Alfred Hitchcock (38 page)

Myron Selznick resumed his intensive lobbying on behalf of the Englishman in the spring of 1937. Frank Joyce, after a year’s illness, had died in 1935, leaving the new Selznick Agency—“the biggest talent agency in Hollywood,” in the words of one trade publication—under Myron’s sole stewardship. Myron piqued the interest of two independent producers: Walter Wanger and David O. Selznick.

Wanger, whose films were financed and released through United Artists, knew Hitchcock from time he’d spent in England in the early 1920s, when the young executive had been a theater administrator in London for Paramount. A versatile, respected producer inclined toward serious material, Wanger had supervised pictures by Frank Capra, Rouben Mamoulian, and Fritz Lang, among other leading directors. Now he expressed his willingness to meet with Hitchcock and strike a deal, if the terms could be worked out.

Wanger’s rival was another respected producer, this one with ties to the Selznick Agency that were hard to beat. Myron’s younger brother David O. Selznick had just separated from MGM and founded his own company, Selznick International Pictures. In his mid-thirties, DOS (the acronym by which he was widely known) was more inclined toward glossy films aimed at female audiences, often adapting middle-class literature with high-class craftsmanship. Wanger and DOS were both consummate salesmen of their films.

But from the moment he joined the competition for Hitchcock, DOS claimed the inside track. Besides being Myron’s brother, he was married to Irene Selznick, the daughter of MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer. DOS had connections with several studios, and close friendships with New York investors who facilitated his grandiose ambitions. By the spring of 1937, DOS had elbowed Wanger aside, declaring his intention to bring Hitchcock to Hollywood. But it would be fully two years before he succeeded.

Hitchcock’s financial predicament was more complicated than has been previously understood. He needed a high salary to offset the taxes he would have to pay to live and work as a nonresident alien in the United States. Selznick Agency memos estimated that the director could expect to pay at least $9,000 in U.S. taxes on a potential $50,000 annual income, or slightly more than $6,000 if he were to accept a $40,000 annual salary.

In England, Hitchcock was now making in the neighborhood of $35,000-$40,000 yearly. (When, for example, Balcon tried to sign Hitchcock to a contract with MGM-British, offering £15,000 annually, the offer was initially rejected purely on salary terms, which one Selznick memo dismissed as “ridiculously low.”) Still, it wasn’t dizzy money, especially by Hollywood standards, and if Hitchcock didn’t extract a substantial raise over his current wage, he would actually suffer a loss of income in Hollywood, after relocation expenses, American taxes, and British surcharges.

All the negotiations between Hitchcock and Hollywood were framed by two important considerations. The first was the salary issue. Hitchcock and the agency decided the minimum amount he could accept for directing one picture was $50,000. This was still less than was earned by other name directors in Hollywood, but Hitchcock was aware that he didn’t yet have the U.S. box-office record of, say, Frank Capra or Howard Hawks.

The trickier issue was that Hitchcock was determined not to abandon England for a single-picture deal. Otherwise he would have taken the MGM-British offer, with its built-in likelihood of a loan-out to MGM-Hollywood. He was practical enough to know that he would have to prove himself to an American producer by making at least one contract film. But Hitchcock the artist was anxious to ensure that any deal he made would preserve his ability to make Hitchcock originals.

Though he realized that he would be closely tied to his benefactor at first, what Hitchcock really wanted was two years of opportunity on American soil, and the freedom to work outside of his contract when an opportunity arose. From the first discussions with both Wanger and DOS, then, Hitchcock asked for a multipicture, multiyear agreement, with an escalating salary, to ensure that any temporary loss in income or professional standing would be offset by the long-term chance to prove himself.

He said he would accept $50,000 for the first year, but only if guaranteed $75,000 for a second. And from the start he insisted on his right to approve his assignments, or any loan-outs arranged by his producer.

Hitchcock was a canny negotiator. He understood that all these demands—the multipicture contract, the salary escalation, and the project-by-project veto privilege—made him a hard sell, so he took the lead in shaping the arguments on his own behalf, sweetening the proposition for potential buyers.

