Alfred Hitchcock (44 page)

For Selznick it was much too early for anything; he was still completely absorbed with making a film out of
Gone With the Wind.
The costs of that production were ballooning out of sight, and the last thing DOS wanted to do was to siphon off money and energy to another film. Hitchcock, on the other hand, coasted to a finish on
Jamaica Inn
in late November, and expected to sail for America after the first of the year. He counted on drawing his salary from Selznick International beginning in January.

When the producer informed him that he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on
Rebecca
until late February at the earliest, Hitchcock was incensed. That would mean weeks of idle, unsalaried time, but not enough time to squeeze in another film in either England or the United States. When he asked DOS to pinpoint a date, DOS wired him back: “
SORRY CAN’T BE OFFICIAL OR DEFINITE.
” After thinking it over, DOS said unhelpfully
that he didn’t think he could focus on
Rebecca
“much before March or April.”

With such vague noises from DOS, the director angrily insisted that Myron Selznick find him another quick job—immediately. Hitchcock sorely wanted to reduce his
NONEARNING PERIOD BETWEEN JAMAICA INN AND COMMENCEMENT SELZNICK CONTRACT
, according to the telegram he sent his agent in Hollywood.

Other Hollywood producers, meanwhile, hovered in the wings. Arthur Hornblow Jr. at Paramount stepped up to offer Hitchcock a rock-solid March 1 start date on a studio-approved project. Hitchcock was inclined to say yes—but it turned out that he
couldn’t
say yes without DOS’s consent; furious to be pushed on a point of pride, Selznick insisted that he, and only he, would produce the first Hitchcock picture in America.

What finally broke the logjam, and lit a fire under DOS, was not Hitchcock’s mounting pique, or the offers of other producers. It was the naming of Hitchcock as Best Director of 1938 in late December by the New York Film Critics. His latest film to reach America,
The Lady Vanishes
, struck the New York critics of that year—as it strikes most viewers today—as a total delight, as inventive a creation as any Hitchcock film to date.

Alarmed that his open-ended agreement with the year’s Best Director might allow Hitchcock free rein to freelance for his rivals, the producer volunteered amended terms that would make Hitchcock
exclusive
to Selznick International for two pictures a year, one of which
could
be a loan-out—though only if circumstances were agreeable to both parties. Added value to Hitchcock came in the form of an increased annual (as opposed to per-picture) salary, which would kick in automatically in April regardless of any further postponements by Selznick. The built-in raises also improved on their previous agreement.

Hitchcock consented to this very quickly, by telephone, and happily finalized his departure. With some awkwardness, he managed to extricate himself from the Jack Buchanan picture he had tentatively agreed to direct. For tax purposes his association with J. G. Saunders was liquidated, though Saunders would continue as his English accountant for the rest of his career. The director arranged to lease his flat on Cromwell Road and the cottage in Shamley Green. Furniture was placed in storage.

Hitchcock had twiddled his thumbs for over two months. Now—sooner than DOS wanted him, but later than Hitchcock might have wished—he, his family, and Joan Harrison sailed from England on March 4, 1939. The bon voyage party that enlivens the beginning of
Foreign Correspondent
gives a hint of the scene: a crowd of friends, drinks and toasts, and the funny tender moment when his mother kissed him good-bye and wished him good luck.

This time, as Hitchcock crossed the Atlantic for good, there were clouds on the horizon that he couldn’t ignore. War clouds. Professional clouds. He was on the verge of forty, of middle age; and now, halfway through his life and career, he had to start over in a country that still felt alien to him.

The Lost Legion of British film industry exiles had filled Hollywood with actors and actresses who made cozy salaries playing European types in American films. A small group of British-accented actors even became stars. But few Englishmen before Hitchcock had managed to carry successful directing careers to the Hollywood system.

And Hitchcock would discover early that films about murderers were considered another lowbrow specialty in Hollywood—partly because “in America,” as he observed in interviews, “crime literature is second-class literature.”

He moved to Hollywood, he said later, fully realizing that he was “a minor figure in a vast film industry made up of entrepreneurs who headed the studios.” It was a system dominated by producers, not directors, and by the stars under studio contract who reigned at the box office. The studios supervised the writers and scripts; they calibrated the glamour of their leading ladies; they designed the “look” of their productions. Directors
weren’t expected to second-guess production designers or cameramen. They weren’t expected to think like writers or editors.

When Hitchcock, a quintessential Englishman, came to Hollywood, he was entering an industry that was quintessentially American. On the boat to the United States, as he tried to relax, he must have wondered if he was doing the right thing. If he had stayed home, he knew, he would easily have reigned for years as the greatest filmmaker in all of England.

His welcome was orchestrated by Selznick International and Albert Margolies, who was now retained personally by the director to handle his East Coast publicity. A guest lecture was arranged at the Yale School of Drama, where Hitchcock reportedly impressed the students with his knowledge of English theater; in another event at Columbia, he addressed a class on the “History of Motion Pictures.”

Presiding over a press dinner at “21,” over champagne and steaks Hitchcock was asked to name his ten favorite films. The list, which readers were assured he “thoughtfully selected,” included two Cecil B. De Mille films. De Mille’s
Saturday Night
, a 1923 feature starring Leatrice Joy, he ranked his overall favorite. It was followed by
The Isle of Lost Ships
(Maurice Tourneur, 1923);
Scaramouche
(Rex Ingram, 1923);
Forbidden Fruit
(De Mille, 1921);
Sentimental Tommy
(the 1921 version of James Barrie’s novel, directed by John S. Robertson);
The Enchanted Cottage
(the 1924 version of Arthur Wing Piñero’s romantic drama, also directed by Robertson); E. A. Dupont’s
Variety
(1925); Josef von Sternberg’s
The Last Command
(1928); Charles Chaplin’s
The Gold Rush
(1925); and the depression-era drama
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
(Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). All but the last title—a socially conscious wronged-man story, which Hitchcock liked enough to praise again in the
New York Times
ten years later—were silent pictures, made before 1928.

