Herbert Coleman Remembered - 1907-2001

Excerpts from my conversations with Hitchcock's associate producer

Herbert Coleman, who died at the age of 93 in Salinas, California on October 3, 2001, has been called "one of the best assistant directors who ever lived." Typically assistant directors have remained fairly anonymous in the movie industry. But when one had worked as closely as Herb Coleman had with Alfred Hitchcock, it was only a matter of time for him to become a slightly more recognizable character. In Coleman's case, it was due to the interviews he gave which were included in the recent dvd releases of a number of Hitchcock films. These interviews and a memoir he had been working on for the better part of the last decade, were something of an attempt to make up for things he said about his former and more famous employer in the past - things he seemed to regret, and which he was now denying he ever said. Needless to say, during my conversations with him, I was intrigued, slightly suspicious, but oh, so curious to find out more about him.

Born William Herbert Coleman on December 12, 1907, in Bluefield, West Virginia, Herbie, as he was referred to by friends and colleagues, spent some 58 years in the motion picture industry. A long standing member of the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, and the Writers Guild of America, Coleman is almost exclusively remembered for his long association with Alfred Hitchcock which began when he was assigned to be assistant director on Rear Window in 1953. During his next assignment for Hitchcock, To Catch a Thief, Coleman was promoted to second unit director, and by their third film together, The Trouble with Harry, Coleman had graduated to the rank of associate producer.

Coleman continued his association with Hitchcock over the next several years as associate producer on The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo fo Paramount, The Wrong Man for Warner Bros., and North by Northwest for MGM. He also worked on a number of abandoned Hitchcock projects, such as Flamingo Feather and No Bail for the Judge. He split with Hitchcock's feature unit for a time when the director made Psycho, but his forays into televsion during those years did include work as a producer on both Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. After years of working without an associate producer, Hitchcock brought Coleman back on board in 1968 to assist on Topaz, which included a good deal of international location work.

While conducting interviews for Writing with Hitchcock, I spoke with Herbert Coleman on a number of occasions. Getting him to agree to an interview took some prodding by his friends such as Doc Erickson, but eventually, Coleman agreed to speak with me. He was guarded at times and on more than one occasion suggested that we end our interview, but after a while he was on a roll and in the end, he commended me on the amount of research he could tell I had done. Here are some excerpts from one of my 1996 conversations with Herbert Coleman:

"Hello," he greeted.

"Hello, Mr. Coleman. This is Steven DeRosa. How are you today?"

"I'm fine, thank you. How are you?"

"Very good. I was wondering if this might be an okay time?" I asked.

"It's okay."

"It is? Great." Success, I thought. Then he qualified:

"First ... maybe I've already told you this, but you know, I have a book at the publisher's right now. Hitchcock is the main subject of my book, of course."

"I understand. Well, I certainly don't want to intrude on anything that you've written."

"Well, I'll see that you don't," he quickly replied.

I knew he knew why I was calling, but thought I'd tell him again that the focus of my book was on Hitchcock's collaboration with John Michael Hayes. I told him that both Hayes and Doc Erickson, Hitchcock's unit manager at the time, felt I should definitely speak with him if I was going to get the whole story. What I quickly found out was that Coleman was as eager to fish for information from me as I from him.

"Did you get much information from Doc?" he asked.

"Mostly in regard to what went on on location and about Mr. Hitchcock," I explained. "Not so much about the writing," I continued. "What I'm particularly interested in are the issues concerning the break up that occurred - their falling out." Had I tipped my hand?

"Well, of course, that's a central issue of my book," Coleman warned. "I can give you very little information about that, because you would be writing stuff that is already in my book."

Long before I had my first conversation with Herbert Coleman I was aware that he had been working on his memoirs for a number of years. After skirting the issue somewhat, and discussing some of the other films, I steered the conversation back to The Man Who Knew Too Much:

"Well, if you could recall, when and why did Hitchcock decide to remake The Man Who Knew Too Much?" I thought that a safe way to broach the subject.

"Well, it was early on in my association with Hitchcock, I guess about late 1953. He had mentioned a couple of times the name of the picture, and I had never seen it," remembered Coleman.

Now that I had him talking about the film, I gradually brought up the subject of Hitchcock's hiring of the writer Angus MacPhail during the early pre-production phase, while John Michael Hayes was working on a screenplay for another producer at the studio.

"Well, I tell you, from the questions you're asking me, I see where they're leading," he stopped. "I don't think I can be of any use to you."

Coleman then told me that he had previously granted a long interview in which he felt his comments were misinterpreted and contributed to the destruction of Hitchcock's reputation. It was obvious that Coleman was now engaging in damage control over statements he made to Donald Spoto for his masterful biography of Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius. Coleman had been very frank about his years with Hitchcock during his interviews with Spoto, particularly over his departure from Hitchcock's feature unit when Coleman struck out on his own as a director. (Coleman directed two Audie Murphy features, Battle at Bloody Beach and Possee From Hell.)

