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  Copyright © 2005 by Charlotte Chandler

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chandler, Charlotte.

  It’s only a movie : Alfred Hitchcock, a personal biography / Charlotte Chandler.

  p. cm.

  Includes index

  Filmography: p.

  1. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899–1980. 2. Chandler, Charlotte. 3. Motion picture producers and directors—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.

  PN1998.3.H58 C53 2005

  791.4302’33’092—dc22 2004052559

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84739-709-6

  ISBN-10: 1-84739-709-3

  www.simonsays.co.uk

  Acknowledgments

  With special appreciation

  Pat Hitchcock-O’Connell, Alma Reville Hitchcock, Chuck Adams, and Bob Bender.

  With appreciation

  Michael Accordino, Jan Anderson, Judith Anderson, Claudio Angelini, Enrica Antonioni, Michelangelo Antonioni, Amelia Antonucci, Dennis Aspland, Linda Ayton, Diane Baker, Roy Ward Baker, Charles Bennett, Marcella Berger, Ingrid Bergman, Sidney Bernstein, Robert Boyle, David Brown, Kevin Brownlow, Henry Bumstead, Bob Calhoun, Jack Cardiff, Fred Chase, Larry Cohen, Herbert Coleman, Wilkie Cooper, Rusty Coppleman, Warren Cowan, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Hume Cronyn, George Cukor, Tony Curtis, Georgine Darcy, Marlene Dietrich, Karin Dor, Mitch Douglas, Lisa Drew, Jean-Louis Dumas, Laura Elliott, C. O. “Doc” Erikson, Ray Evans, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Rudi Fehr, Jean Firstenberg, Henry Fonda, Joan Fontaine, Barry Foster, Joe Franklin, John Emmanuel Gartmann, Bob Gazzale, Anthony Gentile, John Gielgud, Lillian Gish, Milton Goldman, Elliott Gould, Farley Granger, Cary Grant, Hilton Green, Dick Guttman, Dolly Haas, Robert Haller, Peter Handford, Curtis Harrington, Robert A. Harris, Harry Haun, Edith Head, Tippi Hedren, Audrey Hepburn, Bernard Herrmann, Arthur Hiller, Thurn Hoffman, John Houseman, Evan Hunter, Peter Johnson, James Katz, Howard G. Kazanjian, Fay Kanin, Grace Kelly, Theodore Kheel, Alexander Kordonsky, Martin Landau, John Landis, Ted Landry, Fritz Lang, Bryan Langley, Henri Langlois, Robert Lantz, Arthur Laurents, Ernest Lehman, Johanna Li, Janet Leigh, Norman Lloyd, Joshua Logan, Sirio Maccioni, Shirley MacLaine, Karl Malden, Groucho Marx, James Mason, Mary Merson, Ray Milland, Ruth Anna Millman, Laurent Momméja, Thom Mount, Dieter Mueller, Reggie Nalder, Ronald Neame, Paul Newman, Arthur Novell, Eileen O’Casey, Maureen O’Hara, Laurence Olivier, Robert Osborne, Jerry Pam, Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins, Vlada Petric, Jay Presson Allen, Dan Price, Michael Redgrave, Claude Reininger, Robert Rosen, David Rosenthal, Eva Marie Saint, Sandra Seacat, Daniel Selznick, Peter Shaffer, Sidney Sheldon, Sylvia Sidney, Martin E. Segal, Walter Slezak, John Springer, June Springer, Jeff Stafford, Michael Starr, Gary Stevens, James Stewart, Roy Thinnes, Richard Todd, François Truffaut, John Vernon, King Vidor, Lew Wasserman, Cheryl Weinstein, Billy Wilder, Emlyn Williams, Paul Wilson, Teresa Wright, Jane Wyman.

  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, the Cinémathèque Française, Film Forum (New York), The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Italian Cultural Institute, New York, The Leytonstone Alfred Hitchcock Society, the Museum of Modern Art, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Plaza Athénée Hotel (Paris), The Potsdam Museum, The Royal Lancaster Hotel (London), the Savoy Hotel (London), Turner Classic Movies, UCLA Department of Theater, Film, and Television.

