Sight and Sound (Jun/1997) - Me and Hitch, by Ed McBain - part 1
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(c) Ed McBain, Sight and Sound (June 1997)
Me and Hitch
by Evan Hunter (Ed McBain)
26 March, 1996 marks ten years since the world premiere of Alfred Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot. My working relationship with him started some 40 years earlier, when he bought a short story of mine for his then half-hour television show. It ended on 1 May, 1963 when I was abruptly replaced as the screenwriter for Marnie, his film then in development. What goes around comes around.
Ironically, the short story was titled Vicious Circle, and it was originally published in Real magazine in March 1953. This was 19 months before publication of The Blackboard Jungle, and I was still writing a mélange of short stories and a handful of paperback mystery novels in an attempt to earn a living for myself and my family. The story was about the rise of a small-time hood, culminating in a gangland murder with a surprise twist - just the sort of clever mystery fare Hitch was offering on his enormously popular weekly show.
In its original half-hour format, Alfred Hitchcock Presents had premiered on 2 October, 1955. Most people who watched the show assumed that he directed each and every episode. In fact, many people believed he also wrote the show's scripts. Hitch did nothing to disabuse anyone of these notions. Years later, when I told one of my sons' friends that I had written the screenplay for The Birds, the kid said, "No, you didn't, Alfred Hitchcock did." Actually, of the 372 episodes filmed during the lifetime of the television show, Hitch directed only 20. Bernard Schoenfeld wrote the teleplay for Vicious Circle. Paul Henreid directed it.
In both the half-hour format and the hour-long format the show later assumed, Hitch would do a little tongue-in-cheek introduction before the story began, and would then continue with amusing little bits during the commercial breaks. These monologues, coupled with the short cameo appearances he made in all of his films, resulted in him becoming the most highly visible director in the world. I sincerely doubt that many moviegoers today would recognise Steven Spielberg if he walked into a restaurant unannounced. When Hitch walked in, everyone knew who he was.
I did not know him personally when his Shamley Productions bought my story, and I was not asked to adapt it for television. Joan Harrison, the show's producer, knew my work because by then The Blackboard Jungle had been published and the sensational movie based upon it had been released. At the time, however, I'd written only one or two teleplays and no screenplays at all, and I'm sure Joan had no inkling that I was anything but a novelist and short-story writer. I'd have been astonished if she'd asked me to write the teleplay of my own story. In fact, the only time I saw the television version was when it aired for the first time in April of 1957.
Pulp rewrite
I next heard from Hitch, indirectly, in the early part of 1959, when my agent called to say that Shamley had bought a story by one of his clients, and they wanted me to adapt it for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I still had no substantial screenplay or teleplay credits, and I wondered why Joan was willing to take a chance on me. (Hitch later told me he specifically wanted a novelist to adapt this particular story because of its 'internal' nature.) The story was called Appointment at Eleven, and it was written by a very good pulp writer named Robert Turner. The movie Pulp Fiction notwithstanding, the expressions 'pulp magazine' or 'pulp writer' may still be unfamiliar. These terms evolved from the fact that the magazines were printed on a yellowish, very grainy grade of paper called 'pulp', in which one could often detect actual wood fibres. These pulps were the forerunners of today's genre novels, specialising as they did in science fiction, detective, sports, adventure, romance and Western stories. The covers of all but the Western, sports and romance pulps were luridly illustrated, and usually depicted a woman in jeopardy. On the science-fiction covers, she was scantily clad in a futuristic toga of sorts, and screaming in terror at the approach or embrace of a bug-eyed monster or a mad scientist. On the detective covers, the victim was usually a blonde-haired woman showing a lot of cleavage, her short, tight skirt pulled back over gartered silk stockings. The men threatening her were either unshaven thugs in blue fedoras or long-nailed Orientals in red kimonos. (The covers were always printed in the primary colours.) Some very good writers, such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich got their starts in the pulps, but you'd never guess anything of quality was packaged between those sexy front covers and the back covers with their Charles Atlas body-building ads.
