Authors: Patrick McGilligan
And in order to establish credibility with banks and a Hollywood studio, the new company had to have stories and stars that would reassure its investment
partners. Each of these needs was inextricably linked to the other, but a first priority was to option and develop stories that would attract box-office names. Finding these properties was actually more difficult than finding investors, because Transatlantic—a two-man operation—was in ceaseless competition with the major studios in London and Hollywood, which made it their habit to snap up everything that had been published or performed, while simultaneously employing armies of writers to think up suitable originals.
The hunt for financial partners would be led by Bernstein; as the businessman of the pair, he would naturally guide the business decisions. Hitchcock would be the creative head of Transatlantic, but the initial plan was that he and Bernstein would woo other directors and creative artists to join their dream. After two months spent planning the future, they were optimistic about their chances. But Hitchcock and Bernstein were also hardheaded about the film industry, and they knew their success would depend on good luck as much as hard work.
Returning from London through New York, the director sat down with Ben Hecht to hash out the script of his next film. He had an informal two-picture understanding with Hecht, and if
Spellbound
was the Selznick film,
Notorious
would be the Hitchcock original.
In midsummer Hitchcock had signed an extension of his Selznick contract, settling on the disputed number of films he owed the producer—now agreed as two—in exchange for a backdated pay raise. Transatlantic, the director realized, was going to take a while to gestate, and he wanted to keep working; he also wanted to work with Hecht again.
Hecht also owed a Selznick picture, and while developing
Spellbound
he and Hitchcock had discussed a second project, originating with a musty
Saturday Evening Post
serial from 1921 called “The Song of the Dragon.” Written by John Taintor Foote, the serial concerned an American theatrical producer approached by federal agents; they want to hire an actress, with whom the producer was once infatuated, to seduce a monocled English gentleman living on Fifth Avenue. The monocle man is actually German, the leader of a “small army of bomb planters and incendiaries” trying to sabotage U.S. industry.
A few basic elements of “The Song of the Dragon” were eventually carried through in the development of
Notorious
(its lead female character is an amateur Mata Hari recruited into the pretense of romance with a German agent). But the
Saturday Evening Post
serial was mainly an excuse for Selznick to use a property he owned, and for Hitchcock and Hecht to lull the producer into complacency while they went about changing the story so radically that its origins were unrecognizable.
The real inspiration of
Notorious
was closer to home. In Hollywood during World War II, several of Hitchcock’s friends gathered intelligence on behalf of England’s Ministry of Information. More than once, amateur English spies had been asked to seduce suspected German operatives. Charles Bennett wrote in his unpublished autobiography about one such incident; though married, Bennett claimed he was assigned to romance a suspected female double agent in order to ascertain her true loyalties. Actor Reginald Gardiner was another Hitchcock friend drafted by MOI into a furtive relationship with an actress believed to be a Nazi sympathizer—a liaison that came to cloud his marriage.
While “The Song of the Dragon” took place in New York City during World War I, the first thing Hitchcock did (as he often did) was to move the setting and time frame forward—not to Hollywood, but to Miami in 1946,
after
World War II. Even as the war was winding down, Hitchcock and Hecht grew obsessed with the future of the Nazis and their sympathizers. Hitchcock had predicted the repatriation of the Vichyites in
Aventure Malgache
; the year before
Notorious
, Hecht had written a play called
A Flag Is Born
attacking the “British barbed wire” surrounding Palestine, the Jewish homeland. (Zionism provoked Hecht’s blacklisting in England, but his anti-British reputation doesn’t seem to have given Hitchcock the least pause.)
As was his wont, Hitchcock had begun planning
Notorious
while still filming
Spellbound.
In August he and Hecht had mapped out a treatment, focusing the new story on pro-Nazi scientists outside of Germany regrouping for another try at world conquest. Hitchcock was far enough along in his thinking to (presciently) propose South America as the main locale. And once again they were hoping for Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant.
In December, after Hitchcock returned from England, they worked on fleshing out the lead characters: Grant would play the American intelligence agent trying to penetrate a ring of fascists-in-exile. Ingrid Bergman had tentatively agreed to portray the woman of “loose morals” whose father has been convicted as a traitor—linking her character, in this last of Hitchcock’s four World War II films about spies and saboteurs, to that of Laraine Day in
Foreign Correspondent.
