Alfred Hitchcock by Patrick McGilligan Page B

theaters.
    Selznick was the father of two go-getter sons. The younger, David, would later become a prestigious producer and give Hitchcock his first contract in America. But the older brother, Myron, was just as important to the director’s future. Serving as his father’s unofficial ambassador to London, Myron first shook hands with Hitchcock on a visit as early as December 1921; in time he would become Hitchcock’s first agent in Hollywood.
    When Balcon-Saville-Freedman became tenants at Islington, Balcon encountered Hitchcock, “obviously a live wire,” a general handyman and draftsman eager to do more. The first-time producer engaged Hitchcock to act as Cutts’s assistant director on
Woman to Woman
, a 1921 stage play slated as the new company’s maiden film production. “At one of our earliest meetings,” Balcon recalled, “I asked him if he knew of a good scriptwriter, as we had not yet turned the play into film form. Hitch replied immediately, ‘Yes, me.’ I asked him what he had done by way of script-writing, and he produced a script he had written but which had never been filmed. I read it and put Hitch to work at once.”
    Woman to Woman
, in Hitchcock’s words, was “the story of a man whohas a mistress in Paris, who bangs his head, loses his memory, and starts going with another woman, who gives him a child.” He had to use his imagination in concocting such a story, he explained later, for at the tender age of twenty-three Alfred Hitchcock was still a virgin. He had never even been on a date, and was ignorant of “the mechanics of sex.” “I’d never been with a woman,” Hitchcock recalled in one interview, “and I didn’t have the slightest idea what a woman did to have a child. I had even less idea what a man did when he was with his mistress in Paris, or when he was with another woman who was giving him a child.”
    But he must have had at least a
general
idea, since he had the benefit of a solid play from which to adapt—and the opportunity to collaborate with the playwright himself: Michael Morton. A Boston native living in London, Morton was a former actor and the brother of well-known Broadway playwright Martha Morton. The author of two decades’ worth of London and New York stage hits, at fifty-nine Morton was old enough to be Hitchcock’s father, and now he set about teaching the younger man the rules of dramaturgy.
    Morton’s play was about a young English army engineer’s affair with a Moulin Rouge dancer in Paris, just before the outbreak of World War I. The Englishman goes off to battle, the dancer gives birth to an out-of-wedlock baby boy, and the soldier, wounded, suffers amnesia. Assuming a new identity, he marries a social butterfly, who denies him the sole wish of his life: a son. Years later, in London, he meets the mistress, an artistic dancer, now gravely ill. The title came from the climactic confrontation between the wife and dancer. After nobly offering to give her son up to the man’s wife, the onetime chorine keeps a dancing engagement that imperils her life. The dance-suicide at the very end of the play (and film) was considered especially unconventional and thrilling; it became the first of a surprising number of “self-murders” to end a Hitchcock film. *
    Woman to Woman
called for a research trip to Paris, and off Hitchcock went with Cutts to do a little scouting, according to John Russell Taylor. Paris was already a kind of home away from home. Hitchcock loved the exhibitions (the art as well as vice museums), the restaurants, the street life, and risqué nightclubs.
    The first thing Hitchcock did after arriving, according to Taylor, was attend Mass at the Church of the Madeleine. His next move, one might say, was equally Catholic: he toured Montmartre and visited the Moulin Rouge, the better to soak up the hedonistic atmosphere and create, in Hitchcock’s words, “an exact replica” of the famous cabaret. Though enjoyinghimself, his mind was also at