Alfred Hitchcock (127 page)

Two more close Hitchcock associates died in first half of 1966. The first, in February, was James Allardice, only forty-six when he suffered a fatal heart attack. Allardice had been responsible for the pixie humor of Hitchcock’s tag-end appearances on television, as well as the speeches he had been making at public events, and even the articles under his byline (Hitchcock’s contribution to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
on filmmaking). Norman Lloyd believed that Allardice’s unexpected passing affected the director profoundly. Whenever Allardice dropped into the office, no matter what else was going on, Hitchcock’s mood had always lightened. He would visit no more.

Without his favorite ghostwriter, Hitchcock cut back on all his speeches. He even dodged an invitation proffered by his old friend, the Catholic priest Father Thomas J. Sullivan, in the second half of 1966. Father Sullivan wanted him to speak for twelve minutes “on any topic” to a San Francisco group. When Hitchcock demurred, Sullivan pleaded with him, reminding him how well received his clever and amusing stump speech had been when he accepted an honorary degree at Santa Clara University in 1963. (Father Sullivan, who had promoted the degree, was in the audience.) “You’ll never know what I went through before the Santa Clara speech,” Hitchcock wrote Father Sullivan. “I was miserable for days and days before it came about. I know the speech got a lot of laughs and that sort of thing, but I personally get no satisfaction from it whatsoever. It’s just the same when I make a picture. I go through hell and get no pleasure at all from the fact that it succeeds. I’m only relieved that it wasn’t a complete failure.” Without the safety net of James Allardice’s wit, Hitchcock no longer enjoyed such public performances, and in the future his few addresses and bylined articles were ghosted by Universal publicists.

June brought the death of David O. Selznick. The career of Hitchcock’s first Hollywood producer had ground to a virtual halt after
The Paradine Case
—and after Selznick’s marriage to Jennifer Jones. Like his father before him, Selznick had become irrelevant in the film industry. But Hitchcock had kept in touch with him socially, and saw Selznick’s death as symbolic of an era passing. He spoke graciously of Selznick at the time, telling
The Moguls
author, Norman Zierold, for example, that the producer used his notorious memos “as much to clear his own mind as much as to communicate with others.”

In years to come, Hitchcock would wax nostalgic for the producers of old. “Are we missing some other stimulus that went with those earlier days,” he asked an interviewer in 1969, “the great movie mogul, for example?” The same year, he told another journalist, “It was fun then. Now the industry’s run by accountants and businessmen and agents. Agents are
the worst, because they’ve no interest in the film, only in getting work for their artists.” (Never mind that he was employed by Universal, a studio run by his own former agent.)

With a heavy heart, Hitchcock attended Selznick’s funeral, and then left for a long, purely social weekend in Santa Cruz with Brian and Jean Moore. Such weekends used to be reserved for close friends, but now his friends were scattered; the weekends were more like treats or outings for principals who worked on his films. When meeting with each other later, the guests would compare notes like children discussing a schoolmaster.

Besides getting Moore started on a second draft, Hitchcock welcomed Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli back to Hollywood. He met with them regularly until July 9, when he and other key personnel flew to Europe to scout
Torn Curtain
locations in Copenhagen and Frankfurt.

The European milieu called for changes in the team. Hein Heckroth, who had won an Oscar for Michael Powell’s
The Red Shoes
, supplanted Robert Boyle as production designer. Hitchcock planned another one of his unusual color schemes—if possible, a shadowless monochrome. “We decided,” the director explained later, “that after we leave Copenhagen, which is the last location in the picture before we go to East Germany, to go gray everywhere—gray and beige—so we have a mood, a depressed mood, a sinister mood, in the general tones of all the sets.”

Bud Hoffman moved over from
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
to edit his first feature. Cameraman John F. Warren’s feature credits included
The Country Girl
with Grace Kelly, but he had been on Hitchcock’s crew as far back as
Rebecca
, and also served as a cameraman for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Edith Head (who concentrated on Julie Andrews’s hair and costumes) and Bernard Herrmann were the only key members of Hitchcock’s long-established Paramount unit to carry over to the new film.

In Hollywood as in London, it was common policy to shoot films as much as possible inside the studio or in the near vicinity, to tuck costs into general overhead. The high cost of his two stars forced him into “cutting corners,” as Hitchcock candidly admitted later; the decision to shoot
Torn Curtain
in its entirety at Universal may have saved a little budget money, but it also dictated, in the words of writer Keith Waterhouse, “the excessive use of (sometimes crude) back projection.”

Any hopes for Eastern European flavor were dashed after the second unit returned from East Germany. For economic as well as surreptitious reasons, Hitchcock had hired a German crew to capture the sights and scenery while pretending to be shooting a travelogue. But their footage proved “inferior,” according to John Russell Taylor, and there wasn’t the time or money to send Americans back. In the end Hitchcock had no choice but to minimize the authenticity.

An airport in the San Fernando Valley stood in for East Berlin’s Schönefeld.
The farm on the outskirts of East Berlin was actually near Camarillo. The Swedish docks were faked in Long Beach Harbor, and the University of Southern California stood in for Karl Marx University. When Paul Newman walks through the Museen zu Berlin in
Torn Curtain
, only the floor is real: the galleries are paintings optically printed into the film. After ten years exploiting all manner of exotic locations, this was the second film in a row with Hitchcock stuck inside soundstages.

It’s hard not to assume that Hitchcock’s decision to stick close to home was also influenced by concerns about his health. But he continued his grueling pace: when he returned to the United States on July 15, Hitchcock went back to juggling two different projects, sometimes working on one script in the morning, then switching to the other in the afternoon.

