Thornton Wilder (73 page)

He was in Hollywood by May 20, at the Villa Carlotta again. Wilder rented a “Drive-U-Self Chevrolet” to get himself back and forth between his apartment and the Universal Pictures studio where he would be working, although he was reluctant to drive in Los Angeles traffic. Just starting the car was an ordeal, punctuated by “lurches, leaps and a screaming of gears.”
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When he reached the studio, however, Wilder immediately found himself “very interested” in the movie, and from the first he enjoyed working with Hitchcock and his producer, Jack Skirball.
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“The other trips I came out with naif illusions about making good movies and fumbled,” Wilder wrote his family. “This time I came out to make money and am really caught up in the thing. Mr. Hitchcock and I get on fine and he and Mr. Skirball are very excited by the way the script is going—for
already there is a lot of script!!!
”
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The intense schedule left him “tired all the time,” however, as he socialized with the Sol Lessers; George Cukor, whose party included “Barbara Hutton Reventlow and Cole Porter. Glamor-food. Footmen”; and his former student Robert Ardrey, now a playwright and screenwriter, and his wife, among others.
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Wilder and Hitchcock met at ten each morning for their story conference, and Wilder spent the rest of the day writing. Hitchcock showed Wilder his 1941 suspense thriller,
Suspicion,
starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, pointing out technical details and procedures all the way through the film.

“Work, work, work,” Wilder wrote to Isabel. “But it's really good. For hours Hitchcock and I with glowing eyes and excited laughter plot out how the information—the dreadful information—is gradually revealed to the Audience and the characters. And I will say I've written some scenes. And that old Wilder poignance about family life [is] going on behind it.”
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Hitchcock, like Wilder, was fascinated with the family as a focus for drama. The Newton family in Santa Rosa in
Shadow of a Doubt
is a stark counterpoint to Wilder's Gibbs and Webb families in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, in
Our Town,
and his Antrobus family in Excelsior, New Jersey, in
The Skin of Our Teeth.
There are resonant “shadows” in the film—the interplay of dark and light, innocence and depravity, truth and illusion, characters who are not what they seem, and characters who are blind to reality. “We think up new twists to the plot,” Wilder wrote, “and gaze at one another in appalled silence: as much as to say ‘Do you think an audience can
bear
it?' ”
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With chilling irony and foreshadowing, Wilder played with the concept of twinship between two family members who could not be more different:

 

YOUNG CHARLIE:

Uncle Charlie, you and I aren't just any uncle and niece. Mother's always said that you and I are alike. And I know we are . . . We're kind of . . . twins. . . .

 

UNCLE CHARLIE (
taken aback
):

Twins? That's a mighty fine thing to be.

 

YOUNG CHARLIE:

It's a very serious thing to be, too. Because we can read one another's thoughts.
³³

 

“I'm fascinated,” Wilder wrote to Bob Hutchins. “Our work is very good. It's not literature. But the wrestling with sheer craft, the calculations in a mosaic of exposition is bracing.”
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Wilder's respect for the motion picture as an art form was growing. He had observed in 1940 that “the movies have risen to surpass the play.”
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Under Hitchcock's tutelage Wilder embraced each step of work on the film script, especially the “complicated plotting and of course that gets denser and more complex as it goes on.” He and Hitchcock were pleased with the emerging screenplay. “There's no satisfaction like giving satisfaction to your employer,” Wilder wrote. “I hope I give it to the Army too. Satisfaction to
yourself
is fleeting, [in] spite of what the moralists say. And satisfaction to the public does not interest me.”
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There was definite satisfaction, however, in receiving his first paycheck. “Never did I love money more purely,” Wilder wrote to Isabel as he banked the funds for his family.
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THE SCREENPLAY
was nearly finished as time drew near for Wilder to report for military duty. “I'm a tiny speck in this War,” he wrote to Woollcott. “But my relation to it is so real that I have the sensation of entering it for the happiest and most selfish reasons.”
³⁸
Because the requirements for civilians becoming officers had become more demanding, Wilder received new orders to report to Miami for a six-week training course in “basic soldiery” to begin June 27. As there were now certain wartime restrictions on cross-country civilian air travel, Wilder would have to make part of the trip by train. Hitchcock decided to join him for the journey, and the two men left Los Angeles by train June 22, bound for Chicago, finishing and polishing the script for
Shadow of a Doubt
on the way. The change in orders had forced Wilder to cancel plans to visit Woollcott at Neshobe. “Anyway,” he joked, explaining the change, “I should think the picture of me at bayonet practice (muttering ‘Jed Harris' and leading the class in ferocity) would be so tonic that no one could wish me anywhere else.”
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“Honest, Ruth, the picture is good,” Wilder wrote to Ruth Gordon after he had finished his work with Hitchcock. “At the end we descend to a little fee-fo-fi-fum, but for the most part it's honest suspense and poignancy and terror.”
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After Wilder's departure from Hollywood, Hitchcock's wife and collaborator, the actress and writer Alma Reville, and screenwriter and short-story author Sally Benson (
Meet Me in Saint Louis
and
Junior Miss
) added dialogue to the script, under Hitchcock's supervision. Wilder was not happy to discover this later on when he first saw the film in a movie theater.

