Hitch (35 page)

Hitch followed up this happy holiday film by doing a bit of PR for his new studio, Paramount, in the form of a two-month tour of Paramount offices round the world. He hit the headlines when he was reported missing in the Orient. Then it turned out that plane delays had enforced the last-minute cancellation of a projected visit to Singapore, but he was quite safe and unruffled at the next port of call. He took the occasion to announce that when he got back he was going to start work on
Flamingo Feather
, by Laurens van der Post, and
From Among the Dead
, by Boileau and Narcejac; the latter ended up three years later as
Vertigo
, but
Flamingo Feather
never got beyond the planning stage. Hitch was intrigued by Van der Post's tale of a situation which he had rejected for
Notorious
but continued to think about: the creation and training of a secret army, this time of blacks in South Africa by the Russians. He went to South Africa to do some research and scout for locations, but found, unsurprisingly, that the
authorities were not very co-operative, It would be impossible to get all the black extras he needed, for the flimsy reason given that every black in South Africa was employed full time and work could certainly not be stopped just for a movie. Also he found that the scenery of the story's original locations was virtually indistinguishable from that within a hundred miles of Los Angeles. All of which confirmed his initial doubts about political subject-matter, so he decided to drop his option on the property. In any case, when he got back to Hollywood he had two other new enterprises all ready to go: a new theatrical movie,
The Trouble with Harry
, and, much more far-reaching in its effects, a television series to be called
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
.

The film was frankly a self-indulgence. The most English of his American films, Hitch calls it; ironically, since just before starting it he had completed the last stage of his Americanization by taking out American citizenship. Alma had already done so, in 1950. Hitch, less impulsive, considered the matter carefully, decided that it was after all the right thing to do, and took out naturalization papers five years later, in 1955. Shortly after this, Sidney Bernstein recalls inviting Hitch and Charles Chaplin to dinner together in London. They were both friendly with him, and inevitably knew each other slightly, guardedly, having little more than their ultimate Britishness in common. On this occasion the talk turned, inevitably, to the vexed question of nationality. Chaplin, for all his years in America, had seen no reason to change his nationality: he was a citizen of the world, and any country, he implied, ought to be willing to welcome him on the strength of his art, with no chauvinistic strings attached. Hitch thought differently: he felt that if you were going to live in a country, work in a country, pay that country's taxes, you should accept the full responsibility of the situation by taking on that country's nationality and all the duties that imposed. Both positions were entirely logical, and neither man could fully understand or sympathize with the other's: as on most other subjects, there was a polite exchange and they agreed to differ.

Despite Hitch's change of nationality, no one could ever easily mistake him for an American; he remained in his outlook and his manner totally English. And as though to re-emphasize this,
The Trouble with Harry
is indeed very thoroughly and consistently English in tone, full of a curious poker-faced English humour on subjects which others are supposed to take very seriously, like death. It is
based on an English novel, by Jack Trevor Story, about a dead body which mysteriously turns up in the countryside, and the bizarre reactions of the various people on the spot. Hitch shifted the locale to Vermont at the magical moment when the leaves are turning, which meant he had to make it very quickly, with almost a television technique (though like
To Catch a Thief it
was made in Vista-Vision, Paramount's pet new wide-screen process), and used a cast of reliable character actors and unknowns. Among the unknowns, or virtual unknowns, were Shirley MacLaine and John Forsythe, while among the older character people was Edmund Gwenn, whose career with Hitch went back to
The Skin Game
in 1931. Hitch made the film largely to please himself, and therefore as cheaply as he could, since he had his doubts about its commercial potential—correct, as it turned out. The film obviously needed special handling which Paramount was not able to give it, and died a death in America, though it did quite well in England and France, where they are weird enough to find this sort of thing funny. Well, anyway, Hitch still likes it, seeing it as the ultimate in his comedy of understatement. And, as is so often the case with Hitchcock films, its reputation has constantly increased through the years.

