Authors: Patrick McGilligan
The Macguffin would cause the director almost as much grief back at the studio as he claimed it did in Millikan’s office. Selznick doubted the
plausibility of Hitchcock’s idea, and his own research staff backed him up; no one except science fiction authors had ever heard of a mass weapon spawned from uranium. The uranium bomb gave Selznick an excuse to temporize about the script: The uranium might be a good idea, or then again it might not. In any event, he would have to study it further. DOS wanted to make pictures for average Americans. Wouldn’t such an unfamiliar idea baffle audiences?
By this point Hitchcock and Hecht had chalked up more than six months of writing, and the producer was starting to regard
Notorious
as “the most expensive script in the history of my career.” But the director wouldn’t surrender the idea of wine-bottled uranium as the film’s Macguffin—and Selznick’s vacillation only gave him more time to polish the script.
At one point, a frustrated Selznick even threatened to sell the whole kit and caboodle to producer Hal Wallis. Acting in collusion, Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman swiftly agreed—startling Selznick. Their willingness to abandon him was “a blow to my ego,” Selznick admitted. So he did offer
Notorious
to Wallis, who had been trying for years to coax Hitchcock over to Warner Bros., but Wallis ended up rejecting the package—because of the uranium in a wine bottle. As one of Wallis’s assistants later told Hitchcock, “The bomb was a goddam foolish thing to base a movie on.”
Wallis’s rejection reinforced Selznick’s skepticism—and yet never were cautious producers so foolish. Uranium was indeed a fissionable component of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just a few months later. Even stupider, neither Selznick nor Wallis seemed to realize that the wine-bottle uranium was merely an intriguing footnote to a film that was shaping up as one of Hitchcock’s greatest love stories.
The spring of 1945 passed pleasantly. Well paid at last, finding spare time for his own projects at last, Hitchcock was moving in several directions at once. He read stories for Transatlantic and dabbled again in radio, producing another audition show, this time a dramatization of Francis Iles’s “Malice Aforethought,” which was offered as yet another series pilot.
Ingrid Bergman and Dr. Petter Lindstrom were frequent dinner guests at Bellagio Road. Alma liked the actress and her dentist husband as much as Hitchcock, and after dinner, Donald Spoto wrote, the couples often rolled back the carpet and danced to the radio, or to recordings.
Whitfield Cook had become a regular guest, and Joan Harrison also often came to dinner, sometimes accompanied by her date, Clark Gable. Another frequent guest was Ben Hecht, who was in and out of town; Hecht had a fierce reputation, but Cook was surprised by his “quiet gentleness” while off-duty at the Hitchcocks’. When there wasn’t dancing
after dinner, there might be Scrabble or other board games, or perhaps a stroll across the golf course. The Hitchcocks’ London habits continued, as the couple made excursions to local theater or road shows. In the spring of 1945, the Hitchcocks organized a group outing to see Paul Robeson in
Othello.
In late March, taking the train up to Santa Cruz for the weekend, Hitchcock told Cook the entire story, thus far, of
Notorious.
(On this trip Cook heard the title for the first time.) Swiftly becoming a regular visitor to “Hitchcock North,” Cook discovered that the host also was surprisingly unfierce off-duty. Work was discouraged at the Hitchcock home overlooking Monterey Bay (although stories came up, and the director meditated on his projects in his enormous marble bathtub). The director had an extensive collection of gardening books, and puttered endlessly in the garden. Shedding his usual uniform, he roamed the estate in shirtsleeves and shorts, and visitors were invited along on the country walks he took with Alma. The director read and dozed in the sun; he and Alma sat for long spells on a bench at the top of a hill, gazing at the ocean. On Sundays, Cook drove Hitchcock and Pat to church.
Weekends up north, Hitchcock was “hilariously funny,” thought Cook. His old stunts were revived for new friends. He greeted guests in the mornings in mock-butler mode, offering a newspaper and champagne in glass-bottomed pewter mugs. On occasion he could even be induced to perform his long-dormant “breast ballet.” Once, Cook recalled, Hitchcock had to return to Los Angeles early, and Alma, Cook, and other guests saw him off at the train station. The director entered his sleeping car, drew up the shades, and started a striptease “with all the mannerisms of burlesque,” in Cook’s words. Alma shrieked with laughter, “Oh Hitch, stop it! Stop!” “There was a lot of fun in him,” recalled Cook.
