Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Lehman signed a contract for the project in December 1960, but it didn’t help when the overcommitted Stewart backed out, leaving the blind pianist to become “a David Niven type.” Or when Walt Disney publicly declared that he wouldn’t let his children watch
Psycho
, “nor would he allow Hitchcock to make a movie about Disneyland,” according to Garrett. The death blow, however, came the day Lehman appeared at Hitchcock’s office and announced he wished to quit, finding himself unable to solve the plot problems. Canceling “Blind Man,” Hitchcock vowed furiously never to work with the capricious Lehman again.
He told the press he might film
Trap for a Solitary Man
, a French play by M. Robert Thomas about a wife who disappears while on holiday in the French Alps—then resurfaces only to find her husband doesn’t recognize her. In interviews he insisted that he might still film
No Bail for the Judge
, with Audrey Hepburn and Laurence Harvey.
Novels were still the most reliable source of potential material, and Hitchcock considered several as the encore to
Psycho.
One was Paul Stanton’s
Village of Stars
, a cold war suspense story that leaves the pilot of a plane stranded in the air, with an atom bomb rigged to detonate at a low altitude.
Ultimately, though, Hitchcock chose
Marnie
, the latest novel by the English writer Winston Graham. Though Graham was best known as the author of the Poldark series about Cornish life in the eighteenth century,
Marnie
was a contemporary English story about a frigid kleptomaniac who is blackmailed into marriage by a man she has robbed. To cure her, he tries everything from forcing himself on her during their honeymoon to subjecting her to psychoanalysis, which traces the roots of her unhappiness to a sordid childhood.
Reviewers had praised the book for its psychological suspense from a woman’s point of view;
Marnie
offered Hitchcock the chance for an informal remake of
Spellbound
, reversing the doctor-patient roles so that the man’s unconditional love cures the woman. This time Hitchcock wouldn’t have to contend with David O. Selznick. Until he embraced
Marnie
it had been unclear whether Hitchcock would direct another film for Paramount, but a skeptical Lew Wasserman accepted
Marnie
largely in order to finalize the move to Universal—reassured by Hitchcock’s promise that the Winston Graham story would be Grace Kelly’s comeback.
Hitchcock had been in touch with Princess Grace in Monaco. He told her about
Marnie
, though he didn’t want her to read the book; he thought
it would be better to send her a detailed treatment, with the story already transplanted to America. With Stefano, who had done such a splendid job on
Psycho
, and Kelly to bring her charm and energy to the character of Marnie, Hitchcock at first envisioned a movie laced with more black comedy than the final film suggests.
For three months, starting on March 1, 1961, Hitchcock met daily with Stefano, trying to develop an Americanized version of
Marnie
, even dummying in dialogue for certain scenes to give Kelly “the best possible explanation of the movie she was coming back to,” in Stefano’s words.
As Kelly was from Philadelphia (like Stefano), that and other East Coast cities became the story’s new terrain. In the book there are two male cousins competing for Marnie’s affections, but Hitchcock wanted to make the film more a story of two women fighting over the same man. So the script invented a beautiful sister-in-law suspicious of Marnie. Marnie’s affinity for horses comes from the novel (she rides them, Hitchcock slyly informed one interviewer, “as though she were cleansing herself”), as does the very English foxhunt. Partial to the pastime (there’s also a foxhunt in
The Farmer’s Wife
), Hitchcock planned to preserve Marnie’s love of horses, while shifting the foxhunt to Philadelphia high society.
But Hitchcock and Stefano were still working in June, when word arrived from Monaco that 1962 was an impossible year for Grace Kelly. If Hitchcock waited for her, Kelly assured him, she would gladly appear in
Marnie
in 1963 or 1964. Hitchcock was willing to wait, and since nothing else was ready, he and Stefano parted amicably, and the partial draft of
Marnie
went into the files. The Hitchcocks took a longer-than-usual trip to New York later that month, meeting up with the director’s sister, Nellie, and his cousin Teresa, who were in from London; the family took in the hot-ticket musicals together, and paid a visit to Washington, D.C.
