It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (35 page)

Assistant director Hilton Green described for me how Hitchcock merged television and feature film techniques to shoot
Psycho.

“Mr. H. decided he wanted to make a low-budget feature with his television crew. The difference between working on television and a feature was like night and day. When he was doing a feature, everything was very precise. In television, he didn’t have time. He had a great knack of being able to make very simple shots and get it done, rather than going into complicated camera movements and shots which he did on features.

“On
Psycho,
I would say 75 or 85 percent of everything was planned more carefully than you would for a television show. To prepare for a television show, you’d show up the day before, and we’d walk the sets together, making sure everything was okay. And that was it. Then, he’d come in and you’d shoot the two days or three days.

“He sent me to Phoenix, Arizona, for
Psycho.
That’s where Marion Crane’s office was. I had to meet people who worked in an office like hers and visit where she would live, and photograph closets of the clothes of young women who had jobs like hers. Then I drove the route she would take to go up to central California. I laid it all out and came back. I mean, that’s how much research we would do. Altogether different from a television show.

“Mr. H. would cut in the camera. I mean, it wasn’t any guesswork of lining it up. It made my job very easy.

“It was very difficult to do the scene when Mrs. Bates is discovered in the fruit cellar. The big problem was to cause a flare in the lens when she turned, with Vera Miles throwing out her arm and hitting the naked bulb, making it swing back and forth. This was what Mr. Hitchcock wanted, that effect, and it took a couple of retakes to get it, which he was very upset about. He wanted things to happen right away. We got it, the second day.

“Of course, the dummy was a dummy. The only time she really moved was in the basement when she turned. The prop man had to lie prone underneath her and do it upside down, really, to get that head to move right. It was quite an ordeal, but it just had to be worked out.”

John Landis, a young director on the Universal lot during Hitchcock’s last few years there, came to know him well.

“I first saw
Psycho
on television, and it made a huge impact on me,” Landis told me. “I was fascinated by how funny it is. ‘Mother’s not herself today’ is one of the lines.

“The ending is for me one of the great images of cinema. When he says, ‘I wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ Tony Perkins looks insane, plus that subtle ‘super’ of the skull that comes on and off his face is just terrifying.”

Psycho
has been criticized for the effect it might have on impressionable minds. Hitchcock did not agree.

“I think it has an influence on sick minds,” Hitchcock acknowledged, “but not on healthy minds. When I made
Psycho,
a man was arrested in Los Angeles for murdering three women. He was alleged to have said that he was inspired to murder the third woman after seeing
Psycho.
I was called by the media for a comment. I asked what film did he see before murdering the second woman? Maybe he drank a glass of milk before he murdered the first woman.

“A little boy came up to me once, he was about seven years old, and he asked me, ‘Mr. Hitchcock, in
Psycho,
what did you use for blood? Chicken blood?

“I said, ‘No. Chocolate sauce’ And he said, ‘Okay,’ and went on his way, satisfied. He understood it was only a movie.”

O
UR SO
-
CALLED
feathered friends are suddenly our feathered enemies,” was how Hitchcock described
The Birds
for me.

When Lew Wasserman, longtime agent and friend of Alfred Hitchcock, and head of MCA, the powerful talent agency, acquired Universal Studios, he arranged for Hitchcock to trade his rights in the television series and
Psycho
for a major share in the ownership of Universal. Hitchcock moved to Universal where his first project was
The Birds.

Watching television, Hitchcock and Alma had seen a commercial that featured an attractive blonde. It was Alma who noticed her and thought she could possibly become Hitchcock’s new star. They both believed in the importance of first impressions.

Nathalie “Tippi” Hedren, the model in the commercial, was contacted, and she met with agents and executives at MCA. At first, she thought she was being considered for commercials, but then she was told she was being offered a seven-year contract by Alfred Hitchcock. Hedren expected to be given parts on the television show. The salary was only about what she earned as a model, but it offered security, and Hedren was the mother of a four-year-old daughter, Melanie. (The child grew up to be actress Melanie Griffith.) By coincidence, Evan Hunter, who wrote the screenplay for
The Birds,
had given the name “Melanie” to the character Hedren would play in
The Birds
before he knew it was her daughter’s name.

Hedren was given the news that she had been chosen to star in Hitchcock’s new film at dinner at Chasen’s, in the presence of Hitchcock and Alma, and Lew Wasserman. By her place at the table was a box from San Francisco’s Gump’s, one of Hitchcock’s favorite stores. Inside was a gold pin of three birds.

