Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Stage Fright
was shaping up as a cozy return to the English thrillers that were Hitchcock’s safe haven. Although the author wasn’t widely known outside of England, Jepson’s work was nonetheless of reliable quality. Jepson had a prolific career—novels, short stories, radio plays, and films (even directing one)—but he became best known for his series of crime novels starring Eve Gill as his detective.
In
Man Running
, the first of the series, Eve Gill is the daughter of a scalawag smuggler. One night in London she notices a man named Jonathan Penrose on the street. Penrose is fleeing from constables, and “without conscious thought” Eve kisses him to deceive the law enforcers
and to “protect this man from the hated police who were our enemies as well as his.” Impulsively, Eve decides to hide Penrose, who is hopelessly in love with a society figure, Charlotte Greenwood.
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Greenwood has accidentally killed her husband (or so Penrose believes); suspecting otherwise, Eve disguises herself first as the lady’s maid, then as an actress, to detect the real murderer. A modest but beguiling policeman joins her on the case.
A wrong-man suspect, a beautiful young woman torn between love and justice, theatrical motifs, and English humor—Jepson’s novel had Hitchcock written all over it.
Alma and Whitfield Cook had finished a film treatment by the end of 1947, but the real scriptwork didn’t begin in earnest until after the holidays. As it was going to be a Warner Bros. production, the studio asked Hitchcock to work with its top writer, Ranald MacDougall, whose credits included the Oscar-nominated
Mildred Pierce.
But Hitchcock hedged on MacDougall; saying he wanted a lengthy prose version before proceeding to a script, he held out for Cook, who had virtually moved in with the Hitchcocks. Perhaps, too, he didn’t want to sacrifice independence by using a man beholden to Warner Bros.
The three Hitchcocks didn’t launch daily script conferences until after Cook was approved by the studio, in mid-January 1948. One of their goals was to maximize the backstage milieu. They would invent a minor role for RADA student Pat Hitchcock, playing a friend of Eve’s with the sly name of Chubby Banister (the first of the memorable small parts she took in her father’s films). Hitchcock wanted a number of splashy scenes for Charlotte, and envisioned a glamorous star playing the diva character.
The team also worked to enlarge the part of Eve’s colorful smuggler father, the Commodore, who is only a passing character in the book. At the urging of James Bridie, whom the director was expecting to polish the dialogue, the three Hitchcocks watched Sidney Gilliat’s
Dulcimer Street
for the scene-stealing performance of Alastair Sim. (Sim had appeared in several Bridie plays.) The Commodore was then tailored for Sim—though later, during filming, the ebullient actor drove Hitchcock crazy, mugging without restraint.
In their script talks Hitchcock was “definitely the leader,” Cook recalled. But Mrs. Hitchcock was “the world’s best critic.” If Hitchcock and Cook worked out something on their own together, and Alma didn’t seem to react one way or another when it was told to her, inevitably her husband would ask, “What do you think, kiddie?” Cook didn’t quite catch the nickname, and thought Hitchcock was calling her “kitty.” One day he
asked the director, “Why do you call Alma ‘kitty’?” “Not kitty,” Hitchcock replied, “
kiddie
, because she was such a young little thing and so small when she started working with me in England.”
In Jepson’s book the climax involves a surreptitious tape recording at a cottage in the woods; Hitchcock took the essentials of that scene and transplanted them to a London theater. But the loudest script debate was over Penrose’s reversal of guilt at the end of this scene. In the book Penrose is utterly innocent, the pawn of the scheming Charlotte and her manager, Freddy Williams. Hitchcock wanted to try something structurally unusual: Penrose would relate a sympathetic version of events to Eve, in flashback, at the beginning of the film; but then a twist ending would reveal that his version of events to have been a lie. In the final moments, a dying Penrose would confess to being the killer.
And this idea made for an even more unusual situation: the Hitchcocks disagreed with each other over it. Mrs. Hitchcock and Cook banded together to fight for Penrose’s innocence, while Hitchcock insisted on trying it his way. Mrs. Hitchcock and Cook—joined against the director as writers, but also in their deepened relationship—never wavered in their conviction that a false flashback lied not only to Eve, but to the audience, who would feel cheated.
