Authors: Patrick McGilligan
On July 1
North by Northwest
had its premiere in Chicago, followed by national openings. “Suspenseful and delightful,” A. H. Weiler wrote in the
New York Times. Newsweek
found it shiny, colorful and “slick, slick, slick.” Hollis Alpert of
Saturday Review
called it funny and macabre and “much the best Hitchcock that has come along in years.” It was a tremendous hit, taking in $6 million in rentals in North America alone.
Shortly after the opening, Hitchcock was eating lunch in the MGM commissary when Cary Grant strolled in and spotted the director. The two had not been on the best of terms during the filming, but now, with all eyes upon him, the dapper star walked over to Hitchcock’s table, knelt down on the floor, and salaamed the director exaggeratedly.
*
Why? Take a look at
Operation Petticoat
, a perfectly entertaining film made in the same year
as
North by Northwest
, but one in which Grant is reduced to mannerisms. Not only were Grant’s Hitchcock films among his very best, no director gave him better roles, and extracted livelier performances.
Often self-deprecating about his films, Hitchcock had no reason to be modest about
North by Northwest.
“It’s the American
39 Steps
,” he told Peter Bogdanovich.
Sam Taylor had come to California before Christmas 1958 and then accompanied the Hitchcocks on their annual getaway to England and Europe. Stopping over in London, they scouted locations for
No Bail for the Judge
; in Paris, they conducted publicity for
Vertigo.
At St. Moritz, they celebrated the holidays and brainstormed on the new script.
No Bail for the Judge
was a novel by Henry Cecil (born Henry Cecil Leon), an English judge who wrote fiction, nonfiction, and plays dealing with crime and the law. The novel concerned a lady barrister whose father is a well-known judge at the Old Bailey. Injured while on his way home one evening, the judge is assisted by a warmhearted prostitute, who takes him to her flat to recover. He likes her, and decides to stay at her place for a time. One night he arrives to find his rescuer dead, a knife in her back. The compromising circumstances lead to accusations of murder. His barrister daughter blackmails a gentleman thief into helping her find the person really responsible for the crime.
The Old Bailey milieu, the wrong man with his fingerprints on a knife, a heroine who clashes with an unjust legal system—all this suggested a run-for-cover crime film, but with enough variations and differences to keep Hitchcock interested. A big budget was anticipated to cover making the film in England—as well as the salary of Audrey Hepburn, Paramount’s leadingest lady (“over the decade” of the 1950s, wrote David Shipman, “she would often seem the only female star worth a light”), who had agreed to play the judge’s daughter.
Although Hitchcock liked to complain about England—and the English film industry—he was looking forward to shooting his first film entirely in London since
Stage Fright
in 1949. Taylor didn’t officially go on salary until the end of January 1959, but by then he was already deep into the script with Hitchcock. Their main concern was enlarging Hepburn’s role in the story; by April, after sessions at the studio and weekends up at Santa Cruz, there was a continuity treatment and partial draft.
Even before the April screening of
North by Northwest
for the MGM board, Hitchcock, Taylor, Herbert Coleman, and production designer Henry Bumstead had paid a second visit to London, finalizing the locations and the largely English cast. Although his appointment book suggests that Hitchcock interviewed Richard Burton for the part, Laurence
Harvey was ultimately selected to play the gentleman thief, and John Williams would have had his most important role yet for Hitchcock, as the judge, Hepburn’s father.
Paramount seemed happy about the project, until executives learned of the director’s intention to push the boundaries of the subject matter. In Hitchcock’s revamping of the story, the female barrister would masquerade as a prostitute to investigate the murder, and then find herself under attack in Hyde Park, dragged into the bushes and fending off a rape. This scene (with its echoes of
Blackmail
) took the studio—and perhaps Audrey Hepburn—by surprise, for it didn’t exist in the book.
Among the Paramount officials who loathed the rape scene was associate producer Coleman. He took the lead as the studio’s intermediary, trying to pry it out of the script, arguing that Hitchcock was straying from the “beautiful people, beautiful scenery” credo of his Paramount films. His leading lady would be repelled by the rape scene, Coleman argued, reminding Hitchcock that Hepburn had just finished playing a saintly missionary in the Belgian Congo in
The Nun’s Story.
