Hollywood Codebreakers: Murder and the Madames de Winter in ‘Rebecca’
Alfred Hitchcock was already a seasoned director by the time he arrived in Hollywood in 1939. He’d made his feature debut with The Pleasure Garden in 1925, moved onto talkies by 1929, and hit his stride in the 1930s with successful thrillers including The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. But Rebecca was the first movie he made with American producers and censors, and he wasn’t having the easiest time. He and Joseph Breen were locked in a battle over the fate of his central characters. “Our conversations possess all the good, lusty qualities of horse-trading,” Hitchcock joked to Picturegoer. Hitch wanted one character, Maxim de Winter, to avoid jail time for killing his unfaithful first wife, Rebecca. Breen felt Maxim must be punished for his crimes, but that perhaps those crimes could be softened. The pair had reached an impasse. “Breen wants Rebecca to die of cancer and I want to have her shot with a gun, and in the middle of the argument I suggest that we get together on a hammer murder,” Hitchcock told the press. When one reporter asked Hitchcock if it’d be necessary to kill him, i.e. Maxim, the director replied, “You mean Breen? I don’t think so.”
Hitchcock lost his first fight with Breen — and lost even more with his producer, David O. Selznick, whom you might remember from Gone With the Wind. Although Rebecca was Hitchcock’s only film to win Best Picture, the director disowned his movie years later, calling it humorless and “not a Hitchcock picture.” If he’d had it his way, the film would’ve contained an explicit murder, a successful cover-up, and possibly even more lesbian subtext than he managed to sneak in.
Rebecca was an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s massively popular novel of the same name. Du Maurier was inspired to write this “study in jealousy” by her own jealous fixation on her husband’s first fiancée, Jan Ricardo, who signed her letters with a large, distinctive “R.” The narrator of her novel is an unnamed young woman who gets caught in a whirlwind romance with the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter. They marry, and Maxim takes her back to his lavish estate, Manderley. But the second Mrs. de Winter cannot enjoy her new life. The house is haunted by memories of Rebecca, the first and much loved Mrs. de Winter. She’s present in all the fine clothes and furnishings she left behind, and the constant reminders from the severe housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. Mrs. Danvers adored, even worshipped Rebecca, and she doesn’t pretend to consider this new wife her equal. She sabotages the second Mrs. de Winter by suggesting an ill-advised costume ball, and urges her to jump out the second-story window to her death. The second Mrs. de Winter does not, because she’s distracted by cries from below: they’ve discovered the body of Rebecca.
Maxim has some explaining to do. He tells his second wife that his perfect marriage was a lie. He hated Rebecca, and she wasn’t too fond of him, either. Although she presented a careful image to society, Rebecca was having an extramarital affair with her cousin, Jack Favell, and she told Maxim all about it. She was pregnant, in fact, with Jack’s baby and intended to pass the child off as Maxim’s own. What Maxim didn’t know was that Rebecca was lying. She was not pregnant at all, but dying of cancer. She wanted a quick death, and correctly guessed she could provoke her husband into murder. Maxim covered up his crime by sending her body out to sea. Once it turns up, however, Jack lobbies for a murder conviction. The police clear Maxim of any wrongdoing, so to avenge her dear mistress, Mrs. Danvers burns Manderley to the ground.
Du Maurier’s book quickly became a hot commodity. Selznick’s talent scout Kay Brown urged him to option the novel, writing that it was “the most fascinating story I have read in ages.” Hitchcock had also seen the galleys while shooting his last film, Jamaica Inn, and was interested in the rights. So were a lot of people, it turned out. The bidding war ended with Selznick offering $50,000, the same price he’d paid for Gone With the Wind. Hitchcock, who had already signed a contract with Selznick International by this point, got the directing assignment in the fall of 1938. He also wrote the treatment for the movie, with the help of several collaborators.
The script went through multiple revisions and screenwriters before it was finally ready to go in the summer of 1939. Selznick submitted it to the PCA for review. Breen wrote him back on August 24, expressing multiple concerns. He outlined three specific violations of the Code. The first concerned Mr. de Winter. “As now written, it is the story of a murderer who is permitted to go off scot-free,” Breen wrote. He also objected to the references to the “alleged illicit relationship” between Rebecca and Jack Favell and the “quite inescapable inferences of sex perversion.” Breen instructed Selznick to make the following rewrites:
Before this story can be approved by us, it will be necessary that you establish… that the first Mrs. de Winter died as a result of an accident… or that the murderer, de Winter, be punished for his crime. It will also be necessary that you remove entirely from the script the suggestion of sex perversion.
