Hitchcock & Herrmann — the alliteration rolls off the tongue almost as agreeably as the collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann came to fruition in the 1950s and ’60s. Their relationship and work together on such films as “Vertigo,” “Psycho,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and “North by Northwest” is celebrated in the thoughtful exegesis that is Steven C. Smith‘s must-read dual biography, “Hitchcock & Herrmann: The Friendship & Film Scores That Changed Cinema.”
Smith (who will be speaking in person at New York’s Film Forum this weekend) has been to the Herrmann well before, having authored the 1991 book “A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann,” which has become a staple in the library of any serious student of film scoring. In-between then and now, he published the equally estimable “Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer.” (Read Variety‘s 2020 interview with Smith about Max Steiner here.) But most roads having to do with brilliant film composing ultimately lead back to Herrmann, as they have for his biographer with this new work. “Hitchcock & Herrmann” is an especially fun read, even for those who aren’t particularly knowledgeable about film music, because the two personalities in question are at least as interesting as their landmark films, individually, let alone in tandem.
Variety talked with Smith about how these two brilliant men brought out the best in each other — and the very best in mid-century cinema — before their volatile personalities inevitably led to a sadly abrupt split that cineastes still speculate about today. He’s got the answers, of course, so read the following Q&A to pick up some of them… or, if you’re in New York, go to his talk Sunday at Film Forum at 1:10 p.m. (He’ll also be introducing “The Man Who Knew Too Much” Friday evening and “North by Northwest” Saturday. Get ticketing information here.)
Has anybody done a book specifically about a composer/director collaboration before, or would this be the first?
That’s a good question. My friend Tim Greiving has just published his John Williams biography, and it devotes a lot of space, understandably, to the Spielberg relationship. But I’m not aware of any other book that focuses entirely on a director/composer relationship, and I think that this is the most interesting one. You know, it’s a fun game to play about which is the greatest pairing — is it Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone? Is it Spielberg and John Williams? Is it Truffaut and Georges Delerue? You can go through all these pairings, but I think that Hitchcock and Herrmann are the best for a book because, also, I’m not sure we will ever see personalities as outsized as theirs ever again.
You published a Herrmann biography as your first book in the early ‘90s. What made you want to revisit him?
The reason I wrote this book after publishing a biography of Bernard Herrmann in 1991 is because there was so much that I discovered about the relationship between these two men. But also, when I started that book in the 1980s, people in the industry didn’t necessarily even know who Bernard Herrmann was. I remember telling several people about him who should know and didn’t know until I mentioned “Psycho.” And then after my book was published, suddenly not only was Herrmann’s name better known, but his music was everywhere. It started to be used in movies: “The Artist,” “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” “Kill Bill”… Lady Gaga used the “Vertigo” main title almost intact in the video for “Born This Way.” I had interviewed Stephen Sondheim for my first book, but he was talking much more in his later years about how “Sweeney Todd” was his homage to Herrmann, and that he built it on what he thought of as his Bernard Herrmann chord. So there were all these extraordinary sightings of Herrmann, and especially Hitchcock/Herrmann, coming up.
It’s inescapable: Herrmann’s music was used in “Wednesday.” Ryan Murphy has licensed Herrmann music in several of his projects. It’s astonishing that now the music’s everywhere. But it was fun going back to talk about things like how, when the Beatles recorded “Eleanor Rigby” in 1966 and Paul McCartney wanted strings, their brilliant producer George Martin based the string arrangement on the main title of “Psycho.” When I give my presentations, and put the music side by side, you can really hear the influence of the famous chugging prelude of “Psycho” on the string arrangement of “Eleanor Rigby,” something that Paul has talked about.
And then, as thoroughly as I researched my original biography of Herrmann, interviewing many key people in his life, in the decades since, when other people passed on, they left their papers to libraries. Tapes of recording sessions turned up. And I found a great deal of new, very intimate material that gave more insight into how the dynamic of how a Hitchcock production worked and where Herrmann fit into that. Interestingly, one of the things that makes their partnership so unusual was that Herrmann was invited into that inner circle after just one movie. He was always involved from the very inception of a Hitchcock project.