In July, he took longer than usual for the only episode of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
he would direct for the 1961-62 season—and the last of the half-hour shows he directed. “Bang! You’re Dead” was a taut suspense story about a boy (Billy Mumy) who roams his neighborhood with a seeming cap pistol, which nobody realizes is a real gun loaded with bullets. As he did now and then, Hitchcock introduced this episode with an atypical lead-in, gravely intoning a warning about the danger of keeping firearms in the home.
Throughout the summer, he sifted through other stories. One novel he considered, interestingly, was
The Mind Thing
, a work of science fiction by Fredric Brown about an alien visiting earth who is able to possess living creatures. At the end, the alien assaults the hero “in an isolated cabin [with] a variety of animals that the alien is using as weapons, ranging from a bull to a dive-bombing chicken hawk,” as Bill Krohn recounted in
Hitchcock at Work.
“Clearly,” wrote Krohn, “Hitchcock wanted to make a film
in which Nature declares war on the human race.” From
Village of Stars
to
Marnie
to
The Mind Thing
: the diversity bespoke a remarkable range of imagination for a man in his sixties. Hitchcock refused to ossify or be pigeonholed.
It wasn’t until nearly August 1962, some eighteen months after he had completed
Psycho
, that Hitchcock settled on a new project, one with noticeable similarities to
The Mind Thing.
As usual, the choice was triggered by a number of factors, including coincidence: he had read in the newspapers of an August 1961 incident in Capatolla, California, when thousands of seabirds swarmed down from the sky, wreaking havoc—and that reminded him of a Daphne du Maurier novella.
Du Maurier’s
The Birds
was first published in
Good Housekeeping
in 1952; Hitchcock had reprinted it in his 1959 anthology,
My Favorites in Suspense.
Du Maurier’s moody novella concerned an epidemic of murderous bird attacks on a quiet Cornish village, as told from the point of view of a peasant farmer, his wife, and their children.
Jamaica Inn, Rebecca
, and now
The Birds:
for the third time Hitchcock would film a du Maurier story, although he was sensitive to that fact, and insisted in later interviews that he had no special affection for the author. Indeed, as Hitchcock told François Truffaut, in a comment that he asked be excised from their published interviews, “I only read the story once. … I couldn’t tell you what it was about today.” Yet there was something that drew him to du Maurier’s fiction, even as he felt compelled to slight it in public.
Once he had decided, he moved rapidly to recruit a writer. Stefano had taken other work, so Hitchcock met first with James Kennaway, who had written the acclaimed novel
Tunes of Glory
, made into a picture in 1960 with an Oscar-nominated script. “I see this film done in only one way,” Kennaway told him. “You should never see a bird.” Out! Hitchcock also interviewed Wendell Mayes, who had written Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder films, but didn’t feel right about Mayes either. So he offered the job to Ray Bradbury, now established in science fiction but also a regular writer for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
(Bradbury had also written John Huston’s acclaimed film of
Moby-Dick.
) Bradbury was enthusiastic about the du Maurier story, but when he told the director he couldn’t start right away—ironically, he was busy with assignments for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
—the impatient Hitchcock decided he couldn’t steal him away from Joan Harrison.
Instead he picked a New York novelist who had less screen experience than any of them. Evan Hunter’s first novel, 1954’s acclaimed
The Blackboard Jungle
, had been made into a compelling film, though the Oscarnominated screenplay was written by director Richard Brooks. Hunter had also sold a short story to
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, “Vicious Circle,”
which was broadcast in April of 1957—though Hunter didn’t write the teleplay either, and Hitchcock himself didn’t direct the episode. It wasn’t until 1959 that Hunter was hired by Joan Harrison to work directly for the series, adapting a Robert Turner story called “Appointment at Eleven.”
“Appointment at Eleven” was about a man sitting in a bar, nursing a drink, and watching the clock. As the story unfolds we learn that his father is scheduled to be executed in a nearby penitentiary, at 11
P.M.
Hitchcock didn’t direct this episode, but it spoke to his opposition to capital punishment, and the host abandoned his customary tongue-in-cheek lead-in to introduce the show by saying the story’s importance spoke for itself.
Hunter had dealt exclusively with Joan Harrison until the late summer of 1959, when the author came to California to adapt his novel
Strangers When We Meet
into a film for Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak, and to develop
87th Precinct
, based on his detective series under the nom de plume Ed McBain, as an NBC television series. By this time Hunter had a solid reputation.
