Alfred Hitchcock (63 page)

As Steinbeck raced ahead of the contract, though, he was also racing ahead of Hitchcock. He met with Hitchcock and MacGowan only once more; all Steinbeck could recall about that second meeting, when deposed later by
lawyers, was that Hitchcock “was interested in dramatic incident and technique, and most of his suggestions had to do with that,” in his words.

Steinbeck recalled only one specific suggestion that Hitchcock made: The well-to-do female passenger in the lifeboat—the lead character Hitchcock had envisioned from the beginning—ought to be wearing a diamond ring, the director said, which the other boat passengers are forced to use as a fishing lure. That was the director’s “usual irony of using a fabulous thing” as a physical detail, Steinbeck said. MacGowan recalled Hitchcock also stressing that the German in the lifeboat should deceive and betray the other survivors. But the director was diplomatic, saying Steinbeck should think his suggestions over.

Remarkably, by the second week of January—still with no signed contract—Steinbeck had churned out more than one hundred triple-spaced pages. Reporting to Hitchcock, he announced that he had elected to tell the story through the eyes of a single character—an ordinary seaman. “My reason for using this method is to focus the film through a human eye, a single human eye and a human brain which is as nearly the camera eye as anything we imagine,” Steinbeck explained. The author said he wasn’t trying to write “stock characters” but “on the other hand I haven’t the slightest intention of going out of my way to make them unusual.” Steinbeck recommended unfolding the entire story in flashback, and using hallucinatory effects to show the progress of starvation. “The overtone of the whole story will be misty, almost dreamlike—actually a memory pattern, as will be described in the beginning of the story of the film,” said Steinbeck.

One ordinary seaman’s subjectivity, a life-and-death drama recounted wholly in flashback, hallucinatory sequences: it wasn’t quite what the director had in mind, but it could work. Hitchcock didn’t panic. Anything Steinbeck wrote was bound to be workable.

After completing most of the first draft of his novelette, Steinbeck headed for New York, where he was preparing to travel overseas as a war correspondent for the
New York Herald Tribune.
Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock followed him there on January 14, convening two weeks of script conferences and revisions. The Hitchcocks stayed at the St. Regis, Steinbeck at the nearby Beekman Tower. Although Hitchcock and Steinbeck spent a concerted amount of time together—joining Alma for lunch at “21”—their meetings were hampered by the fact that Steinbeck already considered the bulk of his job done.

In Steinbeck’s “dramatic narrative,” Willie, the German rescued and squeezed into the lifeboat, was the story’s pivotal figure, as Hitchcock had wanted. But Steinbeck left it unclear whether or not Willie was a Nazi, whether or not he was an officer of the submarine that torpedoed the ship. Steinbeck’s Willie was an enigma, his true nature an issue raised but never resolved by the author. The other passengers can’t communicate with him,
for he doesn’t even speak English. Where Hitchcock had envisioned a story that hinged on concrete deceit and betrayal, Steinbeck offered only a general atmosphere of distrust and paranoia.

As intriguing as this might be, it wasn’t what Hitchcock wanted. But asking Steinbeck to change Willie’s characterization was problematic: Steinbeck had no time for a wholesale rewrite, and besides, he was confident of what he had written. One thing Hitchcock asked for was a new crescendo—not the relatively benign conclusion of the novelette, but a culminating episode of “dramatic violence” of some sort. “Whether his suggestion or mine, I don’t know,” recalled Steinbeck later for lawyers; “we agreed to put in the ending of the destroyer and the German ship which hadn’t been in my original idea. I had wanted to end by having the boat picked up.”

Later, when
Lifeboat
stirred up controversy, Steinbeck would complain that Hitchcock was “one of those incredible English middle-class snobs who really and truly despise working people.” But his animus seems to have been inspired less by Hitchcock himself than by resentment over the substantive changes Hitchcock made to his version of the lifeboat story. The two men may not have cozied up the way Hitchcock and Wilder had, but they got along professionally, and spent very little actual time together.