"That book caused me a lot of problems," said Coleman. "I lost some friends in England, I lost some friends at Universal. People who read it, who didn't really know me very well, who were not friends, but were business friends, just couldn't believe that I would say such things about Hitch, and about other people."

"Well, maybe you'd like to set the record straight," I baited. "That's what I'm trying to do." I then told him about MacPhail's story notes for the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and how I felt he contributed to the structure of the plot. (Although a good deal of the plot was lifted directly from the 1934 film, and a great number of the ideas in MacPhail's notes were tossed aside.)

"What John Michael Hayes is excellent at is sophisticated dialogue," Coleman explained. "He's excellent at that. His structures are not good at all. That's why Angus MacPhail was brought in."

I continued telling Coleman that I'd devoted some twenty pages of my manuscript to the MacPhail notes.

"How did you get access to that material?" he asked.

I explained that MacPhail's notes were part of the collection of Hitchcock's papers housed at the Academy Library and that it had been donated by Patricial Hitchcock-O'Connell. I also told Coleman about the Paramount materials that are there, which include everything from the story department's hiring notices to correspondence with the WGA concerning the credit arbitration on the film. Coleman was now aware that I had a lot of documentation to back up, or refute anything he might say on the subject.

"I've always been fond of Hayes," Coleman backpedaled. "But the one thing that he did that turned Hitch and myself against him was the fact that he didn't give Angus MacPhail any credit at all on The Man Who Knew Too Much."

I mentioned MacPhail's agent from the William Morris Agency, the late Reece Halsey, and said that I had spoken recently with his wife about MacPhail and his apparent drinking problem.

"I was one of his closest friends," Coleman said of MacPhail. "As a matter of fact I really took charge of Angus. We always quit working in the afternoon because Angus was quite old, you know, and feeble, and he'd quit at three o'clock in the afternoon. I know that Angus would have a glass of wine, that's all he ever touched. He never drank anything at all during the day, always after he got back to his hotel. And all he had then was a little wine." (It is interesting that Coleman described MacPhail as "quite old" and "feeble." Everyone I spoke with had similar memories of him, believing he was in his seventies, when in fact, he was only 52 at the time.)

I mentioned to Coleman that I knew that he, Angus MacPhail and Hitchcock departed for London at the same time, prior to the first draft screenplay being completed, and that Hayes had stayed behind to work on it.

"Well, I was unsure about it, as I said, in my book, whether he'd come to London at all," said Coleman of Hayes. "Because he did want to come to Marrakesh, and we refused to allow him to come to Marrakesh. We left and we left Hayes working in the studio."

"Because the script had not been completed," I said. "And pages were being flown over as needed?"

"That's right," Coleman confirmed. "Well, I see you've done some very extensive research, and I commend you for that. I have no animosity toward John Michael Hayes, at all," he stressed. "I was just unhappy the way he refused to give any credit of any kind to Angus MacPhail. That was our intention. We were very upset when the screenplay arrived in Marrakesh and his name was not on there. It was not a pleasant evening I can tell you."

"At the time that, when I saw that screenplay that arrived over there in Marrakesh didn't have Angus's name on it, I blew my top. I was furious, to say nothing of Hitch. When I gave him the screenplay and waited for his reaction - because I had seen it in the afternoon right on location. I just pulled it out and when I saw that, I shoved it right back in and wouldn't let Hitch see it. He kept asking for it, I said 'No, wait til after dinner tonight and look at it.' Unbelievable the reaction to it."

I mentioned that I had a memo that Coleman sent back to the studio from Marrakesh indicating that the title page on the screenplay should not contain the word "final" because changes were still being made. He told me Hitchcock had him to do that so he could put MacPhail's name on the script. After Hayes learned that Hitchcock put MacPhail's name on the screenplay, he protested the credits to the Writers' Guild, initiating an arbitration in which Hayes was ultimately vindicated. I asked Coleman about the changes that were made to the script after the arbitration started.

"Well the changes were made after we received the screenplay, and I don't remember the actual date," said Coleman. "They were done by Hitch and Alma, his wife. They were not done by John Michael Hayes, or Angus. And they were not extensive changes. Well, I see that you've done a lot of good research so I hope that you have a lot of good luck with your book."

I thought we should take a break from that topic for a while and I asked some questions about To Catch a Thief. One topic I was curious to get Coleman's take on was the difficulty the production had over Charles Vanel, the French actor who played the restauranteur Bertani. Coleman confirmed that all of Vanel's English language in the film was dubbed, but he downplayed the frustration that other members of the unit had mentioned to me since many of Vanel's scenes had to be rewritten.

