Authors: Patrick McGilligan
At the end of November, Hitchcock wrote Maxwell Anderson to say that he now had a suitable springboard for a shooting script, and invited him to rejoin the project. “This construction has taken many weeks of work between Mr. Coppel and myself,” Hitchcock wrote, “and I still wonder that after all the years of one’s experience why construction is such a hard job.” His long letter reminded Anderson that “an audience sitting there looking at this picture has no idea at all that this is a murder story.” The film should be “a strange mood love story,” wrote Hitchcock, with the woman falling in love with the detective just as tragically as the detective falls in love with her. “I am really anxious to get mood,” he said, “but not necessarily somber mood” and not “heavy-handed.” As an example of such a mood, Hitchcock cited the “fey quality” of a favorite play,
Mary Rose
—another story about a haunting woman.
They arranged to meet a few weeks later, when Hitchcock would be in New York doing publicity for
The Wrong Man.
But when Anderson showed up, he told the director he’d thought it over—and wished to decline. Hitchcock was taken aback. He phoned Kay Brown immediately to ask about other writers—telling the agent “with remarkable clarity,” according to Herbert Coleman, “the story [of the film] in a very few minutes.” Brown thought of Sam Taylor, a playwright whose Broadway hits included
The Happy Time
and
Sabrina Fair.
(The latter had been adapted for film by Ernest Lehman, another writer being pursued by Hitchcock.) Serendipitously—it was one of the reasons Brown thought of him—Taylor had been educated at Berkeley and had lived in the San Francisco area for several years.
The early-1957 start date was pushed back again. Even so, the script might have been rushed—and
Vertigo
might have been less of a film—if events hadn’t further delayed the production.
Shortly after the first postponement of
Vertigo
, the director suddenly dropped his fork during lunch, hugging his stomach. Although the pain went away, Hitchcock knew it was his navel hernia. His physician, Dr. Ralph Tandowsky, insisted that he have the operation he had been stalling for years. The January surgery was expected to be routine, but turned out more serious when colitis was discovered. Hitchcock took to bed for a few weeks.
It was while recuperating at home that Hitchcock held his first meetings with Sam Taylor to discuss the
Vertigo
script. “We discovered as soon as we met that our minds worked alike,” the writer remembered, “and that we had a rapport. It seemed to be a rapport that didn’t have to be announced. So, when we worked, especially at his house, we would sit and talk. We would talk about all sorts of things—talk about food, talk about wives, talk about travel. We’d talk about the picture, and there would be
a long silence, and we’d just sit and contemplate each other, and Hitchcock would say, ‘Well, the meter is still running …’ And then all of a sudden we would pick up again and talk some more.”
In the middle of the night on March 9, however, Hitchcock woke up in extraordinary pain, and was rushed to Cedars of Lebanon in an ambulance. He was wheeled into an operating room for a second operation, this time to remove obstructing gallstones, and this time lingering in the hospital for a month. At first his visitors, and phone calls, were restricted. Soon he rebounded, and within a week he was conducting interviews from his bed, expounding on his favorite murderesses: Madeleine Smith, Adelaide Bartlett, Edith Thompson. …
Yet for the first four months of 1957, Hitchcock was hospitalized or bedridden at home. “For one who has always boasted of never having been sick, I really hit the jackpot this time—Hernia, Jaundice, Gall Bladder removed—and two internal hemorrhages—all in 12 weeks,” he wrote to Michael Balcon, who used the widely reported news of Hitchcock’s illness to seek a rapprochement. “I am now busily restoring my blood count,” he added cheerfully, “in order that I may resume at least in three weeks more lucrative ‘operations’ such as two feature films, 30 one-half hour television shows and 10 one-hour shows!”
Released from the hospital on April 9, Hitchcock spent another month at home, taking it easy. Not until the end of April did he return to work at Paramount, and keep a pressing lunch date with Lew Wasserman, MCA agent Herman Citron, and James Stewart. Stewart, a full business and creative partner on
Vertigo
, as on all his films with Hitchcock, had continued meeting with Sam Taylor during the precarious months of March and April. The star’s willingness to explore emotions he had never bared before—his instincts for drama and performance—helped Taylor deepen Stewart’s role.
