Authors: Patrick McGilligan
He may have dozed, but the director didn’t dawdle. Principal photography was over by late August, and then it was on to the matter of Salvador Dalí’s dreams.
Selznick had been slow to authorize the hiring of Salvador Dalí. “I think he didn’t really understand my reasons for wanting Dalí,” Hitchcock said
later. “He probably thought I wanted his collaboration for publicity purposes.” The producer considered the surrealist’s initial asking price too high: five thousand dollars for approximately ten drawings and paintings, from which Hitchcock would derive his dream sequences. While the two DOSs negotiated with Dalí’s agent, Felix Ferry, the producer commissioned a poll to determine whether his hiring would be worth the expense—and if Dalí’s name signaled “art” to the general public—which DOS thought might be a bad thing.
It wasn’t until early August that Hitchcock was able to convene his first meeting with Dalí, his agent, and the special-effects experts. The meeting went well. The director told Dalí the entire story of
Spellbound
“with an impressive passion,” in the words of the surrealist, who afterward declared Hitchcock “one of the rare personages I have met lately who has some mystery.” But Dalí refused to start drawing until his contract was finalized.
Dalí now said he was willing to accept four thousand dollars for his art, but he insisted on retaining ownership of all his sketches, as he felt they would have long-term value. Since he was paying for Dalí, though, DOS felt
he
should own the art. The final negotiations during filming led to a Solomonic solution: cut the baby in half. Dalí agreed to split the artwork “down the middle,” according to Dalí biographer Meredith Etherington-Smith, with the producer reserving the first pick of half the sketches, and the rest going to the artist.
By the time the producer approved Dalí’s terms, however, “there was not much time to prepare. The various arguments leading up to Dalí’s hiring had left little time for the actual work,” according to James Bigwood in his definitive account of the production.
Dalí’s contract spelled out four distinct dreams: “1. The Gambling Sequence, 2. Two Men on a Roof, 3. The Ballroom Sequence, 4. The Downhill-Uphill Sequence.”
Dream 3, the Ballroom Sequence, was slated to go before the cameras first, on the last two days of August. Dalí’s conception for that dream had Bergman as a stone statue with ants crawling out of the cracks, “representing life taking refuge inside the statue,” in his words. Hitchcock nixed the ants, an image he felt was too identified with the artist. But the statue was okay; and the production crew began a race against time to turn Bergman into one, and construct the ballroom.
As usual, Hitchcock found himself hurting for time
and
money, for Selznick, resenting the size of Dalí’s fee, elected to compensate by scrimping on the length and budget of the dream sequences. Determined to have his Dalí dreams, Hitchcock insisted he could pull everything off with, if necessary, “no sets whatsoever—with possibly some miniatures but with somewhere between 80–100 [thousand dollars] per painting.” Instead Selznick slashed the entire dream budget—from the original plan of $150,000 to $20,000.
Originally, Hitchcock had hoped to shoot “in the open air so that the whole thing, photographed in real sunshine, would be terribly sharp,” in his words. Now he beat a retreat to the soundstages. At first, in order to create the impression of a nightmare, with “heavy weight and uneasiness” hanging over the guests in the ballroom, Dalí had envisioned hanging “fifteen of the heaviest and most lavishly sculpted pianos possible” from the ceiling and swinging them over the heads of cutout dancers “in exalted dance poses” who “would not move at all, they would only be diminishing silhouettes in very accelerated perspective, losing themselves in infinite darkness.” Saving time and money, Hitchcock substituted miniature pianos dangling over the heads of live dwarfs.
No one had bothered to inform Dalí of the changes. Arriving at the studio to observe the filming on August 30, the artist was “stupefied at seeing neither the pianos nor the cut silhouettes.” He was assured that tiny pianos and dwarfs “would give perfectly the effect of perspective that I desired. I thought I was dreaming. They maneuvered even so, with the false pianos and the real dwarfs (who should be false miniatures). Result: The pianos didn’t at all give the impression of real pianos … and the dwarfs, one saw, simply, that they were dwarfs. Neither Hitchcock nor I liked the result and we decided to eliminate this scene. In truth the imagination of the Hollywood experts will be the one thing that will ever have surpassed me.”
