Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Regardless of the cheerful mortician’s mask (and uniform) that Hitchcock wore for public appearances, illness and death moved him. He visited old friends like cameraman Jack Cox in the hospital on their deathbeds, and was an inveterate attender of funerals; now the funerals were starting to accrue. He wept at the news of deaths, and his logbook scheduled his day around funerals; it was a point of honor to stand over the burial site of old friends like Edmund Gwenn. When he couldn’t attend the funeral, he always sent flowers and a note.
Suddenly he seemed surrounded by death, and Hitchcock’s own health began to preoccupy him, much earlier than has been reported. During the making of
Marnie
, he called Norman Lloyd in and told him that something was wrong with him. Dr. Ralph Tandowsky couldn’t pinpoint a cause, but Hitchcock felt tired, with constant aches and pains. Though the director kept his concerns from the cast, he told Lloyd, “You might have to finish this one for me.”
Everyone thought the usual vacation would do the trick.
Marnie
had been stressful, but Hitchcock always bounced back. Shortly after returning from abroad, though, he was still feeling poorly, and in mid-July he enlisted a crew of specialists to conduct tests. Again the diagnosis was elusive, and it’s possible that it was all in his head. But Hitchcock was feeling his age, and it was quietly agreed that he would cancel his television series, now in its third season as an hourlong program (the half-hour show had run for seven seasons). Although it had been three years since he directed an episode, he couldn’t let go of his pervasive involvement, and he took his role in approving the main elements and performing the lead-ins seriously.
Doctors advised him to slow down, restrict his activity, cut down on food and drink. His weight, which he had kept under control since
Lifeboat
two decades earlier, was rising.
So the summer of 1964 was a quiet one, by choice. Hitchcock held meetings with Norman Lloyd and Joan Harrison about the final television season, conducted a few interviews with journalists, spent long weekends in Santa Cruz. But he continued to feel anxious about his health, and initiated regular medical appointments, twice weekly. He had long taken vitamin B boosters, but it now appears that he began to receive cortisone shots as well.
Hitchcock was a lifelong devotee of studio screenings, and now he had his own private screening room. The films he watched had always run the gamut; he’d watch almost anything—except films that implied cruelty to animals. (He cut off
The Misfits
and walked out, and remained furious with Peggy Robertson all the rest of the day for booking it.) But once
Hitchcock had a definite project in mind, the roster homed in on similar subjects, and in the fall of 1964 he began watching a spate of recent films—
The Prize, Seven Days in May, Fail-Safe, The Manchurian Candidate
—that pointed in a new direction. To the hotel-of-crooks project and the run-for-cover about a serial murderer, Hitchcock now added a contemporary political thriller.
Briefly he had toyed with filming another John Buchan novel with Richard Hannay as its central character, but the book he considered,
The Three Hostages
, was set in the year of its publication, way back in 1924, and was hopelessly quaint. Rereading Buchan helped him recharge his batteries, however.
Though he was a fan of the James Bond films, Hitchcock resented how brazenly the 007 series appeared to be borrowing from
North by Northwest.
The duel between Cary Grant and a crop-spraying biplane had been shamelessly lifted and copied, Hitchcock believed, for the clash between Bond and a helicopter in
From Russia with Love.
In Hitchcock’s estimation the Bond films had taken his vision one step further toward comicbook storytelling; the only way to compete, he felt, was to make a more “realistic Bond.” After all, he had been making spy thrillers since
The Man Who Knew Too Much
and
The 39 Steps;
he had this branch of his reputation to uphold.
Besides the “realistic Bond,” Hitchcock toyed with the possibility of shooting the hotel-of-crooks story on location in Italy. He watched the latest works by Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, and other Italian filmmakers, while returning to
Big Deal on Madonna Street
, a robbery-gone-wrong satire he liked for its sophisticated plot mechanics and ironic tone. (He also liked, according to Furio Scarpelli, the fact that it “somewhat mocked the film style of Hitchcock” himself.) Hitchcock inquired about the availability of the veteran Italian writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli, and then arranged a spate of meetings with other writers who might be right for one of his other future projects. He spoke with novelist Richard Condon, the author of
The Manchurian Candidate
, and with
Twilight Zone
creator Rod Serling, who had scripted
Seven Days in May.
