Alfred Hitchcock (130 page)

“We must milk the fact that there are so many ships, they don’t know
which one to search first. We want to see the men coming from
HIGH
, so we know that they have got a long way to go. If we shoot high up like that, we could put mirrors in their flashlights so the sun reflects in them as we’re shooting day for night.”

That is how they left it for the time being. The Hitchcocks talked about “Frenzy” through June; the director himself revised Levy’s treatment, with Peggy Robertson taking down his dictation. The Hitchcock version is the one Auiler calls brave and disturbing—“the best of all the versions.” Hitchcock wrote the waterfall murder as a bucolic love scene that ends up as the shocking annihilation of an innocent. He planned ample nudity featuring both women
and
men (“an insistence on sex and nudity,” Truffaut later pointed out), and a vignette where the killer’s mother interrupts him masturbating in his bedroom.

By mid-July the project was ready for another writer, and since “Frenzy” was a Hitchcock original demanding the skills of a novelist, he hired Howard Fast. With a long, prolific career dating back to the Great Depression, Fast had seen his novel
Spartacus
, about a slave revolt in ancient Rome, made into a spectacular film by Stanley Kubrick. Although as a disaffected ex-Communist he might have seemed more appropriate for
Torn Curtain
, Fast was also was a reputable crime novelist with a series, under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham, that featured a Japanese American detective in the Beverly Hills Police Department.

“My god, Howard!” Fast recalled Hitchcock exclaiming. “I’ve just seen Antonioni’s
Blow-Up.
These Italian directors are a century ahead of me in terms of technique! What have I been doing all this time?”

Though Fast was treated to the usual mini-Hitchcock festival, the director himself now seemed fixated on Antonioni’s films. And he commissioned Antonioni-style camera tests in New York, “primarily intended to compare different film stocks in low-light settings,” wrote Dan Auiler, but with “full mockups of actual scenes from the screenplay, using unknown actors and models.” According to Auiler, “nearly an hour of silent footage” was assembled.
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“The first scene,” Auiler reports, “is of the young model getting up from bed in her New York apartment. She’s nude as she rises in the scene—lit only by natural light—and walks to the bathroom. The camera remains fixed as it does a full 360-degree pan of the apartment—starting with her rise from the bed and following her around to her entry into the bathroom.

“The second scene is at the artist’s studio, where the young killer meets the nude model. There are several dollies and elaborate pans of the artists (including the young man intended as the killer) at work.”

After a series of script conferences Fast was left alone to start writing, while the Hitchcocks spent the early fall on a South Sea cruise with the O’Connells, visiting Tahiti, Fiji, and New Zealand. “Hitchcock gave me a very free hand,” the novelist recalled. “He seemed mostly interested in working out elaborate camera movements. By the time the script was finished he had specified over four hundred and fifty camera positions.”

Returning in October, Hitchcock read Fast’s draft and announced he was pleased by his progress. However, he decided, one more writer—and revision—was called for. That suggested the weight Hitchcock attached to “Frenzy,” but it was also a sop to a growingly concerned Lew Wasserman. Universal was doing everything possible to dissuade Hitchcock from making the explicit film. The final script, Hitchcock assured Wasserman, would moderate the studio’s censorship and adverse-publicity concerns. Meanwhile, he agreed to set it aside temporarily—permanently, Universal hoped.

And Hitchcock did set “Frenzy” aside for a month or two, which was always beneficial to a project. Throughout the fall he watched films, attended plays and concerts, kept up his medical appointments. At Christmas he took his annual trip with Alma, but this time to Hawaii, which was sunnier and closer than St. Moritz. Teresa Hitchcock and the O’Connells joined the Hitchcocks in Kamuela, where James Stewart had a ranch.

After New Year’s, he returned with renewed zeal to “Frenzy.” Playwright and novelist Hugh Wheeler, who wrote exceptional crime novels under various pseudonyms, but whose screen credits included
Five Miles to Midnight
, a murder mystery starring Anthony Perkins, arrived to spend two weeks in meetings with Hitchcock, pruning scenes and polishing dialogue for the shooting script. After that, “Frenzy”—with its extensive test footage, its script by several writers (including Mrs. Hitchcock) prepared over the course of a year, its subject the director’s lifetime obsession—would be ready.

