Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Among the people who showed interest in the English director even before he finished his first Hollywood film were Loretta Young, who had struck up a rapport with him at parties; the former silent star Harold Lloyd, who operated a production unit at Paramount; and Walter Wanger, whose interest in Hitchcock had persisted since 1937.
Wanger was the one with the most active program, and he wanted to produce a Hitchcock film as soon as possible. Primed by Myron Selznick, he had met with Hitchcock casually; now, in mid-September, with
Rebecca
entering its second week of photography, the director received Dan O’Shea’s official permission to talk with Wanger.
As a directing prospect, Hitchcock had one curious shortfall: he didn’t own or possess any literary properties. He had never had the time, the inclination, or the financial wherewithal to keep a back file of stories or scripts to wave in front of producers. It wasn’t practical, and it wasn’t his style. He had always been a working professional under contract, who reviewed the available studio properties and then chose the project that best matched his sensibility.
Starting over in Hollywood, when producers asked him what
he
wanted to do next, he found himself taking a shortcut and offering to remake one of his best-known English films, transferring the English settings and characters to America. A remake of a proven Hitchcock success was attractive to Walter Wanger. Lunching with Wanger in September, the director discussed transplanting
The Man Who Knew Too Much
to America. Or, if the producer preferred, Hitchcock could take
The 39 Steps
and craft a surefire sequel to it, using John Buchan’s second Richard Hannay novel,
Greenmantle
, which he had always favored anyway. Hitchcock even ventured that Robert Donat might be willing to reprise his role.
Wanger was intrigued by
Greenmantle
, but knew it would take some
time to negotiate the screen rights with the Buchan estate. Perhaps
Green-mantle
could be their second film together, Wanger suggested, already hoping for a long-term collaboration. In the meantime, the producer said, Hitchcock might consider taking over a troubled project called
Personal History
, whose off-and-on status had been splashed all over the trade papers.
Personal History
was a memoir by Vincent Sheean, an American newspaper correspondent who had chased headlines in foreign capitals during the 1920s. Ever since its publication in 1935, the producer had been piling up flawed scripts, trying unsuccessfully to turn the book into a Walter Wanger production. Wanger said he would be happy for Hitchcock to take over the challenge; for all he cared, as long as the story had an American foreign correspondent, Hitchcock could do anything he wanted—even change the book into a sort of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, or an informal remake of
The 39 Steps.
Hitchcock didn’t need much convincing. Once he’d accepted, Wanger went after a deal with Selznick International. Wanger agreed to pay Selznick International $5,000 a week, only $2,500 of which would go to Hitchcock as his regular salary. But Wanger also agreed to employ Mrs. Hitchcock for an additional $2,500 weekly, which Alma Reville could earn free and clear of Selznick, to whom, after all, she was not under any signed contract. Soon thereafter, as the director concentrated on
Rebecca
, Mrs. Hitchcock and Joan Harrison plunged into
Personal History.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and annexed Danzig; two days later England and France, which had mutual defense treaties with Poland, declared war on Germany. America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced, would abide by its Neutrality Act, which had been passed by Congress in the mid-1930s to keep the United States out of foreign wars.
The war headlines shook the cast and crew of
Rebecca.
The director frantically phoned his mother, Emma Hitchcock, trying to convince her to come to the United States; but Mrs. Hitchcock refused to be uprooted, proud of having survived World War I in London. Alma was more successful with her family, and arranged to bring her mother and sister to America.
Five days after Hitler’s invasion, Hitchcock commenced filming on
Rebecca.
Most of, the cast were professionals with sterling credentials. Hitchcock could trust their instincts, especially those of Laurence Olivier, just coming off his Oscar nomination for
Wuthering Heights.
Although his role in
Rebecca
was sketchier than that in
Wuthering Heights
, Olivier was always self-assured, even intimidating in performance.
Hitchcock typically devoted more attention to his actresses, and that was true even in the case of Judith Anderson, whose charge it would be to convey—subtly enough to elude the censors—the peculiar closeness between Mrs. Danvers (“Danny”) and Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier had implied a protosexual bond between the women; two weeks before filming, the implication remained intact in the script. And now the Production Code office, known informally as the Hays Office, strenuously objected to “the quite inescapable inferences of sex perversion” in the film script.
