It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (23 page)

“I remember it well. First of all, meeting Hitchcock. It was the third or fourth picture I ever made, so I was still pretty green, and I was very flattered that this world-famous director wanted
me
to play the lead in his film.

“He asked me to come and meet him at the Savoy Hotel where he and his wife were staying and have lunch. That was flattering, too. And what struck me about him, he was
so
enthusiastic. He spent a couple of hours telling me all about the story. ‘You see, we do this, and then we do that, and this happens, and then that happens,’ and she [Alma] kept piping up as well.

“His wife had written the script. She was chattering away as much as he was. She was totally involved. So I came away just about as enthusiastic as they were.

“I got on with him very well, right from the very first day I met him. Then he arranged for me to have lunch at the Savoy with Marlene Dietrich, who was to be my girlfriend. It seemed a bit strange then, and still does, in the movie. I got along with her very well. I got on with Jane [Wyman], too.

“Then when we started actually working in the studio, it was a very different kettle of fish. He worked like no other director I know of. He was very impersonal with his actors. I can now believe that he actually did say ‘Actors are cattle,’ because he didn’t take an awful lot of interest in what they were doing. I was lucky. I was the one he sort of cottoned on to more than most. At one point, he said I had very expressive eyes. So he kept on doing close-ups of my eyes. This was the first time I was aware of speaking with the eyes.

“It helped me particularly, this thing about expressive eyes. Hitchcock wanted to light them and come in close on them all the time. Well, that made me feel that I certainly was getting something out of it. Hitchcock didn’t give the kind of hints directors give at all, but I didn’t mind.

“I wasn’t too sure of myself, because as I said, I hadn’t made all that number of movies. I just hoped I was doing the right thing. But he’d let it go, and so I thought, ‘Well, it must be all right then.’

“He was more interested during the filming in his setups, in his camera positions and so on than he was in his actors, how they played their roles. Most of the time, what he did was as soon as we’d finished a setup, and it was in the can, he would give the first assistant director a note of how he wanted people to move, where they were to stand and be. Then he would go off to his office; and he didn’t come back onto the floor, the set, until we were ready to shoot. All the arrangements had been made by the first assistant director. I’d never come across
that
before. After that, I never came across it again.

“I was newly married at the time, less than a year, and my little wife and I had a very nice address in Park Street, Mayfair. The only trouble was, it was a converted house, and our flat was at the top of four stories, and we didn’t have a lift. We had asked Hitch and Jane Wyman to supper one night, and they came. Alma wasn’t there.

“Hitch simply waltzed up the stairs. No problem at all. Jane Wyman was huffing and puffing. He was remarkably fit.”

The year before, Richard Todd had received an Oscar nomination for his performance in
The Hasty Heart.
Though his success seemed to come quickly, Todd’s acting career had been delayed by his six years of military service during World War II.

“Funny thing was that I had just finished making
The Hasty Heart
with Ronald Reagan, and he was a bit down in the dumps because his marriage with Jane Wyman had broken down. He was terribly sorry about it all.

“And then, less than a year later, I was working with Jane. So, I heard
her
side of the story. I think she had a lot of regrets, too. I continued to see Ronald Reagan for years. We became great friends.”

Stage Fright
was based on
Man Running,
a novel by Selwyn Jepson, the first of several in which Eve Gill is an amateur sleuth. It was inspired by a sensational murder of the 1920s involving an actress, a case that had long intrigued Hitchcock.

During early 1949, he and Alma worked on the treatment and script. Later, playwright Whitfield Cook contributed dialogue. Cook had written the play
Violet,
in which Patricia Hitchcock starred on Broadway.

When it came time for her to choose a college, wanting to become an actress, Hitchcock’s daughter made the decision to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Her father, knowing that she wanted to study drama, had suggested RADA, and she enthusiastically agreed.

She made her feature film debut in
Stage Fright.
Jane Wyman, who was the star, played a RADA student. Their daughter being there inspired the Hitchcocks to place their heroine at RADA as an acting student and to use it as an important setting. Though it was only a small part for Pat, Hitchcock was pleased, and it led her to a more important role in
Strangers on a Train.
This was the ultimate sign of approval from her father. In
Stage Fright,
she brings more to her role than might have been expected from her relatively few lines.

Pat was the recipient of some technical advice from Marlene Dietrich.

“I was able to give his young daughter some valuable tips based on what I had learned about camera lighting,” Dietrich told me in Paris many years later. “The wrong lighting, the wrong lens, being photographed from the wrong angle, this ages you. The wrong lighting could have taken away her freshness.

“She listened with great attention, but I think she was not very vain, about makeup or wardrobe, either. She was more deeply involved with her acting. For me, acting is only part of it.”

Pat Hitchcock told me that she really loved best being onstage, and would have chosen to be a stage actress. “It’s a career that lasts longer. I’m glad I had the opportunity to be in films and television. As it turned out, being in the films of my father was the most lasting part of my career. But the most fulfilling part of my life has been being a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother.

“People think it’s much easier to be an actress if you have a relative in the business. Well, it has the obvious advantage, but it’s also much harder because there are people who think it’s the
only
reason you got the part.