When, on March 24, Jane Wyman won the Best Actress Oscar for
Johnny Belinda
, a Warner’s tearjerker in which she portrayed a deaf-mute, she became queen of the Burbank lot. Shortly thereafter, Hitchcock asked for Wyman to play Eve Gill. It helped that her agent—who also represented her husband, Ronald Reagan—was Lew Wasserman.
There was never any question but that the good-humored Michael Wilding would return to play Lieutenant “Ordinary” Smith, the detective who falls in love with Eve—a much better part for Wilding than the one in
Under Capricorn.
Dublin-born Richard Todd was almost an afterthought for Penrose, though Todd had been nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor for his ailing patient in
The Hasty Heart
, a Warner Bros. film that Hitchcock watched for Ranald MacDougall’s script.
The most important part, from Hitchcock’s point of view, was the diva Charlotte Inwood. The part called for a genuine diva, and once again Hitchcock thought first of Tallulah Bankhead. But Jack Warner balked at Bankhead, remembering
Lifeboat
’s box-office fate. Next the director suggested Marlene Dietrich. To Dietrich—almost fifty, but still a goddess—Warner said an enthusiastic yes.
In early April, Hitchcock sent a treatment of the script to Dietrich at her residence at the Hotel George V in Paris. She wrote back directly, saying that although she recognized the treatment as rough, “I like it very much,
knowing that you are going to do it,” adding, “I being quite an Erle Stanley Gardner
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admirer would love to ask you a couple of questions but I will wait with that until I know more through the script or until I see you.”
Her agent extracted a salary of ten thousand dollars weekly, for ten weeks of filming. In the last week of April, when the Hitchcocks and Cook passed through New York on their way to England aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
, Dietrich flew in from Paris to meet with them. Hitchcock invited her to lunch in his suite at the St. Regis. “She came in,” recalled Cook, “looking so ravishing, her hair done back smoothly on her neck and in a plain black dress. Just the most beautiful person in the world. And we had a lovely time, drinks and funny conversation.”
After a whirlwind of theatergoing—running the gamut from
Death of a Salesman
to
South Pacific
and
Kiss Me Kate
—the three Hitchcocks sailed for England on April 28.
“There must be a lot that doesn’t appear on the surface,” Eve (Jane Wyman) muses in
Stage Fright.
“Who knows what goes on in a woman’s mind? I mean, like wheels within wheels.”
Both the scripts Alma worked on during her dalliance with Whitfield Cook involved women torn between two lovers. In
Under Capricorn
, the audience would be kept guessing until the end as to Lady Flusky’s true feelings—which lie, incidentally, with her husband. In
Stage Fright
the audience must similarly bide its time to learn whether Eve will stick with the dull Penrose or fall for the appealing Lieutenant “Ordinary” Smith. Marriage decisively wins out in
Under Capricorn
, while the ending of
Stage Fright
is drastically different from the book The book leaves Eve with tender feelings for Penrose; for the film, Hitchcock had insisted upon something that he had never done before: the “wrong man” turning out, in fact, to be guilty.
Did Alma’s intermittent romance with Cook persist? It’s impossible to know. Arriving at Southampton, and then proceeding by boat train to London, the Hitchcock party registered at the Savoy; that evening, they joined Pat Hitchcock, the Sidney Bernsteins, and Al Margolies (who was handling publicity for Transatlantic) for dinner.
Cook had finished a draft of the script during the crossing, but Hitchcock suffered an attack of the flu, and took to bed at the Savoy. Largely from his bed, by phone and telegraph, he then ordered up changes and touch-ups from James Bridie in Glasgow and Ranald MacDougall in Hollywood. MacDougall, working as a favor, refused credit.
It was Cook’s first visit to London, and Alma took it upon herself to escort the writer to bombed-out areas of the city, and to Chelsea, Hyde Park, and Covent Garden market. She took him to favorite pubs, and the pair attended plays and music hall in Islington.
The first weekend of May, the three Hitchcocks repaired to Bernstein’s farm at Kent, where life was peaceful and dull. Still nursing a sore throat, the director spent part of the weekend in bed, but he rose for a screening of Bob Hope’s new
Sorrowful Jones
, which Bernstein had arranged, and which everyone found hilarious.
The cast was shaping up, and the script was coming along. There were none of the unpleasant harbingers of
Under Capricorn.
Old friends could be found at Elstree: George Cukor, for one, was there directing Spencer Tracy in
Edward, My Son.