By the time he returned to California, however, Hitchcock realized that
Lifeboat
needed a fresh writer, one with a better understanding of his kind of storytelling. Even before Steinbeck had finished the revisions to his novelette, Hitchcock was meeting with MacKinlay Kantor, an acclaimed author of short stories and novels about America in wartime (his novel in free verse
Glory for Me
would become the basis of
The Best Years of Our Lives
, and he’d win a Pulitzer Prize for
Andersonville
). As a kind of audition, Hitchcock asked Kantor to work with Alma on devising the opening scenes of
Lifeboat.

Mrs. Hitchcock, who returned to the project on salary, and Kantor then drafted an opening set in a movie theater, featuring a sailor and his girlfriend on their last date before he ships out to sea—one of Hitchcock’s Chinese-box conceits, reminding audiences they were watching a piece of fiction. This segued into a seaboard sequence introducing the other characters just before the ship is sunk by a German torpedo. But Hitchcock didn’t feel a connection with Kantor; “I didn’t care for what he had written at all,” he recalled. Kantor was dismissed inside of two weeks.

That was toward the end of February 1943, almost simultaneous with Steinbeck’s submission of the revised novelette. By March 1, Steinbeck was done with
Lifeboat.
Yet in the credits Steinbeck alone was listed for the film’s “Original Story”; he was even nominated for an Oscar, and his contribution has been routinely praised ever since.

In fact, Steinbeck’s contribution to
Lifeboat
was like that of dozens of other Hitchcock writers over the years, whose official credits simplified a
complicated collaborative process. His case has engendered decades of misunderstanding. Articles in the
Steinbeck Quarterly
have argued that Steinbeck was principally responsible for the “allegory of a world decimated by global warfare,” and that his original story was profoundly ironic and broadly humanitarian, while the eventual Hitchcock film was “suspensefully dramatic but morally empty.”
Literature/Film Quarterly
has also contributed to the prevailing impression that Steinbeck wrote a “more realistic, meditative” story, compared to the “clichés, stereotypes and simplistics” of the Hitchcock version.

“Actually, Hitchcock’s idea was to do a movie on the merchant marine,” Jackson J. Benson wrote in
The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer.
“It was Steinbeck, long before he was brought into the project, who had the lifeboat idea, and it was he who wrote the original screenplay. His work was then doctored to make it slicker and less allegorical.”

But incontrovertible evidence buried since the 1940s in studio and legal files proves these claims to be false. It’s true that Steinbeck did augment and amplify Hitchcock’s story in his novelette. But what he wrote, besides having a point of view that was introspective and uncinematic, was hardly up to his own best standards. Even his own agent and editor, Annie Laurie Williams and Pat Covici, regarded the novelette as “very inferior Steinbeck, however good it might be for pictures,” in the words of one Twentieth Century–Fox memo. Indeed, it was Williams and Covici, not the studio, who successfully pressured Steinbeck
not
to publish the novelette. Chagrined by Steinbeck’s decision, the studio offered a bogus magazine version co-bylined by Hitchcock and a studio publicist.

There was a false start with another writer (who made at least one suggestion Hitchcock incorporated, changing the wealthy woman’s ring into a Cartier diamond bracelet) before
Lifeboat
was inherited by one of Hollywood’s finest stooges.

Jo Swerling was a cigar-chomping ex-newspaperman and playwright from New York, lured to Hollywood in 1929 to help cope with talkies. He wrote notable films for Frank Borzage, Rouben Mamoulian, William Wyler, and John Ford, and was a regular scenarist—frequently in combination with Robert Riskin—for Frank Capra. (The finishing writer on
It’s a Wonderful Life
was Swerling.) Although unknown to the general public (especially compared to John Steinbeck), Swerling was regarded inside the industry as the consummate pro, a self-effacing and companionable expert at comedy and drama.

Swerling shook hands with Hitchcock for the first time in the office of Kenneth MacGowan, who had recommended him as the best available man under contract. Swerling never met or spoke with Steinbeck. Later, when there was a lawsuit against the film by a third party alleging plagiarism
against Hitchcock and
Lifeboat
, Swerling recounted in a deposition how little he valued Steinbeck’s novelette.

