Authors: Patrick McGilligan
The next day Lloyd showed up at the office, but Hitchcock’s door was closed to him. For three or four days, nobody could convince the director to see Lloyd, until finally one day Hitchcock’s door was open, and Lloyd walked in. He apologized, and told Hitchcock he had changed his mind. Hitchcock was sitting there with the script in his hands, pencil poised. “Hitch,” said Lloyd, “I really would like to work on it with you.” “Never mind,” he said brusquely, “I can do it myself.”
“I have never forgiven myself,” said Lloyd.
But Hitchcock really didn’t want to make a film by himself—a film without any involvement from Mrs. Hitchcock. On those days when she could, Alma sat up in a wheelchair, or was propped up on a window settee in the living room. She liked to read
Time
and
Newsweek
“and now and again a book,” as Hitchcock informed one intimate in a letter. “Of course you can get awfully bored with reading, but she does have a little Sony color set about eight inches square. It works very well and she lets it run a good part of the day.”
That was a sanguine version of the sad reality. Whenever he left for his office at Universal, Alma acted hurt and resentful at being abandoned, Hitchcock told actor Barry Foster, who stopped by to see him in October 1978. When he said good-bye to his wife at Bellagio Road, Alma aimed “a stream of invective and foul language” at him, according to Foster, “which, poor soul, she didn’t know she was doing, and it puzzled him.”
Writing to a relative in England, Hitchcock admitted, “I am preparing a film, but, as you can imagine, [Alma’s] condition at the age of 78 makes everything melancholy.” But he usually joked about his own “condition.” Writing to his eighty-five-year-old sister, Nellie Ingram, at the end of November 1978, he described a recent fall in the bathroom, painting it with Hitchcockian details and comedy. He set the scene: the white marble floor,
the sheet of carpet he slipped on, the wild stumble, which propelled him backward against the shower door, his head and shoulders crashing against the wall as the rest of his body slammed down hard against the floor. The night nurse (“a very clean cut little woman”) phoned for the paramedics, who arrived with a young man wearing a fire helmet (“so I was able to say to myself, ‘What’s he here for? I’m not on fire.’ ”).
An ambulance then whizzed the director to the hospital, where “in no time I was stripped, given a hospital gown and then taken into the X-ray room. I was given X-ray treatment but everything seemed to be all right. I actually hadn’t broken my neck or anything, but I must tell you that the whole feeling of my head and shoulders and back was extremely painful.”
Railings were now put up for him everywhere, at home and in the office. And he began to use a cane. The rest of the letter was as cheerful and affectionate as could be, under the circumstances: news about his dog (a West Highland terrier named Sarah), his granddaughters, and a long, funny anecdote about a monsignor making unpriestly comments. Hitchcock vowed not to mention dreadful current events and “all that stuff we read in the newspapers,” and told Nellie he would send her an “emolument” shortly.
Three months went by between the departure of Norman Lloyd and the arrival of David Freeman, the next writer, who came to Hitchcock’s office for lunch on December 7, 1978.
“Find me a younger man,” the director had told Universal. Though he had tried writing the script on his own, it was lonely and unamusing to muse aloud, or to dictate to a young secretary, however pretty, who didn’t appreciate all of his asides and references.
Born in Cleveland, Freeman was in his late thirties. He had been a magazine journalist before turning to play-and screenwriting. His
Jesse and the Bandit Queen
had been an off-Broadway hit in 1975-76, and he had done a fair amount of rewriting for studio films. “One Universal picture that I did, uncredited, had recently made a bundle,” Freeman recalled. “Another,
First Love
, for Paramount, had recently been in the theaters.”
When Freeman arrived, the secretaries were in a “tizzy,” he remembered. “It seems that Mr. H. is not only expecting me, he’s expecting Thom Mount, the head of production at the studio. Mount has not been informed of this. After much frantic buzzing about the lot, Mount is located and changes his plans at the last minute.” Waiting for Mount, Freeman was introduced to Hitchcock, his first glimpse revealing a short man “with almost unwrinkled skin” who was “very fat. The famous deadpan eyes that stared out so opaquely, so unrevealingly on television, permitting only drollness to be perceived, seemed a little more relaxed
now, less guarded, less contrived. A hopeful sign. We shake hands and he immediately begins a monologue about prison breaks and South America. It makes very little sense.”