"Well he had some knowledge of the English language," said Coleman of Charles Vanel. "He was very worried at the beginning that Hitch wasn't pleased with his work. But we were very pleased with what he was doing. We knew that we were going to dub everything that he did in dialogue. But we settled him down so that he wasn't worried about it."

I understood from my earlier conversations with Doc Erickson that Coleman had been upset that in several interviews Shirley MacLaine mentioned that Doc Erickson had seen her in The Pajama Game on Broadway and recommended her to Hitchcock for The Trouble with Harry, when in fact both Erickson and Coleman were there and had seen her together, having scouted New England locations for the film.

"That's correct," Coleman said. "The way that came about was that my daughter, my eldest daughter, was always interested in drama, she was in high school at the time, and she wanted to see Pajama Game. So I said, 'That's no problem.' And we got to New York, and the New York office (of Paramount) said it's impossible to get tickets. Now later, when Doc and I were back in New York to do the survey (for The Trouble with Harry) I was able to get tickets. Now I thought I was watching Carol Haney. So Doc showed me his program. He had an insert in his that wasn't in mine, and Shirley MacLaine was doing the part. And what attracted me to her was her comedy timing - just excellent."

I mentioned some of the other members of the crew that I had interviewed, such as Daniel McCauly and Henry Bumstead.

"We had a nice company," Coleman remembered. "I put all those companies together... every picture I made with Hitch, I put the company together. Selected the personnel completely. And Danny McCauly used to be my assistant. When I was a first assistant, he was my second for a number of years."

Gradually we got around to talking about some of Hitchcock's working methods.

"Now, speaking of editing," Coleman explained. "The editing on a Hitchcock picture was done entirely during the shooting. Every Hitchcock picture that I worked on was always shot in such a way that it could only be edited in one way. Because the editors were not given protection footage."

"The whole thing was laid out in his memory," he said of Hitchcock. "Standing in his office, he could see the scene, the set, everything that was in the set, and that's the way the script was created. And it was shot exactly the way the script was written. I must say - as I keep repeating on John's dialogue - I'll never forget the dialogue that John wrote for Grace Kelly's entrance into the picture Rear Window. The dialogue was absolutely brilliant."

I asked if members of the unit, specifically director of photography Robert Burks, were invited in early on, perhaps during story conferences, and such.

"The writing was done strictly between Hitch and the writer," Coleman explained. "Sometimes I would be there. At the studio, our suite had three offices ... two offices, and two secretaries' offices. I had a coffee maker in my office, and every morning Hitch would come in and help himself to a cup of coffee, sit down and we'd gossip for a while. And when Hayes joined us, the same thing would happen. One morning, after we'd been gossiping, and we did a little bit of talk about the screenplay. Hitch said to John, 'Today we're going to start working on the screenplay.' And he and Hayes got up and Hitch said, 'Herbie, come along.' So I went in with them, you know. Now this is on Rear Window. And I could see that Hayes was very unhappy about this. What's an assistant director doing in a story conference? And I already at Hitch's instructions had a typewriter and a portable desk set up in the middle of Hitch's office. So when they started working, John sat down at the typewriter and Hitch started walking around the office dictating. That's how that was started."

Now, I was familiar with Hitchcock's use of the word "dictate" from the deposition he gave during a lawsuite concerning Rear Window (see the On the Record page elsewhere on this site), so I wanted to be very clear about what Coleman had just stated. (Subsequent to my conversations with Coleman, he made a similar remark - which went unchallenged - during the audio commentary on the Vertigo laser disc and dvd.)

"Do you mean things like the camera directions? Or dialogue and scenes and so forth?" I asked.

"The way he did it, that he dictated to John was he would be dictating the camera movement, and when it got to the dialogue, he would say to John, 'Now the dialogue that - now I'm not quoting exactly what he said - now, John dialogue has to convey this sort of .. you know .. this and that.' And that's the kind of instruction he would give John Michael Hayes."

I mentioned that John Michael Hayes said that at the most, Hitchcock would contribute two or three lines of dialogue to a screenplay.

"I have to agree with John," said Coleman. "Hitch might have suggested a line of dialogue now and then, I can't remember any specific ones. He never tried to write dialogue with any writer that I know of."

After a while we spoke about some of the other writers who had worked with Hitchcock.

"I'll tell you, we had Samuel Taylor who wrote Vertigo and Topaz. And he wrote a screenplay, which was one of the best he ever wrote, and we never made it called No Bail for the Judge." (Regular readers of this site know of my own fondness for that particular project.)

Returning to Vertigo, which at the time was being prepared for its big reissue and "restoration," Coleman asked what I knew about the image of the spirals coming from the eye in the title sequence, something he just couldn't remember about the film.

