The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (an ebook reader txt) 📗

to summarily reject them,” as Hayes had experienced with other filmmakers. With the draft finished, Hitchcock came back on board to scrutinize the material, going through the whole thing shot by shot. To Hayes, it felt like a true partnership, each man lending his own talents in a thoroughly complementary fashion. They ended up with arguably the best script Hitchcock ever worked with: lean but layered, witty, clever, with a flawed but likable central character, and a gripping suspense story pulling us through from beginning to end. Rear Window was the first of four consecutive movies Hayes wrote for Hitchcock, the others being To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry (1955), and the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. All but The Trouble with Harry did terrific business at the box office, and each chimed with Hitchcock’s playful, urbane eccentricity.

According to Hayes, the problems began in April 1955 when he got the attention he deserved for the Rear Window screenplay, in the form of the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Hayes had never won an award before, and he showed it off the following day. Hitchcock’s only response was, “You know they make toilet bowls from the same material.”

Viewed on its own, a quip like that doesn’t seem much; ill-judged, perhaps, but not malicious. When clustered with other tales of Hitchcock’s apparent refusal or inability to praise those with whom he worked, a definite pattern emerges. According to Hayes, he was approached by the New York Times to write a piece about the experience of working with Hitchcock. Probably assuming that a self-promoter like Hitchcock wouldn’t object to having his praises sung in the pages of the Times, Hayes wrote the article, and as a courtesy showed it to Hitchcock before he submitted it. As Hayes told the story, Hitchcock was furious, tore up the article, and said, “Young man, you are hired to write for me and Paramount, not the New York Times.” Hayes had been unambiguously put in his place—“young man”—and reminded that no mere writer should consider himself a creative peer of Hitchcock’s; he was not a collaborator but an employee.

Such a dramatic response also makes one wonder whether Hitchcock’s main anxiety was to keep control of his mythology. In Britain, America, and elsewhere, he’d published articles under his name—though not always written by him—that shed light on his creative process in a way that enhanced his contributions and diminished those of his colleagues and collaborators, with the exception of Alma, whose contribution to the Hitchcock project he seemed to enjoy highlighting. To allow somebody to gain a public profile by detailing the ways in which they influenced his work was damaging not only to his ego but to his reputation. “He wasn’t for a moment willing to allow anyone to believe he couldn’t do it all on his own,” was Hayes’s ultimate judgment.

The Hayes-Hitchcock relationship imploded when—ironically, considering his complaint of Hitchcock’s inability to give “credit where credit was due”—Hayes took umbrage at Hitchcock handing a cowriting credit to the writer Angus MacPhail for The Man Who Knew Too Much, a script Hayes insisted should be credited to him alone. Hayes told an interviewer many years later that he had strayed too far from the path of Hitchcock for the master’s liking. “I had a viewpoint and a unique way of working . . . that was my downfall, because it was too recognized, and Hitch resented it.” Long-standing members of the Hitchcock team accused Hayes of wildly inflating his importance, and claimed it was his ego, not Hitchcock’s, that ended their association. Whatever the precise burden of blame, Hayes was cast out of the Hitchcock enterprise. At various points over the coming years when Hitchcock was in need of a writer to enliven a script, those around him recommended bringing Hayes back in from the cold; their talents and sensibilities had so complemented each other, a reunion made perfect sense. Hitchcock would never countenance it.

Hitchcock’s most celebrated films were not based on equally celebrated sources. In the 1930s, he adapted Seán O’Casey’s highly acclaimed Juno and the Paycock (1930), and The Skin Game (1931) by John Galsworthy (a Nobel Prize winner in 1932), but he felt he brought little to either play, constricted by the weight of their reputation. In their interviews, Truffaut asked Hitchcock whether he’d ever consider adapting Crime and Punishment. Unthinkable, said Hitchcock, as the novel was already considered a classic, implying that he preferred to work with obscure or mediocre literature that he could elevate to the level of Hitchcock.

He did, however, make repeated efforts to recruit exalted authors to work on scripts with him. The most successful of these ventures was with Thornton Wilder, whom he hired for Shadow of a Doubt (1943), a troubling tale of American innocence shattered. Wilder had no particular interest in writing films but accepted the job as he was soon to depart for war service and was keen to earn some quick money for his family. For both men, it proved a richly satisfying project. Not long after starting the assignment, Wilder wrote his sister telling her how much fun he was having. “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.” He concluded the letter with a line that would have delighted Hitchcock: “There’s no satisfaction like giving satisfaction to your employer.”

For the rest of his life, Hitchcock spoke glowingly of Wilder and their working experience. He said that although many writers sneered at the work he did—Graham Greene among them, who publicly criticized Hitchcock’s films and turned down the opportunity to collaborate—Wilder never did. “He wasn’t like a big shot. . . . He allowed me to direct him and I was grateful for that,” said Hitchcock. In return, he treated Wilder as an equal. “My relationship with him was respectful, and this is the