Memoirs of a Private Man

  After some months, Grace Kelly decided to withdraw. It seems that when the Monegasques discovered that their princess had agreed to play the part – not of the Madonna or some stately queen of history, but of a girl thief who cheated and lied all through the film and who was sexually frigid – there was a sort of palace revolution. Reluctantly, having regard to the enormous sum Hitchcock had offered to pay her, she announced she must back down.

  Although disappointing, life became normal for me again. The legal battle between the two newspaper groups (with me involved on one side) was finally settled out of court. The following year the film was made, with Sean Connery, and Tippi Hedren playing the title role.

  I did not see any of the filming of this novel because I was having an operation in Hove at the time. Although agreeable and complimentary over the telephone, Hitchcock could not have regretted this. A man of many estimable qualities, he was, as far as film-making was concerned, the complete egoist. Writers, actors, musicians, editors, they were all disagreeable necessities in the making of a film; only one person was important. Everyone else and everything else ministered to him.

  Two scriptwriters worked on the novel: only one, Jay Presson Allen, appeared on the credits. The scene of the film was switched from Plymouth in England to Baltimore in the United States, but that didn’t matter so much as the many nuances of the story missed and the drastic oversimplifications which took place. Of course the screen is the medium of broad brush strokes, and Hitchcock’s films are noted for their emphatic structure.

  Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the music for the film, said to me when we met: ‘ Of course the real conflict of the film was not about Marnie’s frigidity – it was about Hitchcock’s sexual frustrations.’

  Hitch had always had this fixation on ice-cool blondes, and after losing Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier, he had picked Tippi Hedren out from a TV advertisment to play in The Birds. When Kelly backed out of Marnie he cast Tippi in the lead. During the film his fascination with Tippi had overflowed, and one day he followed her into her caravan and made advances to her. Tippi rejected them – not too tactfully, Herrmann said – so that throughout the rest of the film they were not on speaking terms. When he was on he set Hitchcock would say to the Assistant Director: ‘Tell that woman to do So-and-so.’

  Not perhaps the best environment for the making of a successful movie.

  When the film was shown in England it got a fairly cool reception from the critics; but within ten years it was being hailed as one of the most important movies Hitchcock had ever made. Significances were discovered. I never quite know how the minds of critics work, either constructively or destructively. When the film was shown on BBC television on Boxing Day, 1992, their reviewer wrote: ‘Your heart goes out to the utterly believable Tippi Hedren, who is a combination of ice-cool sinner and vulnerable victim, in this gripping, subversive, jagged-edged emotional powerhouse of a thriller.’

  The last time I saw Hitchcock was when we lunched with him in his caravan on the set in Hollywood. It was a hot, sunny day but all the blinds were drawn. He sat there like a large boiled egg, round, tough – part cockney, part ad-man, part genius – eating a fillet steak and nothing else at all, and drinking mineral water; talking with a hint of cynical amusement of the book François Truffaut had just written about him.

  ‘He asked me what the special significance was of that very bad backdrop of Baltimore harbour, when Marnie visits her mother. I didn’t tell him but in fact it had no significance, it was just a very bad backdrop.’

  Since writing this I have received a copy of The Making of Marnie, a book published in January 2003 by the Manchester University Press. It is by Lee Moral and is a well-written, academic study which devotes the whole of its 211 pages to the one film, from its inception as a novel, and extensively tells the exact details of the purchase of the novel by Hitchcock, the Princess Grace involvement, the problems of the scriptwriters, details of the shooting, of the distribution, the showing, the reviews, the financial outcome, and the story of its later special significance in the eyes of the intellectual French film makers.

  Hitchcock, as I have implied, did not take the highly intellectual Frenchmen’s analyses too seriously – nor do I – but neither should they be disregarded. Lee describes me in his book as an instinctive feminist. Maybe that is right. Maybe the Frenchmen’s analyses of my writing reveal more in the work than I knew of. Maybe the analyses of the filmmaking reveal more than Hitchcock himself was aware of. Artists, creative people, that is, often work by instinct. Possibly I did; possibly Hitchcock did. It remains for others to perceive what they may.