Exploiting her guilt over her father, Grant would coerce Bergman into an undercover assignment, which she accomplishes so credibly that the South American Nazi proposes marriage. Despite the growing attraction between Grant and Bergman, the agent urges her to accept the marriage, leading to her endangerment.
The Hitchcock-Hecht story conferences were “idyllic,” observed Frank Nugent in the
New York Times.
“Mr. Hecht would stride about or drape himself over a chair or couch, or sprawl artistically on the floor. Mr. Hitchcock, a one hundred and ninety two pound Buddha (reduced from two hundred and ninety five) would sit primly on a straight-back chair, his
hands clasped across his midriff, his round button eyes gleaming. They would talk from nine to six; Mr. Hecht would sneak off with his typewriter for two or three days.”
The casting helped drive the writing. Grant’s Devlin would become a coldhearted government operative gradually thawed by the more selfless Alicia (Bergman). (In “The Song of the Dragon,” it was the other way around.) But what should Alicia’s mission be? What were those South American Nazis up to? This was the film’s Macguffin, but it was as elusive to Hitchcock and Hecht as it is to Devlin in the film. The two sketched in the idea of the German refugees setting up a secret army in mountain camps, knowing all along that this was just a temporary solution.
Then, taking a break from the scriptwork, Hitchcock volunteered for his own secret government mission. In early December, he and Hecht agreed to create, for the U.S. State Department and Office of War Information, a ten-minute film looking ahead to postwar foreign policy, touting world unity while laying the groundwork for American participation in a “world security” organization. This unusual project was personally authorized by Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr.
On the day after Christmas, 1944, the two men traveled to Washington, D.C., and “sat up most of the night” of December 26 “roughing out a script,” in Hecht’s words. The original idea was simply to film a six- or seven-minute speech by Stettinius, weaving it together with newsreel footage. But Hitchcock and Hecht preferred to dramatize the need for a world-security organization. They urged outlining “the proposed international organization in dramatic form by projecting into the future and telling the story of its operations in stopping an unnamed potential aggressor about the year 1960,” according to Stettinius memos.
When Hecht outlined the script ideas they had brainstormed to a group of State Department officials on December 17, everyone present, including the secretary of state, agreed “that it was a very dramatic and effective presentation.” Although there was talk of an actor narrating the film, Hitchcock insisted that “for dramatic effect it would be necessary for the Secretary to carry the entire narration.”
But as usual with Hitchcock’s war work, his ideas were too hardhitting. The projected script’s blunt warning about “a future belligerent attack by a world power, threatening peace in the futuristic world,” in the words of film scholar Sidney Gottlieb, alarmed U.S. officials, who were hoping to build postwar relationships with former enemy nations. Sensitive policy points were overlooked, even trampled, by the “combined imaginations” of Hitchcock and Hecht, according to one memo.
Although some published sources indicate that Hitchcock may eventually have shot a couple of scenes for the short film, ultimately titled
Watch-tower over Tomorrow
, John Cromwell was credited as director. Whether
it was ever shown publicly is uncertain. As with his war work for England, this quasi-Hitchcock film for the U.S. State Department not only bucked conventional politics, but went unreported for years.
In
A Child of the Century
, Hecht bemoaned the whole interlude as a waste of time, dismissing the secretary of state and all his colleagues as a “vacuous wagonload of politicos.” He and Hitchcock were in Washington for only a few days; they returned to New York in time for Alma and Pat to join the director for the holidays. And the trip had other creative payoffs: while in D.C. Hitchcock soaked up the top secret atmosphere—and came away with an intriguing idea for a
Notorious
Macguffin.
By the time they got to Hollywood in January, Hitchcock and Hecht had fifty pages of
Notorious.
Selznick had asked to see their progress by February 1.
“Selznick remained an extraordinary editor,” Leonard Leff writes in
Hitchcock and Selznick.
