Authors: Patrick McGilligan
The sexagenarian director, trying to craft a realistic Bond, was sadly out of touch with the real world, Uris thought. And Hitchcock seemed not only removed from, but contemptuous of, humanity. He was cold, morose. Hitchcock saw “the writer as his enemy.” thought Uris.
Suffering from poor health, under mounting strain, and stuck with a challenge that eluded him, Hitchcock was grasping desperately at every strategy that had worked for him in the past, trying to impose his will on the film by establishing mutual ground with Uris. But nothing he did elicited any real engagement—or even sympathy—from the author.
In the end, they clung to their differences; Uris resisted doing Hitchcock’s bidding. The director warned Uris, for example, to write the intelligence agents
and
the revolutionaries as human beings, without regard to politics. But Uris’s treatment made Fidel’s lieutenant Rico Parra “a cartoon sex maniac to whom Juanita finally offers herself to distract him while Devereaux is getting out of the country,” in the words of Bill Krohn. “She then has rings inserted into her eyes to force her to watch while Parra is beaten to death, and is last seen with her breasts forcibly bared for carving by Havana’s chief of police.”
In the end, director and writer
did
become enemies. Uris lasted only until July, though he delivered a partial draft before moving on. After turning it in, according to Uris, he tried to contact Peggy Robertson about something, and she cut him off on the phone.
With
Topaz
in trouble, Hitchcock brought “Frenzy” back to the table. The director had valuable test footage, he had copious storyboards prepared, and he had a script all but finished. All he needed was one more writer and a final polish. He met with Herb Gardner, the playwright of
A Thousand Clowns
, and showed him the storyboards: the way Hitchcock explained it, what he was really looking for was someone to do the job that brought him into film, in 1921—a title writer, who would “caption” the drawn shots.
Gardner was tempted, until he saw in one storyboard a shot of a character being choked and pushed off the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge—and then, two frames later, the same man sitting at an outdoor café on Fifth Avenue. “How do we get from the guy being pushed off the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to the same guy at a Fifth Avenue cafe?” he asked.
“The crew goes there,” said Hitchcock, without cracking a smile.
“Wait a minute. How do we get the audience there, is what I mean.”
“Mr. Gardner,” said Hitchcock, “The audience will go wherever I take them and they’ll be very glad to be there, I assure you.”
When Gardner bowed out, Universal itself proved unwilling to go any further with the project. On July 10, 1968, Hitchcock met with Edd Henry and Lew Wasserman, presenting the “Frenzy” slides and test footage in a last-ditch attempt to make his case for the film. The result, as Donald Spoto wrote, was humiliating. Over the next week the three met several more times, but MCA and Universal had been opposed to “Frenzy” all along, and now these two executives—the head of MCA and the boss of Universal—forcefully reiterated their opposition.
“You may question my taste,” Sir John tells Handel Fane in
Murder!
, describing his plans to mount a play based on the murder he suspects Fane himself of perpetrating, “but as an artist you’ll understand my temptation.” Now, in addition to the studio and agency that represented Hitchcock, other friends questioned his taste, and few understood his temptation.
Back at Paramount, when
Psycho
had encountered a wall of resistance inside his team, Hitchcock had proved everyone wrong. But that was ten years earlier, and Hitchcock was more vulnerable now. He had lunch with Herbert Coleman and Doc Ericksen, asking if they would come back to work for him, but Coleman expressed a distaste for the
Psycho
-like “Frenzy.”
Even François Truffaut disappointed him. When Hitchcock sent him the script of “Frenzy,” just after the U.S. publication of
Hitchcock/Truffaut
, he couldn’t have predicted the reaction of his great champion. Truffaut was no Godard or Antonioni. He made humanist films, and he never intentionally shocked or alienated audiences. Although the Nouvelle Vague filmmaker strove to be diplomatic in his letter, praising certain scenes while stressing how much “I respect, admire, and esteem you,” in his words, the Frenchman obviously recoiled from “Frenzy.” He pointedly mentioned the pervasive nudity, sex, and violence (“It does not worry me too much because I know that you shoot such scenes with real dramatic power,” he temporized, “and you never dwell on unnecessary detail”), and targeted several key scenes of the script as simplistic or implausible. More broadly, he diagnosed the entire second half as “a trifle banal.”