Edith Head, who had created the wardrobe for Grace Kelly and Kim Novak, was to do the same for Hedren in her personal life as well as in her films. Hitchcock was preparing Hedren to be the next Grace Kelly. The problem was, Hedren said, she didn’t want to be the next Grace Kelly. She wanted to be the first Tippi Hedren.

Georgine Darcy visited Hitchcock while he was directing Hedren.

“He was directing Tippi like a robot. He said to me, ‘Now, watch this.’ If he wanted her to deepen her voice when it would get too high or she was getting nervous, he’d have a signal for that.”

Before
The Birds,
Hitchcock had planned to film
Marnie
with Grace Kelly. She had hoped to return to the screen, but quickly realized those hopes were in vain.

“My husband wanted the movie star without what went with it,” Grace Kelly told me years later. “In
To Catch a Thief,
my screen presence was certainly larger than life. I think my husband fell in love with that character. I probably confused the roles myself. I read that I was going to be a fairy-tale princess, and I believed it. I became a princess, but ‘They lived happily ever after’ was much more complicated than in fairy tales.

“In a way, it was Hitch who gave the bride away, but I don’t think he thought it was forever.

“When we married, my husband said, ‘Being an actress wasn’t a princess-like thing to do.’ He was worried about how the citizens of Monaco would react to seeing me on the screen, but he said it would depend on the part.

“He wanted the girl I was, with her spirit, but he didn’t want a
wife
with too much spirit.

“I’d always thought I wanted, as an actress, to play a wide assortment of parts, but in life, once I agreed to be a princess, I was typecast.”

H
ITCHCOCK READ IN NEWSPAPERS
of a bird attack around Santa Cruz, a large flock of seagulls, lost in the fog, that flew into street-lights and broke windows. It reminded him of
The Birds,
a short story by Daphne du Maurier that he had purchased for possible development.

The Birds
told of a Cornish farmer’s cottage inexplicably invaded by angry birds. Hitchcock decided that
The Birds,
relocated from Cornwall to northern California, would be his next film rather than
Marnie.

Hitchcock selected novelist Evan Hunter to write the screenplay. Hunter had written
The Blackboard Jungle
as well as the short story “Vicious Circle” for
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine,
which was adapted for the television program. He was also the writer of the
87th Precinct
series under the pseudonym of Ed McBain.

Hunter had the idea to contrast a “meet-cute” screwball comedy with the sudden horror of the bird attack. Hitchcock liked that, especially if Grace Kelly and Cary Grant could be the couple who “met-cute.” Hitchcock encouraged Hunter to create more articulate and glamorous characters than the farmer and his wife in the short story.

Though Hitchcock was accustomed to solving impossible technical problems,
The Birds
proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated. He said that if he had judged accurately the technical difficulties involved, he would not have begun
The Birds.

Art director Robert Boyle talked with me about some of the difficulties.

“Hitch asked me whether it would be technically possible to make the film. I read the short story, and it didn’t give me too many clues except that there were going to be birds all over the place, pecking at the walls, coming down the chimneys, doing whatever they had to do to destroy the human race. That already seemed difficult enough, but I knew we would be involved in some technical procedures which were not new, but putting them all together would be new. It seemed rather chancy.

“The most difficult shot was the seagulls’ point-of-view of the gas station explosion in
The Birds.
The overall design I had for the film from the very beginning was inspired by Edvard Munch’s painting,
The Scream,
the sense of bleakness and madness in a kind of wilderness expressing an inner state. It was just what Hitchcock wanted. He insisted on a subjective approach, so that the audience would emotionally share in the characters’ feelings as well as their fears of physical danger. The actors worked almost six months, but the artists and special effects people and those in the optical department worked more than a year.

“Hitchcock would push the technical aspect of any shot to any length
if
it satisfied that gut feeling of whatever he’s trying to do—suspense, terror, whatever. He bonded reality to his purpose to get the real truth.”

For
The Birds,
Hitchcock decided to dispense entirely with music, replacing it with the sound of birds. German inventor-musician Remi Gassmann, who had designed a keyboard synthesizer capable of reproducing the sound of hordes of birds, “composed” the score. Bernard Herrmann was a consultant.

Hedren had to endure days of having live birds thrown at her. She had never anticipated this, and the ordeal took its toll on her, and on her relationship with Hitchcock.

“Hitchcock was more careful about how the birds were treated than he was about me,” Hedren said. “I was just there to be pecked.”

