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Christina Lane, "Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock" (Chicago Review Press, 2020)
01:01:36
An interview with Christina Lane
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Keep it real welcome to the New Books Network.
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Annie Burke
Hello everybody and welcome back to the New Books and Film, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Annie Burke, the host. Today we'll be talking to Christina Lane, professor of Film Studies at the University of Miami and author of Phantom Lady. Hollywood producer Joan Harrison, the forgotten woman behind Hitchcock. Hers is the first book to ever be written about the life and work of Joan Harrison. Christina, thank you for joining us at the nnbn.
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Christina Lane
Thank you for having me.
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Annie Burke
Can we start by you telling us a little bit about yourself?
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Christina Lane
Sure. So I I was born in Virginia and I grew up in in Maryland and the Washington D.C. area. And I first became interested in film, really, coming out of college, and I was interested actually in going into film production. I really thought I wanted to be a filmmaker. And soon as I was making these decisions, I guess I figured out that I was much more interested in. In the scholarly side of things and luckily found myself in a graduate program with, with people like Judith Main and Laura Mulvey and studying, you know, feminist film theory and classic movies. And that's kind of how I fell into what I'm doing now.
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Annie Burke
Excellent. Well, it seems like that was a really good sort of preparation for the book that we're going to be talk. The title of your book refers to Joan Harrison as a forgotten woman. And Phantom lady is both a biography, but I would also call it a feminist historiography, a kind of history of the history, how we get the histories that we inherit and what shapes them. So I'm curious about the. The origin story of this project and why you think it took so long for someone to write the story of Joan Harrison.
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Christina Lane
Yeah, and it took me 20 years, you know, to figure out what I wanted this project to be. But I think that's a really good point, is that, you know, this isn't just a straightforward biography. It does, it does start with Joan Harrison's birth. It's a cradle to grave, you know, story in a sense that it goes kind of through her entire life. But I did want to try to be somewhat critical or reflective about what it means to write history, what it means to tell a woman's story at the same time. And, and what was happening actually over the last years, you know, years and years and years, as I was thinking about the fact that I wanted to, to focus on Hitchcock and women is, you know, every so often someone would mention Joan Harrison on like a DVD commentary or in a Hitchcock biography, and they would drop her name and, and essentially say, you know, well, somebody should really write a book about Joan Harrison. Right? She's a really important figure. Somebody should talk about her. And meanwhile, I guess in the background, I. I was interested in the subject of female collaborators, right? And just the number of women who were so important to Hitchcock's work. And so I was thinking that I wanted to write a book more about the kind of the topic of collaboration and cover that there are probably a dozen women that I could name that were central to his career and why, why they are so written out of history. But at a certain point, it just came to such a head, like I just began to say, you Know, somebody really should write a book about Joan Harrison, you know, and it just, you know, it just became kind of an urgent and urgent. I felt an urgency about her in particular, partly because she had a career, you know, that was a solo career, and she was so important to the tradition of film noir. And because just as a personality, she was such a fascinating figure. So all of that really pointed me in the direction of a biography. Yeah.
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Annie Burke
And their collaboration from your book, it gives you such a sense that they have this very equal, sort of respectful relationship that's so different from the collaborations that we might know about Hitchcock with the actresses that he notoriously tormented or at least, you know, bullied. Yeah, I'm gonna go with tormented. I'm gonna round up there. So I think that Harrison does provide this really compelling counterpoint that's happening maybe behind the scenes, but because it's behind the scenes, you needed to sort of look beyond the films and to do some real archival digging. So what sources and archives, collections did you consult in assembling this history? And did you talk to any living subjects?
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Christina Lane
Yeah, and this was really the. The most difficult and challenging part of. Of Joan Harrison's story and. And writing this, you know, this book is. Is that, you know, she didn't leave behind any papers. Right. There's no collection where you can point to, oh, let's go to Joan Harrison's papers at this particular archive. And she didn't have any, you know, she didn't have any offspring. There wasn't. There wasn't really a family legacy or people that were waiting for someone to come knocking on their door and say, thanks for coming. We. We have all of her letters and her, you know, her diaries here. We've just been waiting for someone to. To announce that they're writing the biography. So one of the. One of the approaches that I was kind of forced to take was to look at, to find, you know, all of the various Hitchcock collections. Right. All the places, for example, where Alfred Hitchcock's papers are held in Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and in London, and kind of get at her work through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock and also various other basically male figures, you know, that were really important in. In terms of her. Her work or her career. Some of this would be William Doer. Right. So he's not a name. He's not a household name, but he was a really important producer at rko, and then later he was a producer of television. And so he. He's somebody where I could go to. Into his papers and find out A lot about Joan Harrison herself. So it was a lot of, kind of working at an angle to get into the documentation, the documentation of, of her day to day kind of professional activities. And I ended up going to about, I think maybe 12, 14 archives, various archival collections in order to piece together and pull together what her just kind of what her participation, what her contribution was to various films and to various filmmakers. And then the other part, in terms of your question about kind of doing interviews and finding, you know, finding sources, I mean, that was a really enjoyable part of the work was trying to track down people who had either worked with her, knew her, could provide, you know, you wanted psychological insight, right? I wanted to find people who could give me a sense of who she was as opposed to person and what I'm, I'm writing a character in a sense. Right. When you're writing a biographer, you're really trying to get kind of inside. Even though you can never access someone, you're trying to still trying to tell the story from inside a little bit of her, her mind and her perspective. So finding people that knew her. And one of the best things that I could do is find like the children of the filmmakers that she worked with, you know, or the producers and the actors and actresses that she worked with. And that was really helpful because those people are trying to carry on the legacy of, of Hollywood, for example, you know, and they were great. So I did, I did over 20 interviews, which is a lot, but it's also, you know, I mean, I think other, some other books do many, many more. You know, I just did as much as I could do. And at a certain point you just have to stop and start, Start writing.