In June 1945, David O. Selznick decided to postpone
Notorious
indefinitely. He wanted to bring in a new writer to work on the script while he shopped the package around to other studios besides Warner’s. Hitchcock didn’t so much as blink.
Delay was perfectly acceptable to Hitchcock; after all, according to the latest amendments to his contract, DOS had to pay his salary regardless. Hitchcock didn’t care to rush
Notorious
, and he had other pressing commitments. As he had agreed back in February, Hitchcock was heading to London in mid-June 1945 to make one final government war film for Sidney Bernstein: a documentary about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, intended for distribution to German audiences.
The idea for such a film had originated early in 1945, when Bernstein was among those in the Allied command structure who were stunned by revelations emerging from the newly liberated camps, and proposing “a systematic record” of the concentration camps, using footage provided by
military and newsreel photographers accompanying the British, American, and Russian forces sweeping across Europe. The supreme commander officially ordered the documentary film in April, but progress had slowed over the question of which government (and which director) would ultimately organize the sensitive content.
Other eminent directors—Carol Reed and Billy Wilder among them—were approached about compiling the documentary. But Hitchcock was the only one who could set aside time in the summer and guarantee a month of availability. “It was a great tribute to Sidney that Hitchcock agreed to come,” wrote Bernstein biographer Caroline Moorehead, for even though the end of the war was in sight, conditions for travel were still neither safe nor predictable. Air passage proved impossible, and once again the fastidious Englishman had to sacrifice creature comforts to travel aboard a crowded ship, sleeping “in a dormitory with thirty other people,” in his words.
By the time Hitchcock arrived in London, in fact, the United States had withdrawn its support for the project, deciding instead to produce its own documentary about the camps. In early July, the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) dissolved, eliminating the other Allies as well.
But the British, spurred by Sidney Bernstein, decided to go ahead and produce their own documentary. It would be one of the last acts Bernstein—a tireless antifascist and crusader against anti-Semitism—would perform before relinquishing his SHAEF and Ministry of Information posts.
In late June, Hitchcock checked into Claridge’s, immediately meeting with two writers who had witnessed the atrocities of Bergen-Belsen firsthand. Richard Crossman (later a Labour member of Parliament, and a minister in Harold Wilson’s government of the 1960s—his book
Diaries of a Cabinet Minister
was a sensation in its time) contributed a treatment, while Colin Wills, an Australian war correspondent, wrote a script that relied heavily on narration.
The director had committed himself to the project early enough to give Hitchcockian instructions to some of the first cameramen entering the concentration camps. Hitchcock made a point of requesting “long tracking shots, which cannot be tampered with,” in the words of the film’s editor, Peter Tanner, so that nobody could claim the footage had been manipulated to falsify the reality. The footage was in a newsreel style, but generally of high quality, and some of it in color.
“One of the big shots I recall,” said Tanner, “was when we had priests from various denominations who went to one of the camps. They had a Catholic priest. They had a Jewish rabbi. They had a German Lutheran and they had a Protestant clergyman from England. And it was all shot in one shot so that you saw them coming along, going through the camp, and
you saw from their point of view all that was going on. And it was never cut. It was all in one shot. And this
I know
was one of Hitchcock’s ideas.”
The footage spanned eleven concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ebensee, and Mauthausen. The filmmakers ended up with eight thousand feet of film and newsreel, some of it shot by Allied photographers, the rest of it impounded. It was to be cut and assembled into roughly seven reels.
At the MOI theater on Malet Street, Hitchcock watched “all the film as it came in,” recalled Tanner, although the director “didn’t like to look at it.” The footage depressed both of them: the piles of corpses, the staring faces of dead children, the walking skeletons. The days of looking at footage were long and unrelievedly grim.
The concentration camp film, like
Watchtower over Tomorrow
, was expected to perform the miracle of excoriating Nazi brutality while holding up optimism for postwar Germany. But by early August, shortly after Hitchcock returned to the United States, funding was suspended with only five or six reels finished. “The military command, our foreign office and the U.S. state department, decided that the Germans were in a state of apathy and had to be stimulated to get the machine of Germany working again,” Bernstein recalled bitterly years later. “They didn’t want to rub their noses in the atrocities.”
