Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (34 page)

A week later, Hitchcock is told by the Princess’s agents that she will do it, though by now Prince Rainier has added the proviso that filming must take place during the family’s customary holiday period, and should not interfere with Grace’s official duties. An official announcement is made on March 18th 1962: ‘Princess Grace has accepted an offer to appear during her summer vacation in a motion picture for Mister Alfred Hitchcock, to
be made in the United States ... It is understood that Prince Rainier will most likely be present during part of the filmmaking depending on his schedule and that Princess Grace will return to Monaco with her family in November.’

A reporter from the
Daily Express
manages to waylay Hitchcock. He asks if there will be any love scenes. ‘Passionate and most unusual love scenes, but I am afraid I cannot tell you anything beyond that. It’s a state secret,’ replies Hitchcock, injudiciously adding that the Princess’s sex appeal is ‘the finest in the world’.

Their Serene Highnesses have underestimated the priggishness of the Monegasques. They are in uproar, not least at the mention of sex. ‘She would be slighting our country,’ says one. They do not like the idea of their monarch kissing her leading man; little do they know that Hitchcock has plans for him to rape her as well. The Prince’s mother is livid, and keeps hissing, ‘
C’est une américaine!
’

Grace is so upset by the reaction that she stops eating, and finds it hard to sleep. To butter up the people, the Palace issues a second statement, announcing that the $800,000 she will receive for the film will be donated to a charity for Monegasque children and athletes. But neither her subjects nor her mother-in-law are appeased.

Eventually, Grace gives an interview to a reporter from
Nice Matin
announcing her decision to abandon the film. ‘I have been very influenced by the reaction which the announcement provoked in Monaco,’ she says.

How upset is Hitchcock by her decision? He tells friends that when they had their lunch together in the Palace, he thought that a spark had gone out of her, and she seemed bored. Her new role as Princess has, he thinks, drained her of warmth.

A few months after her decision, in June 1962, Princess Grace writes to Hitchcock. ‘It was heartbreaking for me to have to leave the picture,’ she confesses. Hitchcock writes back: ‘Yes, it was sad, wasn’t it? ... Without a doubt, I think you made not only the best decision, but the only decision to put the project aside at this time. After all, it was only a movie.’

WALKS OUT ON

6005 Camino de la Costa, La Jolla, California

September 1950

Alfred Hitchcock sends Raymond Chandler
Strangers on a Train
, the new novel by Patricia Highsmith. Eight other writers have already turned it down, including Dashiell Hammett. ‘None of them thought it was any good,’ Hitchcock recalls. This is strange in itself, because it is a compelling story, the first in a series that is set to make Patricia Highsmith the world’s finest suspense novelist.

Chandler says he finds it ‘a silly enough story’,
¹⁵⁰
but grudgingly agrees to adapt it, partly for the money and ‘partly because I thought I might like Hitchcock’. In early July, he signs a contract with Warner Brothers giving him $2,500 a week for five weeks’ work. The contract contains a clause confirming that he need never leave home: he has always hated what he calls ‘those god-awful jabber sessions’ with executives. Like many novelists, Chandler is unhappy as a screenwriter. Hollywood feeds his paranoia and self-loathing. ‘If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood,’ he maintains, ‘and if they had been any better, I should not have come.’

Nevertheless, he has enjoyed a fair share of success (though, in his case, ‘enjoy’ is possibly too strong a word), and six years ago was nominated for an Oscar for
Double Indemnity
.

Alfred Hitchcock is easy with Chandler’s contractual clause, and happy to be driven in his limousine to Chandler’s house in La Jolla, generally accompanied by his executive producer, Barbara Keon.

At first, everything goes fine, and Chandler finds Hitchcock ‘very considerate and polite’. But after a few of these meetings he starts to grow
irritated by him. ‘Every time you get set, he jabs you off balance by wanting to do a love scene on top of the Jefferson Memorial or something like that.’

Chandler’s main gripe concerns Hitchcock’s indifference to plausibility. He accuses him of being too ready ‘to sacrifice dramatic logic (insofar as it exists) for the sake of a camera effect’, preferring to work with a director ‘who realizes that what is said and how it is said is more important than shooting it upside down through a glass of champagne’.