He lunched with old
Vertigo
hands Alec Coppel and Sam Taylor, wondering if either of them might click with a run-for-cover crime picture or the political thriller.
But his days were uncrowded, and there was no urgency until after Thanksgiving—and George Tomasini’s death. Then he struck out in several directions at once.
In early November, Hitchcock had registered “an untitled original story subject” with the Writers Guild, broadly outlining a sort of prequel that would “cover the events prior to the beginning of the story told in
Shadow of a Doubt
.” Following “an attractive man” who murders rich widows
while on the run from police, the prequel would present “the events surrounding the killing and disposal of these various women.” According to the outline, the story would draw on the facts of “famous English criminal cases” such as John Haigh, John Christie, or Neville Heath, while Americanizing the characters and situations.
Later that same month, Hitchcock invited
Psycho
author Robert Bloch, whom he didn’t know very well (though Bloch had gone on to write multiple episodes of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
), to a “gourmet luncheon accompanied by wines of appropriate bouquet and vintage,” in Bloch’s words.
At lunch, Hitchcock explained that he was mulling approaches to a run-for-cover crime film whose true inspiration harked back to Jack the Ripper. But he wanted to modernize the story by borrowing from public-domain accounts of more contemporary killers. He was thinking of adopting the stylistic methods of the Nouvelle Vague, or Italians like Antonioni.
The lunch was more of a monologue, all of it captured on tape—Hitchcock rambling on about the necrophile Christie (“a very sordid little man … almost like Hume Cronyn could be”), Heath the flagellator of women (“he always went beyond … the thing got to the point where he would push the crop up them and bite their breasts and all that kind of thing”), even bringing up Patrick Mahon (“I used some aspects of his case in
Rear Window
because he got a girl in the family way and he killed her—you know, all it is, is a matter of economics really”). The director said he could envision using another detail of the Mahon case in the new planned film: when Mahon tried to destroy the head of a victim by shoving it into a fireplace and lighting a fire, Hitchcock recalled, “the heat caused the eyes to open.”
The theory was that Hitchcock would pay Bloch to write a novel based on an actual serial killer’s exploits; then, after Bloch wrote the novel, the director would convert it to film—a plan that had worked for Hitchcock at least as far back as Dale Collins and
Rich and Strange.
The director recommended that Bloch read
Ten Rillington Place
, a nonfiction account of the Christie murders and trial by journalist Ludovic Kennedy, as the kind of realistically flavored narrative he wanted to sponsor. His story ideas were sketchy, Hitchcock admitted, and he wasn’t sure which of the notorious murderers offered the best prototype. All that was up to Bloch.
And then, during same week he met with Bloch, Hitchcock wrote to Vladimir Nabokov in Montreux, Switzerland, following up on an earlier telephone call to the world-renowned author of
Laughter in the Dark
and
Lolita
(Nabokov had helped adapt the latter into a well-regarded Stanley Kubrick film). It is unclear whether Hitchcock knew the Russian-born author beforehand, whether he had met him in England (where Nabokov was educated after World War I), in the United States (where he had taught
college after World War II), or in Switzerland (where Nabokov moved in 1959). Whatever the case, the director addressed him formally as “Mr. Nabokov,” and offered the world-class writer—as highbrow a candidate as Bloch was low—his pick of the two other competing projects.
The one he thought optimal for Nabokov was the political thriller, which was shaping up as a fictional riff on the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. As Cambridge students in the 1930s, Burgess and Maclean had belonged to a circle of left-wing intellectuals, several of whom were recruited as Soviet spies. Later, as British diplomats, Burgess and Maclean funneled secrets to Russia during and after World War II, until their treachery was discovered and they fled from England in 1951. Hitchcock had long been fascinated by Burgess and Maclean, and discussed them with Angus MacPhail (another Cambridge graduate) while remaking
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
The real-life Bonds were often shabby, cold-blooded ideologues, and the kind of political thriller Hitchcock had in mind would delve deeper into the women who attached themselves to such Cold War pawns—women not unlike Mrs. Drayton (Brenda de Banzie), the more sympathetic of the villains in the second
Man Who Knew Too Much.