Steven C. BookSmith
“Mark A. Vieira”
“The Trouble With Harry” is not going to be very many people’s favorite Hitchcock movie, but besides being very enjoyable on its own terms, it set up their tight relationship and teed up a whole series of masterpieces to follow.
This wasn’t just a professional relationship; this was, as my book title says, a friendship between two men. By their second film, Hitchcock is signing notes to Benny and his wife “Love, Hitch.” When he heard the music for their first collaboration, “The Trouble With Harry,” he knew that after 15 years of making movies in America, and after 35 years of working on the film industry, he finally had found the composer who could put into music exactly what he was putting on the screen in images. He chuckled as he listened to the music, he just was so delighted. And although it’s not a film people know these days, it was a black comedy that really introduced audiences to Hitchcock’s sense of macabre comedy. Up to that point, his movies had touches of dark humor in them, but it wasn’t until “The Trouble With Harry,” which preceded his television series just slightly, that Hitchcock really got to show people what his sense of humor was like. And it also has some lovely romantic scenes in it. It isn’t just the story of corpse that won’t stay buried and hidden. It’s also got these two romances between a young couple and an older couple falling in love, and it’s filmed and set in Vermont with these lovely autumnal reds and greens. So there’s a lot of tone switching in the movie, and Benny handled that brilliantly.
For the first time, Herrmann put Hitchcock in the music. You can listen to the score of “The Trouble With Harry” and close your eyes and you see Alfred Hitchcock. Thirteen years later, Benny arranged a suite of music based on that first score, and he called that suite “A Portrait of Hitch.” So, when Hitchcock heard Herrmann’s music for him for the first time, he just knew, “This is it. This is what my movies have needed.”
And it was such an instantaneous creative falling in love that Hitchcock didn’t just ask Herrmann to score his next film, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”; he had the screenwriter put Herrmann in the screenplay before they shot the movie. In the screenplay, it says that Bernard Herrmann is the conductor in the Albert Hall sequence, the famous sequence of the attempted assassination. And sure enough, in the movie, you see Doris Day arrive the Albert Hall, and there’s a big poster that has Herrmann’s name on it. He gets a big entrance and they filmed it inside the Albert Hall for five days, and Hitchcock gave Herrmann the best onscreen cameo that any composer for film has ever had. So it just shows how quickly these men connected with each other.
Of course, it’s not an entirely happy story — either the Herrmann/Hitchcock relationship, or Herrmann’s own professional trajectory, although his “solo career,” if we can put it that way, has a nice denouement. But as your first book well established, he fit the tortured artist stereotype in certain regards.
He was a true renaissance man, and that’s why it’s so tragic that the thing that separated him from, say, a renaissance man like Leonard Bernstein was that while Bernstein was charismatic and a very sharp political animal, as you needed to be to succeed in music, film or anything, Herrmann had a personality that had a very volatile side to it. He could be delightful company, he could be a great conversationalist, or he could be a volcano who blew up, and then you couldn’t get to the exit quickly enough if you were the subject of his invective. And unfortunately, as the world around him changed in ways that he didn’t like, and as he was not reaching the goals he had in mind for his life, that volatile side of him came out more often, and Hitchcock saw it more and more often.
We all know how entertaining a story of a great odd couple can be, and in a way, Herrmann and Hitchcock and Herrmann are a great odd couple. Hitchcock was very British and extremely conflict-averse, and he would leave the room if there was even the hint of conflict brewing, whereas Herrmann walked into a room and brought the conflict, quite often. Conflict could be a source of artistic creation for him. It could be positive, or it could just be him railing against things he was unhappy about and driving people away. Unfortunately, if we could give him a magic pill that made him a calm and courteous person every day of his life, he probably could not have written the music for “Psycho” or the romantic turmoil of “Vertigo,” or name any of the Hitchcock scores. It came from his personality. So, what was so great about him artistically is tied into what made him a problematic figure in his life as well.