"Jim Katz (one of the film's 'restorers') kept asking me about this eye thing that Saul Bass had created. Even with my remarkable memory and I have one of the finest memories of anybody in the world. I can't remember the spiraling eye."

I told him that it's indeed there on the film and that Hitchcock and Bass had repeated the image somewhat at the end of the shower sequence in Psycho.

"Well that's the only place that kind of a scene could really be used properly, because with a spinning eye, right away you begin to think something mysterious. Well, it could have been used over Rear Window to deliver the idea of the eyes watching everything. But of all pictures that it shouldn't have been used in was Vertigo. And the last time I saw the picture was at the preview in San Francisco, and I don't believe that that was on the picture at that time," remembered Coleman.

This prompted me to ask about the scene that appears at the end of the screenplay, which on at least one occasion Samuel Taylor failed to remember he had included in his script. "There's a scene that's written in the script which is supposed to occur after Kim Novak falls at the end in which Jimmy Stewart is with Barbara Bel Geddes, and they're listening to a radio report..."

"No, no. Who wrote that?" Coleman asked. "Tell me what you just said again. Because I'm so shocked at what you were saying."

"After the scene at the tower when Kim Novak falls ..." I started.

"And he's staring down and the nun appears."

"He's staring down, the nun is there, she starts ringing the bell."

"Right."

"And in the script there's a scene which is supposed to be sometime later. Scottie is in Midge's apartment ? Barbara Bel Geddes apartment ? and she's just sitting there, and he's standing there staring, he's still in a similar state, he's staring out of her window, the big picture window there and in the background there's a radio report stating that Gavin Elster is being extradited from Switzerland and that's where it ends."

"We never shot such a scene!" exclaimed Coleman.

"I thought that maybe, it may have been tagged onto the script just for the Production Code people, just to let them know that Gavin Elster was being brought to justice."

"Well, that to my memory was not a part of the original screenplay. It had to have been added later. The actual ending we always intended to use was what you saw. Anything added to that would be ridiculous. It wasn't written in my opinion. I don't know where it came from."

"I have the script, and it's there," I offered.

"Well, I don't know where it came from, because it certainly was not in any screenplay that was passed around during the production."

Of course, we now know that the scene in fact had been filmed after all.

Before long I brought the conversation back around to the growing tension between Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes. I asked if it was strictly the arbitration issue over The Man Who Knew Too Much, or if other factors had come into play.

"Well, I know that Rear Window was a one picture deal," Coleman remembered of Hayes's contract. "And To Catch a Thief was a one picture deal, as I remember. Now in there sometime, Ned Brown, who was Hayes's agent at MCA, asked for a three picture deal, and in the contract - I never saw it, but Hitch told me about it - on the third picture, Hayes would also direct the picture. I don't think Hitch signed it. Now I think that's the first time Hitch began to doubt that he wanted to keep up his association with Hayes. It's just all conversation, I never saw any paper."

Now Hayes told me that Ned Brown urged him on more than one occasion to seek a directing assignment, but this was the first I'd heard of him being pitched to Hitchcock as a director. I could find no documentation, signed or unsigned, to confirm that such a deal had been proposed. I told Coleman that Hayes claimed he had no interest in directing. And Coleman recalled another occasion, years later, when Ned Brown tried to get a directing assignment for his client.

"When I was producing at Universal a few years later, during the writers' strike (in 1959-60), Ned Brown came to me one day and said 'I have a good deal for you.' I don't remember the exact dialogue, he said, 'I'll give you John Michael Hayes to write one of your segments of Checkmate, if you'll let John Michael Hayes direct it.' And I said, 'I'm not going to sign that kind of contract with you. To begin with, I know Hitch's attitude toward John Michael Hayes, and I would be insulting Hitch if I signed that.' So there's no doubt that Ned Brown was trying to sell John Michael Hayes, that's his job to get anything he could."

As our conversation came to a close, we wished each other well on our respective books.

"It's being read by Putnam," Coleman said of his opus. "It's been there two weeks and I haven't heard a word, but I've been working with this man, a Jim Katz at Universal, who's 'restoring' the print of Vertigo. And evidently Jim Katz must have mentioned to Lew Wasserman what I was doing because, you know, Putnam is owned by Universal and suddenly a letter comes to Jim Katz, with copies of the letter to me and Lew Wasserman and they understand I've written an autobiography and they'd be interested in reading it, and if they like it, publish it. So, I sent them the book. And I'm sitting on pins and needles waiting. Although I've sent it to them, I didn't have it completely finished the way I wanted it. I was still making changes, but I kept getting hints from Universal that they were not going to wait forever."

Coleman's memoir was eventually published. Although I've yet to read it, I gather it is full of juicy stories, offering yet another perspective of what it was like to brush up so close to genius.