Alfred Hitchcock (65 page)

Even more offensive to Zanuck than Willie’s character was the scene where the lifeboat passengers tie up the distraught mother to keep her from throwing herself overboard, only to discover her body drifting at the end of the rope the next morning. The head of the studio hated the whole theme of the drowned baby and suicidal mother, and urged Hitchcock to delete the sequence. Hitchcock resisted, and prevailed. Zanuck also strongly advised trimming the comic-relief card game and baseball small talk between Kovac and Rittenhouse; Hitchcock made minor changes.

Worried about a budget that had already escalated during the long pre-production, Zanuck asked his subordinates to time the script with a stopwatch. Their report, delivered to him in the third week of filming, warned that, at Hitchcock’s current rate of progress,
Lifeboat
might run as long as two hours. Zanuck dashed off a memo, urgently delivered to the director on the set, which insisted that Hitchcock speed up and make wholesale cuts in the script. “You’re not going to get your eliminations by cutting out a few lines here and there in each sequence,” Zanuck wrote. “You are going to have to be prepared to drop some element in its entirety.”

Hitchcock could be steely with writers or actresses, but it wasn’t often that he confronted the top bosses with his rage. But he had spent nearly a year coaxing
Lifeboat
through the shoals of scriptwork and casting, and he wasn’t about to scuttle the film now for Darryl F. Zanuck.

His reply, dated August 20, 1943, was remarkable, considering that Hitchcock was addressing the studio’s highest executive. “I don’t know who you employ to time your scripts,” the director wrote, “but whoever
has done it is misleading you horribly. I will even go so far as to say disgracefully. In all my experience in this business, I have never encountered such stupid information as has been given you by some menial who apparently has no knowledge of the time of a script or the playing of dialogue.”

Hitchcock went on to state that he based his calculations on indisputable facts (“facts that come from persons of long experience”). They were shooting in sequence, and already up to page 28 of the script (“which includes a fair amount of silent action”); Hitchcock estimated the existing footage would run fifteen minutes. On the basis of a 147-page script, and allowing for the storm sequence, he predicted a final running time of eighty-four minutes or “7560 feet, which, in my opinion, is considerably inadequate for a picture of this caliber and importance.”
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Hitchcock insisted he was making reasonable progress, no matter what Zanuck’s foolish subordinates thought. Just now he was busy shooting a nine-page sequence “which will take approximately two days—which is exactly one day under the allotted time in the production schedule.” Hitchcock closed: “Dear Mr. Zanuck, please take good note of these above facts before we commit ourselves to any acts which in the ultimate may make us all look extremely ridiculous by giving insufficient care and notice to these considerations.”

Zanuck took a deep breath, and had the script retimed. The new estimates made him realize the film wasn’t so “bad off” schedule-wise, after all. The head of the studio backed off any showdown with Hitchcock, conceding that the initial timing “was not done by an expert” and that the pacing of certain hard-to-time scenes hadn’t been taken into account. (To producer Kenneth MacGowan, Zanuck admitted, “For your confidential information, the damn fool who timed the script also timed all of the descriptive reading.”)

This early backstage face-off, with Hitchcock demonstrating his superior knowledge of production minutia, had the effect of strengthening the director’s hand—though throughout the filming Zanuck continued to plead for the elimination of “nonessentials.” Hitchcock made a show of small excisions in minor scenes, but nothing significant was endangered.
Lifeboat
still belonged to the director.

Everything about
Lifeboat
challenged the conventional wisdom, from its subject matter to its casting to the way it was filmed. The script centered on ten people in a lifeboat, none of them stars with any track record with audiences. At the helm was a German superman. Among the highlights of the story were the drowning of an infant, the suicide of a crazed young
mother, and an onboard amputation endured by the character who most closely evoked an ordinary American.

The cast had to submit to three months of huddling together in a mock lifeboat, rolling and pitching in relentless surf simulated by wave-making machines. They were constantly doused by water, and had to struggle to keep their balance or risk being heaved overboard. The actors were “frequently wet, cold, and covered with diesel oil,” Hume Cronyn recalled. Even during scenes that took place in a “flat calm,” he said, “there was a large demand for anti-seasickness pills among the actors.”