Neither Selznick nor Hitchcock were happy with these requests. Selznick complained to his colleague Jock Whitney, “The whole story of Rebecca is the story of a man who has murdered his wife, and it now becomes the story of a man who buried a wife who was killed accidentally!” Still, the producer conceded this point, overseeing a rewrite that saw the first Mrs. de Winter die from an accidental fall. Breen also made concessions. He let his objection to the Jack and Rebecca relationship go, conceding its importance to the story. But he was not so accommodating with Mrs. Danvers, the source of his “sex perversion” complaint. He had noted with concern “Mrs. Danvers’ description of Rebecca’s physical attributes” and “her handling of the various garments, particularly the night gown.” After watching the final cut, he warned Selznick, “There must be no suggestion whatever of a perverted relationship between Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca. If any possible hint of this creeps [in]… we will of course not be able to approve the picture.”
Breen was specifically referring to a scene where Mrs. Danvers gives the second Mrs. de Winter a tour of Rebecca’s old room. “Loveliest room you’ve ever seen,” Mrs. Danvers says with reverence. “Everything is kept just as Mrs. de Winter liked it.” She takes the new Mrs. de Winter to Rebecca’s closet, where Mrs. Danvers eagerly plucks out a fur coat. She brushes the sleeve against her cheek, staring at her terrified mistress the entire time, and then raises the sleeve to Mrs. de Winter’s own cheek. “Feel this,” she says. “It was a Christmas present from Mr. de Winter.” Mrs. Danvers moves across the room, recounting Rebecca’s late nights with Mr. de Winter and how much “everyone loved her.” She eventually lands at the bed. She picks up the silk pillowcase she embroidered herself and removes a lacy negligee from it. “Did you ever see anything so delicate?” she asks. She motions for Mrs. de Winter to come marvel at the sheer lingerie. “Look,” she says as she slides her palm under the fabric, “You can see my hand through it.” Mrs. de Winter turns away in fear and the scary music swells. Clearly, we’re supposed to be creeped out.
Hitchcock’s films frequently feature a queer subtext. The villains in Strangers on a Train, Rope, and Psycho are all coded as bisexual or gay. Charters and Caldicott, the two stranded cricket fans in The Lady Vanishes, can also be interpreted as a gay couple. But Mrs. Danvers’ queerness was not exactly Hitchcock’s invention. Many scholars and casual readers have theorized that du Maurier wrote Mrs. Danvers with an implicit queerness, possibly as a means of expressing her own complicated feelings on sexuality. Du Maurier had three children with Frederick Browning, to whom she remained married until his death, but also had passionate relationships with Ellen Doubleday and Gertrude Lawrence. There’s some self-loathing about her sexuality in her letters — one to Doubleday read, “By God and by Christ if anyone should call that sort of love by that unattractive word that begins with ‘L,’ I’d tear their guts out.” Some readers have inferred that du Maurier’s punishment of Rebecca is a reflection of her own conflicted attitudes about queer women.
When Rebecca hit theaters on April 12, 1940, it was hailed “another distinguished offering by the producer who gave the screen ‘Gone With the Wind.’” The newspaper ads hyped the crowds that gathered outside Radio City Music Hall, touting Rebecca for giving the venue the “biggest opening business in its history.” Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock’s names were frequently used to sell the movie, but Selznick’s appeared perhaps most prominently. The movie’s stars, Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, were sometimes lost in the copy. But Fontaine, at least, likely didn’t mind. She had been struggling for years in bit roles, and failed to make an impression at RKO, which let her contract expire in 1939. Rebecca put her back on solid ground, earning her serious, if a bit snide, accolades. “Hollywood, with unfeigned surprise, suddenly woke up the other morning and discovered that Joan Fontaine is ‘a great actress,’” wrote Picturegoer in an article titled “Miss Fontaine Becomes an Actress.” The piece noted that “for at least four years various studios had attempted to sell her as a great and glamorous discovery, but by their own ill-concealed doubts they had demonstrated in the clearest possible fashion that they were not at all sure about the girl.” But Rebecca, the paper proclaimed, “has ‘made’ Joan Fontaine.” The movie earned her an Oscar nomination, which she did not win. But she took home a trophy the following year for another Hitchcock collaboration, Suspicion.
Just one month after Rebecca’s debut, Turnabout arrived onscreen. The body-swapping comedy was praised as the “season’s funniest” movie, another hit for legendary producer/director Hal Roach. But it almost didn’t make it to the movie theater, because of its “pansy flavor.” We’ll discuss it next week on Hollywood Codebreakers.
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