The character of Scottie was safe in Stewart’s hands, then; it was the part of Madeleine/Judy that was suddenly up in the air. That was the crisis facing the four men at the end-of-April lunch. When the director’s gallstones had forced yet a third postponement of
Vertigo
, Vera Miles had telephoned Coleman in a panic. “She was not the calm, thoughtful Vera I knew so well,” recalled Coleman. “Her voice revealed a troubled young lady”—because, as Miles informed Coleman, she was pregnant.
During the filming of
The Wrong Man
, Miles had married Gordon Scott, an actor who portrayed Tarzan in several 1950s movies. Their marriage had in fact aggravated the tensions between Miles and Hitchcock, for he had a history with actresses being distracted by new husbands, and he was especially opposed to a marriage if he didn’t think much of the husband.
And marriage inevitably produced babies. Now Miles was pregnant, which mandated either another postponement of
Vertigo
or a new leading lady. Although Hitchcock’s first personal star might have been able to finesse
the role earlier in 1957, she knew she couldn’t disguise her pregnancy on a midyear shoot; besides, she wanted to take time off to be with her baby. That news ended her conversation with Coleman, he recalled—“together with Hitch’s dream of making Vera a major star.”
Coleman was the bearer of the tidings, bringing the news to Hitchcock when he was still in the hospital. The director didn’t curse or scream; he simply let out a long, weary sigh. First Ingrid Bergman, then Anita Björk, now Vera Miles. Actresses falling in love, and their ill-timed pregnancies, seemed to haunt his career. Though he tried to stay cordial with Miles, casting her in
Psycho
and as the lead of his only hour-long color telefilm, he “lost interest” in making the actress a star, Hitchcock later admitted. “I couldn’t get the rhythm going with her again.”
All along, Lew Wasserman had preferred a different actress, someone more glamorous and well established at the box office—someone like Kim Novak. Wasserman and Stewart had spoken enthusiastically about Novak, a twenty-four-year-old actress who had made her screen debut with a walk-on in a 1954 Jane Russell vehicle. Hitchcock had in fact looked at test footage of Novak while casting
The Trouble with Harry.
Although at first she seemed an obviously manufactured personality, and the critics loved to snipe at her, by 1957 Novak had not only made strides as a performer, but been named by
Box-Office
as the most popular star in the United States Best of all, she was a sexy blonde with ethereal looks—like Madeleine’s.
Novak was an MCA client but under contract to Columbia, where she was a pet protégée of studio head Harry Cohn. After Hitchcock agreed, Wasserman walked into the office of Harry Cohn and arranged a swap: James Stewart would consent to appear in a future Columbia production with Novak, in return for the studio loaning her to
Vertigo.
At lunch, the four men decided on a new start date: June.
Though still unfinished, the script of
Vertigo
was evolving as a jewel, the four men agreed. Taylor had improved scenes and dialogue throughout, although his only real innovation was coming up with the character of Midge, a college friend of Scottie’s with an unrequited crush on him, who would function as one of Hitchcock’s Greek chorus characters early in the story. Taylor even had an actress in mind for the part—his friend Barbara Bel Geddes, who had been nominated for an Oscar for
I Remember Mama
, but who worked mainly on Broadway.
Taylor’s first substantial conference with Hitchcock since the second hospitalization came the following week, the first week of May. It was then that Hitchcock, who had just spent weeks in bed brooding over
Vertigo
, broached a major departure from the novel. Judy’s involvement in the real Madeleine’s death, suggested the director, ought to be revealed to the audience two-thirds of the way through the film, rather than at the denouement
as in the book. The truth would be made clear to audiences through Judy’s memories as she wrestles with her role in deceiving Scotty.
Taylor was “shocked” by the idea, Hitchcock later told Peter Bogdanovich. But the writer remembered things differently. “I kept saying to Hitchcock that there’s something missing,” Taylor said. “Then one day I said to him, ‘I know exactly what’s missing’—I said, ‘It’s really a Hitchcockian thing.’ I was naturally being ‘Hitchcock’ with him. I said, ‘This is not pure Hitchcock unless the audience knows what has happened,’ and he agreed.