Cronyn cracked two ribs one day, he recalled, when he was whipped about by the water and hurled into the gunwale. Tallulah Bankhead wrote that she was “black and blue from the downpours and the lurchings.” Suffering under “the heat, the lights, the fake fog and submersions followed by rapid dryings-out,” the leading lady came down with bronchial pneumonia, halting production for several days. (It was one of many such delays.)

A prima donna playing the part of a prima donna, Bankhead set everyone’s teeth on edge. She was “a compulsive talker with a reputation for wit,” recalled Cronyn. The actress was also a compulsive name-dropper, with a vocabulary bristling with obscenities. “Listening to her constant talk was like a Chinese water torture,” said Walter Slezak. “She told us she’d given up drinking for the duration of the war about seventy-two times a day.”

There was this storied sidelight: Bankhead eschewed undergarments, and freely exposed her private parts. Some people, including Slezak, were offended. “In order to step into the boat we had to go over a little ladder,” Slezak recalled. “The first day she lifted her skirt to under her arms—with nothing underneath. She carried on that tired joke for about fifteen weeks, while I was on the picture. Every day, three, four, or five times, she showed she wasn’t wearing panties. Maybe I’m a prude, but I don’t like vulgar women.”

Not Hitchcock: One day, according to Cronyn, a visiting lady journalist from a women’s magazine took umbrage at Bankhead’s exhibitionism, and complained to the publicity department. The publicists pressed the issue with production manager Ben Silvey, who passed the buck to Hitchcock. Joseph Cotten vouched for what happened next: he was visiting the set when he noticed cameraman Glen MacWilliams slide over to Hitchcock and whisper that whenever Bankhead spread her legs, the shot was ruined.

The director lifted up his stomach, stuck out his bottom lip, and pronounced loud enough for everyone to hear, “This is not for me to handle. We shall call the hairdresser.”
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Bankhead behaved snobbishly, and worse, toward her lowly Hollywood
colleagues, according to all accounts. One day she lashed out at Henry Hull, whose advanced age gave him some trouble memorizing his lines. “You goddamned old ham,” Bankhead snarled. “The company was paralyzed,” wrote Cronyn. “Hitch quickly went to the water-cooler. He hated confrontations.”

Apparently unable to distinguish the actor from the character, Bankhead nurtured a near hatred for Walter Slezak, referring to him on-and off-camera as a “goddamned Nazi.” On the day word reached the set that the Italians had capitulated and Mussolini had fled, Slezak said something like, “Well, thank God that part’s over. Perhaps it will spare more unnecessary bloodshed”; according to Cronyn, Bankhead turned on the actor, hissing, “I hope they spill every drop of German blood there is. I hate them all! And I HATE YOU!” There transpired a “deathly hush, followed by Walter’s reasonable voice: ‘I’m sorry about that, Tallulah.’ ”

Hitchcock, defending Bankhead in subsequent interviews, insisted she wasn’t serious about Slezak: “Only semiserious.” The director liked her diva personality—her imperial style of acting (he later quipped that she acted like the capital of Siam: Bang-Cock), her lack of inhibition. Such a personality suited Connie Porter—the toughest person in the lifeboat, who intimidated all the others.

When Bankhead tried to intimidate the man in charge, however, seeking to interpret a given scene according to her own lights, she was told by Hitchcock, “very quietly with that wonderful dead-fish face of his,” in Walter Slezak’s words: “No, do it my way.”

Hitchcock was very “gentle” with her throughout the filming, according to Bankhead; he could be gentle—or firm—with any actress, as needed. Oft quoted is his rude riposte to Mary Anderson, who made the mistake of fishing for a compliment from the director. “Mr. Hitchcock, what do you think is my best side?” “My dear,” he is said to have replied, “you’re sitting on it.”

Anderson tried Hitchcock’s patience—especially after he caught her stuffing Kleenex into her bra. But even she benefited from his direction. When she came to her big emotional scene, Hitchcock waited and “waited for her to get into the mood,” according to Slezak, then finally threw up his hands and started issuing orders. “Look, child,” the director exclaimed, “we haven’t got that much time! First of all you will drop your voice about three notes. You will then take one long deep breath and begin talking. At that line [he pointed to the script] your breath will give out—but you will keep on talking, even if I can’t hear a word of what you are saying! Let’s shoot!”