Perhaps this stark but promising film might have remained in the director’s sights if Mrs. Hitchcock had advised her husband to ignore the critics and go ahead with “Frenzy.” But there is no evidence she said anything one way or another. Her deep involvement in the script may even have made her shy about pressing her opinion; after all, she had backed
Under Capricorn.
Although she supported Hitchcock’s every move, the important moves were up to him. And perhaps he could have bucked Wasserman and Universal, insisting on making “Frenzy”—which, unlike
Mary Rose
, wasn’t strictly precluded by his contract. But the united front wore him down—and Hitchcock was reluctant to spurn advice from Wasserman, a friend who had done so much for him.
“Frenzy” was indefinitely postponed—and before too long Hitchcock was referring to Antonioni in interviews as “pretentious.”
Topaz
was swiftly given the green light.
After he’d lined up Herbert Coleman and Doc Ericksen, the director’s attempt to recapture the halcyon days of the 1950s was symbolized by the eleventh-hour hiring of Sam Taylor—Hitchcock’s greatest stooge of that era, a writer who
enjoyed
long lunches with him, who vacationed with the Hitchcocks, and even hosted them at his home in Maine.
Moving swiftly to make up for lost time, on July 21 Hitchcock, Coleman, and Ericksen left for England and the Continent. Taylor received a long phone call from Claridge’s, getting him started on the new script. While scouting locations in Denmark and France, Hitchcock interviewed European actors and shot tests of Vienna-born Frederick Stafford at Cinecittà in Rome.
When Hitchcock returned to California by early August, the production was put on a pressure-cooker schedule. The director juggled script conferences with Taylor and staff meetings with costume designer Edith Head, art director Henry Bumstead, and editor William Ziegler—all veterans of Hitchcock films, adding to the déjà vu atmosphere. Even cameraman Jack Hildyard, who had won an Oscar for
The Bridge over the River Kwai
, was an old acquaintance, from his days at Elstree as a clapper boy.
Universal was pushing for a fall start, but give Lew Wasserman credit: he put his money where his mouth was, investing $4 million in
Topaz
, Hitchcock’s biggest budget to date—his biggest ever, as it turned out. Universal figured that an international cast and exotic settings would serve as an antidote to the lure of watching free programming on a small living-room screen.
Although Taylor had finished off
Vertigo
in style, that script was also indebted to an excellent novel, and a series of capable writers who built on each other’s drafts over a period of years. On
Topaz
, Taylor began with an unwieldy novel, one partial draft, and material alien to anything else he had ever written. Now, instead of
Notorious
, the script shifted toward a less romantic model: 1965’s
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
, a film Hitchcock and his staff watched several times. Taking Uris’s criticisms to heart—that he was out of touch with spying—Hitchcock arranged for several briefings from intelligence officials, including George Horkan, former deputy inspector general of the CIA.
Taylor got rid of the World War II-French Resistance flashbacks, which the budget couldn’t handle, and at Hitchcock’s behest turned Rico Parra into a sympathetic, almost tragic figure—in truth, the film’s most faceted character. Taylor also built up the Cuban scenes—his heavy rewriting
would make them among the best in the film—and radically altered the plotting of Uris’s book.
One highlight, Juanita’s death, was never fully described in the script, or even storyboarded, until it came up on the schedule. Though Hitchcock had mused about it endlessly—and built a floral motif into preceding scenes. As Bill Krohn observed, in the opening defection sequence Topaz “pauses to contemplate a ceramic flower being put together petal by petal”; later, when the American intelligence chief visits Devereaux in his hotel room, “he brings a grim-looking bouquet of yellow flowers as a pretext for screwing up a family vacation with an assignment”; and later still, there is “a dolly-in on a white funeral wreath” ending the sequence where the rogue employed by Devereaux sacrifices a Cuban informant.
Then when Juanita is shot to death at close range by Parra, her betrayed lover, the Cuban heroine collapses into Parra’s arms and sinks to the floor, her purple dress spreading out over the black-and-white tiles like a gorgeous flower blossoming.
*
The director filmed this stunningly from high overhead; it is the one shot people always remember from
Topaz.
“This is the level on which the film took shape in Hitchcock’s mind,” wrote Krohn, “often without being set down on paper, in images that are also metaphors for its venomous beauty.”