Shadow of a Doubt
was released in 1943 to rave reviews, and was frequently reported to be Hitchcock's favorite production. One of Hitchcock's biographers later observed that the Wilder-Hitchcock collaboration was “one of the most harmonious” of Hitchcock's career.
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Wilder received screenwriting credit and a special acknowledgment for his contributions to the film. Credits also went to Reville and Benson, and Gordon McDonell received an Academy Award nomination for Writing—Original Motion Picture Story. Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten starred as Charlie and Uncle Charlie, with a strong supporting cast including MacDonald Carey, Hume Cronyn, and Patricia Collinge. In 1943 Wilder wrote to Sol Lesser about the film, noting that the text was about 80 percent his, and suggesting that he and Lesser do a film after the war—provided Lesser thought, on the basis of
Shadow of a Doubt,
that Wilder could “write movie-telling.”
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“IT SEEMS
both diplomatic and army-air intelligence needs Thornton's type,” Isabella Niven Wilder wrote to her son Amos on May 13, 1942. She was already worried that Thornton would be sent to “dreadfully far, dangerous posts.”
⁴³

Capt. T. N. Wilder, 0908587, age forty-five, was sworn in on June 16, 1942, and received orders to begin six weeks of training in “basic soldiery” June 27 in Miami, Florida, and then to report to Army Air Intelligence Officers Training School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
⁴⁴
In Miami six thousand officer candidates were being trained, and a smaller number of “re-treads,” or veterans of World War I, were undergoing “refresher training.”
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In the tropical heat and humidity Captain Wilder kept up with the best of the younger men, with “unflagging vitality.” Men in uniform often collapsed in the summer heat, to be carried off the parade ground. But Wilder, his khakis and his overseas cap soaked with sweat, actually appeared to enjoy the exercise. At forty-five he was in better shape than he had been at twenty, when he had difficulty passing the physical examination for service in World War I.
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After one sweltering daily parade in Miami, Wilder met the writer Paul Horgan, who was traveling as an official “Expert Consultant to the Secretary of War” to inspect officers' candidate training programs across the United States, and then to write a script for an army training film with Maj. Frank Capra. Horgan and Wilder had corresponded occasionally but had never met until that particular July afternoon. Horgan asked Wilder about his next assignment. “In a few weeks I go to the Air Corps Intelligence School at Harrisburg [Pennsylvania],” Wilder said. And what would he be doing after that? Horgan wanted to know. Writing training manuals or historical records of the air services? “Never!” Wilder answered “in a subdued sort of shout,” Horgan wrote. “He kept his smile but it became severe and his heavy brows seemed to bristle. ‘Never:
I shall not write for my country
!' ”
⁴⁷

Wilder had taken this same position with Archie MacLeish, insisting that he did not want to serve in the relative safety of Washington or Hollywood, using his skills as a writer to turn out propaganda and training films. MacLeish promised to help him find an interesting assignment, perhaps in Army Air Force Intelligence, where there was a need for people with analytical prowess and fluency in foreign languages. Wilder was determined to serve overseas: “The dream of most of our lives is to become that Intelligence Officer in the Combat Zones,” he wrote to his family.
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For the most part Wilder would have his wish. He was “still healthy, hot, hardworked and happy” in Miami in July. He complied with requests from the Bureau of Public Relations to do broadcasts and lectures, and to meet the press with the popular actors Capt. Clark Gable and Capt. Don Ameche, but he found the most satisfaction in the achievements of Squadron M, to which he belonged. They won the pennant for best marching and got the highest marks ever recorded by the training program for a test on judgment. Captain Wilder made a score of 400 out of a possible 400 points in “Company Administration.”
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He was excelling mentally and physically in his work, sleeping well, even enjoying reveille, and feeling “the War coming nearer and nearer—a huge concrete thing that diminishes everything one has ever known except friendship, love of places, and the few occasions one has known of good hard work.”
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From Miami he was dispatched to Harrisburg, and from this point on letters with explicit details of his whereabouts and his duties gradually diminished, in accord with army policy. “It's supposed to be a secret: where we are and what we do and who we are,” he explained to Woollcott in August 1942. He could say only that he was in “the most exclusive school in the world,” and that he and his compatriots were “being trained and polished to very specialized and very responsible duties.”
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He was being schooled to be an Army Air Force Intelligence officer—“a new kind of officer at the interrogators' table” where Allied pilots were debriefed. Young pilots were “emotionally immature,” Wilder wrote. “Returning from raids where they have killed, or where their friends behind them, gunners, etc., have been killed, they approach the Interrogators Table in inner turmoil. They do not wish to speak to a human being for 24 hours. They fantasize or worst of all develop mutism.”
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As for the officers doing the interrogating, “it's not enough to know maps, read photographs and compute ballistics. There must be a psychologist, etc. He must know with which pilots he must be hard as nails, with which he must be patient and indirect. Yes, all War is ugly, not less so when it tries to be humane.”
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Still he was thriving. “Say, we come of good stock,” he wrote Amos that summer, looking back on his training in Miami. “Those Hebridean parsons; those Maine farmers . . . your kid brother never missed an appointment, a roll-call, a class, a drill. . . . My colleagues were fainting on the drill field, or getting excused from this or that . . . but Brotherboy was up at 5:15 and enjoying it.”
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At Harrisburg he underwent training in “map reading; aerial photography; codes; celestial navigation (!); structure of planes, etc.—so that we can at least talk adequately to the young flyers whom we interrogate and whose lives, meals, payrolls, service records we must direct.”
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Civilian life intruded now and then: Myerberg and Kazan traveled to Harrisburg to meet with Wilder about the script for
The Skin of Our Teeth
. He was able to get leave in late August to go to New York to confer with them about the play, and he looked forward to meeting Montgomery Clift and having dinner with Isabel, Tallulah Bankhead, and Clift at Sardi's. He was able to spend nearly twenty-four hours with his family at Deepwood Drive.
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By mid-September, Wilder had done all he could do for the time being with the script and was ready to put it aside. “I reckon that I believe that a text counts 95% of a show,” he told Isabel, “and I let all the rest go hang. . . . Anyway, now the text's established and I don't have to think one more iota about that part of it.”
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