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Annie Burke
Absolutely. So speaking of starting writing, your book starts with sort of from Harrison's youth, just, you know, a very good place to start for a biography. And looks at her sort of her middle class upbringing and her initial employment with Alfred Hitchcock as a private secretary. I think the Wanted sign, you sort of present her like as looking at this wanted young woman for employment sign. It really does feel like the beginning of a Hitchcock movie, certainly one of his early, you know, more modest British productions. So tell us a little bit more about her early life and, and how Harrison would sort of call back on it later as she was creating her sort of public face.
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Christina Lane
Right. Which is a really good point, you know, that she did have a, an important role in going back and telling a story about herself as she was creating a Persona or kind of fiction. Once she gets to Hollywood, she, she really does begin to give interviews about this, the way that she met Hitchcock and the way that she entered the industry. And so as I was doing research and as I was trying to tell her story, you know, basically what she. What she says, what she explains is that she had been kind of casting about and kind of relatively lost after going to the Sorbonne and going to Oxford and. And she came from a newspaper family. So her. Her dream, at least the way she tells it sometimes, is that she had wanted to be a newspaper reporter. She wanted to be a reporter. And her own father had said, well, you can't do that because that's too masculine of a job. So we want you to marry the boy next door, you know, or at least go out and do something that is more appropriate, like become a secretary or a sales girl. So that's what she was doing when she is presented with this ad in the newspaper for a secretary, for a director. And so she lines up for this job to work for, it turns out, for Alfred Hitchcock. And so, you know, the story. Right, the story, and this is what I tell in the book, but I also try to create a little bit of distance around. The story is that she becomes his secretary, but within just a couple of weeks, it becomes obvious that she's the worst secretary that he's ever had. And it's really cute, you know, that she cannot take dictation and she can't type. And he realizes that at least she actually has all these great strengths and that she's great as a story editor and that he can use her for all these wonderful, wonderful areas. Then eventually she. She starts writing screenplays for him. So this is her career trajectory. But at the same time, as I was, you know, as I was trying to kind of piece together her story, it is really important to. To kind of remember that the way that I get at that is basically all these interviews that she gives later to, you know, Hedda Hopper and various, you know, gossip columnists and newspapers. And so the story changes a lot. You know. So, for example, she is lining up for this job interview, and first there are 20 people in line, and then in another interview, she'll say that there's 40 people in line. At a certain point, she says there were 200 people in line, you know, and she's always. She's always kind of improving or exaggerating on her own stories. And she's a storyteller. So this is what's fantastic about Joan Harrison, is that she dramatizes even her own narrative. And that was part of my own challenge was trying to create a little bit of critical, kind of a reflexive tone. So that. And as I also tried to do with a lot of the footnotes or the endnotes, you know, they're not, they're not exactly footnotes, but it's just kind of showing the research and kind of showing the work at the end of the book, so that I'm not exactly creating, you know, a text where I. Where I'm suggesting that I know everything, you know, but I'm at least showing. Showing the sources.
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Annie Burke
Well, that seems like one of the sort of great rewards and difficulties of writing a biography is that you would get really taken in by your subject. You sort of need to be. You need to be sort of enter into a monogamous relationship with Joan Harrison for a few years, but it felt like a lot that you would need to sort of read what she says in a different way, as I'm such a bad secretary, I have to be a producer. I'm not a good writer. And then she proceeds to sort of spin a yarn for you about her origins that make you think maybe you are a little bit of a writer. But primarily her job was working with writers as a producer and working with Hitchcock and producing. So she started with him, obviously, what you're telling us, she started with him in the British film studio system, and then she made the transition with him and his wife, who started as an editor to Hollywood. And so what was that sort of transition like for her? And what were her biggest achievements on both sides of the. Of the Atlantic?