“They did the scene in one take,” Slezak remembered. “At the exact line where Hitchcock had predicted, her breath gave out, but she kept on mouthing the words. And suddenly you had a feeling, that there was a girl
who was completely spent; her parched lips, after forty-two days on the open sea, quivered and trembled. She didn’t have the strength to make them heard but you understood everything she said. Hitch knows more about the mechanics and the physical technique of acting than any man I know.”

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, the filming wrapped. Although
Lifeboat
was the first Hitchcock film to consume an entire year of production, and although it cost close to $2 million—although, as one film historian claims, “the aftermath left everyone feeling betrayed,” including Darryl Zanuck—the truth is that when the head of the studio saw the first cut in mid-November, internal studio memoranda confirm that Zanuck raved about
Lifeboat
as an outstanding film with awards potential. Despite the costs and the disagreements over the director’s first Twentieth Century–Fox film, Zanuck still wanted to keep Hitchcock at the studio.

The reluctant partner again was Hitchcock. His contract dangled the possibility of a second Twentieth Century–Fox production after
Lifeboat
, but the agreement hinged on finding mutually acceptable subject matter.

Stalling the decision gave Hitchcock leverage during the making of
Lifeboat.
Beginning in the spring, Twentieth Century–Fox tried to nudge him along on the option clause. The director told the studio he was leaning toward filming an adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s play
Mary Rose
, the subtle, enigmatic tragedy with
Peter Pan
echoes that he had first seen on the stage in 1920. Hitchcock informed the studio that he intended to purchase the rights himself, and coproduce the film with Kenneth MacGowan.

This desire was partly quashed by the Barrie estate, which demanded an exorbitant sum for the story rights, and partly by Zanuck, who had an adverse reaction to the project. Zanuck regarded
Mary Rose
as a pure fantasy, too whimsical for U.S. audiences and for a suspense director like Hitchcock. MacGowan backed Hitchcock, but when MacGowan announced he would be leaving the studio after
Lifeboat
, all hope of
Mary Rose
vanished.

Instead, the studio gently pushed the idea of adapting another property:
The Keys of the Kingdom
, A. J. Cronin’s novel about a Scottish missionary in nineteenth-century China. Although Hitchcock said he liked the book, he refused to commit to the project, even after Zanuck had penciled him in as director and
Keys of the Kingdom
was scheduled for filming in the fall of 1943. Seeing the move as a ploy intended to move
Lifeboat
along, Hitchcock continued to equivocate, and
The Keys of the Kingdom
was handed over to studio contract director John M. Stahl.

With Thanksgiving looming, Hitchcock’s next picture was still up in the
air. He hadn’t enjoyed his small taste of Zanuck’s authority, and David O. Selznick also weighed in against extending the Twentieth Century–Fox contract. According to Leonard Leff’s study of Selznick and Hitchcock, DOS saw Zanuck as another producer who had not supervised the English director properly; leaving Hitchcock to his own devices, DOS believed, had only freed the director to gleefully run up the “inordinate costs” and filming schedule of
Lifeboat
—behavior DOS feared might ruin Hitchcock’s reputation and diminish his value on future loan-outs.

DOS staved off other inquiries—Hal Wallis at Warner’s, Sam Goldwyn again. After cornering Hitchcock for a talk in late 1943, Goldwyn received a sharp reprimand from DOS: Goldwyn couldn’t hope to understand a man like Hitchcock, his producing rival lectured.

If anything, though, professional distance had improved Hitchcock’s relationship with Selznick. DOS was grateful when, as a personal favor, Hitchcock took a break from
Lifeboat
to shoot a War Bonds trailer with Jennifer Jones, the young actress with whom Selznick had fallen in love. Now DOS was sounding serious about producing films again, and about wanting his next production to be directed by Hitchcock. That was fine with Hitchcock, who wanted nothing more than to fulfill—and be done with—his Selznick contract.

The most urgent item on his agenda after finishing
Lifeboat
, though, was to go to England and keep his commitment to Sidney Bernstein. A series of cables had kept him in touch with Bernstein’s plans at the Ministry of Information. In the spring of 1943 the director had agreed to the subjects of two war films he would supervise in London, and Bernstein had begun developing the stories, while trying to nail down the director’s availability for later in the year.