  One point in this book which I find surprising is its reiteration that the film was a financial failure. I’m sure it did not live up to expectations. But when I met Hitch at Claridge’s when the film had been running three weeks in London and had had mixed reviews, he did not seem at all downcast. He complained bitterly about the amount Sean Connery had cost him, but then after a few more comments, added: ‘Anyway we’re already in profit.’ I can see no possible reason for him to say that if it had not been true.

  But of course there had been the high expectations.

  Proof, however, exists – for instance in the quote from the Radio Times – that opinions of a film can change radically even without the weighty influence of the French nouvelle vague.

  Hitchcock was making a big event of the premiere in Rome, so I decided to go along. They said they would be delighted to arrange accommodation. When I arrived I at once had to give a couple of interviews and a bit of other publicity. It was only at about six o’clock, when I asked them where I was staying, that they suddenly were shocked to find that they had forgotten about my accommodation. Rome was bursting, every hotel full, but after some frantic telephoning they were able to twist somebody’s arm and found me a room at the Bernini-Bristol in the Piazza Barberini.

  It was a very hot day, and at seven I got a cab and dragged myself into the portals of the hotel. I was expected and was allotted room 342. I went up: the room was large, with a big double bed and a deliciously spacious and cool bathroom. Hopefully I ran cool water to the brim of the bath, stripped off everything and plunged in. Five minutes later I climbed out, gorgeously refreshed, and came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a small towel, to look for something in my bag. As I crossed the room a key grated in the lock, it rattled, and the door opened to display a stout middle-aged American lady with blue-rinsed hair. What it revealed of me, I’m not sure, but I hastily retreated behind a blue velvet curtain.

  ‘What,’ I said, ‘ what the devil are you doing here?’

  ‘This is room 342, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘ I was given the key to room 342.’

  ‘Well, 342 is taken,’ I said angrily. ‘ This is my room!’

  ‘So it seems,’ she said, and retreated.

  As soon as the door closed, I padded to the telephone.

  ‘Look!’ I said. ‘I have just been given room 342, and almost on my heels, almost, almost on my very heels, you have sent up some blue-rinsed old girl claiming it’s hers. What in hell’s going on?’

  There was a pause. Then the receptionist said: ‘I’m very sorry, sir, that we could not find anybody younger and better-looking.’

  I slammed down the telephone and collapsed on the bed, choking with laughter.

  In what other country in the world would you, in a five-star luxury hotel, get such a reply from a receptionist? Vivat Italia!

  I have mentioned Christine, who came as nursemaid for our daughter. She was a tall, good-looking girl of about twenty, slim, well educated and well mannered, but she had one or two foibles. She took at least three baths a day, and her passion for horses far exceeded the norm for a girl of her age. She spent all her spare time at the riding school. Then one day Jean went into her bedroom when she was out, and there was a letter from her mother lying open on the dressing table. It was so peculiar that she brought it down for me to see.

  It was full of hate – and the h
atred was for men. Christine must learn to keep them at a distance, never encourage them, never allow them to touch her, they were filthy and any contact with them would contaminate her. She must be careful how she dressed, not ever to attract their lascivious glances, etc., etc., etc.

  I am told that a few years later the girl committed suicide. But to all intents and purposes she was reliable and intelligent and a good nursemaid. It is only certain notorious cases that have made the headlines of the press since then that have made me realize the risk taken in putting one’s beloved child into the care of a comparative stranger, however normal and nice she may seem.

  Just before that, during World War II, Perranporth received many scores of evacuees. A family was put up in a cottage near us. It consisted of a mother and three children, the father being in the navy and therefore usually absent. There were also in the village a large number of soldiers, some English, but later many American. Mrs A., the evacuee mother, was highly respectable, and the three children fairly well behaved. Andrew quickly began to talk with an East End accent.