Cukor invited the Hitchcocks and Ingrid Bergman to dinner in his own suite at the Savoy. The two directors swapped Selznick horror stories, laughing as they tried to top each other.
Hitchcock also feasted on the English newspapers and the latest crop of headline killers. John Haigh was arrested in February 1949 for the acid-bath murder of a wealthy widow, which, as the Scotland Yard investigation revealed, was his last in a series of gruesome murders purely for profit. (Well, not purely; he confessed to drinking the blood of his victims.) The trial was in July, the hanging in August; the case riveted the British public.
Later in 1949, when
Stage Fright
was in postproduction, the arrest of Timothy Evans for strangling his wife and child also drew lurid coverage. Although Evans at first confessed, he withdrew his confession at trial, insisting that the deed was done by a meek middle-class neighbor named John Christie. Evans was hanged in 1950, but sure enough, a couple of years later Christie was found out and arrested for the murders of his wife, neighbors, and a series of prostitutes and working girls, whom he stuffed in the closet and under the floorboards of his house at the ever-after sinister address of 10 Rillington Place. All during 1949, Hitchcock read about Haigh and Evans and Christie, filing his fascination with these horrific killers away for the future.
After he recovered from the flu, the Hitchcocks went out several times to nightclubs, for dinner and dancing; when Hitchcock danced with his wife, Cook danced with Pat. On May 15, Cook flew to Paris and Italy for three weeks of vacation. By the time he returned in mid-June filming had started, and Alma met him at the airport.
“Miss Dietrich is a professional,” Hitchcock was widely quoted as saying after
Stage Fright.
“A professional actress, a professional cameraman, a professional dress designer.”
Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor said that the director’s comments were sincere evidence of his professional regard for her, and that an unspoken affinity existed between the two screen legends. The truth was, Dietrich tended to dominate any film that she starred in. She came with all sorts of personal and professional baggage. Still, Hitchcock accepted her for the way she was: as with Tallulah Bankhead, Dietrich’s reputation for manipulative behavior preceded her, and she was in the film precisely because she was a known quantity.
Her contract, for example, stipulated her wardrobe; she had to be adorned in Christian Dior dresses—expensive outfits that she could take home afterward. But Hitchcock, always controlling about what his leading ladies wore, had a clause that allowed him to approve the designs: the marabou, white fox, black tights, diamonds galore.
In fact, once Dietrich accepted the role of the diva, the character of Charlotte was rewritten to reflect her particular persona. In Selwyn Jepson’s novel the character is said to be an ex-actress, but not a singer; with Dietrich, though, it became imperative to incorporate a song or two into the script, and that was one priority of the revisions.
Hitchcock volunteered a few song suggestions of his own. One of his ideas was a 1927 Cole Porter tune, “The Laziest Gal in Town.” Though its composer was famous, the song was obscure, having been recorded only once. The director recalled hearing the number at the Biltmore Hotel, where saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer led the house band on NBC radio during the summer of 1938, the year of Hitchcock’s first trip to Hollywood.
Dietrich countered with Edith Piaf, one of her friends (and some say lovers). She got Piaf’s permission to sing her famous chanson, “La Vie en Rose.” It wasn’t a bad choice, and Hitchcock knew Dietrich could pull off a Piaf song. But he was planning to stage one of the production numbers in its entirety, and for that purpose he wanted a song less familiar to audiences—and more to his taste. Dietrich wasn’t thrilled about ceding a song choice to Hitchcock, but he held fast. After sifting through numerous possibilities, she finally surrendered to “The Laziest Gal in Town.”
Dietrich also had ideas about the script. Hitchcock listened respectfully, and the May and June rewriting continued to enhance her role. But her scenes weren’t stretched out of proportion, as they were for Ingrid Bergman in
Under Capricorn.
It was more as though a spotlight swept down over her in scenes, illuminating an icon.
Bridie and MacDougall both labored over Dietrich’s scenes, giving her much of “the picture’s best dialogue,” in the words of Steven Bach in his biography of the star. That included her curtain-call soliloquy, after Charlotte is found out as an accomplice to the murder and waits to be taken to jail. Talking to a police guard as she smokes a cigarette backstage, she
complains obliquely about pet dogs, who don’t return their owners’ affections. “When I give all my love and get back treachery and hatred,” she hisses, “it’s—it’s as if my mother has struck me in the face.” It was a great speech expressly tailored for Dietrich.