Needle in a Hay-stack
How two famous murder cases crept into Hitchcock’s films—and crossed over into the director’s real life.
IWOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS IAN HAY WITH YOU, BUT I CAN'T. Hay, pseudonym for novelist and playwright John Hay Beith, is credited with writing dialogue for The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936) and Sabotage (1936)—half of the thriller sextet that solidified Hitchcock’s reputation as England’s top director. Yet, sadly, very little information appears to be immediately available about the writer’s brief association with Hitchcock. He had been a schoolmaster and after some success as a novelist, retired to devote his full attention to writing. After serving in the First World War (he was decorated), he turned to playwrighting and, later, writing for the screen. He seemed to hit his stride in that arena in the mid-to-late 1930s writing dialogue, after which he was appointed Director of Public Relations for the British War Office. As Vertigo’s Scottie would say, “That about covers everything”—and I’m left with a play on words in the title of this piece that Hitchcock himself might have appreciated.
But wait, there’s more. Bloody more.
What sparked my interest in pursuing more about Ian Hay, beyond the few sentences he garners in the full-length Hitchcock biographies by John Russell Taylor, Donald Spoto and Patrick McGilligan, was in reference to the Patrick Mahon murder case, which has long been cited as having influenced an aspect of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). In Françios Truffaut’s book-length interview with Hitchcock, the director himself described the elements of the murder that appealed to his macabre sensibilities:
In the Mahon case the man killed a girl in a bungalow on the seafront of southern England. He cut up the body and threw it, piece by piece, out of a train window. But he didn’t know what to do with the head, and that’s where I got the idea of having them look for the victim’s head in Rear Window. What Patrick Mahon did was to put the head in the fireplace and light the fire. Then something happened that may sound phony but is absolutely true. Like in a stage play, just as he put the head in the fire, a thunderstorm came on, with lightning and thunder. Somehow, the heat of the fire made the eyes open wide, as if they were staring at Mahon. He ran out to the beach screaming, with the storm pouring down on him, and didn’t get back until several hours later. By that time the fire had burned the head. (Truffaut 164)
I have lectured on Rear Window close to a hundred times, if not more, often retelling the same scant bits of the most macabre information available about the influence of the Mahon case on that film. Hitchcock and screenwriter John Michael Hayes changed the disposal of Mrs. Thorwald’s remains into something far more grisly than the fate imagined by Cornell Woolrich, author of the original short story. Similar to Mahon’s victim, she was distributed in pieces along the East River. Although the film leaves us to imagine this ghastly act, Hayes’s treatment spells out that the final bit of evidence dug up from Thorwald’s flowerbed was his wife’s head, “still nagging.”
While recently preparing to give yet another lecture on Rear Window, referencing the Mahon case, I sought to find some more colorful details and came upon a tiny bit of information mentioning that Mahon’s victim, Emily Kaye, had been private secretary to Ronald Beith, father of playwright and author Ian Hay. (Sydney Evening News 1) I immediately made the connection to the dialogue writer and was intrigued as to why I had never read about this connection before.
I checked my own Hitchcock resources and could find no mention of it. Surely, if true, I could not imagine that Hitchcock would have been unaware of this at the time that Hay was supplying colorful dialogue to the scenarios that the director had devised with his then closest writing collaborator, Charles Bennett. It’s the kind of personal detail that one could imagine Hitchcock relishing the opportunity to discuss with one of his writers while putting off the matter of the work at hand, namely the screenplay. While there wasn’t much information to be found about Hitchcock’s interactions with Hay, I was intrigued enough to pursue more about the Patrick Mahon case and located a copy of the Famous Trials Series volume devoted to the case edited by Edgar Wallace, who himself warrants a mention in the director’s Blackmail (1929). John Michael Hayes told me that Hitchcock loaned him his personal copies of both the Mahon and Crippen cases while he was writing the treatment for Rear Window so that he could include details from each in their film adaptation.
Hitchcock’s Favorite Crime
Years ago, I outlined in a blog post the various references to the case of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen found in Hitchcock’s films and episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that he directed himself. At the time, I dubbed the case “Alfred Hitchcock’s Favorite Crime,” as various aspects seemed to appear in and influence his work over again. References appear in The 39 Steps, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window, Vertigo (1958), and the Hitchcock-directed teleplay, Back for Christmas (1956). In 1945, Hitchcock even directed a radio adaptation of Frances Isles’s Malice Aforethought, which was based on the Crippen case and at one point, he hoped to make a film version. (DeRosa, Alfred Hitchcock’s Favorite Crime: The Case of Dr. Crippen) (Young)
As I delved deeper into the Patrick Mahon case, I found there was an aspect to it that seemed to be speaking with several of Hitchcock’s works beyond Rear Window and the gruesome details about Mahon’s attempts to dispose of the corpse of Emily Kaye.