“The trouble was, I didn’t know exactly how to write it because I thought originally of [having a] scene between Judy and Elster, in which he is preparing to go east and she is saying, ‘What will become of me?’ That would’ve revealed it to the audience, but I came to the conclusion—not I alone, but Hitch and I talking about it—we came to the conclusion that [that] would strangely rob Scottie. It was just an instinct with us both.
“We finally fastened on what we did, which is the writing of the letter and the flashback. I always felt that it was a weakness that we had to do it that way.”
As Hitchcock and Taylor continued refining the script, a minor crisis postponed the production once more: furious at Harry Cohn for profiting on her loan-out, Kim Novak refused to report to work. Cohn and Novak haggled throughout the summer.
Vertigo
was ultimately rescheduled to start filming in October 1957, almost a year from its original start date. With all that time to put to productive use, “the screenplay was written in great detail, as it should be directed,” noted Dan Auiler, “down to the camera directions and even the commentary on the music.”
The delays deepened and darkened the script. For the first time, a Hitchcock love story would end pathetically, with the abject failure of the hero and the death of the leading lady.
Over the summer, as Hitchcock pressed forward with
Vertigo
, he also met with Ernest Lehman, whom he had coaxed into writing
The Wreck of the Mary Deare.
Most of their time was spent gossiping over enjoyable lunches. In spite of the fact that Hitchcock had a signed deal, he didn’t seem eager to film the Hammond Innes best-seller. “Every time I brought up
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
,” Lehman recalled, “I saw looks of anxiety cross his face and he would adeptly change the subject.”
Lehman was likewise indifferent. All he managed to sketch out was “a powerful opening image of a ship drifting, deserted, in the English channel” and a tentative ending. He thought “the rest” was doomed to be “a boring courtroom drama” with manifold flashbacks. He waited and waited for Hitchcock to arrive at a similar conclusion, as their delightful lunches continued. Finally one day Lehman announced, “I give up. I just cannot see a way of dramatizing this book
properly.
Please get yourself another writer.”
“Don’t be silly,” responded Hitchcock, shaking his head. “We get along so well, let’s forget this one and think of some other picture to do together.”
“I think he sensed that he’d be ‘safe’ with me,” Lehman told Donald Spoto. “He cast those around him very carefully, based on his unconscious readings of their potential behavior—whether they’d be threatening to him, perhaps the type who could leap up and show anger. I was quiet, respectful, interested, maybe even interesting, and obviously one who would easily fit the role of ‘sitting at the feet of the master.’ ”
Lehman sat at the master’s feet for a few more weeks, kicking around ideas. Forgetting, once again, his vow to stay away from costume pictures, Hitchcock revived the idea of filming the life of eighteenth-century highwayman and escape artist Jack Sheppard. But Lehman wasn’t keen on Jack Sheppard, either, so eventually they fell to musing about what Hitchcock called “a sole provocative idea with which I had long been obsessed.” The idea for “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose” concerned a nonexistent master spy who has been set up as a CIA decoy. The man would be mixed up in an assassination at the UN, and the climax would be the decoy dangling from a presidential nose at Mount Rushmore—“a unique predicament” in the director’s mind “before even one word of the script was written,” in Hitchcock’s words.
Hitchcock had carried around the germ of
North by Northwest
for seven years, talking about it with friends and associates and other writers. “We used to discuss it every time we had a chance,” recalled John Michael Hayes, now banished from Hitchcock’s employ.
Hearing the director sketch this ultra-Hitchcockian story—wrong-man suspense mingled with comedy and romance—Lehman grew excited. They brainstormed some ideas. The decoy agent, whose name was Thornhill from the earliest draft, was “probably a traveling salesman” in Otis Guernsey’s original synopsis. Hitchcock saw him as a New York businessman, and now, talking to Lehman, thought he might be an American supersalesman—a highly successful ad executive. Lehman had a Madison Avenue background, so why not?
There was only one hitch: MGM thought Hitchcock was busy developing
The Wreck of the Mary Deare.
No problem, the director told Lehman. He set up a meeting at MGM, and informed officials there that it was going to take him quite a while to lick the Hammond Innes novel, and he said he could knock off another MGM picture in the meantime. “Which delighted them,” recalled Lehman, “because they thought they would get two films instead of one.”
*
So MGM got a two-page outline of a story called “In a Northwesterly Direction.”