It was the greatest film Hitchcock never made.

Death and desertion continued to cull the Hitchcock circle.

The director’s longtime physician, Dr. Ralph Tandowsky, died in January 1968. The death of the heart specialist who had treated Hitchcock for thirty years—who gave him his twice-weekly shots in 1966 and 1967—was a milestone followed closely in May by the death of cameraman Robert Burks and his wife in a freak house fire.
^*
James Allardice, George
Tomasini, and Robert Burks, the core of Hitchcock’s glorious Paramount years, were all gone.

And when he stopped producing
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
in 1968, it had the effect of removing two of his other chief lieutenants, Norman Lloyd and Joan Harrison, from regular counsel and contact with him. Pining for England, Harrison was on the verge of moving back there to live in quiet retirement with her husband, Eric Ambler.

Hitchcock might once have entertained hopes that Peggy Robertson, his production assistant in England on
Under Capricorn
and
Stage Fright
, and then in America on every film since
Vertigo
, would emerge as Harrison’s successor. By 1968, Robertson was the last of the old guard, the gatekeeper to the master’s presence, in the background of every production, a vital component at meetings and script conferences. But she had never graduated to being a writer, script editor, or producer; and when Robertson urged Hitchcock to reunite with John Michael Hayes—whom she herself had never met—tellingly he felt no compunction about ignoring her advice.

The flow of writers and stories had slowed to a trickle, worsened by the end of the TV series and the dwindling of staff, but also by the fact that Universal had a more provincial story department. Already feeling constricted by the studio’s limitations, Hitchcock was nevertheless dependent on it for stories. Lew Wasserman, who thought that Hitchcock was pinning too much on “Frenzy,” urged him to get working on another project, and shelve “Frenzy” until they could calmly review its prospects. Even though things had gone awry with
Torn Curtain
, Wasserman encouraged Hitchcock to have another try at similar spy-thriller material. In truth, Hitchcock hadn’t lost the desire to produce a realistic Bond, and he wanted nothing more than to erase the memory of his previous failure.

He stayed home to reread John Buchan’s gentleman-spy stories, and talked vaguely of making another Richard Hannay film. Once more the rights were elusive, and he seemed to have little recourse but to appeal to Universal’s story department. The result was
Topaz
—a book he chose as his next project, after rummaging through the available properties, because it was “better than nothing,” in the words of John Russell Taylor.

Yet there was also something about
Topaz
that appealed to Hitchcock. He had a penchant for Cold War stories based on reality, and author Leon Uris had based his lead character—French intelligence agent Andre Devereaux—on Philippe de Vosjoli, a Frenchman who had gathered information about Russian missiles in Cuba for the CIA, but who fell out of favor for refusing to identify his Cuban sources. (De Vosjoli feared that Soviet spies in France would pass the information along to Moscow.) One of de Vosjoli’s sources was Fidel Castro’s sister Juanita, whose identity is changed in the novel to Juanita de Cordoba—a onetime revolutionary who has become Devereaux’s secret mistress.

An admirer of John F. Kennedy, Hitchcock was fascinated by the American president’s showdown with Castro and Khrushchev in 1962. The island nation where Hitchcock had enjoyed vacationing (under the previous regime) would have to be re-created largely on the back lot of Universal, but Wasserman promised to let him shoot the last third of
Topaz
, which exposes Soviet moles in de Gaulle’s government, on location in Paris.

A dense, labyrinthine novel,
Topaz
begins in Copenhagen with the defection of a KGB agent. Through the defector the Central Intelligence Agency learns of Soviet plans to place missiles in Cuba, and of a high-level French spy ring channeling classified information to Russia. An honorable French agent, working secretly with the Americans, agrees to a CIA mission in Cuba, and to try to prevent future leaks in Paris. The political allegiances of the characters are tangled up with their love stories. The widow of a onetime revolutionary now actively conspiring against Castro makes love to Devereaux whenever he is in Cuba on behalf of France, and Devereaux’s wife is the secret mistress of a disloyal Parisian.