False Confessions and Conversions
Upon his arrest and at trial, Patrick Mahon claimed that Emily Kaye’s death was accidental. He indicated that they had argued about her wanting him to leave his wife and begin a new life with her in South Africa. According to Mahon, when he informed Kaye that he had no intention of leaving with her, she became so enraged that she hurled a coal axe at him. He said the axe grazed his shoulder and then that she came at him again, clutching at his face and neck. In the course of trying to defend himself, they both fell over an easy chair and in the struggle, “Kaye’s head came in violent contact with the round coal cauldron.” When Mahon came to, he noticed that she wasn’t moving and after attempts to revive her, he realized Kaye was dead. Rather than alert the authorities, Mahon stated that he panicked and, fearing that nobody would believe his story, decided to dispose of Kaye’s remains, which proved to be quite an undertaking. (Wallace)
In Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry (1954), Psycho (1960), and at least one episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that the director himself would helm, One More Mile to Go (1957), a character goes to some length to dispose of or hide a corpse. It seems the director was haunted by this notion, so much so, that he even described the scene of the eyes of the victim’s severed head opening in the fireplace to Psycho author Robert Bloch when he tried to get him to write the idea which became the unproduced screenplay called Frenzy. (Bloch and Hitchcock) This aligns with what Hitchcock described to Truffaut and what many commentators, me included, have thought was the extent of the influence the Mahon case had on Hitchcock’s work. On reading further details of the actual case, however, my eyes were opened (without benefit of a fireplace), to a whole other aspect of the case that quite possibly may have influenced a few other Hitchcock films.
According to Chief Detective Inspector Savage’s testimony, Mahon’s statement was not believed, and it was easy to assemble a timeline of his activities surrounding the death and disposal of Emily Kaye. Although the defense would attempt to portray Kaye as a strong and “athletic” woman—thus Mahon would have reason to believe that she could overpower him—facts that he had purchased a bone saw and a large chef’s knife days before their trip to Eastbourne were not lost on the jury. (Wallace) Setting aside the details of his attempt to get rid of the body, the incredible story told by Mahon is suggestive of three instances where a character in a Hitchcock film tries to explain their involvement in the death of another.
First and foremost, Mahon’s story, sans the coal axe, sounds remarkably like the equally implausible story told by Maxim de Winter to his second bride in Rebecca (1940). In Daphne du Maurier’s original tale, Max explains that he shot Rebecca when she goaded him into killing her by saying she was to have another man’s baby and that Max would be powerless as he watched her child grow to become heir to the de Winter name and fortune. This scenario, of course, would not be allowed under the Hollywood Production Code, as murderers could not get away with their crimes. As a workaround, Hitchcock, Selznick and writers Robert Sherwood and Joan Harrison, had Max explain that after Rebecca revealed her intentions, he struck her and after a moment she came toward him, stumbled, and hit her head on a heavy piece of ship’s tackle. Upon realizing she was dead, he proceeded to cover up her death with an improvised burial at sea. (Leff 53-54) While the character’s story—and the inventive way in which it was filmed by Hitchcock—satisfied the Production Code Administration and the film’s heroine, watching the film today, one can’t help feeling that Max de Winter does indeed get away with murder even though Rebecca intended to provoke him into killing her. And I’m fine with that. It’s the kind of cinematic sleight of hand that Hitchcock would bring to the small screen, having his television murderers get away with their crimes in the body of the story, only to be “tripped up” by Hitchcock in his post-commercial epilogues.
An equally unconvincing story is spun by Johnny Aysgarth, the lead male character in Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941). From a true-crime perspective, Suspicion unabashedly takes its inspiration from the case of William Palmer—a poisoner who had such a penchant for dispatching his victims in that way that he named one of his racehorses “Strychnine.” Yet, the studio-imposed “happy ending,” which exonerates the character played by Cary Grant, feels like ground Hitchcock had recently covered in Rebecca. (Staveley-Wadham)
The last-minute compromises made over the ending of the film are well-known—and yet, are not without their own set of myths. As I detailed in the first edition of Writing with Hitchcock in 2001, it was Hitchcock’s original intention to have the character played by Cary Grant to be guilty. He is a murderer. He kills his good-natured, yet horribly gullible friend, Beaky, in order to swindle him in a land deal so that he can pay his gambling debts. When his wife comes to suspect him of this, he contrives to do away with her with an untraceable poison and collect on the insurance policy he has taken out on her. The original planned ending was to have the wife, Lina, knowingly take the poison Johnny offers her but compose a letter incriminating her husband to stop him from doing further harm. The final images of the planned film would have shown Johnny unwittingly mail the letter that seals his fate.