  To Hitch

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Introduction

  I. The Early Years

  Hitch

  Hitch and Alma

  II. The British Films

  Cub Director

  The Pleasure Garden to The Lodger

  Great British Hope

  Downhill to Waltzes from Vienna

  British Star

  The Man Who Knew Too Much to Jamaica Inn

  III. Hollywood

  The Selznick Years

  Rebecca to The Paradine Case

  Transatlantic Interlude

  Rope to Stage Fright

  The Golden Years

  Strangers on a Train to Psycho

  The Universal–International Years

  The Birds to Family Plot

  IV. The Last Years

  The Short Night to The End

  Alfred Hitchcock—A Complete Filmography

  Index

  Prologue

  IREMEMBER INGRID BERGMAN coming up to me in a terrible state,” Alfred Hitchcock told me. “Worried, miserable, high-strung, romantic, idealistic, sensitive, emotional. Dear Ingrid. She took life very seriously, and fiction even more seriously. She said, her voice pregnant with feeling, almost trembling, ‘Hitch, there’s something I must ask you about my part. I don’t feel it. I can’t find my motivation…’

  “I said to her, ‘Ingrid, fake it. It’s only a movie.’

  “That seemed to satisfy her, but then, a few weeks later, Ingrid was back standing to the side, shyly waiting for me to be free. I turned to beckon her over. It was interesting, because Ingrid is many things, but shy isn’t one of them. I asked her what was bothering her.

  “‘Oh, Hitch, I’ve been thinking…’

  “I thought, ‘Oh, dear.’ I said, ‘Please go on.’

  “She did. I couldn’t have stopped her.

  “‘I’ve been feeling that what I do isn’t worthwhile. Movies. Being an actress. I’m not doing enough to help people. Of all the worthwhile things you can do with your life, I feel I should be doing something more.’

  “‘Well, Ingrid,’ I said, ‘have you thought about going to a hospital and emptying bedpans?’

  “When the actors were taking themselves too seriously,” Hitchcock told me, “I hoped the light touch would give them some perspective. I found it rather successful. There was only one person on whom my little diversionary technique didn’t work.

  “Whenever I found myself getting overwrought over problems with one of my films, I would say to myself, ‘Remember, it’s only a movie.’ It never worked. I was never able to convince myself.”

  Introduction

  MY DEAREST DREAM,” Alfred Hitchcock said to me, “would be to walk into an ordinary men’s store on the street and buy a suit, off the rack.

  “There are, I suppose, many men who would envy me having the finest tailors to make my bespoke suits of the best material, but my own dream would be to buy a suit—on sale.

  “Now, I have pretty much given up my hope of losing enough weight, which I don’t think will ever happen, but that is not the problem. The real problem is not my size, but my shape.

  “Even sex is embarrassing for a person who looks the way I do. There weren’t enough light bulbs to turn off.

  “If I had been given the choice in life, I would have looked like Cary Grant on whom everything looked good, and I would have indulged some fashion fantasies, a 39 Steps raincoat, tossed on, a beige cashmere cardigan thrown casually around my shoulders, or better yet, tied around my waist—if I had one.

  “Some writers say that Cary Grant was my fantasy alter ego. Silliness. When I look into my mirror, I don’t see Cary Grant
. I look into my mirror as little as possible, because the person who looks back at me has always seemed something of a stranger who doesn’t look at all the way I feel. But, somehow, he kept getting into my mirror.”

  When Alfred Hitchcock showed me his home on Bellagio Road in Bel Air, California, in the mid-1970s, I had the opportunity to see his astounding wardrobe. Most remarkable was not the quantity of suits, nor the quality, all of the finest fabric, but that they seemed to be the same suit, repeated many times.

  At second glance, however, it was obvious that there were numerous subtle distinctions. Among the black suits, there were shades of black.