But despite that, they had so much in common, and that’s the other thing I really wanted to bring out in the book. If Hitchcock was outwardly placid and in public exhibiting a version of his TV host persona — someone very calm and mordantly comic in his comments and all that — inside, Hitchcock was roiling with anxieties and terrors, which is why he made the movies he did. And if Herrmann was outwardly explosive at times — and if he was kind of a mess in his wardrobe, with cigarette butts going down his shirt— on the inside, he had the soul of a romantic poet. Listen to scores not just for something like “Vertigo,” but outside of Hitchcock, “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” and this is some of the most beautiful music of the 20th century.
So what Hitchcock and Herrmann recognized in each other was that, outside of what they showed the public, they had so much in common in terms of their artistic impulses — a dark, romantic vision that they had in common. They had a shared sense that life was tragic but had great beauty to it; that life was filled with tension, and constant tension, but that tension could be the source of movies that were entertaining and music that was wonderfully thrilling to listen to, either in the film or on its own.
What was their friendship like, in their best days together?
Herrmann and his wife Lucy would be invited over to the Hitchcocks’ home and Alma would cook these wonderful meals. And Hitchcock had a tradition that the guests, no matter who they were, would have to do the cleanup with Hitchcock after the meal. So there are these wonderful scenes that Benny would talk about later where … they cleaned dishes and put things away, and they would trade stories about their lives. There’s one that Benny loved to tell where they would talk about what they would do if they hadn’t gone into the professions that they had. And Benny said that it was his dream to run a pub, either in London or a London-style pub somewhere, because Herrmann was a tremendous Anglophile. And Benny asked Hitch what he would’ve done, and according to Benny, Hitch took a napkin and put it on his head and said, very solemnly, “A hanging judge.” So you could just imagine how fun it would be to be with these two, either when they were having meals and just talking together or when they were creating together.
There’s pretty much a three-picture peak with “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest” and “Psycho,” which very few people would dispute are masterpieces, through and through. If people pick one of those as either Herrmann’s or Hitchcock’s best, a lot of people tend to pick “Vertigo.” Do you agree with that?
Yeah, I’ll say no director-composer team had a better three-movie run than “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest” and “Psycho.” But if “Psycho” is the example of how the music really saved a movie — and I don’t mean that it was bad, but it added the ingredient it needed — and if “North by Northwest” is a perfect combination of humor and suspense, which is something Herrmann didn’t get to do very often, “Vertigo” is the summit of their collaboration, because it’s arguably Hitchcock’s most personal film. The reason people go back to it is about the brilliance of its filmmaking but also its rather disturbing picture of a highly dysfunctional relationship, of romantic obsession. And Herrmann was as obsessively romantic as Hitchcock was, so they really met on this film.
What I detail in this book that I didn’t get to talk about in the first book was how Hitchcock had such faith in the power of this music was that there is an entire reel in “Vertigo” that has almost no dialogue. Hitchcock directed this film and edited this film in a different way because he knew that Herrmann would be scoring it. And Hitchcock, who started in silent films, makes in effect a silent movie for long stretches of “Vertigo,” with total faith that Herrmann is going to write something compelling enough that we can follow Jimmy Stewart’s character driving around and walking around San Francisco for an entire reel of film and not be bored. And Herrmann just didn’t deliver; he gives you a masterclass in how to make it compelling and beautiful.
And it was a very difficult score to finally record, because there was a musicians strike. There’s a very colorful story of how the poor associate producer and Hitchcock traveled the world trying to find an orchestra that wouldn’t quit on them when they showed up to record this score. So they spent a lot of money, going the extra mile to have this score recorded as best as it could be. And I think it is the peak in terms of collaboration. For the famous love scene, the 360-camera shot, Benny loved to recall Hitchcock saying to him: “We’ll just have the camera and you.”
Is it fair to say “North by Northwest” created a template in some way for light-hearted action thrillers, and that the score might have done the same?
Benny said that “North by Northwest” was basically the template for the Bond film series, and it’s a fact that the makers of the Bond series went to see “North by Northwest” and were very interested in Hitchcock and certainly drew from that film. Benny loved working on “North by Northwest” because it’s written by a friend (Ernest Lehman), it’s directed by a friend and it’s fun. And he lamented the fact that people didn’t ask him to score more comedies. But you think, “Well, because they listened to your music! You take things pretty seriously.”