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Christina Lane
Yeah, the ocean. Right. Pretty far.
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Annie Burke
And across America. This is not new books geography, obviously.
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Christina Lane
No, no, but you're absolutely right. And, and, and it's a really good point, right, is that she was really lucky to be coming along in the, the British industry when she was in the 1930s. And as a very young woman, she. She begins at the age of 26 years old and she comes in to Hitchcock's team and is able to kind of learn the ropes from. From all angles and from the beginning, you know, beginning of the process to the end of the process. And so she. This is very different than the Hollywood system or the factory mode, you know, system, system. And so she, she's given access, right, to. To not just the writing, the area of writing, but also she's able to kind of be on. On set and see all aspects of production. And if something is needed, there aren't that many people to do whatever is necessary. So, you know, oh, just hand it off to, to Joan if she's nearby to Joan Harrison, right? If she's nearby, she learned what it was to do scoring, to do the music, to do marketing. I mean, I was just in the files for the Making of Young and Innocent, right, which is a 1937 film. And it's clear that there was a lot of thought given to the marketing and the. And the kind of pre. Selling of that film. And a lot of the exploitation or the publicity around that film was. Was batted around. And I can only imagine, right, that she's in all of those meetings as well, because there. There just weren't that many. It's not as though there was a huge publicity department. It was not departmentalized, you know, and compartmentalized. And she talks a lot about that in her own interviews as she reflects on the differences between the British and the American film industries. So that when in the late 1930s, Hitchcock, you know, is asked or hired over into the United States and David or Selznick hires him to. Hires Hitchcock to come over. And first. The first film is Rebecca. Joan Harrison is. Is. Is brought over kind of, right? Hitchcock brings her as part of the team. She's the only person that Hitchcock is working with besides his wife, Alma Revel, that he brings with him to the United States. And so she, when she comes to Hollywood, is exposed to a complete, completely different mode of production. And that's basically what she recognizes as the major difference is just how the. The divisions are and how the mode of production is so different. So generally there the writers are. Are kept with the writers and the editors are kept with the editors. But given that she had been exposed to so many areas, she had kind of a leg up, you know, and she could take the producer's vision, in other words, the perspective of the producer, and see how everything worked, because she basically was already armed with all that knowledge.
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Annie Burke
What would you say were it sort of in these years that she's working with Hitchcock in film? What would you say? Sort of like her crowning achievement, what she would refer to as the best film or the best experience, and what was a. Maybe a failure that they encountered together.
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Christina Lane
These are good, you know, good questions. So I would say, you know, she always reflected back on Rebecca, right? On Rebecca as being her favorite film. And also the film which she. She kind of lost the most, right? She spent kind of the most, cried the most, you know, kind of just had the most turmoil, but also felt that she had invested the most time and that it was her. Her kind of baby, in part because she did bring the property right Daphne du Maurier's novel to him. And that happened in England. So then when they, they come to the United States to make the film, it becomes an 18 month process from beginning to end. And it really was a journey, Right. You know, of filmmaking to the point where, and I talk about this in the book, by the time the editing and post production is going on, Hitchcock has already left the, you know, the production and has moved on to his next film. And she's the one who's sitting in the, you know, kind of in the editing, in the post production suite with David O. Selznick kind of as a surrogate for Hitchcock. So from the, from the readerly phase, right, from choosing the book all the way to the post production, Harrison was the one who was heavily involved in Rebecca. And I think you also see a lot of her own interests kind of right. Writ large across that film that you're going to see later in her own, in her own work. So I think that would be kind of the crowning achievement, although it's really hard to choose with her film.
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Annie Burke
Can I dig a little deeper on Rebecca for a moment? Because, I mean, obviously it's, I think, one of Hitchcock and Harrison's greatest works together. Certainly a highlight in the auteur's body of work, but the ending is a pretty controversial adaptation of the novel. Spoiler alert for people who haven't read Rebecca by now or seen the film. The novel has a much more menacing portrayal of the, of Maxim, the husband character. He's a cold blooded killer. The film did not keep that same ending. The first Mrs. De Winter is, is still deceased at the beginning of the film, but the, you know, her fate is different. The husband is more or less sort of exonerated of any kind of real premeditated murder. What did Joan Harrison think of that ending and what did they do in sort of the wake of pressure from the Production Code Administration to write, to, you know, keep things above board, morally speaking.
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Christina Lane
Right, right. There was a lot of pressure from the Production Code administration and, and I think that is where she learned a lot of lessons about what, what it was going to be like to work in Hollywood. So I think a lot of those changes that you're talking about where it was a much more romantic ending, you know, where we, we needed to have the couple end in a way that we could imagine them heading off into a better, somewhat brighter future, that there's.
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Annie Burke
Not going to be a third Mrs. De Winter coming up in a few years.