Meanwhile, in order to turn Bergman into a statue, the actress had a breathing pipe placed in her mouth. A papier-mâché mold was constructed around her, and then she was draped in a Grecian gown, with a crown on her head and an arrow through her neck. When action was called, she burst out of the mold; when the film was run backward, the actress seemed to metamorphose into a statue.
With Dream 3 completed, they had to wait a week before Dream 1 was ready, with its giant scissors and painted eyes. Dalí himself chalked up “the jagged path that he wished the giant scissors to follow,” cutting the eye-adorned curtains, according to Bigwood. “As specified in Dalí’s sketches and notes, metronomes embellished with cutout eyes (a twenty-year-old image borrowed from Man Ray) were set in motion ‘precisely synchronized in opposing directions’ on tables with human legs. His plan to have a ‘cockroach with an eye glued onto its back moving across the blank cards’ was politely rejected, as was his suggestion that ‘the eye could reappear and serve as a dissolve into the wheel in the chimney scene’ ” for the still-unfilmed Dream 2.
Flitting around a nightclub and kissing all the gamblers in this scene was a lady sprite, or “kissing bug,” wearing “hardly anything.” (The gamblers are wearing weird stocking masks and playing distorted card games.) Dalí himself created the costume for kissing-bug Rhonda Fleming by
spending two hours with a large scissors cutting a four-hundred-dollar Dior negligee into shreds. When his creation was shown to the Hays Office, however, the censors insisted on additional shreds to cover her exposed midriff, thighs, and breasts.
Two dreams down, two to go: Hitchcock moved on to numbers 2 and 4. The Two Men on a Roof and Downhill-Uphill converged in a murder committed on a snowy rooftop, with one man sporting an insecure beard and another clutching a limp wheel—a Dalí trademark.
By the end of the month the dreams were done, assembled, and shown to the producer. But Selznick was unimpressed. His notes ordered retakes, optical work, newly dubbed dialogue, and fresh editing of all sections of the dreams—adding significantly to the costs. “Selznick’s hopes for an inexpensive dream sequence were history,” wrote Bigwood.
Hitchcock had compromised, he had cut corners, he had labored mightly—and it was no longer any fun. After finishing the rough cut, he spent only one more day in the studio, according to Leonard Leff. Then the director abandoned
Spellbound
and his Dalí dreams for England, where he had agreed months earlier to meet with Sidney Bernstein.
Selznick was glad to let him go. The Dalí dreams were bothering DOS—he questioned even the merit of the art—and now he could tinker freely with them. The producer ordered another art director, William Cameron Menzies, to begin retakes stripping away Dalí’s background for the statue dream, and refilming Bergman sitting in a “weird deserted place.” Menzies shot new close-ups of the man cutting the giant eye. “Though the scene had been originally shot using a double, Norman Lloyd did the honors in the closeup,” according to Bigwood. “His presence in the dream (as well as Rhonda Fleming’s) was a subtle clue to the mystery, as both appeared elsewhere in the film. The fact that they are both unrecognizable in the finished sequence somewhat diminishes the clue’s value.”
The retakes spilled into December. There was so much reshooting, re-cutting, and redubbing that Selznick decided the dreams were no longer Dalí’s—they were Dalí’s with “other work, not by Dalí, being mixed in.” He explored the possibility of lowering the size of, or changing the wording of, the famed surrealist’s screen credit. But the credit was mandated by contract: “Dream Sequence Designs—by Salvador Dalí.”
Later interviews with Bergman have given rise to the idea that the dreams were originally “a wonderful twenty-minute sequence that really belongs in a museum”—that Selznick hacked the Hitchcock-Dalí vision to bits. This is pure myth, according to Bigwood. On-screen, the dreams totaled slightly under three minutes. “The sequence was indeed originally intended to be longer,” Bigwood explained. “Never twenty minutes long—Ingrid Bergman exaggerates a bit—but certainly forty or fifty seconds
longer than it finally wound up.” The only one of the vignettes to be dropped entirely was that of Bergman as a statue, along with the “weird deserted place” as its background.