“Some people took such a hard look at what I did. They thought I was getting jobs because of my father, but my father would never have cast me if I hadn’t been right for the parts. He was very particular about casting. I wish I’d fit more parts. I’d like to have done more.”

A common occurrence in Hitchcock’s films is a wrong man being on the run. In
Stage Fright,
the twist is that it’s the
right
man who is on the run.

Some critics complained that the opening “false flashback” was dishonest. “I felt the flashback was justified,” Hitchcock said, “because the scene is from the viewpoint of Eve Gill, who believes Jonathan’s account of the crime.”

“I was prepared for it,” Richard Todd said, “having read the script and gone over it in depth. It didn’t disturb me. Just part of the job.

“I didn’t mind at all being the villain because it would be very boring to play a goody all the time. Fundamentally, he was a villain, but he didn’t come over that way, until you realize what he was up to. In the beginning, he seemed rather a nice young man. Had to be, or the girl wouldn’t have taken all that risk to help him.

“Dietrich was ruled by the stars. She didn’t do anything without talking to her astrologer. When she realized I was newly married, she asked me to give her my wife’s date of birth. About a week later, she said, ‘You know, it’s no good. You’ve married the wrong person.’ She’d gotten in touch with her chap in America, and he’d looked it up, and it wasn’t right at all.

“We proved her wrong—for twenty years.

“It was quite a pleasant film to make. It was good for my confidence, to feel I’d got through a movie with the great Hitchcock and hadn’t made a mess of it. And he was very complimentary about it.

“This is what astonished me—only a year out of a repertory theater, and suddenly here I was with this world-famous great man, being entertained and having everything about the script explained at great length as if I was important, which I wasn’t.”

In the more than half century that has passed since the release of
Stage Fright,
Jane Wyman has consistently refrained from speaking ill of Hitchcock, but her praise of the director has been restrained. She said very simply, “He was a good guy.”

When she went to England to film
Stage Fright,
she had just received the best actress Oscar for
Johnny Belinda,
and her hopes were high. The lack of special attention as an Oscar winner disappointed her. She felt Dietrich was being accorded greater respect. The picture was never one of Wyman’s favorites.

Wilkie Cooper, photographic director for
Stage Fright,
told me that the greatest challenge was filming Marlene Dietrich’s scenes. “Hitchcock gave me special instructions, which really surprised me, especially it being Mr. Hitchcock and all. He said that for any scenes with Miss Dietrich, I was able to listen to her instructions, and—this was the part that really took me aback—to do it the way she said. Need-less to say, I didn’t question Mr. Hitchcock’s instructions, but I prepared myself for the worst. Perhaps seeing the expression on my face, he reassured me, saying, ‘Miss Dietrich is quite expert and knows what she’s talking about,’ and he says, ‘Don’t argue about it with her. Just discreetly let me know.’ No one knew more about his camera than he did. Mr. Hitchcock knew more about the camera than
I
did.

“Well, he was right about it. Miss Dietrich certainly did know a great deal, especially about camera lighting. Mr. Hitchcock had mentioned that she had learned from Josef von Sternberg. What she had to offer was very professional, and she knew what she was doing, especially for herself.

“What worried me was that she would look like she was in a different film. I needed to make it all match.

“The other problem was Miss Wyman. She could see that Miss Dietrich was getting all of this attention, which certainly must have seemed to her to be preferential. Well, it was. I can’t say Miss Wyman was exactly a good sport about it, but she did her best not to complain.

“Miss Dietrich was pleasant enough to work with—as long as she got her way. She considered herself to be the director and the camera director for her scenes. I think Mr. Hitchcock must have made some kind of special agreement with her in order to get her for the picture. Though she didn’t say it exactly, it was clear that there was only one concern she had, and that was that she look as young as possible. Actually, what she really wanted was to look younger than was possible for any camera or any lighting to achieve.”

Hitchcock wanted Marlene Dietrich for the part, he told me, because she really was a great character, and he wanted her to bring that character with her to
Stage Fright.
He preferred actors who didn’t require constant direction, and she certainly was one of those.

“Dietrich was very much herself,” Hitchcock commented.

I told Hitchcock a story Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., had told me about Marlene Dietrich, with whom he had had a long affair. Fairbanks sculpted several nude figures of Dietrich during their time together, and when the romance ended, the friendship remained, and Fairbanks offered the figures to Dietrich. “You keep them to remember me by,” she said. “I don’t need them. I have myself.”

Fairbanks kept them for years, and then he decapitated one and all, feeling that if anything happened to him, he didn’t want people to find them and recognize Dietrich, even if the figures were impressionistic, and it was unlikely that they would have been identified, even
with
their heads.

When Marlene Dietrich reached the moment she had to recognize that no amount of camera lighting with perfect makeup and distracting costumes could camouflage the changes in her looks, she cared more about her public image than about her personal life. Her pride was great, and she chose to retire to Paris where she retreated into her avenue Montaigne flat. She not only retired from films and live performances, but also from eating in restaurants, seeing friends, or opening the door to receive her groceries. She dismissed her maid, and
became
her maid.