Someone at MGM evidently suggested that the main titles for “North by Northwest” should have kind of a Gershwin-esque sound, because the movie starts in New York City, Benny said, “Absolutely not.” He instead based his main theme on the rhythm of a Spanish fandango, similar to what Leonard Bernstein would use in the song “America” in “West Side Story.” Benny said he used a Spanish fandango rhythm because the movie wasn’t about New York, it was about the crazy dance about to take place between Cary Grant and the world. And it’s funny how Herrmann could come up with something that’s intellectually clever; that doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work, but just instinctively, it’s right. No one in the general public goes to “North by Northwest” and says, “Oh, wasn’t that clever that he used a Spanish fandango.” No, it’s just that the music’s exciting and it’s menacing, but it’s got a little bit of wit to it.
Anything having to do with how the “Psycho” score came to be legendary.
In 1960, when Hitchcock finished the very, very risky-for-the-time “Psycho,” a movie that he personally financed — he was not going to be reimbursed for the production until he turned in the negative to Paramount — many people in his circle had urged him not to make it because of the violence and the sex. They thought it was sleazy. When Hitchcock looked at the rough cut, which was longer than the final film and had no music, he was very disappointed in the movie, and he thought that his friends were right and Paramount was right and he had made a terrible mistake. According to Herrmann, Hitchcock mused that he might cut the film down and put it on television, because he had his television series at the time and some other television projects too. Benny was amazed because he saw the potential of the film at a time that Hitchcock was ready to give up on it. And Herrmann wrote a score that I think is the most extreme example of what music can do: to take what is potentially in a film, but not there yet, and addit to the movie to the degree that it went from something that was listless and slow to something electrifying and transformative for the culture in general. I mean, every serial killer series you see on Netflix, you can all trace that back to “Psycho,” so imagine, for better or worse, what the world would be like if “Psycho” had been cut down to a television program and forgotten. But Herrmann convinced Hitchcock that this film was something fresh and came up with what he later famously called “a black and white sound” for the black and white film. He created a score for an enormous string orchestra — 50 players, only strings — and created that sound so harsh that it’s been called “marrow-scraping.”
And Hitchcock went along with that choice for “Psycho,” obviously, as bizarre as it must have seemed at the beginning of the ‘60s.
One story that I was able to get for the new book is a detailed and quite revealing description of the cast and crew screening. Those are not screenings where people are really engaged in the story. The actors traditionally watch a cast and crew screening and think, “Oh, that wasn’t my best take” or “God, it was hot that day.” Well, none of the people involved had seen “Psycho” with the score yet, except for the screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, who loved the music. You have Janet Leigh and her husband, Tony Curtis. You have the soon-to-be-head of Universal Studios, Lew Wasserman, one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. And the script supervisor, Marshall Schlom, recalls that basically it turned into an audience screening where, when the murders happened, the people who made the movie jumped six inches in the air. Schlom had never been to a screening where the makers of the film turned into the opening weekend audience… Marshall said that in the dim light of reflection from the screen, he saw Hitchcock’s smile. And he had reason to smile, because it was the smile of a man who was going to make, I think we can conservatively estimate, something like $100 million in today’s money for a movie that he almost put on television. And Bernard Herrmann played a tremendous part in that.
And then after that is “The Birds,” which had a non-score, really, although Herrmann was involved in making those choices, even without composing music. But after that is when the story starts to go haywire, with “Marnie” not being a success, and the studio telling Hitchcock that Herrmann’s score was too old-fashioned… that they needed someone with more of a pop-score sensibility. And then their relationship completely falls apart on “Torn Curtain,” and it’s curtains for everything about their friendship.
There are so many interesting details to the slow car crash that was the breakup of Hitchcock and Herrmann that I devote two chapters to it in my book. There are elements of personality. There are areas of small grievances and things irritating each other about the other person. But what I found most poignant researching this book was that everyone involved thought they were doing what they were doing for the best of the project.