Harrison invited Hunter and his wife over to the Revue screening room at Universal to view “Appointment at Eleven,” and afterward they were escorted onto a soundstage where the host of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
was directing a scene for “The Crystal Trench.” The scene required an actor to lie beneath a block of ice, Hunter recalled; “the ice was resting on a narrow wooden ditch into which the actor had crawled. Another actor was supposed to rub his gloved hand over the ice, until the face of the actor below was gradually revealed.”
Hunter was not the first or last writer to feel that his wife was an asset to his résumé where Hitchcock was concerned. Anita Hunter was then “all of twenty-nine years old, an attractive, russet-haired woman with green eyes, a warm smile, and a smart New York Jewish Girl sense of humor,” Hunter recalled in
Me and Hitch.
Hitchcock “took an immediate liking to her, which was somewhat surprising considering his predilection for glacial blondes,” and proceeded to ignore Hunter, guiding his wife around, “explaining pieces of equipment, introducing her to his cinematographer and his assistant director.”
The crew was beginning “to get a bit frantic,” noted Hunter, “because the huge block of ice seemed to be melting under the glare of the lights and Hitch still showed no intention of wanting to direct the scene. Finally, after the plaintive words, ‘Mr. Hitchcock, sir, we’re ready to go now sir’ had been repeated a half dozen times, he cordially bade us goodbye.”
Flash forward two years, to late August 1961, when Hunter received a telephone call from his agent asking if he’d be interested in adapting Daphne du Maurier’s novella into a Hitchcock film. “Why me?” the author wondered. Had Hitchcock finally remembered him, or his charming
wife, Anita? “I told my agent I would have to read the story before I decided,” Hunter recalled. “In truth, for the chance to work with Alfred Hitchcock on a feature film, I would have agreed to do a screenplay based on the Bronx telephone book.”
After reading
The Birds
, Hunter told his agent he would like to take a shot at it, and Hitchcock phoned him to talk that very day. They had several phone conversations discussing ideas before he left the East Coast for California. Hunter signed a contract for seven weeks; Hitchcock warned that it might turn into a three-or four-month stint, and perhaps he should bring his lovely wife and children to California for the duration.
If Hitchcock read the Daphne du Maurier novella only once, his memory for the arc and details of the story was remarkable. Besides the pattern of birds “attacking, retreating and massing to attack again,” in the words of Bill Krohn in
Hitchcock at Work
, and the “vivid descriptions of bird attacks,” several key incidents in the film are lifted directly from du Maurier. These include the discovery of a neighbor found dead with his eyes pecked out, and the climax, with the family barricaded inside a house as the birds rally their final attack—followed by “the complete absence of explanation for the catastrophe,” in Krohn’s words.
But the script also deviated radically from the book, and once again the first order of business was “transatlantic”—moving the story and characters from Cornwall to an America familiar to Hitchcock. The farming village in southwest England would become the seaside hamlet of Bodega Bay, sixty miles north of San Francisco.
*
Characteristically, this location was established before the writer signed his contract, and one of the first things Evan Hunter did was tour San Francisco and Bodega Bay, with Hitchcock as his guide. As usual, the reality inspired the director: a small lake ringed by a road gave him staging ideas, and the local schoolhouse prompted the imagining of a particular frightening scene, with a swarm of birds pursuing young, screaming children.
The pair then launched into daily script conferences, with rituals that Hitchcock had been following for almost forty years. “During our first exploratory week of getting to know each other and our individual styles,” Hunter recalled in
Me and Hitch
, “I arrived in time for breakfast with him in the morning and we worked together till noon, when he broke for lunch.”
“Tell me the story so far …,” Hitchcock always began.
“Hitch shot down two ideas I’d brought out with me. The first of these was to add a murder mystery to the basic premise of birds attacking humans, an idea I still like. But Hitch felt this would muddy the waters and rob suspense from the real story we wanted to tell. The second was about a new schoolteacher who provokes the scorn of the locals when unexplained attacks start shortly after her arrival in town. In the eventual movie, the schoolteacher survived (but not for long) in the presence of Annie Hayworth. In the movie, the town’s suspicion and anger surfaces in the Tides Restaurant scene. But Hitch did not want a schoolteacher for his lead; he needed someone more sophisticated and glamorous.”