But Hitchcock dug in his heels. He relished shaking up the star’s decorous image, as he had with other actors throughout his career—a career also spent pushing the cinema closer to unflinching depictions of violence. Hepburn wouldn’t exactly be raped, he argued; she would fight off the rape. He insisted that the scene could be—would be—filmed in such a way as to satisfy Hepburn, Paramount, and the Production Code. By now, though, Paramount understood that Hitchcock’s assurances were slippery where censorship was concerned, and the studio was reluctant to let him go to England with a script that hadn’t been vetted.
According to Coleman, Hepburn herself read the script and objected to the scene; other books, including Barry Paris’s authoritative biography of the actress, concur that Hepburn was “notoriously squeamish about violence,” and nervous about the Hitchcock project. Armed with Hepburn’s qualms, Coleman made one last unsuccessful attempt to convince Hitchcock to drop the scene. Finally, on behalf of the studio, Coleman shelved the script, and halted the production.
But the official explanation—the one Hitchcock offered in subsequent interviews—is just as plausible. Hepburn had just learned that she was pregnant. She had suffered miscarriages in the past, and was desperate to bear a child. Considering his history with pregnant actresses, Hitchcock would have been quick to read the writing on the wall. The birth of Hepburn’s son Sean Ferrer on July 17, 1960, bears out this timetable. And until he officially left Paramount, Hitchcock continued to mention Hepburn and
No Bail for the Judge
in interviews, as though in his mind the project was only just temporarily postponed.
Either way, the decision came to a head soon after the men returned
from their final scouting mission to England.
No Bail for the Judge
wouldn’t have the same allure for Hitchcock if it had to be made without Hepburn—or without the rape scene. Once again, as with
The Bramble Bush
and
Flamingo Feather
, he set aside a film. As Hitchcock later explained, preproduction had cost Paramount $200,000—but after he warned studio officials that continuing the troubled project would risk the loss of another $3 million, “they asked no further questions.”
In any event, Hitchcock told the studio, he had another project in mind, an American run-for-cover that he could whip together quickly. He might not have canceled
No Bail for the Judge
so agreeably if he hadn’t had a ready alternative. As Paramount waited to learn more, at home on June 3, 1959, after talking it over with Lew Wasserman, Hitchcock convened the initial production conference for
Psycho.
Six months earlier, on December 18, 1958, MCA had taken a historic step, entering the film production business by purchasing Universal International and its 367-acre lot for $11.25 million. MCAs takeover of Universal cemented Lew Wasserman as the most powerful man in Hollywood, at once the head of the biggest talent agency and the head of a major studio (albeit one fallen on hard times). Immediately after making the acquisition, MCA started signing its clients to Universal contracts—an activity that intensified the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation of the agency’s strong-arm practices. The cancellation of
No Bail for the Judge
opened the door for Universal to recruit Hitchcock, which was Wasserman’s goal. But Wasserman had to accept
Psycho
; that was Hitchcock’s clever gamble.
Psycho
may well be the most overly familiar motion picture in history. There are innumerable essays, books, college courses, academic symposia, fan clubs, and Web sites devoted to extolling and analyzing the film. But when Hitchcock first presented
Psycho
to his agents, his staff, and Paramount, he framed it as a simple, low-budget American shocker, in the style of his TV series, which would provide a breather from more lavish, grandiose productions.
Galleys of Robert Bloch’s novel had circulated at Paramount back in mid-February 1959, but the weird yarn about a psycho killer who runs a lonely roadside motel was promptly rejected by studio readers as too ghoulish and posing insurmountable problems for censorship. Hitchcock’s office routinely saw all the reader reports, but the director’s antenna shot up when Anthony Boucher, in his
New York Times
crime-fiction column of April 19, 1959, praised the novel as “chillingly effective.” Hitchcock, a devotee of Boucher’s column, asked his assistant, Peggy Robertson, to get him a copy of the book.
Bloch, a Wisconsin author little known outside pulp-fiction circles, had been inspired by the real-life case of Ed Gein, a Plainfield, Wisconsin, farmer arrested in 1957 for grave robbing, cannibalism, and murder. A search of Gein’s property revealed the remains of an indefinite number of female victims who had been cut up, eviscerated, and cannibalized; their skins, skulls, and body parts were displayed throughout his home. The investigation revealed that Gein, who adorned himself in garments made from the flesh of his victims, had had a tormented, perhaps incestuous relationship with his mother, whose death triggered his spree.