Oddly enough, plausibility has never played a particularly prominent part in Chandler’s own work. Like Hitchcock’s films, his novels exist on a level of heightened reality, akin to a dream or a poem. ‘When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand,’ is his advice to aspirant crime writers.

He finds Hitchcock niggly and interfering. ‘He is full of little suggestions and ideas, which have a cramping effect on a writer’s initiative. You are in a position of a fighter who can’t get set because he is continuously being kept off-balance by short jabs.’

In turn, Hitchcock finds Chandler increasingly touchy. ‘We’d sit together and I would say, “Why not do it this way?” and he’d answer, “Well, if you can puzzle it out, what do you need me for?”’

Time is against them. Hitchcock wants to start filming before the autumn leaves begin to fall. It annoys Chandler that he did not mention this at their first meeting, when he insisted that there was ‘no hurry at all’.

Hitchcock starts passing Chandler’s completed pages to others for rewrites. Chandler hears about it, and sees red. ‘What this adds up to is that I have no assurance, to put it rather bluntly, that anything much more is happening to me than that my brain is being picked for whatever may be in it, and that someone else or a couple of someone elses are at work behind the scenes, casting the stuff into a screenplay from the way he wants it,’ he complains to his agent. He asks to change his salary to a lump sum, so that he can work at his own pace, and without interference. The studio refuses this request.

Hungover in the mornings, Chandler begins to resent Hitchcock’s daily arrival. ‘Look at that fat bastard trying to get out of his car!’ he mutters to his secretary. She warns him he might be heard. ‘What do I care?’ he snaps.

On this particular morning in early September, Hitchcock arrives bang on time. Unknown to Chandler, he has decided that this meeting will be
their last. As Hitchcock levers himself down into his usual chair, Chandler, already drunk, starts ranting. The film is inferior to the original book, he says, and why the hell doesn’t Hitchcock just forget all his silly plot variations and daft camera tricks?

Hitchcock says nothing, even when Chandler falls silent. Realising that Hitchcock has sent Chandler to Coventry, Barbara Keon can’t resist filling in the silences. This causes Chandler to resume his ranting, which in turn causes Hitchcock to stand up, walk out of the room, and exit through the front door without a backward glance. Keon hastily packs up her bits and pieces and chases after him.

The chauffeur opens the car door. Hitchcock lets Keon in first, then squeezes in beside her. As the car moves away, Chandler runs outside and screams abuse, employing his old phrase, ‘Fat bastard!’ and others too rude for repetition. ‘It was personal, very personal,’ recalls a friend of Keon.

As the car gathers speed, Hitchcock remains silent, staring out of the window with a poker face. He is clearly brooding. After a while, he just turns to Barbara Keon and mutters, ‘He’s through.’

Chandler and Hitchcock never speak again. Chandler can’t understand why. ‘Not even a telephone call,’ he complains to a friend. ‘Not one word of criticism or appreciation. Silence. Blank silence.’

But he carries on writing as though nothing has happened, mailing his completed script to the studio, special delivery, on September 26th. Hitchcock doesn’t even bother to acknowledge its receipt. The next month, he hires a new writer, a young blonde. Hitchcock initiates their first script conference by holding his nose, picking up Chandler’s script between his thumb and forefinger, and dropping it neatly into a wastepaper basket.
¹⁵¹

LOSES THE PLOT WITH

Warner Brothers Studio, Burbank, Los Angeles

October 1944

Plotting has never come easy to Raymond Chandler. He sees it as his key flaw, and describes himself as ‘a mystery writer with a touch of magic and a bad feeling about plots’. To a young novelist seeking advice, he writes, ‘As to methods of plotting and plot outlines, I am afraid I cannot help you at all, since I have never plotted anything on paper. I do my plotting in my head as I go along, and usually I do it wrong and have to do it all over again.’

It worries him. ‘I wish I had one of these facile plotting brains, like Erle Gardner or somebody,’ he confesses to his publisher. ‘I have good ideas for about four books, but the labor of shaping them into plots appals me ... Most writers think up a plot with an intriguing situation and then proceed to fit characters into it. With me a plot, if you could call it that, is an organic thing. It grows and often it overgrows. I am continually finding myself with scenes that I won’t discard and that don’t want to fit in. So that my plot problem invariably ends up as a desperate attempt to justify a lot of material that, for me at least, has come alive and insists on staying alive. It’s probably a silly way to write, but I seem to know no other way. The mere idea of being committed in advance to a certain pattern appals me.’