Appointment at Eleven is a short story about a young man sitting in a bar, drinking and waiting for 11pm to arrive. The reader doesn't know why. The story is told entirely in the young man's head as alternately he drinks and watches the hands of the clock. At 11 sharp, the lights in the bar dim, and we learn that his father has just been electrocuted at the penitentiary nearby.
This was a difficult story to adapt because it all took place in the lead character's head, in a silent internal monologue. I opened it up by having various people in the bar attempting conversation with him, trying to draw him out. Why do you keep watching that clock, kid? Something going to happen at a specific time, kid? What time, kid? And so on. The audience would learn the title when Hitch introduced the show, and this preparation would give me an advantage: whatever was going to happen, the audience would already know it would happen at 11. All I had to do was keep cutting away to the clock and the advancing minute hand for a kind of built-in suspense. Gradually, through casual conversation that becomes inexorably more pointed, we learn that an execution is going to take place down the road tonight, and we learn that the kid has a father, and the father's in jail, and that he's in jail for Murder One. When the lights dim and the kid breaks down, we know without question that the man who just got electrocuted was his father, and the shock is almost palpable.
Suspense and shock.
Two of Hitch's trademarks, and I hadn't yet exchanged a single word with him.
First meetings
I met him for the first time on the set of The Crystal Trench, one of the few shows he himself directed for the television series bearing his name. This was sometime during the late summer of 1959. By then, I had written four bestselling novels under my own name, and was on the Coast adapting one of them (Strangers When We Meet) for Columbia Pictures. A weekly television series based on the '87th Precinct' novels I'd begun writing as Ed McBain three years earlier was scheduled to go on the air that season. Joan Harrison invited my then wife Anita and me to the studio to view the final cut of Appointment at Eleven, which was to air in November. Watching the film, I discovered to my great surprise that Hitch had abandoned his usual wry introduction, instead stating quite simply that the subject matter of tonight's show was too serious to joke about, and he would let the story speak for itself.
After the screening, Joan took us down to meet him. Since he directed so few of the television shows, his personal appearances on the set were rare, and always occasioned an appreciably higher energy level. There was an unmistakable buzz in the air when we walked down from Joan's office. That day, he was shooting a particularly difficult scene in which an actor was lying under a block of ice, the crystal trench of the title. The ice was resting on a narrow wooden ditch into which the actor had crawled. Another actor was supposed to rub his gloved hand over the ice until the face of the actor below was gradually revealed.
Hitch strolled over from where his people were setting up the scene. Joan introduced us, and he immediately began explaining to my wife the enormous technical problems of lighting the scene from above as well as from inside the trench - somewhat similar to lighting the rain from both front and back in Gene Kelly's famous 'Singin' in the Rain' number. At least, that was what I gathered from what I could overhear; all of the conversation was directed at my wife.
Ed McBain is fond of repeating that 15 October is the birth date of great men. On that 15 October I would be 33. Hitch was 62. Anita was all of 29 years old, an attractive, russet-haired woman with green eyes, a warm smile, and a smart New York Jewish Girl sense of humour. Hitch took an immediate liking to her, which was somewhat surprising considering his predilection for glacial blondes. As he showed her around the set, explaining pieces of equipment, introducing her to his cinematographer and his assistant director, the people setting up the shot began to get a bit frantic because the huge block of ice seemed to be melting under the glare of the lights and Hitch still showed no intention of wanting to direct the scene. Finally, after the plaintive words "Mr Hitchcock, sir, we're ready to go now, sir" had been repeated half-a-dozen times, he cordially bade us goodbye, and got on with his work.
Two years later, he asked me to write the screenplay for The Birds.
Forget the story
The call came from my agent toward the end of August. I thought at first that Joan Harrison wanted me to adapt another story for Hitch's television show. But no, it seemed Hitch had purchased motion picture rights to a Daphne du Maurier novella titled The Birds, and he wanted me to write the screenplay for the movie he planned to make from it. I told my agent I would have to read the story before I decided. In truth, for the chance to work with Alfred Hitchcock on a feature film, I would have agreed to do a screenplay based on the Bronx telephone book.
