Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Launder and Gilliat didn’t want a regulation hero, so they had changed Ethel Lina White’s dam engineer into Gilbert, a folklore scholar. It was probably Hitchcock who nudged the character further along this path into “a scholar of folk music”—which allowed for the comedy sequence that introduces Gilbert, and the tune that will save the world (self-plagiarism from
The 39 Steps
, where the tune inside of Robert Donat’s head finally reminds him of Mr. Memory).
Ted Black urged Hitchcock to test Michael Redgrave, who had carved his reputation in classics on the stage (he was then appearing nightly in the Chekhov play
The Three Sisters
). Although inexperienced in film—and as wary of the rival medium as John Gielgud—Redgrave was persuaded by the generous long-term contract proffered by Gaumont.
For Iris, the producer championed Margaret Lockwood, a pert brunette rising in audience polls who had never met her costar before she was cast in
The Lady Vanishes.
“We were introduced at a charity film ball at the Royal Albert Hall, where we danced together and were photographed in a tight embrace which suggested that, to say the least, we knew each other quite well,” Redgrave recalled in his autobiography.
Characteristically, the director was counting on an awkwardness between them. Hitchcock was up to his usual tricks, choosing the first day of filming to shoot the scene where Gilbert and Iris “meet cute.” The folk-music scholar has collected members of the hotel staff in his room to noisily reproduce a local dance. The dancers are making too much commotion for Iris, who is trying to go to sleep in the room just below; she convinces the hotel manager to evict Gilbert. Gilbert then vengefully barges into her room, booming out the march later used famously in
The Bridge on the River Kwai.
“It is possibly the gravest disadvantage of acting for the camera,” Redgrave later reflected, “that one must do an important scene with someone one has never acted with, perhaps never even met, or, as with Margaret Lockwood and myself, met only briefly and in somewhat artificial circumstances. After some initial parrying, Margaret and I got along well, though we remained suspicious of each other for some time.”
In the film, as Hitchcock well knew, the two characters also meet at a disadvantage and remain suspicious of each other for some time—their romance developing stealthily.
“Something of an intellectual snob,” in his own words, Redgrave harbored suspicions of Hitchcock and film in general. The director’s slashing brand of humor Redgrave never got used to: he couldn’t understand why, at one cast party at Cromwell Road, Hitchcock poured drink after drink for Mary Clare (the aunt in
Young and Innocent
, the baroness in
The Lady Vanishes
) until, to his obvious satisfaction, the actress got roaring drunk.
Like others before him Redgrave couldn’t understand Hitchcock’s “shock tactics,” in his words—his fallible belief “that actors take themselves too seriously, and that those who have an infinite capacity for taking praise will sometimes perform better if they are humorously insulted. He evidently thought that I had a romantic reverence for the theater, and he could see that I had the newcomer’s disdain for the working conditions of the studio.”
The writers begrudged Hitchcock. The leading man regarded him warily. The budget was shoestring. The director was fat and pale, his future gray and cloudy.
The months spent making
The Lady Vanishes
were filled with nervousness and difficulty, and once again there were published reports of a fatigued director stealing forty winks during filming. “He was a dozing, nodding Buddha with an enigmatic smile on his face,” recalled Lockwood. Once again there were reports of a Hitchcock, literally backing away from confrontations with people—standing as far away against a wall as he could, staring sullenly at someone who had trapped him, stabbing a finger at him.
It’s a curious fact, but nobody has been able to date the origins of that most notorious of Hitchcock pronouncements: “Actors are cattle.” The director himself recalled that he might first have said something along those lines in the late 1920s, thinking of stage actors who took a snobbish attitude toward motion pictures. The purity of theater was a pretension that Hitchcock, himself a theater aficionado, couldn’t abide. “I do not know whether his famous ‘Actors are cattle’ remarks was coined for my benefit, but I well remember his saying it in my presence,” Redgrave remembered.
“When we started,” Hitchcock recalled, “we rehearsed a scene and then I told him [Redgrave] we were ready to shoot it. He said he wasn’t ready.
‘In the theater, we’d have three weeks to rehearse this.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘in this medium, we have three minutes.’”
The leading man was subsequently taken aback when fellow actor Paul Lukas, whom he “greatly admired and liked,” wondered aloud why Redgrave didn’t even seem to be
trying
to fit into the film world. Redgrave felt chastened: he
hadn’t
been trying. Hitchcock had advised him to “do as I was told and not worry so much.” When Redgrave finally decided to follow this advice, he finally started to relax—and began to like the director.