After Mount arrived, the trio headed to the private dining room, several steps down. “Hitchcock remarks that he fell on these steps a few days ago. Now there are rails. He needs them.” The table was set with steaks and coffee. “As we eat, he continues to deliver various monologues. It’s all interesting, but the sort of stuff you read or hear if you spend any time in Hollywood. The truth is I’m starting to get uncomfortable. I begin to think he doesn’t know why I’m here. Does he think I’ve come to interview him?”
Mount smoothly steered Hitchcock (who had been “going on about English pork butchers and how to best prepare pork cracklings”) toward the film project. The talk narrowed. “He has ideas, I have ideas,” recalled Freeman. “We agree here and disagree there. His face lights up and he sounds a hell of a lot better. It’s amazing. A minute ago I was convinced this wasn’t going to work, and now I can feel a script forming.”
They agreed to meet again the following Monday, whereupon they began five months of collaboration on the fifty-fourth Hitchcock—a period Freeman chronicled in his book
The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock.
Freeman forthrightly warned Hitchcock that he might write such a book, that he was keeping a journal. Imagine: Hitchcock knew his daily deterioration was being recorded for posterity. Although the director didn’t acknowledge Freeman’s comment, “I think he heard me,” said Freeman—who suspected that some of what later transpired between them was
intended
for posterity.
The big difference between Ernest Lehman’s draft and Freeman’s was that Lehman’s began after the jailbreak, according to Freeman, “focusing on the hero of the picture, an American who pursues Blake,” while his started in England with the traitor and the prison escape. “The idea is to show how determined the hero’s adversary is,” said Freeman, “and because it follows a narrative device Hitchcock has used to good effect in the past: a story begins one way, proceeds, then stops abruptly, allowing the main story to begin.”
Hitchcock showed his age-old appetite for researching all the physical details—“how high is the wall, what is the geography of the prison yard, what sort of uniforms do the convicts wear,” in Freeman’s words. (If the Blake character used a rope ladder to escape, for example, what kind of rope should it be? Jute?) Though he could no longer visit London, Hitchcock ordered up enlarged maps, positioned them on his belly, and studied them with a magnifying glass.
To Freeman, he seemed obsessed with such minutiae, “even if it’s all to be shot on a soundstage. It reminds me of Stanislavski’s dictum about stage sets: A living room might be all the audience sees, but the director
and the actors must know what’s in the hypothetical offstage rooms, right down to what’s in the linen closets.” According to Freeman, “He’s immersing himself in it, creating the density of felt detail, from which fine performances emerge. Hitchcock moves from the general to the particular in his script preparation exactly as he does in the celebrated sequences of his films.” He was defining for himself “first the place (if it’s unusual),” said Freeman, “then the people—much of the discussion wide-ranging and speculative—then the details about the people that will drive our story forward. Sure enough, the general to the particular, the farthest to the nearest.”
If the detail-seeking was “compulsive and a little nuts,” it was also, Freeman perceived, partly “to avoid actual script writing.” When Hitchcock was bored or having a painful day, they switched to discussing “the nature of the love affair,” which usually alleviated his bad mood. The vengeance seeker making love to the traitor’s wife: that excited Hitchcock. When Freeman brought up his vision of “compulsive, life-changing, soul-altering sex—all to be made more explicit than any scenes in his previous films,” Hitchcock responded, “Yes, yes. That will work, very exciting.” (“It was as elaborate as praise ever got,” Freeman recalled.)
One day, discussing the scene between the two lovers in a cabin on the Finnish island, Hitchcock visualized an X-rated interaction. “The lovers are seated across the room from each other,” he intoned—with their robes
open
, he added. (Freeman: “He stopped, savoring the scene, repeating that the robes were open.”) “Their robes open as they look at one another,” Hitchcock continued, breaking into a lascivious grin. “Outside, on the bay, a tiny boat is approaching, coming over the horizon. The lovers know the husband is approaching. They can hear the sound of his boat’s motor, growing louder as it comes over the horizon. They stare at each other and begin to masturbate, each of them. The camera moves closer to their eyes. The sound of the motor grows louder as their eyes fill the screen.”