Ethel Griffies, the actress who played an ornithologist in the film, began her stage career in 1881 when she was three years old. Hitchcock had seen her on the London stage when he was a young man.

Some of the birds seen in the film were trained, some were mechanical, some were animated. Ub Iwerks, an animation pioneer, assisted Robert Boyle on the animated birds. One of the live bird actors, a talented crow, was so enthusiastic about his part that if there was more than one take, he would anticipate his cues.

“I was overwhelmed by birds who would not move to the right or close their beaks,” Hitchcock said. “Much has been made of my comment, ‘Actors should be treated like cattle.’ Now I would say, ‘They should be treated like birds.’

“Alma had never liked the original idea of doing
The Birds.
She didn’t think there was enough story there. Well, she was right. Not enough story, too many birds.” Initially,
The Birds
received mixed reviews and was disappointing at the box office, but later it came to be held in much higher esteem.

Hitchcock sent a gift to Hedren’s six-year-old daughter, Melanie. It was a small doll dressed in a miniature of the green suit worn by her mother in
The Birds,
with her sleek blond hair coiffed in exactly the same manner as Hedren’s had been. There could be no confusion about whom the doll represented, but the problem was that the box that contained the doll was not a routine cardboard doll box. Made of wood, Hedren perceived it as a coffin, and both she and her daughter have continued into the twenty-first century to be perfectly convinced of that.

Asked by a friend how she felt about Hitchcock, the adult Melanie Griffith said, “He was a motherfucker. And you can quote me.”

“T
HERE WAS THIS
continuous struggle on the set with regard to him holding it together, and there were people worrying about him,” actress Diane Baker told me. “On
Marnie,
I think there was a sense of ‘Hitch is disturbed’ or ‘He is not happy.’ I felt he was a man troubled. They had people down from the Black Tower [Universal’s executive office building] watching, to keep Hitchcock happy. There was a lot of worry about Tippi. I think Sean Connery had a very good time. He didn’t let any of it bother him. He just did his part.” Connery had been cast as Hedren’s co-star.

Hitchcock liked Connery personally and found him good company. He was most impressed by his “professionalism.” Hitchcock defined that term simply as “He came early, knew his lines, and hit his marks. I was pleasantly surprised. He directed himself and you could always find him.” Connery was frequently there even when it wasn’t necessary. “I was interested in seeing Hitch work, as well as in doing everything I could to make it easy for him,” he told me.

Connery remembered having “a bloody good time” making
Marnie.
“Hitchcock and his wife were very generous to us, inviting us to their home, showing us southern California. He had his way of directing, as with every director. I saw he didn’t wish to over-discuss things, and
any
discussion was ‘over-discussing.’”

Since Hitchcock was comfortable with Evan Hunter, professionally and personally, while working on
The Birds,
he asked the novelist to adapt
Marnie
from the Winston Graham novel. “
Marnie
was
The Taming of the Shrew,
” Hitchcock told me, “but the public didn’t notice. No one could tell a story like Shakespeare.”

There was one scene in the novel that disturbed Hunter. As it turned out, the scene in question was the one to which Hitchcock was firmly attached.

After his marriage to Marnie, Mark, played by Connery, expects to enjoy a husband’s conjugal rights, but he has underestimated the extent of his wife’s psychological trauma. Patient with her rebuff on the first night of their honeymoon, later he is carried away by his passion.

In the opinion of Hunter, this “rape,” as Hitchcock described it, would destroy all sympathy for and identification with the lead male character. Hitchcock described the scene he wanted in detail to Hunter and art director Robert Boyle, but Hunter was not persuaded. He offered two versions of the script, one version written as Hitchcock wanted, the other without the rape scene. Hunter believed that Marnie truly loved Mark, even though she couldn’t really admit it to herself, and that Mark would be patient with her.

Hunter described Hitchcock’s reaction to this suggestion: “He framed me up with his hands the way directors do, and said, ‘Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want the camera right on her face!’ And then he moved into a close-up of
my
face.”

Years later, talking with writer Jay Presson Allen, Hunter was told, “That scene was his reason for making the movie. You just wrote your own ticket back to New York.” Hunter was dismissed and given no writing credit.

Alfred Hitchcock had read the script of
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
before it was produced on the stage and thought the playwright, Jay Presson Allen, might be the right one to replace Hunter on
Marnie.
Allen, who lived in New York, went out to Los Angeles and met Hitchcock.