It is a virtue to know one’s solace, and Hitchcock found ways of nurturing his spirit in the worst of times. As striking as any anecdote of friction or unpleasantness on the set of
The Lady Vanishes
is the one about an event the director orchestrated for an important visitor. One day, at lunchtime, he had the stage cleared. Mood lighting was ordered, and a small group of studio musicians on the sidelines struck up an arranged playlist. He had a favorite menu drawn up, and juice served in champagne glasses. Then he and nine-year-old Pat, just father and daughter, ate a special lunch aboard the dining car of the mock train.
Even while he was making
The Lady Vanishes
, Hitchcock kept one eye on America. The Selznick Agency was working to reignite interest in bringing him to Hollywood. Producer Bob Kane seemed eager to employ the director for the new London unit of Twentieth Century–Fox, and RKO in Hollywood floated a long-term producer-director pact. Most promising of all, independent producer Sam Goldwyn reentered the competition.
The new prospects were encouraged by the Selznick Agency mainly to heat up the lukewarm discussions with David O. Selznick. The agency went so far at one point as to wire DOS in his drawing room aboard the Santa Fe Chief, advising him that it was “really urgent” for him to focus on the matter “as propositions are coming up for Hitchcock elsewhere.”
But DOS, consumed with preparations for
Gone With the Wind
, couldn’t seem to think ahead. He couldn’t focus on Hitchcock. When Jock Whitney and Kay Brown dined with the director at the Connaught Grill in London at the end of November 1937, they were again impressed with the man in the ample flesh. When Whitney took in
Young and Innocent
at a subsequent preview, however, his reaction was dismay. His transmission to DOS warned that the latest Hitchcock “establishes new low for both Pilbeam and himself. Please see it before further negotiation.” Brown didn’t learn of this rash, mistaken verdict for several weeks; when she did, she weighed in belatedly: “Regret do not agree with Jock.”
Yet Brown, along with Jenia Reissar—Selznick’s talent and literary scout in London—also warned DOS repeatedly that Hitchcock was reputed to be a “slow worker.” Bob Burnside was another Selznick adviser who informed
his boss crudely that Hitchcock was “a fat man and a little lazy.” These reports—unfair to Hitchcock’s true efficiency and productivity—gave DOS pause. Furthermore, whenever DOS asked about the director’s present salary, he was told a sum equal to less than forty thousand dollars. He couldn’t figure out why Hitchcock was asking for so much more.
When DOS himself finally saw
Young and Innocent
in February 1938, he emerged from the screening to proclaim Hitchcock “the greatest master of this particular type of melodrama.”
*
Yet the Hollywood producer continued to balk at the salary the Englishman was requesting, and continued to prefer a one-picture contract; and DOS didn’t want to sign any contract until he knew what the first Selznick-Hitchcock production was going to be.
Halfway through the filming of
The Lady Vanishes
, his last commitment under the Gaumont contract, Hitchcock still didn’t know what his next project was going to be. So he was nearly frantic when he met with Charles Laughton in the spring of 1938.
After his break with producer Alexander Korda, and following the disaster of the unfinished Josef von Sternberg film
I, Claudius
, Laughton had gone into business with German émigré Erich Pommer to set up Mayflower Films. There had already been two successful Mayflower productions, and the next was going to be
Jamaica Inn
, based on a 1936 novel by Daphne du Maurier, and Laughton wanted Hitchcock as his director. Set in the nineteenth century,
Jamaica Inn
concerned a band of cutthroats who wreck and plunder ships off the Cornish coast, under the secret leadership of a local vicar (the starring part earmarked for Laughton). Their piracy is threatened by a young, upstanding maiden—the niece of one pirate—and an undercover naval officer.
It was while considering Laughton’s proposition that Hitchcock also read the latest Daphne du Maurier novel in galleys.
Rebecca
was a gothic suspense thriller about the English lord of a manor who is haunted by the memory of his first wife, the never-glimpsed Rebecca, who has perished in a mysterious boating accident before the story begins. The book’s narrator is his new wife, who must unravel the horror of the past.
Hitchcock promptly tried to option
Rebecca
, but flinched at paying the asking price himself. This, finally, spurred DOS into some semblance of action. Jenia Reissar, who had started in the business working for Gerald du Maurier, set about acquiring the book for the American producer, which the Selznick Agency considered the first step toward a contract with Hitchcock. But DOS optioned many properties, and his talk was still vague.