  Hitchcock’s suits were famous, and it was widely assumed that he invariably wore the same black suit. James Stewart remembered, “Hitch in Marrakech, 110 in the shade, scarcely ever taking off his dark jacket or even loosening his tie.” Director Ronald Neame recalled that even as far back as 1928 when Hitchcock was directing Blackmail, he wore a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, black shoes and socks, in spite of the intense heat from the klieg lights, before air-conditioning.

  Many of these suits actually were navy blue. “It is called French blue,” Hitchcock told me, a blue so dark that it seems black. Every suit appeared new, in keeping with the reputation of the director for being meticulous.

  Another noteworthy aspect of the collection was that there were many different sizes. “Those suits are all in my sizes,” he said.

  “If my weight changes, up or down, I’m prepared.”

  I asked him how he kept so many suits paired, together with their mates. He explained that they were all keyed, the trousers with their jackets, the sizes with labels sewn in and dated. Inside the waistband of each pair of trousers was a large number in black, and in each coat was a number. “I don’t enjoy any suspense about finding my clothes.”

  Continuing in a more serious tone, he said, “I never achieved the body I wanted, but I am proud of my body of work. It is tall and thin and handsome.”

  Henri Langlois, the founder and secretary general of the Cinémathèque Française, introduced me to Alfred Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, at the Plaza Athénée hotel in Paris. Some years before, Langlois’s dismissal by the French government from his post as curator of the Cinémathèque had provoked demonstrations that escalated into the 1968 riots, effectively shutting down Paris. Throughout dinner, Hitchcock and Langlois talked about Hitchcock’s films, those that existed, and a few that existed only in Hitchcock’s mind.

  “I once had an idea,” Hitchcock told us, “that I would like to use to open a film. We are at Covent Garden or La Scala. Maria Callas is onstage. She is singing an aria, and her head is tilted upwards. She sees, in a box high up, a man approach another man who is seated there. He stabs him. She is just reaching a high note, and the high note turns into a scream. It is the highest note she has ever sung, and she receives a tremendous ovation.”

  Hitchcock seemed to have finished the story.

  “And then? What happens next?” Langlois would have leaned forward on the edge of his chair, except that because of his substantial girth, he already was on the edge of his chair.

  Hitchcock turned and indicated his wife, Alma, who had worked with him officially and unofficially for more than fifty years. He said to Langlois, “Ask the Madame. She does continuity.”

  “I’ve retired,” Alma said.

  “The closest I ever came to doing this opera vignette,” Hitchcock continued, “was in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

  “I’ve always wanted to do a murder among the tulips, too. When I saw the vast fields of tulips in Holland, I knew right away it was a setting I wanted to use, especially in color with blood on the tulips.

  “There’s another scene waiting for a story that I’ve thought about, involving an automobile assembly line in Detroit. The cars are moving along, and the workers are talking about their lives, an argument with the wife, lunch, and other mundane matters. A car rolls off the assembly line, and when the door is opened, a body falls out. That’s as far as I got.

  “Some years ago, I was in New York for Rope, and the publicist took me to my first baseball game. We watched from the broadcast booth, and I made a few drawings. I asked him how many people were watching the game, and he said sixty thousand. I thought, what a perfect spot for a murder! A murder on a baseball field. One of the players is shot, and there are sixty thousand suspects.

  “Then, it actually happened a few years later.”

  “Sometimes your films seem like nightmares that are really happening,” Langlois said.

  “I consider them frightmares,” Hitchcock explained. “Frightmares are my specialty. I have never been interested in nightmares per se. Frightmares have a great deal of reality. A far-fetched story must be plausibly told, so your nonsense isn’t showing.

  “Fear of the dark is natural, we all have it, but fear in the sunlight, perhaps fear in this very restaurant, where it is so unexpected, mind you, that is interesting.

  “Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It’s just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.