Despite Bernstein’s protests, the unfinished fifty-five-minute film—without completed sound or narration—was dumped into the Imperial War Museum, under the title of its archival file number: “F3080.” It wasn’t unearthed and shown to the public until 1984. Then, like Hitchcock’s other wartime contributions, “F3080”—or “Memory of the Camp,” as it has come to be known—was discovered to be no Hitchcockian flight of fancy, but an extremely hard-nosed, politically farsighted, totally unflinching look at the nightmare truth—“truth,” as Norman Lebrecht wrote in the
Sunday Times
, “at its most naked.”
Hitchcock’s belief in
Notorious
, fortified first by his trip to Washington, D.C., was only strengthened by the stark footage in London. Back in Hollywood, though, David O. Selznick was losing faith in a film that had never really interested him.
The project still posed all kinds of problems to Selznick. The producer preferred Joseph Cotten, his contract player, over Cary Grant, who would come with ego and salary demands. The Macguffin still bothered him. As
Duel in the Sun
drained his resources,
Notorious
looked increasingly like a millstone he ought to unload.
Hitchcock seemed remarkably indifferent as Selznick opened negotiations with RKO—perhaps because he had already met with RKO producer
William Dozier several times back in the fall of 1944, pitching him a not-dissimilar story of “a woman sold for political purposes into sexual enslavement.” Thanks to Hitchcock, Dozier—on the verge of marrying Joan Fontaine—was already an interested customer.
An amiable, laissez-faire producer, Dozier wound up paying the astronomical price of $800,000 for a package that included Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, and the script, as well as agreeing to cede 50 percent of any net profits to Selznick.
*
When Selznick stipulated that
Notorious
must undergo one final revision as a condition of the sale, Hitchcock was obliged to agree. But when Selznick spoke up against Cary Grant, who wasn’t available right away—urging RKO to go ahead with Joseph Cotten—Hitchcock invoked a subclause in the deal that prohibited any further interference by Selznick.
The deal was all but signed by August 9, by which time the United States had dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—putting to rest any doubts about Hitchcock’s Macguffin. And after Japan surrendered on August 14, ending the war, the script seemed all the more propitious, as it anticipated the fears—suddenly pervasive in the press—that diehard fascists would hide out and conspire after the peace.
RKO scheduled the filming of
Notorious
for later in the fall, giving ample time for the final rewriting and casting, and for Hitchcock to undertake a personal mission. At the end of the summer he and his wife set time aside to escort their daughter Pat to visit Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, just outside of Manhattan. With Cary Grant unavailable until October, and Hitchcock away on the East Coast, Group Theater playwright Clifford Odets slugged away at a revision. During September and October, only minimally advised by Hitchcock, Odets took an unsatisfactory pass at the final script.
After Odets was paid and dismissed, after Selznick had been taken out of the loop, Ben Hecht returned to the project. Hecht was a notorious gun for hire, and it was becoming rare for him to care enough to see a film through from start to finish.
All along, DOS had used possible Production Code and government objections as arguments against the script; now this buck was passed to RKO. Not only was
Notorious
as politically provocative as Hitchcock’s war propaganda films—imagining an alliance of U.S. fifth columnists and unregenerate Nazis at play in South America—it was also angling to be as sexually explicit as any Hollywood film to date.
Hitchcock was his own best ambassador, meeting repeatedly with studio and Production Code officials, lulling people with the shifting script and his wry reassurances. The director planned one scene that would blatantly skirt the guidelines of the code, which forbade any “excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures.” Unofficially, screen kisses were limited to just a few seconds, but in this scene, set on the terrace of Devlin’s apartment, Grant and Bergman would kiss passionately for much longer—their kissing interrupted by a ringing telephone, and then, as they moved inside toward the phone, by their nuzzling as they walked. The lines in the script were revised to the satisfaction of the censors, though it was the staging and the close camera work that stretched the code (“metaphorically,” Hitchcock said later, “the camera had its arms around them”).