The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto

Author:Donald Spoto [Spoto, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dansker Press
Published: 2015-03-23T07:00:00+00:00

In any event, Selznick grew cooler by the day, and during April he ordered that joint script sessions be held at his home (as he had done on Rebecca). Hitchcock knew what this meant, and he was not eager for these conferences. Selznick ordinarily called the working sessions for late in the evening, and eleven o'clock was a typical beginning time. Earlier Hitchcock and Hecht would dine at Romanoff's, to clear some thorny sections of the script and pool their defenses about what Hitchcock thought was a first-rate script. As the appointed time approached, Hecht would prepare to depart for Selznick's house, but Hitchcock predicted that it mattered little if they were late, since Selznick would pace and shuffle and not settle down to serious consideration until three in the morning. Several nights were passed just as he said, to his profound annoyance.

Hitchcock spent late summer and early autumn at New York theaters. By September Selznick, deeply involved in the production of the epic Duel in the Sun, had sold the entire Notorious package to RKO for $800,000 and 50 percent of the profits, and Dozier and Hitchcock had assumed the producer's responsibilities. Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant had been contracted for the leading roles, and to them Hitchcock added the distinguished German actor-director Reinhold Schuenzel, dancermime Ivan Triesault, and the versatile Louis Calhern. Dozier selected Claude Rains for the sympathetic villain—Hitchcock had oddly wanted the epicene Clifton Webb—and when Ethel Barrymore rejected the role of the villain's mother, RKO suggested Mildred Natwick. But the role of the spidery, tyrannical Nazi matron demanded a stronger, older presence. Schuenzel proposed one of the great actresses of prewar Germany: Leopoldine Konstantin. She had acted with Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater from 1908 to 1937, and had made an American tour in 1911/1912. Her role in Notorious turned out to be her only American screen performance (she was so unknown in Hollywood that RKO negotiated a paltry salary), but it was also one of the unforgettable portraits in Hitchcock's films.

Principal photography lasted from October 1945 to February 1946. The Hitchcocks' social life had been virtually nonexistent while the director was engaged in publicity activities. In July, for her daughter's seventeenth birthday—and before Pat departed for Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York—Alma gave a dinner party in her honor; Hitchcock ordered two dozen bottles of a perfume that had been specially created and named for Spellbound and had them distributed to his daughter's dinner guests. Alma, in the autumn, continued as the ideal hostess and companion, accompanying her husband to several radio shows on which he made publicity appearances—not to publicize his films, but to publicize himself. In the earlier part of the year he was on Milton Berle's radio program in New York (for which he was paid $2,000—half what he had asked); and later, contestants tried to guess his identity on Which Is Which? But the biographical data he submitted was so vague that he stumped the stars and won $1,000.

In November Spellbound

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