  One could see Mrs A. in the morning, out for her walk to the shops, trailing two children and walking with an entirely affected knock-kneed walk, almost as if in reaction to the thought that she would ever open her legs to anybody. In fact she took it upon herself that it was her patriotic duty to offer comfort to the poor boys who were so far from home. It was kept very discreet, but it got about that if a man she fancied came to her cottage late at night and tapped on her window, Mrs A. would pick up her youngest little girl, who normally slept with her, take her into the next room, and then gently slide open the window.

  This went on for many months. Then Mrs A. found herself to be pregnant. Her husband was far from home, and no one – but no one – was to be told. Of course the village, like most villages, eventually got to know the truth. But she still denied it. Being very slim, she was able to wear disguising clothing until near the end. When the pains came on, she got the old charlady next door to help her, and she was delivered of a fine healthy boy. Her determination still to keep it a secret was eventually thwarted by a persistent haemorrhaging, so her helper went to call the doctor. While the other woman was away, Mrs A. stranged the child and wrapped it in a newspaper and hid the body under the bed in the spare room, where it was later discovered.

  The mother was found not guilty because of ‘puerperal insanity’.

  Two years later, the little daughter who was accustomed to being turned out of her mother’s warm bed at nights, and who probably witnessed some of the scenes of the new baby’s birth, began to steal, and the last I heard of her she had acquired a criminal record.

  I do not know how I came to meet Sandy Mackendrick – it could have been at the Savile – but it was after the two splendid comedies, Whisky Galore and The Ladykillers, he had made for Ealing Studios, and before he left for Hollywood, where he made the big hit, Sweet Smell of Success, with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. I had had three of my novels made into films by then, and he was interested in me and my work. Anyway, he invited me to have dinner with him one night at the Ecu de France in Jermyn Street.

  We had a very pleasant meal and talk, and towards the end of it conversation turned to my books. He suggested I might write a book that he could film.

  Then he said: ‘ D’you know, Winston, your women characters are always particularly good, attractive, intelligent, they are real people, real women, with real emotion. But they are all what I might call white ladies, people who embody the right side of life. Have you ever thought of writing a book about a grey lady, one who is maybe a transgressor of some sort?’

  I replied that I had not. I am not, as may have become clear, an easily suggestible man so far as my novels go. Whatever the quality they may have, or lack, they are homegrown. We did not pursue the subject, but I was flattered that he should take so much interest, and I said so. The evening ended agreeably, and we parted, to meet only once more before he left for his triumph in Hollywood.

  So far as I know, I entirely forgot his suggestion, but it has occurred to me more recently to wonder if it had lodged itself in my subconscious and had itself contributed to the genesis of Marnie.

  Chapter Ten

  When The Grove of Eagles was published it was a Book Society Choice.

  About fifteen years before this, at one of my meetings with Somerset Maugham, he had said to me: ‘Take my advice, young man, n-n-never read reviews.’

  I had taken it. I had cancelled the press-cutting agency subscription and bullied eager young ladies in my publishers’ offices not to send anything at all – good or bad. I found it a tremendous help. But for The Grove of Eagles research had been so extensive that I was ready to jump on anybody who dared to query it on historical grounds, so I relaxed the prohibition. As it happened, nobody did; but the barrier has not gone up so completely since. I wish it had.

  The origin of this long and detailed historical novel about Cornwall and religion and Spain and the later Armadas derived from a day when I was reading some eighteenth-century papers while writing the third or fourth Poldark novel. The entry referred to one ‘John Killigrew of Arwenack, governor of Pendennis Castle in Cornwall, who in 1596 sold his castle to the King of Spain.’ This seemed such an outrageous and outlandish statement that I felt I must some day find out the truth about it. The time was not then, or it would divert me from the Poldarks. The time came, many years later, when, in the middle of a spate of modern novels, I decided this had to be the next assignment.

