Alfred Hitchcock (74 page)

Grant was skittish about “Weep No More” and also about the partnership with Hitchcock. He didn’t enjoy long lunches at Lucy’s as much as the director, and didn’t speak up much about the script, according to Taffel. Still, one day the star did ask Taffel to do something for the character he was going to play: “Give him some zzzzz,” he said, leaving Taffel free to interpret the request as she might. She interpreted it as “pizzazz.” (That’s the quality Tippi Hedren is said to bring to the Rutland household in
Marnie.
)

Twice in the first half of 1946—in February and May—Hitchcock flew to New York aboard Howard Hughes’s private plane, along with Cary Grant and Hughes himself. The February passenger list also included Edward G. Robinson, Paulette Goddard, and William Powell. Arriving in New York, the celebrities shot off to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel for
“elaborate wining and dining,” according to Grant biographer Charles Higham. Hitchcock had his own agenda: interviews, business meetings, the usual sightseeing and theatergoing.

In late May, Bergman accompanied the two aboard Hughes’s plane. Grant spent part of the trip in the cockpit, helping Hughes fly the plane. This time Hitchcock spent a week in New York, bringing his two stars to meetings to boost the prospects of Transatlantic. Influenza plagued him the whole week—and the return trip only made matters worse.

“We thought we were as good as home,” recalled Hitchcock, “but then [Hughes] began to make stops. In Chicago, I believe, for a change of clothes. Then in St. Louis to go to a nightclub. The problem was, as difficult as it was to get commercial passage from New York to Los Angeles, it was all but impossible from anywhere else. So there we were, dropping in on some cabaret in Denver, or a restaurant in Nevada.”

In between these two flights, on April 11, 1946, word leaked to the press that Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein were organizing a new company to produce independent pictures in London and Hollywood. The first production, it was reported, would be
Under Capricorn
, with Ingrid Bergman in the starring role. Surprisingly, the second was announced as a contemporary
Hamlet
, starring Cary Grant.

Hamlet
had arisen almost out of desperation. With Grant losing interest in “Weep No More,” Hitchcock had scrambled for an alternative to keep the star on the hook. He went over to Warner Bros., where Grant was shooting
None but the Lonely Heart
, and pitched him the idea of a modern-day
Hamlet
—receiving Grant’s tentative endorsement.

The notion was “to take the Shakespeare text and transcribe it into modern English,” in Hitchcock’s words, presenting the classic “as psychological melodrama.” Hitchcock thought about finding an English professor to create a modern-language adaptation, which he and Mrs. Hitchcock would then convert into a cinematic treatment reinterpreting “the situations in a modern idiom.” Their treatment could then be converted into a full script, Hitchcock assured Bernstein, by any Hollywood “stooge writer.” And
Hamlet
had the added advantage of being cheap: Shakespeare, after all, was in the public domain.

After Mrs. Hitchcock submitted a 195-page revised version of
The Paradine Case
—basically an edited compilation of the many earlier drafts—Hitchcock prevailed upon the producer to hire the very opposite of a stooge: the preeminent Scottish playwright James Bridie (pseudonym of Dr. Osborne Henry Mavor).

Bridie, once hailed by J. B. Priestley as “the most undervalued dramatist of his stature,” had had his first play produced in 1928, and wrote
over forty others in his career, including satires on the middle class, light fantasy, biblical and poetic allegories, and searching dramas.
Storm in a Teacup, A Sleeping Clergyman
(with Robert Donat as the original lead),
The Black Eye
, and
The Anatomist
are among the Bridie plays that remain in British repertory even today. A physician who never left his profession (he was always addressed in person as Dr. Mavor), Bridie set many of his plays in a medical context.

Things started out on the wrong foot, though, when Bridie flew from England early that summer to confer with Hitchcock, expecting to be met at the New York airport by a Selznick representative. When no one materialized, Bridie, “a very independent man,” in Hitchcock’s words, tore up his contract and flew home. Fortunately, Hitchcock, who had flown ahead for scouting and research, was waiting at the London airport to greet him.

But Bridie refused to return to America, and Hitchcock had to choose between discharging a man he respected, or collaborating from a distance with Bridie, who lived in Glasgow. An unreserved admirer of Bridie’s work, he chose the latter—knowing that keeping the writer at a distance from Hollywood also shielded Bridie from Selznick.