Topaz
had been a best-seller a year earlier, but was overlooked by Hollywood—in large part, the author believed, because it had been stigmatized by lawsuit threats and U.S. government opposition. Hollywood producers shied away from the budgetary costs as much as the controversial politics. When Hitchcock contacted him, Uris was “shocked out of my wits” that such an important director had chosen to film
Topaz.
He was just as shocked to be asked to write the script.

On January 21, 1968, three days after attending Dr. Tandowsky’s funeral, Hitchcock met Uris for the first time; the two launched into regular meetings in late April. Uris faced a man who was changed in every way for the worse from five years before. Hitchcock looked and acted defeated, sour and defensive. Photographs taken during the filming of
Marnie
show an almost trim and dapper man; in contrast, the director Uris greeted in 1968 was once again far overweight, pink-cheeked from drinking, and transparently depressed with the realization that time, always his cruelest enemy, was closing in.

Once, his office had bustled. Now there was something eerie about his streamlined operations, about Peggy Robertson’s fierce guardianship, about her welcome to Uris: rubbing her hands together, she told him confidentially that
Topaz
was going to dust Hitchcock off and bring him out of the museum—that it would be his comeback to greatness.

Uris had hugely admired Hitchcock before they met. But Uris was a prickly, independent-minded writer, and from the first there were “bad vibes” between him and the famous director, he recalled. According to Uris, Hitchcock tried to lord over him, making it clear who was the boss and who was the underdog. On his very first day of work, Hitchcock escorted Uris to “a little office in his cottage,” and said this was the writer’s
niche; Uris demurred, saying he felt that he was entitled to a private office in the studio’s Executive Building. “This miffed him, I’m sure,” recalled Uris. Later, Hitchcock invited Uris to New York for a press conference announcing
Topaz
, booking the author into a suite adjacent to his at the St. Regis; but Uris offended the director by insisting on staying at his own favorite hotel. “I made a fight out of it,” Uris recalled.

Hitchcock had spent his career turning writers into his friends and allies by keeping them in constant close proximity—huddling with them in offices, hotel rooms, or his own home, even taking them on vacations. Trying to win Uris over the same way, he scheduled regular lunches with the writer, but Uris resented being stuck in the office, eating every day in the private dining room, where Hitchcock presided oppressively over the menu and conversation. To Uris, lunch just seemed like an extra obligation. “I couldn’t say no,” Uris recalled. And Hitchcock, once such a proud wine connoisseur, now found his physical condition shaky enough that he couldn’t handle even one glass of spirits at lunch without becoming slipshod in conversation—and two glasses would be a violation of doctor’s orders.

Uris realized that he received a “classical education” from watching Hitchcock films, with the director sitting close to him and narrating aloud (recalling “every famous shot” all the way back to his first film, according to Uris).
Notorious
was the golden oldie to which Hitchcock kept referring, the kind of film he said he hoped
Topaz
might be—“espionage with an emotional relationship.” After a while, however, Uris found the experience of watching Hitchcock films “a drill in self-aggrandizement. He wasn’t trying to teach me anything. He was trying to show me how great he was.” And when a Hitchcock film wasn’t scheduled, they watched not Godard or Antonioni, but “some other Universal junk,” in Uris’s words.

Once a man of boundless energy who drew inspiration from scouting trips and social forays, Hitchcock now sat immobile behind his desk all day long, Uris reported. He seemed most interested in playing with his dogs, who rode in the car with him from Bellagio Road every morning to romp around the bungalow and wet the rugs. The director and writer would work, but mostly it was talk, hours of talk—fixated on the story’s crescendo moments. Uris expected to discuss the political complexities of his story, but he decided that Hitchcock didn’t have the slightest grasp of political complexities, and that all his ideas about espionage (as evidenced by his repeated references to
Notorious)
were outdated and quaint. He “didn’t seem to understand how a real secret service worked,” said Uris.

Hitchcock’s personality assets—his insistence on intimacy with his collaborators, his love of gossip, his crude humor—failed to beguile Uris. When the director told Uris he “hadn’t been laid” in twenty-five years, the
author thought that a tasteless confidence. Hitchcock proffered salacious tidbits about stars he had known, “but I didn’t like that,” recalled Uris.