“I read the [Steinbeck] script,” recollected Swerling, “and decided that I would take the assignment only with the consideration that I would not have to follow the script, the reason being that Steinbeck had written it entirely from the point of view of the mental reaction of an individual, which would be exceedingly difficult to dramatize with a camera. And there were other elements in the lineup that I did not like. Thereupon it was agreed that we would start from scratch, using the basic idea. After the first reading that I gave to the Steinbeck story, I never again referred to it, nor did anybody else working on the picture.”

Asked how a writer of Steinbeck’s stature could have failed to produce a satisfactory script, Swerling explained, “The industry could give you thousands of examples of an original idea being given to first-rate writers, men of national reputation, who thereupon, to use a vulgar term, ‘bitched’ them, and which ideas were subsequently handed to professional screen writers, without national reputations, who thereupon made acceptable screen plays out of them.”

At times, in his deposition, Swerling made deprecating comments about the Steinbeck novelette which, he hastened to add, were “not for publication.” Steinbeck hadn’t really shirked the task, Swerling insisted. He had done precisely what he had been paid to do. His name was an asset to the film, and the studio wanted to preserve it as an asset.

Swerling didn’t claim the final script he turned in was particularly original, or brilliant. “The formula of
Lifeboat
is a standard formula,” he cheerfully admitted. “Sometimes the people are segregated on a desert island, as in the case of
The Admirable Crichton.
Sometimes they are in a hotel, as in the case of
Grand Hotel.
Sometimes they are in a doomed submarine. The locale changes, but the principle is the same. The principle is that you get a group of people in the environment which forces them to be together.

“We claim no originality, and I imagine that Hitchcock would claim no originality in the conception of the idea itself, excepting insofar as it related in this particular example to the War.”

What message, lawyers asked Swerling, was the average moviegoer supposed to derive from
Lifeboat?

“He was supposed to say to himself, ‘Beware of the Nazis bearing gifts,’ ” replied Swerling. “After the War, when you meet these people, remember that they are likely to turn right around and do the same thing over again.”

The best thing about
Lifeboat
, Swerling stated—and the only really original thing about the film—was the Hitchcockian theme of “the world in minuscule—something that Steinbeck completely fell down on.” That
was an idea the director had touted, Swerling said, from the first moment they met.

Indeed, the true author of
Lifeboat
wasn’t Steinbeck, Swerling insisted in his deposition—but neither was it Swerling himself. Every character, every dramatic incident, scene after scene, was largely or “entirely” Hitchcock’s. “Every move in the story basically was Hitchcock’s move,” Swerling said, “In other words, I would say that Hitchcock was entitled to the credit ‘Original Story by Alfred Hitchcock,’ provided he had chosen to make a claim to it.”

Not once in Hollywood did Hitchcock take screen credit for a story or script. Indeed, he bent over backward to exclude himself in favor of all other eligible writers, with the interesting exceptions of
Strangers on a Train
and the remake of
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Any of his scenarists would have understood his taking a cocredit; one way or another, he picked the stories, guided the script meetings, articulated the characters, visualized the key situations, and edited the drafts. When absolutely necessary, he even wrote dialogue. Paradoxically, it was his modesty as a writer, and his generosity with credits, that opened the door for complaints from writers who felt his very silence on the subject was a way of stealing their thunder.

Both
Hitchcocks were humble about their writing, and throughout the late spring and early summer of 1943 Alma Reville rejoined the project, attending meetings with Hitchcock, Jo Swerling, and producer Kenneth MacGowan to hash out the final script.

Since Hitchcock wasn’t keen on MacKinlay Kantor’s material, and as Steinbeck’s novelette unfolded entirely in flashback, the team started over on the film’s opening scene. While toying with different openings, Hitchcock made a point of seeing the new Warner Bros. war drama
Action in the North Atlantic
, and the morning after the preview announced that
Lifeboat
had to avoid any obvious similarities by starting its story immediately
after
the explosion, introducing the individual characters as they clamber aboard the lifeboat. “This saved the company $150,000, and made a much better opening,” recalled Swerling.

Steinbeck’s “dramatic narrative” was actually an interior monologue, devoid of real action or conflict—which was surprisingly undramatic. The author himself admitted to lawyers that Hitchcock carried over only one specific dramatic incident of his from the novelette—the plight of the drowned baby and despondent mother, which crops up early in the film.