“He read the
Notorious
first draft, criticized the occasionally precipitous story turns or mediocre treatment of certain plot points, and scribbled double question marks and triple exclamation marks in the margins.”
One early draft, according to Leff, had Alicia speaking in “Tallulah fashion,” which Selznick lambasted as “horribly coarse without being witty,” complaining that it consisted of “jokes and words that date back to Hecht and MacArthur’s
Front Page.
” According to Leff, “Noting the omnipresence of Hecht in the treatment, Selznick cried, ‘More Hitch.’ ”
This notion of DOS as an editor extraordinaire of Hitchcock scripts is itself extraordinary, although it is presented as all but gospel in other books as well. Hitchcock and Hecht, both grizzled veterans of a practiced Hollywood regimen that routinely involved multiple drafts (and multiple writers over the course of many months), didn’t need Selznick to tell them their first draft was formative. “The script writing moves thru a molasses covered paper,” Hecht wrote to his wife early in 1945, “but it moves.”
Hitchcock didn’t need Selznick to tell him to add his personal stamp to a script, either. After Selznick’s comments, in fact, Hitchcock and Hecht spent another four months working alone, without the producer. It wasn’t until May that they got down to regular late-night meetings with Selznick. Hitchcock and Hecht would hunker down at Romanoff’s beforehand; Selznick didn’t expect them until 11
P.M
. Then “for four hours,” wrote Leff, “the producer would pace, discourse, and digress, then at three in the morning finally turn to the project at hand.”
Hecht’s letters to his wife make it plain how much he enjoyed Hitchcock’s company. They dined together “like two Edwardian dandies,” he wrote. And he also appreciated Selznick’s notes, “that extra twenty per cent” worth of fine-tuning, as Hecht put it.
But neither he nor Hitchcock was blind to the fact that Selznick didn’t seem very enthusiastic about their pet project—or that much of his advice didn’t suit their higher ambitions for the film. Aware of the producer’s short attention span, and the fact that his costly production of
Duel in the Sun
starring Jennifer Jones was then spiraling out of control on location in Arizona, they listened patiently to Selznick, nodding to him and each other. And then they simply went ahead with their own plans.
The producer was of little help on the most stubborn plot point: What was Alicia’s mission? What was the plot objective? By March 1945 Hitchcock and Hecht were itching to reveal their solution: Hecht’s letters began referring to his son as “the little atomic bomb,” and by April even the press had been informed of their “secret researches,” in the words of Thornton Delahanty in the
New York Herald Tribune.
It was a variation on an idea that Hitchcock had nurtured over most of his career. “Big Bomb Sensation!” Hitchcock’s newsboys scream in
Sabotage.
Russell Maloney of the
New Yorker
had told the director about rumors of a secret government project in New Mexico; then, during their trip to Washington for
Watchtower over Tomorrow
, Hitchcock and Hecht had picked up further tantalizing hints of the revolutionary weapon of mass destruction being developed by a team of U.S. scientists. “A bomb,” the director liked to tell scriptwriters, “is always good.” The biggest bomb sensation in history? That would be very good indeed.
Musing aloud with Hecht, the director—who prided himself on being a wine connoisseur—said he thought the vital component to such a bomb might be hidden in the wine cellar of the German agent’s mansion. Rooting around for clues in the cellar, Alicia or Devlin might accidentally break a bottle of 1934 Pommard, only instead of burgundy, out spills sand—pitchblende, uranium ore being mined by the fascists.
Donald Spoto calls Hitchcock less than honest for claiming he consulted an expert on the subject of atomic weaponry. But it’s exactly the sort of thing the director was wont to do. In the spring of 1945, probably in mid-March, Hitchcock and Hecht visited Dr. Robert A. Millikan, the first American-born physicist to win the Nobel Prize, at his offices at the California Institute of Technology in nearby Pasadena. Millikan was known for his radiation and nuclear-energy research and for application of that research to military problems.
According to Hitchcock, Millikan vaulted out of his chair and warned the director against inquiring into such high-level secrets. Although Millikan’s appointment book doesn’t prove the visit, contemporaneous newspaper accounts allude to it, and attest that California Institute of Technology scientists were “pretty leery” about talking to the Hollywood duo.