At the time, the film's importance was eclipsed by the début, on 2 October 1955, of a new television series,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
. It is difficult now to reconstruct how revolutionary it was, back in those relatively early days of television, for a front-rank, top-class movie director to involve himself in any way with this trashy, despised medium. Hollywood was still burying its head in the sand, trying to shrug off the competition of television and pretend it did not exist. Despite which, stay-at-home audiences glued to the small screen were already making big inroads into the attendance figures at movie houses. The various gimmicks of presentation in the early 1950s—triple-screen Cinerama, CinemaScope, Vista Vision, 3-D—were one form of response to the danger; the theatrical movie could give you something television could not—spectacle, colour, sheer size. There were other indirect responses, like the gradual erosion of the notorious Production Code, with all its absurd puritanical restrictions on what could and could not be shown in movies; if television was of necessity a family entertainment, theatrical movies could offer something it couldn't, more outspoken, more sexy, more violent and sometimes even more adult entertainment.

But as yet few of the majors had had the sense to see that the
thing to do, if you couldn't beat them, was to join them. Not so MCA, the giant conglomerate which had evolved from agencies like Joyce-Selznick and Leland Hayward, publishing companies (the initials stand for Music Corporation of America) and production companies, and was to become, among other things, the parent company of Universal Pictures. The heads of MCA had early seen the potential of television, and got more and more involved on the production side. And at the same time Hitch was deeply involved with them. In the process of accretion, the agency which represented him had been incorporated into MCA, and so from 1945 he was represented in all his business dealings by MCA and in particular by Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA, who became one of his closest personal friends. When Lew Wasserman talked, he listened. And in 1955 Wasserman did some very effective talking.

At a managerial conference the question of new television shows for the company to produce came up. Wasserman suddenly said, ‘We ought to put Hitch on the air.' Exactly how he did not know, but Hitch's name, his reputation and his eccentric personality seemed to make him a natural. There was some scepticism. Could he do it? Would he do it? Would it work if he did? To all of which Wasserman answered, practically, that it would do no harm to ask, and to test the market in the usual way with preliminary research. So Wasserman went to Hitch with the idea. Hitch was cautious but open-minded. He had nothing against television, and the financial advantages if the series turned out well would be considerable. On the other hand, did he need this at a time when his theatrical movie-making was immensely successful and satisfying, and he had more projects buzzing round in his head than he could ever find time to do? Finally, he asked Wasserman's opinion as a friend as well as an agent—did he think Hitch should do it? Very decidedly, Wasserman did. He did not see how it could do anything but good, and strengthen Hitch's position in the cinema as well. In his most sanguine moments, though, he had no idea how much.

Once he was decided, Hitch acted speedily. He set up a company nostalgically named Shamley Productions and called in his old associate Joan Harrison to act as producer on the series. She gathered together a small staff which was eventually to include as her assistant—and later successor—Norman Lloyd, who had worked with Hitch as an actor in
Saboteur
and
Spellbound
, writers such as Francis Cockrell, who wrote an amazingly high proportion of the
early scripts, including seven of the episodes directed by Hitch himself, the photographer John L. Russell and a nucleus of readers and editors, as well as James Allardyce, whose job was to write the brief framing discourses for each episode delivered by the master himself. The organization was tight and efficient, and once the pattern was established Hitch found it possible to delegate most of the work. He was most closely involved with
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, as the new series was called, for the first two years, at the end of which MCA signed up with NBC to deliver another series of forty-two hour-long shows called
Suspicion
. Of these, twenty-two were to be done live in New York and twenty on film in Los Angeles—and Shamley Productions were to do ten of the latter as well as the weekly half-hours. It was for this that Norman Lloyd was brought in from New York to provide the additional help needed, and stayed on in the expanded organization for another seven years as Hitch gradually had less and less directly to do with it.