Up to this time Bridie hadn’t had much experience or luck writing for film, and the director had to compensate for their distance with lengthy phone calls and cables, laboriously explaining his ideas and methods, specifying the story’s action and dialogue on a scene-by-scene, incident-by-incident, even line-by-line basis. One typical cable ran thirty pages, taking over thirty minutes to transmit.

Selznick had cautioned Alma to adhere to the book; now the director relayed the same advice. The one major change Hitchcock had proposed fell swift victim to the producer’s anxiety about censorship. Neither America nor England would allow Mrs. Paradine’s execution on the screen, but she couldn’t commit suicide either—that was equally forbidden. How, then, should
The Paradine Case
end? What ending could possibly substitute for the original, or compare to the suicide crescendo Hitchcock had imagined?

Hitchcock focused on the climactic courtroom sequence. Perhaps Keane’s rhetorical flourishes against the manservant might provoke Mrs. Paradine into openly confessing—a kind of emotional suicide that would rock the courtroom. With the lawyer devastated, the focus could then switch to Keane, and his crushing defeat. It bothered Hitchcock, though, this idea of finally unmanning the hero. “Do you think this could be written without making Keane too much of an ass?” he asked Bridie in one cable.

Almost from the inception of the project, Hitchcock had to feign his interest in many parts of the story. He never believed in Mrs. Paradine as a coldhearted murderer, and he never understood the mystery being parsed
in the courtroom. What exactly happened on the night in question? How exactly did Mrs. Paradine commit the murder? And why?

Though he directed more than a handful of films set in grand mansions, Hitchcock admitted in more than one interview that he himself felt lost and disoriented in such surroundings. Movie mansions—like the one RKO had forced on him for
Suspicion
—were always
too
grand. When it came to
The Paradine Case
, he confessed that he couldn’t figure out how the rooms connected with each other, an issue that bears directly on Mrs. Paradine’s guilt—and the explanation is forbiddingly complicated in the final film. The director mused in more than one interview that he couldn’t figure out where the people went to the bathroom in such mansions. The camera in Hitchcock films liked to peek into the bathroom, just to make such things clear.)

And he never did resolve the crux of his problem with the book: why would such a beautiful woman kill her husband for such a mangy lover? Hitchcock understood handsome men committing murder, yes—but, less so, beautiful women. He needed a beautiful woman he could believe in, not one who murdered.

Consequently, his focus gradually shifted to the only true innocent of the story. Hitchcock told Bridie to build up Keane’s wife, Gay, as an emotional counterweight, and to focus on the scene after Keane’s courtroom debacle, that showed Gay and her husband behind closed doors. He wanted that scene to be a reaffirmation of marriage, the film’s real crescendo—“a moving scene of reconciliation without any necessary physical embrace,” in the director’s words.

Over the summer of 1946, at his home in Glasgow, Bridie wrote and wrote.

From May on, Hitchcock spent much of his time overseas. After squaring his thoughts with James Bridie and Sidney Bernstein in England, he flew to Paris, where he gave interviews for the premiere of
Spellbound
, followed by an excursion to Nice for the first Cannes Film Festival, where
Notorious
had been entered in competition.
^*

Returning to England, Hitchcock was fascinated to read about the arrest of Neville Heath, a former Royal Army Service Corps officer who turned out to be a particularly nasty murderer; his two female victims were viciously beaten, whipped, and sexually mutilated. (His last words before he was hung were reportedly, “Come on, boys, let’s get on with it!”)
Heath became the first postwar Jack the Ripper logged into Hitchcock’s pantheon.

Scouting locations ahead of the
Paradine
script, he toured mansions, visited Holloway Prison for women, and reacquainted himself with one of his old haunts—the Central Criminal Court, known as the Old Bailey. The keeper was persuaded to let a crew photograph the courtroom, so the Hollywood re-creation could be exacting.

The judge in the story, Lord Horfield—who suggests a composite of real-life Lords Rayner Goddard and Travers Humphreys, both capital-punishment advocates who had figured in sensational murder cases
^*
—called for special research on the part of the director. Hitchcock consulted with official wig- and robe-makers, attended several court sessions, and sketched the judge in action. “As I watched the judge,” he noted in an interview, “I even knew what lens I would use to photograph him.”

“Casting became a battleground,” wrote David Thomson in his Selznick biography. First the producer tried for ideal casting: Greta Garbo, who had been on sabbatical since 1941. But Garbo became the latest Hollywood star to turn up her nose at Hitchcock; she didn’t care to make her comeback as a murderess. Then the director set his hopes on Ingrid Bergman, but in spite of their friendship she refused to get involved in another Selznick production.