From the earliest negotiations he emphasized that his wife and creative
partner, Alma, would work on all the Hitchcock films without taking any salary. He said he would toil beyond what was expected of the typical director and outside the normal time frame of involvement. He promised to steep himself in script development, scouting, and research, preparation in every category of preproduction, vowing to work without salary for up to eight weeks “previous to starting production,” in the words of one agency memo—no big sacrifice for Hitchcock, according to the memo, as he preferred “to work and write on his own stories” anyway.

This offer of free scriptwork actually may have backfired as a bargaining chip. Hitchcock didn’t yet appreciate that he was negotiating with a system where, as a matter of policy, scripts were developed not by directors, but under the firm control of producers.

Sabotage
, renamed
The Woman Alone
, was just opening in New York, and Gaumont had booked a miniretrospective of
The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps
, and
Secret Agent
into revival houses. To publicize the films, Gaumont agreed to defray the costs for a trip to New York. The Selznick Agency urged the director to seize the moment.

As soon as
Young and Innocent
was finished, the Hitchcocks (including nine-year-old Pat) boarded the
Queen Mary
for America. They were accompanied by Joan Harrison.

The crossing took six days, but boat travel soothed Hitchcock. He happily lounged on deck, watching the waves and the passengers with equal pleasure. Whenever asked to define perfect happiness, Hitchcock answered: a blue sky without any clouds. “A clear horizon,” he told television host Tom Snyder in 1974, “not even a horizon with a tiny cloud bigger than a man’s fist.”

According to a subsequent account in
Life
, the Englishman astonished his fellow passengers “by reciting the ports of call and times of arrival and departure of all ships sighted at sea.”

One fellow passenger was the actor Cedric Hardwicke, whom the Hitchcocks had admired in West End plays (he was Churdles Ash in the original stage production of
The Farmer’s Wife
). Hardwicke’s friendship with the family was cemented on the voyage; Hitchcock later cast him in pivotal roles in
Suspicion
and
Rope
, and several times in
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Talking with François Truffaut years later, Hitchcock wondered aloud why he had waited so long to visit a country he had followed since boyhood, like a favorite sports team. “I was meeting Americans all the time and was completely familiar with the map of New York. I used to send away for train schedules—that was my hobby—and I knew many of the timetables by heart. Years before I ever came here, I could describe New
York, tell you where the theaters and stores were located. When I had a conversation with Americans, they would ask, ‘When were you over here last?’ and I’d answer, ‘I’ve never been there at all.’”

Ostensibly the Hitchcock party was on vacation, as the director insisted in interviews. But anxious to settle on a new project, he, his wife, and Joan Harrison spent their spare time brainstorming stories. Hitchcock told the press they were working on a script called “False Witness,” intended for
Young and Innocent
star Nova Pilbeam, which involved “her con-man father and alibis.” If that didn’t work out, he had another film in mind, “based on a pet theme of his.” He said he’d nurtured “a long-felt desire to take a comic situation and suddenly switch to tragedy—to experiment on the effect of slapstick under fairly sane conditions.” He thought he might open a film “with a half-dozen Keystone cops crawling out of a tunnel, while a thug stands over the exit with a club and hits each one coming out. Wouldn’t it be interesting to show a close-up of the sixth cop with blood trickling down his face—comedy suddenly turned sober—and then cut to a picture of his family in agony over his misfortune?”

Of course the real reason for the trip was to further Hitchcock’s American ambitions. The Hitchcock party was met at the docks by Katherine “Kay” Brown, an eagle-eyed talent and literary agent who worked for David O. Selznick in New York. (Brown was the scout who first recommended Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic
Gone with the Wind
to Selznick.) While Hitchcock busied himself with interviews promoting
The Woman Alone
, arranged in advance by Gaumont’s U.S. publicity director, Albert Margolies, job interviews were set up by the Selznick Agency.

Hitchcock lost no time making an impression with David O. Selznick’s associates. The director and his family spent a weekend on the beach at the East Hampton home of Kay Brown, who had a daughter Pat’s age; he lunched with John Hay “Jock” Whitney, scion of an old-line family—a sportsman, millionaire, and show business investor.