The du Maurier tale was about a Cornish farmer and his wife, whose small cottage is suddenly and inexplicably invaded by birds. There was not a line of dialogue in it. The climactic scene occurs when a huge flock of starlings fly down the chimney and into the room. I told my agent I would like to take a shot at it, and Hitch called me personally that very day.
The first thing he said was that he never wanted to work in Britain again, and certainly did not wish to use as his lead characters an inarticulate farmer and his dreary wife.
"So forget the story entirely," he said. "The only elements we'll be..."
We'll be!
"...using from it are the title and the notion of birds attacking human beings. Other than that, we'll be starting from scratch and building an entirely new story. When can you come out?"
In those days - according to my records, I began work in September 1961 - screenwriters were required to do their actual writing on the Coast. Nowadays, a writer can work wherever he wishes, so long as he delivers the script on time. But back then the habits of a waning studio system were still being honoured, more or less, and when a writer was hired he was handed a typewriter, a ream of paper, a secretary, and an office at the studio. A perhaps apocryphal story has William Faulkner asking his producer if he could go 'home' to finish his screenplay, instead of writing in his assigned studio office. The producer thought Faulkner meant home to the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying at the time. Generously, he said, "Sure, Bill, why not?" Faulkner went directly home. To Oxford, Mississippi.
On Strangers When We Meet, my agent had negotiated a rented house into the contract, and I'd worked in Santa Monica, on a deck overlooking the Pacific, reporting only once a week to Columbia on Gower Street, for meetings with the director, Richard Quine, and the movie's stars, Kim Novak and Kirk Douglas. The contract I'd signed for writing The Birds was for a seven-week minimum term, but Hitch had already told me it might turn into a three-to-four-month project and that I should plan on bringing out my family and placing the kids in school (my notes show that I worked on it for a total of 11 weeks). I told him at once that I could not possibly write in a studio office, and he agreed that I could do the screen-writing itself wherever I chose (in Los Angeles, of course), but that our pre-writing discussions would have to take place in his office at Paramount. We agreed that I would fly out that weekend, get temporarily settled in a hotel, and begin work on Monday morning. "Bring some ideas," he said.
I spent my first week on salary...
Paying writers 'salaries' was another hangover from the studio's serf system. Nowadays a flat fee is negotiated. But back then, writers were paid so much per week, which might have explained why their presence in LA was deemed necessary. If you're paying a person by the week, you want to know exactly where he is and what he's doing. I got $5,000 a week for writing the screenplay, precisely what I'd got for all my work on Strangers. To me, at the time, it seemed a small fortune. (Just before Anita and I left California in November, Hitch asked us to join him and his wife Alma in St Moritz, where they traditionally spent the Christmas holidays. "You can afford it," he said, impishly raising an- eyebrow to indicate I'd been exorbitantly overpaid.)
Exorbitantly overpaid or not, I reported to work at nine o'clock on the morning of 18 September, 1961 and was introduced first to Hitch's personal secretary, a rake-thin, soft-spoken woman named Suzanne Gauthier, and next to Peggy Robertson, a jolly Brit with spectacles, a broad smile, a quick wit, and a razor-sharp mind. Unlike today's politically correct 'assistants', who are really what used to be called file clerks, Peggy was a genuine assistant; it was she who inherited the onerous task of firing me from Marnie almost two years later.
I only vaguely recall the Paramount offices on Marathon Street. My impression now is that they were similar to but less opulent than those at Universal, where Hitch and I later discussed the Marnie screenplay. I remember dark wood panelling and black leather wingback chairs in both offices. I remember Hitch sitting in one of those chairs, clad in a dark blue suit with dark blue socks and white shirt and black tie, his hands clasped over his wide middle, his feet scarcely touching the floor, asking me yet another time to tell him the story so far. I remember in both offices a panelled wall hung with all the awards and plaques and trophies Hitch had garnered in a career then spanning almost four decades.