The supreme high point of collaboration on “Psycho” laid the seeds for the disaster that would happen six years later in March of 1966 when Hitchcock went to hear the score for “Torn Curtain.” You couldn’t really hear a film score in those days before it was recorded, if it was written for an orchestra. Hitchcock showed up to the session wanting a miracle for this movie that he knew wasn’t particularly good. He heard that Herrmann had written a heavy, dark, sometimes lugubrious score that Benny thought would convey the sense of the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain that the heroes are trapped behind. Benny thought Hitchcock would love that. I was able to hear the recording of the session, and you can tell that Benny has no idea what’s coming. He’s in a great mood, so he was absolutely stunned when Hitchcock listened to two cues and fired him on the spot and canceled the session.
Can you go into how the success of their collaboration on “Psycho” ironically set up the disaster that happened with “Torn Curtain”?
Four or five times, Herrmann was told by Hitchcock or by Hitchcock’s staff that they did not want a score that sounded like what he’d done in the past. And yes, the terminology was a little vague, but Hitchcock made it clear that he did not want a heavy score. He used words like “light.” He used the word “beat.” He wanted something contemporary and energetic. And Benny basically let Hitchcock and everyone else think that he was going to follow those instructions, and he didn’t. He wrote a heavy, militaristic, threatening score — the opposite of the light “beat” score that Hitchcock wanted. He wrote it not to be contrary, but because he thought that Hitchcock was just getting bad advice from others. And he didn’t think that Hitchcock had the right perception of his own film. Benny thought, “I’m going to do what the movie needs, and he’s going to hear it and he’s going to love it. And I’m going to rescue this film as much as a composer can, and he will be thrilled.”
And the reason he thought that was because that’s what happened on “Psycho,” with such great, transformative results?
Yes, the reason Benny felt that he could go against Hitchcock’s wishes on “Torn Curtain,” I’m confident, is because Hitchcock said on “Psycho,” “Do whatever you think is best. I only have one instruction. Do not write music for the murders.” And of course, Herrmann ignored that, and he wrote the music for the shower scene. … Herrmann had what was the supreme triumph, I think, of his career in film when he said, “Hitch, I did write music for that scene. May I play it for you?” And he did, and Hitchcock said, “Well, that’s what we’ll use.”
I have a much clearer understanding now of how, when Hitchcock walked in to the “Torn Curtain” scoring session, he was just stunned, and his thought was an understandable “Why have you betrayed me like this? Everything’s gone wrong, and I counted on you, my friend, and you did this to me too.” Benny didn’t do what he was told, and he wasn’t the director of the movie. And this could have been avoided. Benny had the chance to turn it down, and they could have gotten Henry Mancini or John Addison (who ultimately did score the film after Herrmann was removed), because the movie would’ve flopped and then maybe Benny could have come back on the next one. As this book shows, he was at the lowest point of his life at that moment, and I think that he was not able to view a project with the same open-mindedness that he could have if his world had not gotten very darkin his head.
It’s funny that, today, the main reason anyone talks about “Torn Curtain” is to talk about the Hitchcock/Herrmann breakup.
Isn’t that ironic, that that’s more interesting than the movie? It’s true. There are few discussions of that movie that don’t quickly turn to Bernard Herrmann. When Universal put the movie out on DVD, they put on every single scene that was recorded with Herrmann’s music before Hitchcock let him go because they knew people were so interested.
Most people who’ve heard the “Torn Curtain” music don’t think it’s a great lost score, and yet there was some vindication when Quentin Tarantino used some of the unheard music for one of his films.
Hitchcock wasn’t wrong in thinking the music needed energy. If you had a generic library and you wanted ominous Bernard Herrmann music, that (unused score) would be fine for that. But the murder cue is terrific.
You start the book off with Herrmann recording the score for “Taxi Driver,” on what turned out to be the last day of his life. What was meaningful about starting the book there, before you jump back in time to tell the story of his life with Hitchcock?