Both of these trusted Selznick advisers were won over by Hitchcock in person—a good thing, since DOS was stuck in California, preoccupied with plans to film the Margaret Mitchell novel, the most expensive production he had ever undertaken. But Selznick spoke with the director at least once—their first known personal contact. Walter Wanger, similarly preoccupied with one of his films in progress, also phoned Hitchcock.

But this first conversation with Selznick wasn’t quite what the director had hoped. DOS had been apprised of the MGM-British offer, and startled Hitchcock by recommending that he grab the MGM deal. If Hitchcock signed with MGM-British, he could still work with Selznick on a loan-out through MGM, with whom DOS had an ongoing relationship, while saving Selznick the risk and cost of bringing Hitchcock over entirely on his own. DOS seemed oblivious of Hitchcock’s own urgent needs and desires; there was no discussion of any specific project, or any attempt to negotiate.

Myron Selznick’s staff went to work massaging MGM and Selznick International, trying to connect and concretize the loan-out options. Though his discussions with Hollywood producers remained largely offstage, Gaumont publicist Al Margolies made sure that the rest of his Cook’s Tour of the East Coast was well documented by the press.

Typical tourist sightseeing was always on a Hitchcock itinerary, and the English visitors made a quick side trip to Washington, D.C., where they took a VIP tour of the U.S. capital. With little time to spare, they glimpsed the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, and other sites from the windows of a limousine, just like Farley Granger in
Strangers on a Train
, or the Soviet defectors in
Topaz.

The English visitors also traveled to Saratoga Springs, New York, where Whitney took them to the races, a lifelong Hitchcock pastime. They gawked at the high-society spas and resorts with their rocking-chair porches. “I pointed them out to my wife,” Hitchcock later told a journalist, “and we stood and looked at them. If we have rocking chairs in England it is only as curiosities. But here you have them in real life as well as in the movies.”

Thinking ahead to
Saboteur
, they visited Rockefeller Center. With the eye toward authentic crime detail he would later put to use in
The Wrong Man
, Hitchcock dropped in on a police lineup and scrutinized the suspects.

He was coaxed by one journalist into visiting the theater where
The 39 Steps
was showing. Although the
New York Times
would report that he slept through his own masterpiece, the newsman who actually accompanied him, William Boehnel of the
New York World-Telegram
, insisted the director
stood
through the show, commenting only once, “and that was to complain because of the way a particular sequence he liked very much had been cut.” Afterward, outside the theater, Hitchcock was pleasantly surprised to encounter a swarm of film fans holding up glossy photos of him for his autograph.

While they were in New York, the Hitchcocks made the beaux-arts St. Regis on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street their headquarters. Hitchcock stayed in luxury hotels wherever he roamed, and in years to come he would adopt the St. Regis as his New York home away from home.

In his suite, between phone calls and interruptions, Hitchcock regaled the fourth estate. Mrs. Hitchcock (“a petite blonde, who doesn’t look as if she tipped the scales at more than 100,” according to one press account) flitted in and out on errands, while Pat (“a gracious little lass who curtsies prettily and says how-de-do”) was throwing a ball against a wall and trying to catch it on the bounce. Margolies ushered in the interviewers, including a man from the
New York Times
, Eileen Creelman of the
New York Sun
, and Janet White of
Picture Parade.
The director went on U.S. radio for the first time, interviewed by Radie Harris for
Gertrude of Hollywood.

As canny as Hitchcock was with critics and journalists, he was learning
the game in America. As open and comfortable as he was with the press, at times he could be too open, too comfortable—and end up hurting himself.

Up to this time, the American coverage of Hitchcock’s career had been scant, limited to a few interviews and brief items in New York and Los Angeles newspapers. His British coverage, of course, was far more expansive, but it had focused on his filmmaking techniques and the films themselves. England hadn’t yet developed the same appetite for celebrity gossip that prevailed with Hollywood personalities (though rarely, in truth, with directors).