That morning, the first thing I asked was, "What do I call you?"
"Why, Hitch," he said, sounding surprised. "Everyone else does."
Which wasn't quite true. I would learn that most people called him what I had heard him called on the Crystal Trench set the afternoon the ice was melting: "Mr Hitchcock, sir."
The next thing I asked was whether he'd heard the joke about the unemployed actor hired to announce the arrival of celebrity limousines outside the Academy Awards ceremonies at Grau-mann's Chinese. The actor is immediately warned that Deborah Kerr and John Kerr spelled their last names identically, but Deborah pronounced hers CAR whereas John pronounced his CUR. Sweating, fearful he will blow his first big opportunity, the actor waits for their limos to arrive. Deborah's limo gets there first, and he announces, "And here's Deborah CAR's car." John arrives in his limo, and the actor announces, "And here's John CUR's car," and then, enormously relieved, he spots the next limo and announces, "And here's Alfred Hitchcar's cock!"
Hitch nodded. "Yes, I've heard it," he said.
During the first exploratory week of getting to know each other and our individual styles, I arrived in time for breakfast with him in the morning, and we worked together till noon, when he broke for lunch and I went looking for a house to rent. In that first week, I found a house in Brentwood, and Hitch shot down two ideas I'd brought out with me. The first of these was to add a murder mystery to the basic premise of birds attacking humans, an idea I still like. But Hitch felt this would muddy the waters and rob suspense from the real story we wanted to tell. The second was about a new schoolteacher who provokes the scorn of the locals when unexplained bird attacks start shortly after her arrival in town. In the eventual movie, the schoolteacher survived (but not for long) in the presence of Annie Hayworth. In the movie, the town's suspicion and anger surfaces in the Tides Restaurant scene. But Hitch did not want a schoolteacher for his lead; he needed someone more sophisticated and glamorous. Someone like...
"Well, Grace, of course," he told me with a sigh. "But she's in Monaco, isn't she? Being a princess. And Cary for the man, of course, whoever or whatever the character may turn out to be. But why should I give Cary 50 per cent of the movie? The only stars in this movie are the birds and me." And then, as an afterthought, "And you, of course, Evan."
(There was never any question in either of our minds, by the way, that the leading role would be a woman's. Instinctively, we recognised that women fear birds more than men do, a psychological truth that later hurt the movie's box office gross and baffled Hitch.)
That first week at Paramount, I came to work wearing jacket and tie. On my second Monday morning, I dressed like all of the other writers on the lot. Slacks, loafers, open throat shirt, V-necked cotton sweater. Hitch wore his customary dark suit, white shirt, black shoes and black tie. Not a sign of disapproval crossed his face as we had our morning coffee and then got down to the serious work ahead of us. But that evening, as I was walking out to my rented red T-Bird convertible parked in a space that already had my name lettered on it, Peggy caught up with me and said, "Evan, excuse me for mentioning this, but Hitch thinks it might be better if you didn't dress for work quite so casually."
I drove home along Sunset Boulevard to Brentwood and my rented four-bedroom, two-storey Spanish-style hacienda, with its thick plaster walls and its fireplaces in every room. It was costing me $2,500 a month, merely half of what I was earning each and every week I worked on The Birds. I had called Anita the night before and told her to pack the kiddies and come on out. Now I mixed myself a drink and sat alone before the fireplace in the downstairs living room and wondered which tie I should wear to work tomorrow morning.
I got there a little early. Sue offered me a cup of coffee, and I stood sipping it in the panelled corridor leading to Hitch's private office, admiring the awards hanging on each side. I heard Sue greeting Hitch, and as he came down the corridor toward me, I thought I detected a quick sweep of his eyes across the sports jacket and tie, an almost imperceptible flicker of approval.
"A lot of wonderful stuff here," I said, indicating the walls festooned with awards. Hitch nodded dolefully, and put his hand on my shoulder: "Always a bridesmaid, never a bride," he said, and I remembered that he'd been nominated for five Best-Director Academy Awards, including one for Psycho just the year before - but had never won any. I was later to learn that the elusiveness of what he considered "true respect" was the engine that propelled the making of The Birds, starting with his having hired me in the first place.