The basic facts of the Gein case were spun by Bloch into a macabre suspense story about a fat, lonely middle-aged tippler who has killed his mother and stuffed her corpse. One rainy night, a young woman who has stolen forty thousand dollars arrives at the motel he runs; he rents her a room, then spies on her through a peephole as she prepares for a shower. Dressed grotesquely in his mother’s clothes, he surprises her with a visit.
“Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.”
Hitchcock liked to boast about playing the emotions of audiences as though they were notes on a organ, but when he read
Psycho
he must have recognized his own inner music surging through him. It was
The Lodger
as the Landlord of a motel; it was a phantasmagoria with a scary mansion, stairwell, and dark basement; it was a Peeping Tom and a screaming Jane; it was the world’s worst bathroom nightmare, mingling nudity and blood; it was a plunging knife in the muscled grip of a man dressed, bizarrely, as his own mother. It is no exaggeration to say that Hitchcock had been waiting for
Psycho
—working up to it—all his life.
Late in April, MCA quietly arranged to option the screen rights—so quietly that the author had no idea who the buyer of his book might be. Only later did Bloch learn that
Psycho
was going to be immortalized by Alfred Hitchcock; like some other authors of books used for Hitchcock films, he always resented the price: a low, blind bid of nine thousand dollars.
Psycho
would be the ultimate
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, the director told his staff: gruesome and scary and darkly humorous. He might even save a little money by shooting the film with his television crew. Shooting it in black and white would also keep costs down (and besides, he added in later interviews, “in color, the blood flowing down the bathtub drain would have been
repulsive
”). All the filming could be done in the studio—on a quick, TV-style schedule.
With such a run-for-cover project Hitchcock could move fast, and he did. At Joan Harrison’s suggestion, he met with James P. Cavanagh on May 12. At this point Cavanagh was mainly a writer for television, including
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
; he had won the Best Teleplay Emmy
for his 1956 episode, “Fog Closes In,” and for the 1956–57 season had written the
Psycho
-inflected episode called “One More Mile to Go.” Cavanagh was given a pep talk, a copy of Bloch’s novel, and eight pages of handwritten notes “in which the director laid out precise camera movements and sound cues for certain key sequences” of the film, according to Stephen Rebello in his authoritative
Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of
Psycho.
When a story spoke to Hitchcock, it was because certain scenes were so specific, so resonant, so Hitchcockian, that he could visualize the pictures instantly. This is how, in this very first script conference with Cavanagh, Hitchcock was already describing Marion Crane’s hours of driving before she finds herself on an unfamiliar road and pulls over at the Bates Motel: “The long traffic-laden route along Route
99
—the roadside sights—the coming of darkness. Mary’s thoughts about Monday morning and the discovery of her flight with the money. The rain starts.”
If Paramount was concerned about Audrey Hepburn getting raped in
No Bail for the Judge
, though,
Psycho
—as Hitchcock (and Lew Wasserman) had foreseen—really threw studio officials into a tizzy. A flurry of meetings followed, involving Hitchcock’s lawyer, MCA agents, and studio head Y. Frank Freeman. Freeman was aghast; he was Hitchcock’s friend and ordinarily his ally, but Freeman had also just accepted the position of president of the Motion Picture Association of America, which administered the Production Code.
Psycho
—with its nudity, violence, transvestism, and bathroom scenes—loomed as Hitchcock’s most direct challenge to the Code.
It was certainly a challenge to Paramount, but Hitchcock vowed to leap the censorship hurdles and said he was determined to make the film. Paramount’s corporate president, Barney Balaban, flew out from New York in early June for another high-level meeting, expressly to discuss
Psycho
—but also to confront Freeman. After twenty-six years at Paramount, Freeman was then ushered out as head of production. Publicly, Paramount explained that Freeman was in ill health, but privately Balaban felt the studio had been foundering without Don Hartman, and that Freeman was proving unable to handle problems like
Psycho.
Balaban was anxious to shift the studio’s focus toward family musicals like Warner Bros.’s
Auntie Mame
and MGM’s
Gigi
, which had been the big box-office winners and dominated the Oscar race in 1958. Freeman was abruptly replaced by Jacob H. Karp, previously in charge of legal affairs, who joined Balaban in opposing
Psycho.
They were willing to revise Hitchcock’s debt to the studio—and Wasserman was ready with an innovative proposal.