Hitchcock and Taylor weren’t able to spend much time together, however, and the filming started without a complete script. Taylor had to rush pages over to Copenhagen and Paris during the location work in mid-September; then, at Universal in October and November, the remaining scenes were revised just days before they were shot. But a decent script eluded Hitchcock, and so did the right actors; certain roles were cast and recast. “An actor who, when he wasn’t employed, operated a beauty parlor was cast in a small but significant role,” recalled studio publicist Orin Borsten. “I watched as Mr. Hitchcock, walking over, the company within hearing distance, asked the actor to play the role in the acting style of Peter Lorre. Time was being lost as he worked with the actor, who either didn’t understand the director’s wishes or was incapable of satisfying him. That same day he was fired.”
He collected actors, literally, from around the world. The cast included imposing Montreal-born John Vernon as Rico Parra, and the African American actor Roscoe Lee Browne as the operative hired to purloin incriminating
documents from the Cuban delegation visiting New York. There were Danes, and there were Germans too. Two distinguished Frenchmen, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret, had parts in the French section, as the Soviet moles. The only old Hitchcock hand was John Forsythe, as the American spy official probing the Cuban-Soviet-French connection.
To save money, and avoid coping with another quirky figure like Paul Newman, Hitchcock thought this time he would launch his own male star. Frederick Stafford was a virtual unknown; Hitchcock had spotted him in a French James Bond hand-me-down called
OSS 17
, about a CIA agent pursuing smugglers in Brazil. Just as he had tried to make Tippi Hedren into Grace Kelly, he would try to transform Stafford into a realistic Bond—“the director’s approximation of a Cary Grant persona,” in Borsten’s words. But Hitchcock’s casting judgment deserted him in his worst hour, and just as in days of yore he found himself stuck with a wooden, unsexy lead.
“One of the tragedies of
Topaz
,” Sam Taylor recalled in one interview, “was that Hitch was trying to make something as if he had Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in it.”
Topaz
featured several beautiful, competent women, but none of them compared to Ingrid Bergman, or the other great ladies of Hitchcock’s past. Stafford’s daughter was played by Claude Jade, who had appeared in Truffaut’s
Stolen Kisses
and came recommended by the French filmmaker. Stafford’s wife was played by the ex-ballerina Dany Robin.
The casting process was chaotic, and Juanita, the key role for an actress, wasn’t filled until just days before her scenes had to be shot. Hitchcock had interviewed actress after actress, finding fault with each one. With the Cuban scenes fast approaching, there was anxiety among the staff. But the director seemed untroubled. “She will show up,” he assured people.
So it came to pass: one day an agent brought in Karin Dor, a ravishingly Latinesque German actress who spoke flawless English. Even better, Dor had appeared in
You Only Live Twice;
how could Hitchcock resist adding an actual Bond girl to his realistic Bond film? Dor was handed a script, costumed, made up, and pushed in front of the cameras.
Alma shared her husband’s instant infatuation with the German actress, and the Hitchcocks took Dor to Chasen’s night after night. Her scenes got extra attention, though ultimately she disappointed Hitchcock, more off-camera than on. One day, during a break in filming, Borsten arranged for a photographic session with Dor and John Vernon, for advertising and promotion purposes. Hitchcock sat in, posing them sexily together. He zeroed in on Vernon’s cigar, telling Dor, “Karin, put it in your mouth,” according to Borsten—“innuendo manifest, a sly twinkle in the director’s eyes.”
Dor blushed, giggled, demurred. Hitchcock insisted: “Come on, Karin, you know you’ve had it in your mouth before. …” She pleaded, refused. Angrily, Hitchcock ended the session, but not before asking Borsten, “Now do you have all the art you need?” Borsten said he would like a few shots of Hitchcock with his brunet star, in contrast to all the photographs that existed of him with blondes. Still visibly deflated by Dor’s refusal to play along with him, the director muttered, “I wouldn’t want a picture with her.” (Borsten recalled: “Only the night before the Hitchcocks had dined her at Chasen’s.”)
The actors resisted him, or they didn’t fathom him. Hitchcock’s sense of humor was off throughout the filming. His back-alley jokes, wasted earlier on Leon Uris, were really squandered on the French actors, according to Borsten; even the best English-to-French dictionary wouldn’t have helped them decipher his Cockney slang and puns. “They gazed at him un-comprehendingly, the humor pointless to them.”