In Hollywood it was rather expected of the best directors that they buck censorship, but Hitchcock would buck the Hays Office with exceptional tenacity in the American phase of his career, pushing the boundaries of sex and violence in film after film. And he usually did so deviously, rather than in direct confrontation—stalling, surrendering by degrees, swapping off one cherished transgression for another.
The Production Code had been written by a Jesuit priest and a crusading Catholic layman, and it existed partly as a check against the proliferation of local and civic censorship groups across America. These included the Legion of Decency, the Church’s official—and even more stringent—ratings board. Catholics ran the Hays Office in Hollywood. Hitchcock met frequently and ungrudgingly with head censor Joseph Breen, and his assistant, Englishman Geoffrey Shurlock. He had an ease with them that others lacked, and they were as amused as they were alarmed by his ability to sneak “inescapable inferences” past them.
Even after the sins of a Hitchcock script had been washed away by the Hays Office, such inferences often remained. Although the censors gradually eliminated any dialogue that suggested an improper relationship between Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers, Hitchcock got around the problem by clever atmospherics and intimate two-shots, with Mrs. Danvers hovering over the second Mrs. de Winter while stroking Rebecca’s lingerie, recalling their precious closeness. (Mrs. Danvers’s line about Rebecca’s underwear being handmade by cloistered nuns probably looked chaste on paper, but what a hoot: of course it’s a Hitchcock line, not in the book.)
To help Anderson with her performance, though she was an actress acclaimed for interpreting Shakespeare and the classics, Hitchock assumed the character in rehearsals and showed Anderson how to position herself for optimum camera effect. “I knew I was in the presence of a master,” she said afterward. “I had utter trust and faith in him.”
But
Rebecca
would have to rise or fall on the shoulders of its least seasoned player. Nearly every scene revolved around the second Mrs. de Winter, Joan Fontaine. Hitchcock had to play Pygmalion with Fontaine: slathering the young actress with support and advice while at the same time isolating her from the other actors and whispering against them (reminding Fontaine constantly that Olivier disliked her, hinting that she was
in danger of being replaced). Hitchcock built up his power over Fontaine while keeping her nervous and vulnerable enough to enhance the nervous, vulnerable character she was playing.
She was not, it must be said, all that popular. Olivier, still smarting over the fact that Fontaine had beaten out Vivien Leigh, treated his costar with transparent disdain. Olivier’s “attitude helped me subconsciously,” Fontaine later conceded in
No Bed of Roses.
“His resentment made me feel so dreadfully intimidated that I was believable in my portrayal.”
Hitchcock encouraged these tensions as grist for the scenes between his two stars. When, during the first week of shooting, Fontaine expressed shock after Olivier used a four-letter word, Hitchcock stepped in. “I say, Larry old boy, do be careful,” he cautioned. “Joan is just a new bride.” When Olivier asked who the husband was, Fontaine replied that she had married Brian Aherne. “Couldn’t you do better than that?” he flung over his shoulder before striding off imperiously. The retort demolished her; Aherne was a lightweight, often typecast as an English gentleman, and Fontaine said later that she could never look at him with the same eyes again. (An impulsive marriage to begin with, it would also be a short-lived one.)
Not just Oliver, but the entire cast, behaved like a “cliquey lot.” United by their superiority and their purer Englishness, they sneered at the least-seasoned player behind her back, or so Fontaine believed. Hitchcock took advantage of this, too, drawing on Fontaine’s insecurity to inform her performance in
Rebecca.
Ordering Fontaine to the set on her day off, the director surprised the actress by throwing her a birthday party. She was equally surprised that the important cast members didn’t bother to show up; they stayed in their dressing rooms. Hitchcock could have summoned them—but their absence suited his strategy.
It wasn’t really a matter of “Divide and Conquer,” as Fontaine described it in her autobiography. It was Hitchcock forcing a novice actress to
become
her character, by treating Fontaine like Mrs. de Winter. The actress felt as alone, as terrified, as de Winter’s young bride felt in Rebecca’s world.