  “It’s what you don’t see that frightens you, what your mind fills in, the implicit usually being more terrifying than the explicit. The unexpected is so important. I’ve never liked heavy-handed creaking-door suspense and other clichés. I like to do a ‘cozy.’ Something menacing happens in a serene setting. The cozy setting is a wonderful opportunity for danger and suspense.

  “I, personally, have always been interested in rounding up the un usual suspects.

  “Eventually everything becomes avoiding the cliché. Your own cliché as well as everyone else’s. It’s not just what you’ve done. It’s what everyone else has done and done and done. I pity the poor people in the future.”

  Hitchcock was interested in Langlois’s activities on behalf of film preservation during the World War II German occupation of Paris. The French film lover had broken the law of the occupation, risking his life to personally save hundreds of films that might have been destroyed or lost.

  Hitchcock asked, “How did you choose which ones to save?”

  Langlois answered, “Those which came to me and said, ‘Save me!’ I didn’t have the possibility to see them—only to save them.”

  “It was very brave of you,” Hitchcock commented. “You could have been put into a concentration camp.”

  “I didn’t do anything brave,” Langlois continued. “I just hid the films in my bathtub and the bathtubs of my friends. We didn’t take so many baths.”

  “Not taking those baths was a great service to the world,” Hitchcock said. “At the end of the war, I made a film to show the reality of the concentration camps, you know. Horrible. It was more horrible than any fantasy horror. Then, nobody wanted to see it. It was too unbearable. But it has stayed in my mind all of these years.

  “I don’t think many people actually want reality, whether it’s in the theater or in films. It must only look real, because reality’s something none of us can stand for too long. Reality can be more terrible than anything you can imagine.

  “I, myself, was not old enough for World War I until near the end, when I was rejected. I was too old for World War II, but I like to believe I would have been brave.”

  “Trying to make films you want to make requires some bravery, too,” Alma said.

  “I have heard of a film,” Langlois said, “that you have wanted to make for years, but…”

  “Mary Rose,” Alma said. “It would be a wonderful picture, but they have typecast him as a director who doesn’t make that kind of picture. But we’re not giving up.

  “My husband is very sensitive to criticism,” Alma added. “But when people don’t like what he does or won’t let him do something he believes in, I’m twice as hurt. I’m hurt for
myself, and I’m hurt for him.”

  “Mary Rose,” Hitchcock explained, “was a play by James M. Barrie which I saw in London in the early 1920s. It impressed me very much. In brief, it is the story of a twelve-year-old girl who is taken on an excursion to an island by her parents. She disappears and, weeks later, reappears, with no explanation. As a young woman, she returns to the island with her husband, and disappears again. She is gone many years. Then, when she reappears, her son is a grown man, her husband is middle-aged, but she hasn’t changed at all. In the end, she has to go back, but to where?

  “I have never forgotten it. I’m trying to attack it now from a science fiction angle, because the public will want to know where Mary Rose went when she disappeared for twenty-five years and then came back as young as she was when she disappeared.

  “There was another story I always wanted to do. It was a true story, on which So Long at the Fair was based. A woman searches for her mother who has disappeared without a trace at the Paris Exposition of 1889. The missing person has contracted the plague, and the facts have been covered over to protect the city from panic. It is a story like Death in Venice, also a very good film. I would like to have made both of those.

  “And Diabolique; I’d like to have made that one, too, but [Henri-Georges] Clouzot beat me to it. For many years, I thought I would do a John Buchan book, Three Hostages. It’s not as good as his 39 Steps, but it’s a good story. And, oh, something of Wilkie Collins. What a writer that man was! I admired Dickens, and I’d like to have done something of Poe.

  “I was always an avid reader of the newspaper from the time I was a boy. As I became interested in the world of film, I became more alert to stories, especially crime stories that could be the basis for a film. There was one I read somewhere, I don’t know where, which has never left my mind. It’s not one I could ever use because it’s too horrible to show, except in a horror film, and even in a horror film, it would be too shocking and probably would provoke a release of tension resulting in a few gasps, some giggles, and then laughter.