Brian Moore was just a week away from finishing the second draft of
Torn Curtain
, and Age and Scarpelli were in and out of Hollywood all during the summer, still developing the “RRRRR” project. Along with the Italian writing team, Hitchcock interviewed a slew of performers, nobodies in Hollywood terms, who might be right to play the family of crooks: actors of different nationalities (one Argentinean), eccentric performers, even circus clowns.

After Moore finished his second draft, Hitchcock asked for rewrites and a third draft, which was delivered to him in the first week of August. The director was sufficiently pleased that he offered Moore a contract for another four Hitchcock films. But Moore was exhausted by the process, and said he’d rather return to novels; then, when Hitchcock summoned him to discuss additional “script fixes” in the third week of August, the increasingly impatient Moore forgot himself and savaged the project. Fed up, he told Hitchcock that the plotting was implausible and the characters cardboard, according to Donald Spoto; polishing the dialogue wouldn’t solve anything. “I told him that if it were a book I were writing, I’d scrap it, or do a complete rewrite,” Spoto quoted Moore as saying.

But a final polish was needed, Hitchcock insisted at the time in a letter to François Truffaut, because Moore had “a tendency to want to avoid all melodrama. This I was quite prepared to do, except that there was a tremendous risk of the story becoming flat and plausible, but unexciting.” Hitchcock said people complained that the dialogue was too literary, that “the people did not talk like human beings.”

After their unpleasant meeting, Moore had second thoughts, and two weeks later he wrote to Hitchcock, offering to accommodate any “rewrites or fixes,” assuring the director that he “vastly enjoyed” working with him, Lucullan meals and all. But Hitchcock couldn’t forget that Moore had disparaged the film on which he was pinning his hopes, and the director left him behind.

Wasting no time, Hitchcock contacted the English writing team of Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, authors of several West End hits including
Billy Liar
(which was also made into a successful film), and the duo agreed to come to Hollywood. They arrived “within a few days of rolling,” according to Waterhouse, “so that we often found ourselves revising scenes only hours before they were to be shot, while on occasion a messenger would be waiting to rush our latest rewrites across to the
Torn Curtain
sound stage, where they would be thrust into the hands of the actors even as Hitchcock lit them for the scene.”

The new writers were “treated to a crash course in filmmaking,” hovering “close at hand on the set,” according to Waterhouse, where Hitchcock would “only very occasionally” refer “to the shooting script being meticulously monitored by his longtime assistant Peggy Robertson, for by this stage in the game the whole film existed, frame by frame, as pictures in his head.

“There was a written part of this highly-paid seminar besides the valuable lectures both on and off the sound stage. Willis and I had been assigned a comfortable star dressing-room bungalow, just around the corner from Hitchcock’s suite of offices at Universal City Studios. Every morning when the studio limo decanted us, there would be awaiting us a big buff envelope containing Hitchcock’s notes on the current day’s work, dictated between looking at the rushes the previous evening and going home to Bel Air to read that day’s London
Times
before his customary dinner of Dover sole, both of them flown to him along with his breakfast kippers. I have kept over twenty close-typed pages of these ruminations. …

“Some of them show Hitchcock’s almost fanatical obsession with accuracy: ‘Scene 88. We should eliminate the Floor Concierge. My information is that they do not have these in East Berlin.’ Others show his sense of meticulous cinematic detail: ‘Scene 127C. I would like to discuss the place where the sausage is carved …’ On Scene 139, where we had someone describing the Julie Andrews character as beautiful, Hitchcock comments: ‘Not that I wish to cast any aspersions on Miss Andrews’ physiognomy, but do you think beautiful is perhaps too much, and cannot we say lovely instead?’

“Above all, there are the notes that reveal the seething mind of Hitchcock at work as he jigsaws the pictures in his head into place. He takes two long paragraphs to detail how he envisages the reaction of refugees on a stolen bus as they witness the approach of the real bus that must give their game away. He wants one character to see the bus in the distance but keep it to himself… then someone else sees it, and someone else, until panic spreads through the bus: ‘It would be rather like the play within a play in
Hamlet
which starts with the King and then spreads to the rest. Anyway, let’s talk about this little moment.’ There was nothing to talk about. He had already conceived the whole sequence exactly as he was to shoot it.”

Hitchcock’s copious notes included his cameo appearance, by now a treasured tradition of a Hitchcock film, but also a headache to think up and insert early enough in the story to satisfy the audience’s expectations without impeding the momentum of the suspense. The director suggested inserting himself in the brief scene in the lounge of Copenhagen’s five-star Hotel d’Angleterre, where Newman and Andrews stay in the film. Waterhouse was struck by how Hitchcock envisioned his cameo “not simply as an ego trip” but as a shot also supplying “valuable background information.”

Hitchcock explained: “I should be seen sitting in an armchair in the lounge with a nine month old baby on my knee and I’m looking around rather impatiently for the mother to come back. This impatience could be underscored by shifting the baby from one knee to the other, and then with the free hand, surreptitiously wiping the thigh. Having this shot would enable us to show the sign announcing the presence of the convention members in the hotel. We might even show some of the delegates crowding around the elevator which, of course, would then lead us to the corridor scene on page 10.”

Waterhouse found working with Hitchcock “an education and a joy”—an education entertainingly leavened by the director’s reminiscences about his silent film days in London, by the long dinners at Chasen’s and Bellagio Road, and by the surprise awaiting them when they returned to England for a play opening, and were feted at a first-night party in their honor, which Hitchcock had masterminded from Hollywood.

Truth to tell, the two Englishmen didn’t think much of the film—or of Brian Moore’s script, which would have ranked
Torn Curtain
“even lower in the oeuvre had we not been called in to improve the script and polish the dialogue,” in Waterhouse’s words. But the writing partners were limited in their contribution “apart from the odd scene … restricting ourselves to dialogue rewrites which we were doing on a day-by-day basis as the film was shot.”