Alfred Hitchcock (124 page)

Hitchcock never forgot his pleasure at watching the James Barrie play in 1920. Barrie’s ghost story concerns a young girl who disappears while on holiday with her parents on a Scottish island, dubbed “The Island That Likes to Be Visited.” When the girl returns after twenty days, she can’t explain where she has been or what has happened to her. Later, at eighteen, Mary Rose gets married and bears a child; returning to the same island on her anniversary, once again she vanishes. This time she goes missing for many years, returning guiltily to look for her son only after he is fully grown into a man. She herself is unchanged—a young, innocent, still-beautiful ghost.

Hitchcock had tried over the years to interest various producers in a film of the play. He had pitched
Mary Rose
to Twentieth Century–Fox in
the 1940s, and mentioned it to Paramount as a possibility for Grace Kelly in the 1950s. He and Alma had discussed the adaptation and scouted the locations. He had invested his own money in preproduction, even contacting the original star, Fay Compton, about playing a small part.

Jay Presson Allen’s draft modified the original play in intriguing ways. Hitchcock’s
Mary Rose
would have been “more nightmarish than dreamlike,” in McBride’s words, “intensifying the anguish felt by the title character and her aged family members.” In Hitchcock’s version Mary Rose would discover that her son, Kenneth, who has enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War I, might be a prisoner of war. This “provokes a harrowing sequence using subjective camera and sound techniques to convey her overwhelming anguish,” according to McBride. “The realization of this loss literally kills her (again). But worse is yet to come.”

In the story’s denouement, Kenneth, still an army officer, returns to his ancestral home, where he encounters the apparition of his mother. Failing to recognize him, she is convinced that he has stolen the young child she is seeking. Facing him with his army knife clutched in her hands, Mary Rose hisses, “Give him back!”—and Kenneth is forced to confess that, in a way, he is the very person who has stolen her child. Kenneth then offers Mary Rose “the forgiveness she seeks for having abandoned him,” in McBride’s words.

“Her hand falls to her side and she gives back the knife, finally freed to accept her death,” McBride writes. “Barrie, too, flirted with this disturbing situation of a mother contemplating her own son’s murder, but the playwright’s Mary Rose, unlike Hitchcock’s, never took the knife from behind her back.”

McBride points out that the “poignant, blissful ending” of the play had “Mary Rose bidding her son farewell, hearing the call of her heavenly voices and returning to her island forever,” leaving her fate ambiguous. But Hitchcock changed the ending so that in the last scene her husband would discover Mary Rose, sitting in a chair, dead. “He will touch her head,” Hitchcock told a London newspaper, “and his hand will glow with blue powder, ectoplasm.”

The final narration—by a local man named Cameron, who had accompanied Mary Rose and her husband to “The Island That Likes to Be Visited”—was written into the draft by Hitchcock himself.

Before Hitchcock could realize his dream project, however,
Mary Rose
was killed by Universal. “I don’t know whether it was because it was costume stuff, maybe marginally intellectual, I have no idea,” recalled Jay Presson Allen, “but Lew Wasserman was on record as not being interested in it to begin with. Hitch never had a green light for the project, never. He just went ahead on his own. By the time
Mary Rose
came up for green-lighting, Tippi was out of the picture, and I think that is possibly why Hitch didn’t fight for it.”

Hitchcock had done substantial preproduction work, along with his work with Allen on the script, and Albert Whitlock, who drew “a lot of sketches” for
Mary Rose
before it was canceled, asked the director why he had succumbed to front-office pressures and abandoned the project. “They believe it isn’t what audiences expect of me,” Hitchcock explained. “Not the kind of picture they expect of me,” he repeated.

Later, Hitchcock would make a sad boast to interviewers: an actual clause had been inserted into his Universal contract, he said, stating that
he could make any film for the studio that he wanted, as long as it was budgeted under $3 million—and as long as it wasn’t
Mary Rose.

His contract was, in fact, amended around the time that
Mary Rose
was canceled. Officially
Marnie
had been a coproduction between Universal and “Geoffrey Stanley Inc.”—a legal entity named for the Hitchcock family dogs—but all future Hitchcock films would be produced and owned outright by Universal. The salary and benefits guaranteed by the new contract of August 1964 reportedly made Hitchcock the highest-paid director in Hollywood history; but more important, the contract made him a part-owner of the studio. He and Alma became the third largest stockholders. In exchange for the stock transfer, Universal assumed ownership of Shamley Productions, including all rights to
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, the reverted Paramount films, and future marketing of the name “Alfred Hitchcock.”

Although it was immensely satisfying to become a part-owner of the Hollywood studio that first showed interest in bringing him to America, back in 1931—the studio, moreover, where he had made
Saboteur
and
Shadow of a Doubt
—there were still tensions in Hitchcock’s relationship with Universal. While Lew Wasserman was trying to transform the once lowly studio into a first-class operation, it would prove a long, slow process, and Universal would cling to television and television-style filmmaking far into the 1970s. Hitchcock couldn’t shake the feeling that Universal would always be more Woolworth than Cartier.

And while his amended contract was generous, friends say that both Hitchcocks resented its strictures and, in sour moments, complained that he had been robbed of his golden opportunity to film
Mary Rose.
Alma felt that it was worse for her husband to have been robbed of his name, even though in exchange he received the pleasure of lifetime security.