While in Paris and Nice, Hitchcock met with French actresses, but Selznick wasn’t interested. The producer’s insistence on selecting his own leads “screwed up all the values” of
The Paradine Case
, as the director later told Peter Bogdanovich. “Unfortunately,” in Hitchcock’s words, Selznick had just signed the sultry Italian Alida Valli, whom he was trumpeting as “another Bergman.” Valli was on the verge of stardom in Italy before the war, when she quit rather than make fascist pictures. Hitchcock liked Valli when he met her, so much so that in Hollywood she was added to both his dinner-party and Santa Cruz guest lists. (In later years, whenever he passed through Rome, he made a point of visiting her.) But in the end Valli wasn’t Garbo or Bergman, and Hitchcock felt she was less than star material. “She was too impassive and didn’t know her English too well, which is a tremendous handicap,” he told Charles Higham.

All along, Selznick had envisioned Gregory Peck as Keane. By now Peck was the producer’s biggest star, his most trusted moneymaker. Hitchcock had declared openly, in meetings and dinner parties, his preference for someone more in the mold of Laurence Olivier or Ronald Colman. In the end, though, it was Peck. “I don’t think that Gregory Peck can properly represent an English lawyer,” Hitchcock was still complaining years later.

For the manservant, Hitchcock wanted the kind of rough-hewn personality called for in the novel (“With horny hands, like the devil!” he told Truffaut)—someone like Robert Newton, for sharp contrast with the ladylike Mrs. Paradine. Being a theater man, Bridie had his own casting notions, and suggested a rough-hewn French actor. But by mid-August the manservant was also a fait accompli; Hitchcock wrote Bridie that he was stuck with a different Frenchman, a Selznick commodity who could hardly be called “earthy,” but who had “sufficient mood,” he hoped, “to provide us with all the mysterious elements connected with his association with Mrs. Paradine.”

That was Louis Jourdan—a rakishly handsome young actor Selznick had met and done cartwheels over. Valli, Gregory Peck, and now Louis Jourdan—all three leads chosen by Selznick, all mistakes in Hitchcock’s eye. Though he ended up liking Jourdan, too, the director always maintained that the Frenchman was “the worst flaw in the casting”—his elegance misplaced in a part that cried out for “a manure-smelling stable hand.” And Selznick even heightened Jourdan’s elegance, capping his teeth, elevating his heels, styling his hair. “A pretty-pretty boy,” Hitchcock called him, rolling his eyes in one interview. He “destroyed the whole point of the film,” he said in another.

As usual, Hitchcock found his consolation in the ensemble. He remembered Ann Todd from West End hits in the 1930s, and now sought her out for Keane’s true-blue wife. In London, he took the actress to dinner and told her she would be “the most exciting person in the film.” And he surely tried to make it so, though in the end, in spite of all the rewrites on her scenes, her character was “too coldly written,” Hitchcock later admitted.

If policemen or detectives didn’t much interest him, Hitchcock was fascinated by judges, whose lives and exploits he followed as avidly as he did criminals’. Judge Horfield and his wife, Lady Sophie Horfield, were especially savory parts. Judge Horfield was first offered to the sympathetic villain of
Notorious
, Claude Rains, but he rejected the job as not his sort of dish. So Charles Laughton, who had hammed it up in
Jamaica Inn
, got a second chance in a Hitchcock film, and Horfield’s wife—a faithful sufferer, who must endure her husband’s constant verbal abuse and fawning over other women—was handed over to Ethel Barrymore, the only performer to emerge from the film with an Oscar nomination.

Reliable veterans Charles Coburn and Leo G. Carroll (appearing in hi
fourth Hitchcock film) portrayed Keane’s partner and the prosecuting attorney, respectively. The “best characters in the picture are some of the secondary figures,” the director informed Truffaut.

By the end of August 1946 all the research and second-unit work was done, the casting was firm, James Bridie’s script had been handed in, and Hitchcock was awaiting the go-ahead. None was forthcoming. Probably none was expected. Long before Bridie submitted his draft of the script, Selznick had decided it would be inadequate. The producer wanted to supervise his own final revisions, but it was hard to set aside the time he needed. He was immersed in postproduction for
Duel in the Sun
and pre-production for
Portrait of Jennie
—his twin Jennifer Jones showpieces. His debt steadily mounting, Selznick was floating around on uppers and downers. “I am on the verge of collapse,” he confided to Dan O’Shea.