But from the outset he knew very precisely what he wanted. Since television, he felt, deals in stereotypes, it was the perfect place for the stereotyped view of him and what he did—which otherwise he might rather resent—to be turned to advantage. He wanted the shows, which were half-hour for six seasons and then hour-length for one, to live up exactly to what people expected when they saw his name—thrillers with a twist in the tail, outrageously cynical black comedy. He directed his group's attention to some of his favourites among the older short-story writers, like John Collier, and some younger writers, such as Roald Dahl, who thought along the same lines as himself. And having laid down the guide-lines he left them very much to themselves. Of course, he could trust them completely not to do anything which would devalue the image, which was very necessary since he did not have time to read all the stories and scripts himself, let alone supervise the actual production at all closely. He did have synopses of the stories projected, and went through them rapidly each week giving a yes or a no. Usually it was yes, but whenever he found it necessary to say no he gave very clear and succinct reasons for his refusal.

Of course he had the pick of the stories for those he would direct himself. From the outset it was part of the idea that he should direct some of the shows—the pilots, the keynote shows, whatever else he fancied and had time to do. He has repeatedly disclaimed any special interest in those shows he did direct—twenty out of an
estimated 365 Shamley productions—pretending that he merely took up whatever was in preparation when he had a gap in his schedule. In fact he seems to have chosen his own shows with great care, using many of his favourite actors in them and selecting stories which particularly appealed to him. In every other way he religiously observed the limitations imposed on the series in general. Normally the half-hour shows were permitted two days of rehearsal and three days of shooting; Hitch always brought his in on time. He found it an interesting discipline. He would pick out in each show the two or three most important shots, and concentrate on them. If they were right, the rest could be left to fall respectably into place.

Not surprisingly, among the twenty shows Hitch directed are several of those that everyone remembers best out of the whole series.
Revenge
, for example, in which Vera Miles is attacked by a man, later recognizes him in the street and after her husband has beaten to death the man she pointed out promptly recognizes another. Or
Banquo's Chair
, in which John Williams as a detective hires an actress to pretend to be a murder victim's ghost in order to flush out the killer, then discovers after his scheme has worked successfully that the actress was unable to keep the appointment … Or, most famous of all perhaps,
Lamb to the Slaughter
, from a story by Roald Dahl, in which Barbara Bel Geddes kills her husband with a deep-frozen leg of lamb, then cooks it to feed the policemen investigating the crime as they talk about the mysterious disappearance of the murder weapon. These could hardly have come about by some mere happy accident.

Nor could the introductions, which really made the series, and incidentally made Hitch one of the most famous people in the world, a star wherever he went. He came up right away with the format when the series was first mooted. The familiar profile caricature, which he had started doing of himself in his twenties, and had varied since only by the disappearance of the three wavy hairs on top; the same profile in his actual shadow; and the little joky chat with the audience, making cynical comments on the story to be shown and even—something totally taboo at the time on television—saying slighting things about the sponsor. The problem was to find a writer who could consistently hit just the right note, capture Hitch's personality in this very brief compass week after week. Finding James Allardyce was a stroke of great good fortune. He met Hitch a couple of times, and Hitch showed him a rough cut of
The
Trouble with Harry
as the best indication of what he wanted. (Bernard Herrmann, the composer who first worked with Hitch on
The Trouble with Harry
, also seems to have seen the film as a sort of Hitchcock self-portrait, and later arranged his music for it as a concert portrait of Hitch.) Allardyce at once created just the right material, and continued to write the introductions throughout the series.

It was a source of constant amazement to the rest of the staff of Shamley Productions the things Hitch could be persuaded to do on screen. That a great director, and one usually so protective of his dignity, should appear as a child in knickerbockers, or with a hatchet buried in his head, or variously, grotesquely disguised in moustaches and beards, or even sometimes play his own brother—that was really beyond imagination, especially since in some mysterious way he always managed to emerge from the most absurd stunts with his dignity intact. Yet another aspect of the Hitchcock enigma. And it was through these appearances, far more than his serious work, that most people got to know Hitch and have an opinion about him. He would drop in periodically at the studio and shoot them very casually at the rate of eight or nine a day—and the rest is history.