; thereafter, joined by members of his staff, Hitchcock watched the 1955 French film several more times throughout the second half of 1956. If
The Wrong Man
had been Hitchcock’s attempt to emulate the Italians, with
Vertigo
he would go French all the way—trying for a film more dreamy, more romantic, its atmosphere more doom-laden than anything Hitchcock had previously done. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film was also based on a Boileau and Narcejac novel—and its story, like
D’Entre les Morts
, was also about a murder and a haunting.
With
Flamingo Feather
deferred, Hitchcock needed to start lining up other projects for the future. So in the late summer of 1956, Lew Wasserman brought him an offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
That summer, almost before it happened, Wasserman found out that MGM’s board of directors had ousted the studio’s production chief, Dore Schary. A former Wasserman client, Schary had presided over MGM’s plummeting production and revenue since 1948. Once Hollywood’s
biggest, most powerful studio, MGM was now in a state of turmoil and despair. A journeyman producer, Sol Siegel, was appointed the new head of production, and Siegel would make almost any deal with Wasserman to be able to tell stockholders he had a Hitchcock film on his schedule. He agreed to give Hitchcock top salary and budget, a percentage of gross earnings, and—in a meaningful first for Hitchcock—a clause in his contract giving the director final cut.
MGM wanted Hitchcock to develop a valued property:
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
, based on the Hammond Innes best-seller about an inquest into the mystery of a freighter found abandoned in the English Channel. Gary Cooper, whom Hitchcock had always admired, was mentioned as the likely star, and Bernard Herrmann recommended an MGM contract writer: his friend Ernest Lehman, a former Broadway publicist and radio writer. Lehman had adapted
Sabrina
for Billy Wilder and had just finished
Sweet Smell of Success
, based on his own scorching novel about press agentry, for Burt Lancaster’s production company.
Hitchcock and Lehman met in the studio commissary on the last day of August. Lehman’s strength was humor and dialogue, and he was wary of the courtroom-heavy
Wreck of the Mary Deare.
He was busy with other assignments, and told Hitchcock he didn’t want to commit himself. But Hitchcock instantly liked Lehman, who was sophisticated and effortlessly funny. Chuckling through lunch, he urged Lehman to read the book and reconsider. They could always have another lunch.
In the meantime Alec Coppel met periodically with Hitchcock, and worked at home on a new continuity for
Vertigo.
Hitchcock was busy through the late summer and early fall preparing the 1956–57 season of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
He preferred to shoot the bulk of his hosting vignettes, and at least two of the shows he was slotted to direct, before Christmas, leaving the winter for preproduction of a feature film. Eight or nine of Hitchcock’s presentations could be polished off in two days of nonstop filming (three or four times a season); directing an episode required two days of rehearsal, followed by three of photography.
With one successful season safely accomplished, Hitchcock was already able to cut back on the time he gave to the series, delegating more authority and responsibility to Joan Harrison. He directed only three episodes for 1956–57, and Harrison was promoted to full producer in the credits.
Hitchcock made it a policy to direct the season premiere, and for 1956–57 it was “Wet Saturday,” a droll suspense story by John Collier, featuring Cedric Hardwicke and John Williams; the second episode he directed was “Mr. Blanchard’s Secret,” a mild satire of
Rear Window
, about a murder mystery writer (Mary Scott) who jumps to erroneous conclusions about next-door neighbors. The third was the season highlight:
“One More Mile to Go” featured David Wayne as a henpecked husband who bludgeons his wife to death, and then drives around on the highway with her corpse stuffed in the trunk of his car, trying to decide how best to get rid of the body. A motorcycle policeman, who has noticed his blinking rear light, repeatedly pulls him over. Latter-day Hitchcock scholars have noted how this tour de force of macabre humor and suspense foreshadows scenes in
Psycho
(the ominous highway patrolman) and
Frenzy
(the dead woman’s body in a potato sack, rolling around in the rear of a lorry).
After the success of the first season, the publicity for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
snowballed; while a press junket every September took care of the national columnists, the requests for interviews with the host became a stream that never abated. Hitchcock’s publicity, once timed to the annual release of his films, became virtually nonstop.
When Gloria Stewart insisted that her husband, James, who was slated to star as the obsessed detective of
Vertigo
, take some time off before his next film, the late-fall start was postponed. Paramount agreed to carry the pre-production team on salary, and the filming was rescheduled for early 1957. Meanwhile, the second unit could continue to shoot location plates; Hitchcock could supervise wardrobe tests for Vera Miles, who had been cast as Madeleine/Judy; and Alec Coppel could take extra time on the script.
Coppel was improving on Maxwell Anderson’s spadework, especially when it came to the love story, which was changing and evolving. Coppel’s version already visualized one of the film’s famous scenes: Scottie kissing Judy in her hotel room, a kiss that plunges him back in time to the moment when he kissed Madeleine in the stables of San Juan Bautista. Coppel’s script, developed during extensive discussions with Hitchcock, even had the camera whirling deliriously around the couple, with Scottie experiencing the memory as an ecstasy.
Among the peculiarities of the latest draft, though, was the explanation for Scottie’s fear of heights—Coppel made it the result of a bad parachute jump in his backstory. And although Madeleine is haunted by a mysterious ancestor in the Boileau-Narcejac novel, Coppel had left that key idea out of his version, while retaining Anderson’s depiction of Judy (Madeleine’s double) as a wealthy woman (and guilt-ridden accessory) from the East Coast.
The longer Hitchcock dwelled on a story, the more deeply he was likely to explore its mysteries. But Coppel wanted to move on—he was preoccupied by a play he was writing—and so the project needed yet a third writer. (The play,
The Gazebo
, produced by the Playwrights’ Company in 1958, includes a character very much like Coppel—a television writer working on a play—who phones Hitchcock and asks him for advice about how to stage the murder scene.) Hitchcock and Coppel parted friends.