Well, just as the Hitchcock/Herrmann films have become greater and greater in our culture, people’s awareness of them, “Taxi Driver” is one of the most famous things that Herrmann did, as well as the last thing he did. And for a book where the whole goal was to make you feel as much as possible that you were inside the room with people, I realized that if I started with the final “Taxi Driver” session, I would be starting on the last night of Herrmann’s life, and you can’t get more dramatic than that. And there were younger people in the room that I could still talk with and get their impressions. They had vivid memories of Herrmann on that night that I hadn’t heard before. So I could do an almost forensic account of his last few hours. Martin Scorsese was so excited to be working with this force of nature that was Herrmann, and to him, Herrmann seemed very powerful. But to people in the orchestra, some of whom who had played on “Citizen Kane” 34 years earlier, they saw him as a man who was near death, as he was.
Herrmann was having this extraordinary creative renaissance, and his whole next year was booked with major A-list movies like “Carrie” and others, and yet he just had hours left to live, with his body failing him. And then meanwhile, literally a slight distance away, Hitchcock is at Universal making what will be his last film (“Family Plot”), while his body is failing. Unlike Herrmann, Hitchcock had remained famous, he’s been popular, but his creative abilities were no longer at their fullest. So it’s rather poignant, the fact that Benny won’t live as long, but he’s going out on top. And you have Hitchcock dying more slowly at Universal, which I thought was very poignant.
It’s hard to say what counts as a happy ending for anyone. But it is reassuring to know that Herrmann was getting respect at the end, whatever he might have done to alienate people, even if he doesn’t live to see all the results of it. Hitchcock doesn’t go out on as much of a high, although no one commands more respect to this day.
I have enormous compassion for Hitch because he was really frightened as he reached the end of his life. You know, he made all of these movies about death and murder and laughing at it, and part of the reason was because death was his greatest fear, and he was in absolute terror of dying at the end. Whereas with Herrmann, you couldn’t ask for a better night. You’ve got Steven Spielberg, who visited the session, kneeling down before you to tell you how wonderful you are. You’ve got Martin Scorsese thanking you for a great score. You’ve got musicians applauding. You get taken out to dinner, and you think about the major movies you’re going tobe doing for the next year of your life, and you just go to sleep. I’d take that over the long, slow agony that Hitchcock had at the end.
But, yeah, it’s a poignant story. and I hope that when people read the book, they will get a sense of these men not as just icons, but as flesh and blood people who had the same anxieties and yearnings and loves that we have. They just had a particular genius in translating that into art.
Their collaboration wasn’t going to last forever, because of their personalities. I think even if Herrmann had been an easier person to get along with, something would’ve happened, as it did with just about everyone. Hitchcock fell out for a time with Ernest Lehman. He fell out completely with the screenwriter of “Rear Window,” John Michael Hayes. I think perhaps with all really singularcreative people, there is a shelf life — a time limit — of how much they’re going to work with certain other people before it just doesn’t gel anymore. But the miracle of it is that for a decade, from 1955 to 1965 — because my book goes into the 17 scores that Benny wrote for the Hitchcock TV series too — these two men with strong egos were able to collaborate and, for most of those years, absolutely be on the same page.
There is a documentary being made that is a companion piece to the book, right?
Yes, I’m co-producing it with Diana Friedberg. I’m also doing a documentary on (famed film director and Hollywood blacklist victim) Abraham Polonsky, with Eddie Muller as the primary producer and Claire Lockhart as co-producer.
What do you think most sets Herrmann apart from other great film scorers?
One thing Benny said that I always quote is, “The composer’s first job is to get inside the drama.” And I would say that Bernard Herrmann was the greatest writer of psychological music in the 20th century. No composer in any medium could make a listener feel a character’s thoughts and emotions more vividly than he did. That’s part of his genius. And it’s what I miss in movie scores today, having music that can help you feel the way you do when you watch “Vertigo” or the way you feel when you watch Janet Leigh’s character in the first 45 minutes of “Psycho.” That identification is intense, and it’s so rare that music has the opportunity to do that now.
An audiobook version of “Hitchcock & Herrmann,” read by Smith, will be released Jan. 6; preorder it through your favorite audio service here. The hardcover edition, which came out in October, can be purchased here. Copies will also be available for signing at Smith’s Film Forum appearances this weekend.