In contriving a new ending for Suspicion, Hitchcock was forced to do some rearranging of the final scenes and add a handful of new shots completed after principal photography. The result was an ending where, instead of Johnny delivering a glass of poisoned milk to his wife who is aware of Johnny’s intentions, Lina deduces that Johnny’s plan is to use the untraceable poison to commit suicide. On having Lina’s explanation conveniently dropped into his lap, Johnny “confesses” this was indeed his plan, but now he sees it as a coward’s way out and intends to turn himself in. As the pair get into the car and drive away, with Johnny seemingly determined to face justice, the car suddenly turns back toward home and, with a swell of Roy Webb’s score, we get a closer view of Johnny putting his arm around Lina, suggesting all will be well. It is certainly one of the least satisfying endings Hitchcock ever put on screen. While it may have pleased RKO executives and the PCA, one need only look at the rest of the film to realize that Hitchcock got away with having Johnny as a killer. (DeRosa, Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes 304-305)
Years later, when developing Stage Fright (1950), Hitchcock had simplified the multiple triangles of the storyline in Selwyn Jepson’s novel Man Running, perhaps in some way to more closely align with the Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters case from which the novel takes its inspiration. Hitchcock had a personal connection to that crime, which he revealed to his biographer, John Russell Taylor. In his youth, while working for the Henley Telegraph Company, Hitchcock participated in his employer’s social club, which provided dancing lessons (separately) to its male and female employees. The dance instructor for the male members of the social club was William Eustace Graydon, father of the woman who would become the notorious Edith Thompson, who was convicted of being an accomplice, along with her lover Frederick Bywaters, to the murder of her husband Percy. Although Bywaters claimed that he acted alone, the prosecution contended that love letters from Thompson, in which she described various ways in which she wished to kill her husband, incited Bywaters to take action. Despite much public outcry on Edith Thompson’s behalf following her conviction and sentence of death, she and Bywaters were simultaneously hanged at separate prisons. (Taylor 35) Her disputed role in the killing and execution have remained controversial for nearly a century.
In Selwyn Jepson’s novel, Jonathan Penrose (changed to Jonathan Cooper in the film) is suspected of murdering Charlotte Inwood’s husband and Eve Gill sets out to prove his innocence. In the end, it turns out that Freddie Williams is responsible for the killing. In simplifying the crime for the film version, Hitchcock and his writers made Jonathan guilty, and while Hitchcock may have believed in Edith Thompson’s innocence, it is clear that the villainess in Stage Fright, played by Marlene Dietrich, manipulated her lover into committing the deed. Jonathan is, however, given a bit of backstory not found in the novel, where it turns out that he killed a woman previously but had gotten away with it in a plea of self-defense. Jonathan’s eleventh-hour revelation to Eve comes off as remarkably close to Mahon’s contrived story of killing Emily Kaye while thwarting an attack after she hurled a coal axe at him.
While the fascination with true crime is not as uniquely British as one might think, clearly, like the second Mrs. de Winter’s father, repeatedly painting his variations on a single tree, Hitchcock kept ruminating over the same crimes that captivated the imagination of his native land. From a handful of grisly murders, he spun a lifetime of stories for screens big and small.
Works Cited
Bloch, Robert and Alfred Hitchcock. "Transcript of talk with Hitchcock about a story idea of Hitchcock's." Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 20 November 1964.
DeRosa, Steven. Alfred Hitchcock’s Favorite Crime: The Case of Dr. Crippen. 25 December 2010. <https://www.writingwithhitchcock.com/2010/12/25/alfred-hitchcocks-favorite-crime-the-case-of-dr-crippen/>.
—. Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes. New York: Faber and Faber, 2001.
—. Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, (Second Edition). New York: Cinescribe Media, 2011.
Leff, Leonard. Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987.
Staveley-Wadham, Rose. William Palmer the Rugeley Poisoner – A Very Victorian Morality Tale. 25 March 2020. <https://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2020/03/25/william-palmer-the-rugeley-poisoner/>.
Sydney Evening News. "It Wasn't Murder." Sydney Evening News 7 May 1924: 1.
Taylor, John Russell. Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967.
Wallace, Edgar. The Trial of Patrick Herbert Mahon. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928.
Young, Filson. The Trial of H. H. Crippen. Edinburgh and London: William Hodge & Company, Ltd., 1920.