The personal bond between Hitchcock and Wasserman was transformed and aggravated by their professional realignment. Once Hitchcock’s agent, Wasserman was now his employer. Hitchcock “resented it,” said Jay Presson Allen. “I know he did.” Universal had been forced by the U.S. Justice Department to divest itself of MCA in 1964, and Arthur Park was Hitchcock’s main contact at the agency now; still, despite Wasserman’s efforts to put intermediaries between himself and Hitchcock in the decision-making process, either at MCA or Universal, there was no question who was the boss of bosses.

The two strove to preserve their always equable personal relationship. The new contract made Hitchcock the undisputed king of the lot, and Wasserman paid court, visiting Hitchcock’s office almost every day to gossip or talk about the stock market. They lunched privately once a week, and at night the Wassermans regularly dined out with the Hitchcocks.

While she was working on
Marnie
and
Mary Rose
, Jay Presson Allen
sometimes joined the pair for lunch. While Hitchcock and Wasserman gossiped, she listened, secretly amused, because she knew that the rest of the industry gossiped about them—the two most powerful men in Hollywood. According to the scuttlebutt she had heard, both men were sexually impotent. Hitchcock had confessed his impotence to Allen (one reason she never believed that he propositioned Hedren), and although Wasserman had a beautiful wife, he was a notorious workaholic who slept on the couch while his wife slept around.

Although Hitchcock had made
The Birds
and
Marnie
with little interference, the failure of
Marnie
—from the first puzzled reactions elicited at studio screenings—would haunt him at Universal. His new contract made him a bird in a gilded cage. At Universal he would be worry-free financially, but creatively he had sacrificed his power and freedom.

Before
Marnie
was released the Hitchcocks took a two-month vacation, stopping first in New York to see the hit musicals—
High Spirits
and
Hello, Dolly
—and rendezvous with François Truffaut, who was conducting follow-up interviews for his book-in-progress. Then they headed for the Villa d’Este at Lake Como, Italy, where they had shot location scenery for the first Hitchcock film. From there the couple followed a complicated itinerary that took them to favorite places (Paris, the south of France, Rome, Vienna, Munich, and, as always, London) as well as new places they had always wanted to explore—Belgrade, Dubrovnik, and Zagreb, Yugoslavia. A driver accompanied them, and as much as possible they journeyed by car.

Except when they stayed at the Villa d’Este, where they tried to blend in and relax, the Hitchcocks made business and public events part of their vacation. In Rome, for example, Hitchcock met with the Italian writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli; billed as “Age & Scarpelli,” they had written
Big Deal on Madonna Street
as well as the successful Toto comedies, which Hitchcock had seen. He spoke of collaborating with them one day.

At the Belgrade Airport the Hitchcocks were greeted by journalists and fans, and the director drew and signed caricatures of himself. He was presented to Yugoslavian colleagues at the national film archives. The Kolarc’s People’s University organized an “Evening with Alfred Hitchcock,” and afterward the couple dined with guests at a famous Serbian restaurant in the artists’ quarter, celebrating publication of the first monograph in Serbo-Croatian extolling his career. Hitchcock ate heartily of the local cuisine; when he was on vacation on doctor’s orders, he told people, he also vacationed
from
doctor’s orders.

Their return to the United States coincided with publicity for the opening
of
Marnie.
The reviews were unusually inconclusive. The new Hitchcock film was “at once a fascinating study of a sexual relationship and the master’s most disappointing film in years,” observed Eugene Archer in the
New York Times.
Edith Oliver in the
New Yorker
described it as “an idiotic and trashy movie with two terrible performances,” adding, “I had quite a good time watching it.” Archer Winsten of the
New York Post
thought the film’s “human warmth and sympathy” made it a “superior” Hitchcock production, while the usually admiring Philip K. Scheuer in the
Los Angeles Times
found the latest Hitchcock “naggingly improbable” and only “fitfully effective.”

In America,
Marnie
would take in a $3.3 million gross (placing it below the top twenty), while in England it ranked as the twelfth most successful picture of the year. This, ironically, was due to Sean Connery’s drawing power (
Goldfinger
was the number one film that year), although his salary also had escalated the budget. (Meeting with author Winston Graham, Hitchcock “complained bitterly about the cost of his two stars.”) Although the box-office figures were modest,
Marnie
went into the black—outperforming
Vertigo
, for example.

As a man who prized box-office success above reviews and was accustomed to ups and downs, Hitchcock undoubtedly considered
Marnie
a momentary dip in his long career, to be erased by whatever he did next. Everything still seemed possible in the fall of 1964, even the idea that he might mend fences with Tippi Hedren and make another film with her.

On vacation he had talked things over with Alma, and he returned home with ambitious plans. As he often had before, he decided to launch several projects simultaneously. Whichever story came together easiest and fastest would be the film he made first.

He had two stories, both no further along than the idea stage. One was a picaresque yarn involving a family-run hotel in Italy, which is a disguised criminal operation. Another was a run-for-cover crime drama based on the exploits of a notorious English murderer—which one he hadn’t decided—to be shot in a contemporary style, with explicit sex and violence.

But in the summer of 1964, Hitchcock couldn’t possibly have predicted the run of bad luck and troubles that would begin to envelop his circle. Over the next three years he would suffer a series of dramatic losses from his valued production team—with whom, he had boasted on
The Birds
, he enjoyed “a sort of telepathic communication that sets us right.”

The passing of his longtime editor George Tomasini was the first of several premature deaths to diminish his team. Tomasini, only fifty-five when felled by a heart attack in November 1964, had edited
Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho
, and
The Birds. Marnie
and a cocredit on
In Harm’s Way
(released in 1965) were his last films.