The dreams may not have been hacked to bits, but Selznick had fought them from the beginning, and then starved the budget, reshooting, recutting, and finally attenuating Hitchcock’s vision. The director blamed Selznick, but he blamed the surrealist equally. The famed artist was “really a kook,” Hitchcock told Charles Higham years later, whose notions were too bizarre for Hollywood.
When Dalí finally saw the finished
Spellbound
, he too was disappointed. “
Les
best parts in Hitchcock
que
I like he should keep,” the surrealist was quoted, “that much was cut.”
En route to London, the director stopped in Boston to attend the preview of a new play. His daughter, Pat, now sixteen, had landed another part in a Broadway-bound comedy drama called
Violet
, adapted from a series of
Redbook
stories about a young Miss Fix-it who helps untangle her father’s love life. Having missed his daughter’s professional debut during
Saboteur
, Hitchcock had no intention of missing this play for
Spellbound.
He proudly congratulated Pat backstage.
The producer of the play was Albert Margolies, who had been Gaumont’s publicity chief in the United States, and then Hitchcock’s East Coast press agent after the director moved to America. The playwright was Whitfield Cook, a Yale-educated author who had published short fiction in
American Mercury, Story
, and
Cosmopolitan.
(Cook’s
American Mercury
story won an O. Henry “Best First-Published” award in 1943.)
Mrs. Hitchcock had read
Violet
and asked to meet Cook, who was working in Hollywood under contract to MGM. He was also going to direct the play. She liked the playwright as much as his play, and helped with some structural suggestions for the final revisions.
Read-throughs and rehearsals were in September, and once again Alma accompanied Pat to New York, staying with her at the Wyndham. Alma wrote home about the time they spent with Joan Fontaine after the premiere of
Frenchman’s Creek
and the plays they attended, like Samson Raphaelson’s latest—the Hitchcocks always kept up with the careers of people they knew personally. Her letters also make it clear how much the New York cost of living worried her (“things are dreadfully expensive here, much higher than L.A.”). She asked about the family dogs (one had been left in the care of Joan Harrison), and fretted about her husband’s weight, which was always burgeoning. She knew Hitchcock had a habit of stalling his checkups with Dr. Ralph Tandowsky, and urged his secretary to remind him to make a doctor’s appointment when he returned to the
United States. New York weather was “very dreary and humid,” she said. “I miss the house and garden so much, and Mr. H.,” Alma wrote her husband’s secretary, “I don’t think I can do this again.”
Following out-of-town previews,
Violet
opened at New York’s Belasco Theater in October, but Pat’s second Broadway play did little better than the first, closing after twenty-three performances.
Violet
earned “dreadful notices,” Alma lamented, reporting back to California. “Pat has taken it all splendidly—her only concern is for Whit. I nearly cried on the second night. My view on actors has changed considerably—they all put on such an act of gaiety and went on the stage giving better performances than they’d ever given.”
Hitchcock was still in London, where he and Sidney Bernstein were rolling up their shirtsleeves to plan a film company that would link their friendship and their dreams across the ocean under the name “Transatlantic Pictures.” While the director was busy planning films that might be as artistic as they were commercial, Selznick oversaw the postproduction of
Spellbound
, continuing to chip away at its length. The film may have lost less than a minute of Salvador Dalí, but Selznick robbed it of up to twenty minutes of Hitchcock.
Hitchcock was in England for nearly two months: the new partners had much to talk about. Transatlantic Pictures, as its name suggested, would exploit the best available talent from England and America, dividing the creative and business operations equally between the two nations. Of course, this was a dream that dated back to Islington—a dream that might be said to have a long, distinguished history of failure—but Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein thought they were the ones to make it work.
The Transatlantic chapter in Hitchcock’s life has been inadequately reported, and misunderstood. In order to make the new company successful, the principals—there were only ever two (not counting Alma, who was ex officio), and never more than a handful of employees—had to parlay a start-from-scratch operation into a fully competitive enterprise, following a model that had never before been successful. And one of the principals was busy directing films, while the other had no real production experience.
Transatlantic’s first challenge was to find investors. The company had to raise production capital by negotiating low-interest loans from banks on both sides of the Atlantic. They needed a major Hollywood studio to share the financial risks—and, just as important, to implement the distribution of Transatlantic films in America and around the world. (Bernstein would handle distribution in England through his chain of cinemas.)