This was one of the director’s techniques, but there were others. Fontaine recalled Hitchcock drawing for cameraman George Barnes a sketch of one shot that featured her character, cringing in an oversize wing chair, the light slanting across her face so that only her frightened eyes peered out. The sketch proved helpful to the cameraman, but also to the actress. “We all could see precisely what he wished to photograph,” Fontaine said.
If sketches didn’t work, Hitchcock was capable of ruder measures: In one scene, Fontaine was supposed to break down into tears. (Selznick’s fidelity to the book meant that Fontaine’s character would spend many scenes on the verge of tears.) After multiple takes, Hitchcock still wasn’t satisfied. The
actress pleaded that she was all out of tears. “I asked her what it would take to make her resume crying,” recalled Hitchcock. “She said, ‘Well, maybe if you slapped me.’ I did, and she instantly started bawling.”
The only other person Hitchcock had to manipulate was the producer. In England producers made self-important visits to sets, but those visits were ceremonial, and easily tolerated. David O. Selznick had a different habit: he made ostentatious on-set appearances to monitor his directors, and often insisted on approving the staging of key scenes
before
they were filmed.
In England, producers were master businessmen in charge of financial decisions. In Hollywood, producers regarded themselves as creative forces. Selznick’s droit du seigneur as a creative producer had sometimes extended to firing directors when they clashed with—or disappointed—him. Although the director’s contract made his firing unlikely, once he had launched photography, Hitchcock recognized the wisdom of following local custom.
“Would you say Selznick was a producer who interfered?” Peter Bogdanovich asked Hitchcock. “Oh yes,” he replied. “Very much so. In fact, the big shock I had was after I had rehearsed a scene and said, ‘Well, let’s go,’ and the script girl said, ‘Oh, wait a minute—I have to send for Mr. Selznick.’ Before a scene was shot, he had to come down.”
Selznick’s visits to the set of
Rebecca
tapered off rather quickly, however. For one thing, Hitchcock made his displeasure clear. For another, the first preview of
Gone With the Wind
took place shortly after
Rebecca
began filming; after that, Selznick’s calendar was taken up with retakes and reediting, and the producer’s grandiose promotional plans. “It was my good fortune that he was extremely busy,” Hitchcock said later. Watching
Rebecca’s
dailies became Selznick’s main involvement, and there the producer swiftly discovered that Hitchcock didn’t direct like any other director he had under contract—or like anyone in Hollywood.
Blanket “coverage” was an orthodoxy in Hollywood: DOS expected a full complement of close-ups, medium shots, establishing shots, angles, and two-shots of virtually every page of script, allowing the producer to have every conceivable option in the editing room. In Hollywood, directors may have presided on the set, but producers ruled the editing roost.
If the scriptwriting had been a game of checkers for Hitchcock, with producer and director jumping and kinging to a draw, the filming was chess with a champion. Hitchcock called the shots with the camera. And although there was usually extra coverage and alternative takes on a Hitchcock film, the director would shoot as little extra as possible on
Rebecca.
Watching the dailies, Selznick tore his hair out. He didn’t understand
“my goddamm jigsaw method of cutting,” in Hitchcock’s words, or what the director was doing with Joan Fontaine, giving Olivier the day off while an off-camera script girl fed de Winter’s lines to the already jittery actress for her close-ups. Convinced that Fontaine was underplaying her role, DOS advised Hitchcock to strive for “a little more Yiddish Art Theater, a little less English repertory theater” in his approach. Selznick eventually grew worried enough that, in early October, he considered closing down the filming, getting more involved, and bearing down on Hitchcock (as he’d done with other directors). And yet, when he showed Hitchcock’s cumulative footage to his wife, Irene, she assured him it was superb.
The producer continued worrying aloud in his memos: wasn’t Hitchcock taking too much time with rehearsals, with lights, with his elaborate setups? But the most taxing delays weren’t the director’s fault: actors blew their lines, Fontaine came down with the flu, the technicians’ union held a wildcat strike. It’s a myth that Hitchcock ate up inordinate time on his first Selznick production, but it was a myth that proved useful to DOS—who gleefully adopted it and spread it via his staff.