In his fifties, after years of struggle, his writing career has taken off. But success fails to make him any happier. A pessimist, he measures his income in tax returns: at the end of this financial year, he has to pay $50,000 in tax. He has just given up writing a screenplay of his own novel
The Lady in the Lake
because the process bored him stiff. He only feels creative when writing fresh material. ‘For God’s sake,’ rants the producer, ‘this is supposed to be an adaptation of something we bought from you. And you keep on writing different scenes!’ In the end, Chandler insists that his name be removed from the credits. It will, he predicts, be ‘probably the worst picture ever made’.

He is more optimistic, though, about the forthcoming production of his novel
The Big Sleep
, principally because he won’t have to write the screenplay. He arrives at Warner Brothers in a cheery mood for a meeting with the director, Howard Hawks, the star, Humphrey Bogart, and the two screenwriters, a novice female crime writer called Leigh Brackett, and the great Southern novelist William Faulkner, many of whose own plots are every bit as hard to unravel as Chandler’s, perhaps even more so.

The meeting goes well, as these preliminary meetings often do. Chandler admires both Hawks (‘a very wise hombre’) and Bogart (‘the genuine article’), and tells Faulkner and Brackett that he likes their script, though he is less flattering about it in private (‘’Twill do’). After this meeting, Hawks assures him that he shoots from the cuff, using the script merely as a starting point for his actors, and rewriting it himself as he goes along. What can possibly go wrong?

While they are filming, the plot, already dense, grows impenetrable. Faulkner’s reliance on alcohol – after a night on the town with Hawks, he is spotted groping for cigarette stubs in a mint julep glass – makes his command of the plot shaky. This is possibly not helped by the unusual arrangement with his fellow screenwriter, whereby he is writing every other scene. Additionally, during filming, Lauren Bacall becomes so distressed by the brilliance of the unknown Martha Vickers, who plays her nymphomaniac sister, that to pacify her the studio cuts all but one of Vickers’ scenes, leading to yet more gaps in the plotting.

The plot is further muddied by Hawks’s impromptu revisions, which often involve going back to the original novel, and by the schmaltzy ending that a third screenwriter, brought in by the studio, has tacked on. Furthermore, the screenwriters have tried to anticipate the censors by editing out all allusions to homosexuality and pornography, thus obscuring the motives for blackmail and murder. Finally, the Hollywood Production Code will not allow a heroine to get away with being an accessory to murder, so that any killings originally ascribed to the nymphomaniac Carmen must now be placed at someone else’s door. The plot, already scrambled, has by now gone completely haywire, involving no fewer than seven mysterious murders at the hands of an indeterminate number of assailants.

To sum up: the nymphomaniac Carmen did not, as Vivian supposed, kill Regan during a mental blackout; in fact he was killed by Eddie Mars,
who believed him to be having an affair with Mars’s wife; Lundgren killed Brody; Canino killed Jones; Marlowe killed Canino; and the chauffeur Owen Taylor killed the pornographer (or ‘rare books dealer’) Geiger.

But who killed the chauffeur Owen Taylor? He is lying dead in a limousine under ten feet of water at the end of the pier, but nobody – screenwriters, director, cast, crew – can work out why.
¹⁵²

Shooting grinds to a halt while everybody tries to puzzle it out. Hawks and Bogart get into an argument about it: Hawks is pretty sure Taylor was murdered, while Bogart assumes it is suicide. Eventually, Hawks decides to send a telegram to Raymond Chandler: he, of all people, must know.

Sitting at home, Chandler studies the telegram. He can’t remember his novel well enough, so he goes back to it and rereads the crucial scenes. But by the end of the process he is none the wiser, so he sends back a telegram: ‘I DONT KNOW.’

A few days later, Jack Warner, the parsimonious head of Warner Brothers, chances upon this telegram, and finds out that it cost the studio seventy cents. He immediately phones Howard Hawks. Was it really necessary, he asks, to spend money on a telegram about a silly little point like that?