For now, there was a script to write.
Snowballing
"Tell me the story so far."
These are the words Hitch would say to me every working weekday morning.
"Tell me the story so far." And every morning, after we'd had our coffee, he would sit back in his big black leather chair with his hands folded over his belly, and I would tell him the story to date, ending with wherever we had left off the afternoon before.
In the beginning, there was no story to tell.
Day after day, we grappled with vague ideas and ephemeral notions, doing what the cartoonists call 'snowballing', but the only recurring approach was the kernel of the Stranger-in-Town idea I'd brought from New York. The schoolteacher was gone, of course, an early casualty. What remained was the concept of a woman coming to a strange town which is attacked by birds shortly after her arrival. Do the townspeople have some thing to hide? Is there a guilty secret here? Do they see this stranger as a messenger of revenge? Are the birds an instrument of punishment for their guilt? All very heavy stuff.
We toyed with this approach for days on end, stopping only for lunch taken in Hitch's office, when he invariably ordered a minute steak, and I ordered tuna and tomato on a hard roll. After lunch, and before we resumed work again, I would take a brisk walk outside the studio while Hitch spent half an hour or so with Peggy and Sue, dealing with the accumulated details of running a production company. It was on one of my solitary strolls that the idea came to me. I take full credit - or blame, as the case may be - for what I suggested to Hitch that afternoon: a screwball comedy that gradually turns into stark terror.
The idea appealed to him at once. I think he saw in it a challenge equal to the one the birds themselves presented. I think, too, that he saw in it a way of combining his vaunted sense of humour with the calculated horror he had used to great effect in Psycho. Moreover, the concept had two other things going for it.
We both realised that by the time the movie opened, the audience would know well in advance that birds would be attacking people. If not, then a multimillion dollar promotion and advertising campaign would have been a failure. So there would be a built-in suspense similar to that in Appointment at Eleven. Here the title and all the pre-opening hoopla would tell us what would be happening - birds were going to attack - but not when. Suspense. And if we could start the audience laughing in the early part of the picture, and then suddenly cause them to choke on their own laughter, the suspense would turn to shock.
During his lifetime, Hitch explained the difference between suspense and shock so often that I'm reluctant to repeat it now. But let me do so hastily.
A meeting is taking place in a boardroom. Men sitting around a table discussing business. We cut away to below the table. We see the businessmen's trousered legs and shoes. Sitting on the floor, unseen by them, is a ticking clock wired to several sticks of dynamite. As the board meeting progresses, we keep cutting away to that ticking clock. Will the bomb be discovered? Or will the dynamite explode when the minute hand and the hour hand are standing straight up? That's suspense.
Same boardroom. Same meeting. Same discussion of business matters. One difference. We never cut away to the ticking clock and the sticks of dynamite. The audience never knows a bomb is sitting under that table and that it is set to go off at high noon. Suddenly an explosion tears apart the room and everyone in it. That is shock.
Hitch was no stranger to either, and had used both in combination in most of his movies. The difference in The Birds would be the goofy humour. Once we got them laughing, we would be leading them down the garden path. And once the early comic scenes turned frightening, then whenever there was a lull between bird attacks, we could hope for a sort of nervous laughter that would lead to further screaming even if we photographed an innocent feather duster.
My own reference points were the black-and-white comedies I'd grown up with in the 40s: Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers. Hitch's more personal reference points were the scenes he'd directed between Grace Kelly and Ray Milland, Grace Kelly and James Stewart, Grace Kelly and - yes - Cary Grant. There is no doubt whatever in my mind that as we began discussing the characters who would set our screwball comedy in motion, we were both thinking of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. This was in September. By November, Grace Kelly had turned into Tippi Hedren and sometime later Cary Grant became Rod Taylor. But for now, we were casting platinum.
...this article continues in part two