  Obviously a more suitable subject could have been chosen for the only period in my life when I have been footloose and without a settled home. But one doesn’t always choose subjects. They may come partly from conscious decision, partly from outside pressures, but usually and mainly from a subconscious urge from within. I know that, at least for myself, once a subject has been chosen there is no going back. Never in my writing life have I begun a novel and not finished it. Nor have I ever been able to break it off for another novel and finish the first one later. Often in the direst trouble, I have tried to jettison a story – or at least put it aside for the time being – but to no avail. I can’t begin to create something different while a book is in the process of creation.

  Three times in my life it has taken three years to write a novel – and in all cases I have done nothing whatever else in those years: no articles, no short stories, no reviews of other people’s work, nothing for radio or television. In the case of The Grove of Eagles an itinerant life may have caused some of the delay, even though the volume of research was chiefly responsible. In The Green Flash there were all sorts of obstacles which I recount later in this book. The third of these novels was Angell, Pearl and Little God, and after its success in the United States, I was invited to write an article for an American literary magazine about the way the book came to be written. I hope I shall not be thought pretentious if I reproduce this article, since it sheds some light on the difficulty faced in this book, and also refers to the inception of Marnie.

  It is likely that the problems which made my last novel, Angell, Pearl and Little God, so difficult to write would not have affected a young writer at all. At least, they would not have affected me as a young writer because when I was young the overmastering need to tell the story would have ridden roughshod over the manner of its telling. But with the years and with experience one becomes more selective, more self-conscious, and one has more desire for perfection of technique.

  (At this stage it will be better to advise all who despise ‘a story’ in the novel that they may safely pass on to the next article. For although I have always had more to say in a novel than the telling of a story, the story itself has always been the framework on which the rest has depended for its form and shape. I have never been clever enough – or egotistical enough … to spend 300 pages dipping experimental buckets into the sludge of my own subconscious. I have always been more interested in other people than myself – though there has to be something of myself
in every character created, or he will not come alive. I have always been more interested in people than in events; but it is only through events that I have ever been able to illuminate people.)

  It is a commonplace of the suspense novelist to use the first person singular in presenting his story. It brings an immediacy to events, to danger, to crisis, to the smallest detail of the central character’s life. It concentrates the narrative wonderfully by preventing the writer from wandering off down byways of irrelevance. By limiting the point of view it helps mystification (on any level – from Proust or Henry James to Raymond Chandler or the latest paperback writer) and the very limitations are a challenge and a stimulus to both author and reader.

  But the personally told story has a number of drawbacks, and one which is frequently overlooked is that the narrative character usually remains something of a negative personality – a sort of multiple mirror reflecting other people’s images but never his own. Things happen to him, events occur, he feels heat and cold and pleasure and pain, he may have endless narrow escapes and struggle among the enveloping sheets of a dozen lecherous beds; or he may spend the book’s lifetime trying to unravel the mystery surrounding two haunted children. In either or any case, it is the villains who beset him, the women who seduce him or, even, the ghosts who haunt him, who come to have personality and remain in the reader’s mind. Not ‘I’. Not the mirror person.

  How does one retain the first person and overcome the obstacle? Or can one?

  Various authors have tried to do so in the past. Marnie was my first attempt. It seemed to succeed. But whether it succeeded or not, the process fascinated me and made the novel doubly worth writing.

  The fault with the average narrator is that he is too normal. His very normality is the plain mirror reflecting the oddities of others. But let the narrator be a psychological case, like Marnie, a compulsive thief and sexually frigid. Her mirror is not plain, it is flawed and distorts what it reflects. All the other characters therefore are at first slightly out of true because of it – that is until the reader adjusts himself. Then you have the intriguing situation of the narrator betraying her character, her slightly twisted reasoning, unselfconsciously, so that the reader gradually perceives what she is, while she does not know she is so revealing herself …