The Hitchcocks took time for a ten-day visit to Florida and the Caribbean, leaving New York by train on March 16, and flying from Miami to Havana, then at the height of its mystique as a hot spot for international high society. Wherever he went his films were bound to follow, and Hitchcock would include nods to Cuba as a fascist haven in
Saboteur
and
Notorious
, and make Castro-era political intrigue a centerpiece of
Topaz.

The director and his family returned to New York via rail on March 27, and departed for California four days later. They passed through Chicago, then crossed Middle America to arrive at the Pasadena depot on April 5. Myron Selznick was among the official greeters, though after a round of pleasantries they were turned over to Dan Winkler.

The Selznick Agency had leased for the family a three-bedroom apartment
in the Wilshire Palms on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, a new high-rise with a view of the mountains and ocean. The Selznick International studio was only ten minutes away by car. Joan Harrison was installed in a suitable apartment in the same building.

Although Hitchcock later insisted he “wasn’t in the least interested in Hollywood as a place,” he eagerly settled in. Eight-millimeter home movies, which he shot from the open seat of a convertible as they toured the city, capture the English family’s exultant mood.

“The only thing I cared about was to get into a studio to work,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut, and by Monday, April 10, he was rested and anxious. On that day he reported to the Selznick International lot on Washington Boulevard in Culver City, a mile east of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. There stood a white colonnaded mansion modeled after Mount Vernon and erected by Thomas Ince during the silent era, now owned by RKO and leased to Selznick, for whom it served as both headquarters and distinctive logo. To the rear of the main building sprawled eight sound-stages and a forty-acre back lot, with vegetation that could be artfully disguised as any exterior in the world.

On the first floor was the spacious, well-appointed sanctum of the head of the studio. On David O. Selznick’s desk was an omnipresent jar of cookies to alleviate his hypoglycemia; dangling from one wall was a photograph of his father, Lewis J. Selznick, whose fall from grace was never forgotten by his sons, and whose roller-coaster fortunes had even affected Hitchcock back in his Islington days. The Selznick executive advisers Daniel O’Shea (financial) and Henry Ginsberg (production) occupied adjacent niches. Hitchcock and Joan Harrison were assigned a comfortable suite with kitchen and bath in an outlying bungalow, where they resumed their work on the
Rebecca
script.

Michael Hogan had moved to Hollywood ahead of the Hitchcocks to write
Nurse Edith Cavell
for producer Herbert Wilcox, and now Hitchcock paired him up with Philip MacDonald to complete a draft of
Rebecca.
A leading figure in detective fiction, the British MacDonald had lived in Hollywood since 1931; until this point his film credits were unexceptional, though notable among them were a number of installments for the Mr. Moto series starring Peter Lorre.
^*

MacDonald was given the job of organizing the chain of suspense, while Hogan filled in with scene-by-scene ideas. On the page and in person both writers were witty, sophisticated personalities; they didn’t flaunt
their egos, and they forged a deferential camaraderie with Hitchcock. Mrs. Hitchcock, the director’s uncompensated wife, joined with Joan Harrison and the newly hired hands to comprise five Hitchcocks collaborating on the script.

Selznick, meanwhile, was so overwhelmed by
Gone With the Wind
that he gave little thought to
Rebecca.
The filming of the Civil War epic had begun on December 10, 1938, with the extravagant burning of Atlanta, and then consumed a record four months of photography; the final take—before retakes, that is—was recorded in April 1939, the month Hitchcock started work. Some seventeen writers and five directors had been deployed on
Gone With the Wind.
The unprecedented costs eventually soared above $4 million.

Postproduction on
Gone With the Wind
, though, had just begun. The dubbing and looping, color values, optical effects, sound and musical scoring, editing, retakes and reediting—these were the producer’s real obsession, his chance to revel in eleventh-hour fine-tuning. A month into his contract, even Hitchcock was asked to ponder a reel of
Gone With the Wind.

“As I outlined on the evening of the 3rd of May,” he reported back, “I feel that the lack of suspense in this reel arises out of the fact that it is deficient in three main essentials.

“(1) That the audience should be in possession of all the facts appertaining to Butler’s, Ashley’s, etc., efforts to get into the home which is surrounded by Union soldiers.

“(2) That the audience should be shown surreptitious exchange of glances by the pseudo-drunken Butler and the character Melanie.

“(3) That the end of the tension should be sufficiently marked as the Union soldiers depart with their apologies.

“I suggest that these things can be remedied by the following method:

“(a) To play the reel up to the commencement of the reading of David Copperfield and, instead of the LAP DISSOLVE to the pendulum, CUT AWAY to some location that has the house in sight and there show the desperate group of Butler, the wounded Ashley, etc. Establish that in the distance they can see that the house is surrounded; their bewilderment as to what manner they can pass the cordon; then, suddenly Butler has an idea. On this, we CUT BACK into the house and proceed with the reel until the family hear the arrival of the drunken group. Then, CUT outside to the drunks coming toward the house. Show Butler lift a sober eye in the midst of his mock inebriation, and from his eye-line show the military preparing to arrest their advance.