The drama would focus on “the problem of the woman who is associated, either by marriage or engagement, to a defector,” in his words.
A woman who loved such a Cold Warrior, Hitchcock explained in his letter, would share his fate. “We have, for example, the case of Burgess and Maclean, where Mrs. Maclean eventually followed her husband behind the Iron Curtain, and obviously Mrs. Maclean had no other loyalties.”
As a “crude example” of the kind of story he was proposing, Hitchcock imagined the “very American” son of Werner Von Braun—an ingenious scientist like his father—taking a vacation to visit his father’s relatives in East Germany. He might have a fiancée, who is “the daughter of a Senator,” whom the CIA and other “security people” enlist to keep an eye on Von Braun Jr.—and report back to them on the young scientist’s suspicious activities.
The plot would follow the “journey behind the Iron Curtain,” but the emotional focus would be on the girl and her dawning realization that her lover might defect. “Maybe she goes over to the side of her fiancé. It would depend upon how her character is drawn. It is also possible if she did this, she might be making a terrible mistake—especially if her fiancé, after all, turned out to be a double agent.”
Such a political thriller, the letter continued, should be “expressed in terms of action and movement and, naturally, one that would give me the opportunity to indulge in the customary Hitchcock suspense.”
If the realistic Bond story didn’t appeal to Nabokov, Hitchcock dangled another possibility, which he admitted might not be as attractive—“but on
the other hand, it might.” This was the family of crooks in an Italian hotel, which, in an earlier incarnation, he explained, he intended to make for a studio in England. But he never completed a script “because I left to come to America.” (If he had, the film would have starred Nova Pilbeam.)
“I wondered what would happen …” wrote Hitchcock, spinning the tale of a young girl, raised in a Swiss convent, who leaves college and moves in with her widowed father, who is acting as general manager of a large London hotel (“at the time I imagined it would be the Savoy,” he noted). The father of “our young heroine” has one brother who is the concierge, another who is cashier, a third who is one of the chefs, a sister who is the housekeeper, “and a bedridden mother living in a penthouse in the hotel. The mother is about eighty years of age, a matriarch.”
Unbeknownst to the innocent heroine, the whole family is “a gang of crooks,” the hotel their headquarters. The “backstage” of the hotel, especially the kitchen and nightclub, would form an important part of the story. Hitchcock said he was seeking a film that would provide the colorful “details of a big hotel and not merely a film played in hotel rooms.”
Hitchcock conceded that he had related only “the crudest conception” of his ideas, adding, “I haven’t bothered to go into such details as characterizations or the psychological aspects of these stories.
“As I indicated to you on the telephone, screenplay writers are not the type of people to take such ideas as these and develop them into responsible story material. They are usually people who adapt other people’s work. That is why I am by-passing them and coming direct to you—a storyteller.”
For various reasons, the easier deal—the job-for-hire with Bloch—fell apart. Hitchcock had offered the author of
Psycho
$5,000 to write the novel, and another $20,000 if a film was produced. But Bloch’s agent knew the score this time, and countered by asking for 5 percent of grosses over $5 million, along with other rights and bonuses linked to sequels and merchandising. The negotiations waxed and waned briefly, until Hitchcock decided that his “modest idea” had been inflated by Bloch’s agent’s demands, and that he was “willing to gamble a small sum for a small picture … not an elaborate one.”
Bloch also didn’t appreciate the fine print in Hitchcock’s offer, which stipulated he wouldn’t receive any compensation until the director had read a treatment and approved his approach. That would mean Hitchcock got to talk (and talk), then wait for a story to be written and accepted, before Block received a nickel. “Mr. Hitchcock was in a position to proceed at his leisure, but this was a luxury I just couldn’t afford,” Bloch said later.
Hitchcock could have afforded to be generous, but curiously—and perhaps more importantly—the director felt no rapport with the author of
Psycho;
after their lunch, he showed no inclination to bend his rules. As
for Bloch, he left his initial encounter with Hitchcock scratching his head. He phoned his agent and asked to be eased out of the deal.