In the spring of 1938 Hitchcock told a London columnist, “If I do go to Hollywood, I’d only work for Selznick.” But he was merely keeping the hook baited. Not until the final days of
The Lady Vanishes
did he receive the equivalent of a nibble. DOS telegraphed his brother’s office in London, proposing a Hitchcock film TO
BE BASED UPON AND CALLED QUOTE TITANIC UNQUOTE.
” There was no script, but Hitchcock could name his preferred writer, the producer’s telegram said, and go straight to work. Filming could be under way by mid-August.
While DOS typically gave himself an out (“
PLEASE DISCUSS THIS FRANKLY AND THOROUGHLY WITH HIM MAKING DOUBLY SURE THAT THERE WILL BE NO DISAPPOINTMENT IF I SHOULD DECIDE AGAINST IT
”), Hitchcock’s reply was an unequivocal yes. The “Titanic” project offered him a splendid opportunity to make a human drama on the grand scale, and he had already demonstrated his aptitude for shipboard suspense in earlier films. Harry Ham’s return telegram pledged Hitchcock’s interest, adding, “
AND BELIEVES HAS VERY GOOD IDEAS ON SUBJECT AS HAS CONTEMPLATED DOING ROUGHLY THE SAME THING HIMSELF
.
Hitchcock said he could make himself available to DOS inside of two weeks. But he cautioned that August would be too soon to develop a suitable script. He reiterated his current salary demand: he required fifty thousand dollars to make the one picture over a six-month timetable, plus round-trip transportation and expenses for him and his wife. After thinking it over, Selznick agreed that August was foolishly optimistic, to Hitchcock’s relief. But the producer offered no alternative timetable—and worse, he said he wouldn’t pay the sum of fifty thousand dollars for six months and one film.
A dispirited Hitchcock met with Dan Winkler of the Selznick Agency in Paris to talk things over. Winkler tried to reassure him. Winkler is said to have coaxed him to a ringside table at the Casino de Paris (which probably didn’t take much coaxing). Hitchcock is said to have fallen asleep, amidst “the noisiest show in the world, nude women dancing right next to his table,” according to Winkler. (Probably it was with one eye fluttering open.)
Hitchcock’s Hollywood prospects at this point were still iffy; his English possibilities, on the other hand, seemed firm, immediate. Sometime during the impasse, Hitchcock agreed to direct the Laughton film, setting a September 1 start date for
Jamaica Inn
, and then squeezed in quick meetings with writer Sidney Gilliat, engaging him for a major “repair job” on playwright Clemence Dane’s first draft. Hitchcock even held discussions with the debonair song-and-dance man Jack Buchanan for a musical picture to follow
Jamaica Inn.
But his next move was more surprising—even to the Selznick Agency. Hitchcock announced that he would return to America, traveling to Hollywood at his own expense to meet with DOS and other producers. The week after
The Lady Vanishes
wrapped, that is what he did, sailing with
Alma aboard the
Queen Mary
in the last week of May. On June 6, they were met on the New York docks by Kay Brown.
Once again, Gaumont publicity director Albert Margolies had set up interviews for Hitchcock, and before he set off for Hollywood the director met with New York journalists, some of whom were familiar from the previous year.
This time, dining with Eileen Creelman of the
New York Sun
at “21,” Hitchcock stressed in his interview that he was dieting on doctor’s orders. (“Mustn’t get too heavy, you know,” he said. “You’ve read those advertisements: ‘When I meet a girl she always passes me by.’”) After a year of constant work and a rigid, sacrificing diet of one meal a day, Hitchcock said he was down to 179 pounds. Creelman reported his dinner consisted of broiled lamb steak, which Hitchcock ordered by drawing a sketch for the waiter of a chop “with lots of meat and very little bone.” Cantaloupe preceded; fresh pineapple followed.
After sampling a New York Yankees game—Basil Radford, perusing the scores in the
International Tribune
, sounded his disapproval of the great American pastime in
The Lady Vanishes
(“Children play it with a rubber ball and a stick”)—the Hitchcocks caught the train to Chicago. There they boarded the Super Chief, the “Train of the Stars,” which departed on a Tuesday and sped through the Southwest to arrive in Los Angeles by early Thursday. It was a forty-hour magic-carpet ride through Middle America that, advertisements boasted, sacrificed only one business day.