*
As Hitchcock talked, he stretched his legs and his cane fell away, according to Freeman; then the director who had always styled the hair of leading ladies to his whim finished his depiction of the scene with a triple-X flourish. “Then after orgasm, the man must take an ivory comb and comb her pubic hair.” Not really a scene intended for “The Short Night,” this was, according to Freeman, “a private vision, playful and from the heart, a true home movie. This led to a general chat about pornography. I told him about the Pleasure Chest—a Hollywood shop
that sells sexual paraphernalia. I told him San Fernando Valley housewives walk up and down the aisles with supermarket baskets buying vibrators and dildoes. God knows if it’s true, but it astonished him, and he loved being astonished.”
This revealing incident, along with others, led the writer to believe that Hitchcock nurtured a Dionysian streak that “at least at the end of his life was trying to get out.” Although he was not the first, he was probably the last confidant taken aback to hear Hitchcock confess that he and his wife didn’t have “relations. Haven’t for years.” Freeman later reflected: “It’s clear he wanted posterity to know that sex and passion, the absolute fundament of his work, was not a part of his marriage. Surely he was trying to say, ‘I am my films, my films are me. If you want to know either, look at them, my spiritual legacy, not at my odd, misshapen corporeal presence. There is no other me.’ ”
Yet Hitchcock seemed ebullient one day when the two temporarily moved their sessions to Bellagio Road, and Alma agreed to sit in. Frail and twisted, Mrs. Hitchcock was helped by a nurse into the study. Freeman recalled how Alma looked “angry to be infirm.” And that day the director came alive as never before in their script discussions. “He was showing off for her,” Freeman recalled. “Strutting his stuff. He was saying, ‘Look, I can still do it. There’s a future. There’s going to be another movie. It’s worth it to go on.’ ”
Most days, though, Hitchcock and Freeman worked at the studio, usually alone, although a pretty young secretary was sometimes there with them, taking notes, and now and then Peggy Robertson sat in. Hilton Green, Robert Boyle, and Albert Whitlock came to meetings, but other visitors were rare. Although he was friendly with his staff, they weren’t close friends. In all the time he worked for Hitchcock, Boyle never spent much time at Bellagio Road, and Whitlock said, “I was known to some people as Hitchcock’s friend, but this always left me feeling part of the ‘friend enigma.’ I am mentioned as an old friend and colleague in John Russell Taylor’s biography, but I make no claim, although this assuredly came from Hitchcock, as did the rest of the quote about me. Hitch sent me an inscribed copy (with his caricature on the fly leaf) and marked also on the page.”
In fact, many of his old, true friends had quit the business or moved away. “No one seems to have the nerve to call him and he’s usually pleased when an old friend does,” wrote Freeman.
Hitchcock showed Freeman something like fifty bottles of pills on a tray in his bedroom at home, and told the writer there were half as many more in the bathroom. His arthritis (“my friend Arthur,” he dubbed
it) was growing worse, and now the director had to be helped in and out of chairs and cars. There were pills at the office, too, and booze everywhere.
His drinking had grown “seriously worse,” in Freeman’s words. There might be wine at lunch, and always vodka and orange juice at the afternoon break. Between times, Hitchcock kept a brandy bottle in a paper bag in the office bathroom “as if he were some wino on the street,” Freeman remembered. “He’d always be shuffling off to have a little bit. That had a kind of sadness about it, as if he were ashamed to be doing it.”
Too often, by the spring of 1979, Hitchcock seemed “adrift in senility and depression,” and too often the production meetings had to be cut short, awkwardly, when he drifted off. The fifty-fourth Hitchcock film, too, was drifting away. Hitchcock was suffering feelings of embarrassment—and fear. But giving up on “The Short Night” and dying were interchangeable in his mind. Some mornings he wept with his pain, and the thought of dying: “When do you think I’ll go?” he asked Peggy Robertson. “When?”
Not before two final honors: first, the American Film Institute in October 1978 had announced that the Master of Suspense would receive its prestigious Life Achievement Award, established in 1973 and thus far awarded to John Ford, James Cagney, Orson Welles, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis, and William Wyler.
Although Hitchcock agreed to be the AFI’s honoree, the tribute dinner, scheduled for March 7, 1979, loomed before him like a sword he had to fall upon. He dreaded the upcoming ceremony, which had all the trappings of a public entombment. “He ignored it all, until the last week or so,” according to Freeman. With the AFI date looming, wrote Freeman, the pain and drinking “seemed to be constant,” and then the director “took to spending long, preposterously flirtatious sessions with a young secretary. When she walked past, he would crinkle his nose and give her little private waves. She always blushed.”