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Christina Lane
Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. And, and also that misses that Mrs. Danvers really gets her due, you know, in terms of seeing her punished. And I don't think, yeah, I mean that was something that David O. Selznick really wanted to see also. Right. It's just kind of have having Mrs. Danvers go, go up in flames. I can't imagine that this Joan Harrison was pushing really hard for that, for that kind of punishment. But, but yeah, I mean there's this the way in which basically most particularly Maxim de Winter cannot be a murderer. You know, he has to be, as you say, exonerated and the murder of his first wife has to be accidental as opposed to, as opposed to more intentional. And so Joan Harrison was not happy with all these changes and that this is one reason why it was such a prolonged process of, you know, constant rewrites and then going back to see if this particular version would satisfy the censors. And also working through the producer, through David O. Selznick, right through Selznick, trying to see would it satisfy, satisfy Selznick, would it satisfy the sensors? And Selznick was really angry also. Right. With the sensors. So he's also trying to defend some of the writers choices up to the censors. All of this was, was really, really, really challenging and quite a lot, quite a lot of lessons learned. But I don't think so. On the one hand, it's a favorite of hers. On the other hand, I certainly don't think that it was her intent, you know, intended, intended ending or her intended.
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Annie Burke
Yeah. Well, while we're on the subject of sort of morality clauses, I want to look a little bit at Joan Harrison's personal life and, you know, as a trained academic, how you reckoned with writing about sort of these more private and sometimes like just obscure, unknowable aspects of her biography. So I'm thinking of two things. First, the unsubstantiated rumor, potentially just a sort of a sexist preconception that Joan Harrison got the job because she was Alfred Hitchcock's mistress. That's one piece. And then another one about sort of the speculation around her affair with Clark Gable, which was real, which was true, but is surrounded by a lot of mystery because, you know, she was a private person. So how did you choose to address these more open ended aspects of her biography, which are really interesting but maybe not going to be found in a paper collection?
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Christina Lane
Right, right.
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Annie Burke
Even William Dozier. Yeah.
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Christina Lane
Right. And this is very good questions. And, you know, so one of the things I was constantly working against. Right, Constantly. One of the reasons I wanted to write the book is because the way, you know, the way that Harrison has been trivialized, her work and her life has been trivialized, is that she's been referred to as Hitchcock's secretary, as his personal assistant, as the nanny of the family in various forums. And then there's the David Spado book that really does play out this narrative of Joan Harrison as kind of the lost love. Right. The one woman that was essentially casting this shadow across Hitchcock's life. And, and what it does is it just. It just basically dismisses the most important parts of their work together. And it just kind of. It does. It. It basically creates the wrong narrative, I think, you know. Right. It just, it was, it was, it was something that I was not consciously trying to write in this way. I was not trying to consciously write against Spoto, but I was trying to basically correct, you know, a lot of the mythology around this idea that Harrison was an appendage to Hitchcock and also that he was only kind of taking her, you know, through his own career because he was attracted to her. Right. He's kind of pulling her, you know, pulling her through these various productions because he wanted to have her around rather than the fact that he really actually needed the term. And it's one reason why I came up with the pitch that, you know, people say Joan Harrison wouldn't have been Joan Harrison if it weren't for Hitchcock, and I flitz that to say Hitchcock wouldn't have been Hitchcock if it weren't for Joan Harrison, that she really helped make him, which is, you know, a way of correcting that sexualization of her. So, you know, one of the, one of the things that just to be really specific and to put a fine point on it is that as I was pitching the book to publishers, the, the working title was Hitchcock's Phantom lady, you know, and at a certain point we all decided that that was not just not the right way of going about it because it suggested his ownership of her or his possession of her, which is the opposite of what I was trying to do in the book, you know, and so we took that, that out and made sure that she was the star of the show. Right. And then Hitchcock became kind of a second point to the, to the title. But then as far as Clark Gable goes, just, just briefly, I mean, I wanted to. You know, you're. First of all, you know, they were together on and off for a lot longer than most people, anybody who knows anything. You know, some people don't know who Joan Harrison was and some people don't really know that there was much of a, of a, of a relationship between the two of them. But if people do, they kind of give that, that relationship like one year or two year of, you know, of a window. And it actually went on for like six or seven years. And it was quite a substantial and significant relationship. So I wanted to give it some time and suggest that there was actually a lot of kind of emotional depth there. You know, it wasn't just kind of a red carpet, you know, glitzy kind of kind of thing. But at the same time, when it came down to it, there is the only real narrative that is out there is this idea that he broke her heart when he ran off and suddenly got married to someone else. The suggestion being that she was waiting for him to propose to her and then he didn't. And when I was speaking to Norman Lloyd, our beloved Norman Lloyd, who was producing the TV series with her and knew her really well and recently passed away at the age of 106. I think, I know he was saying that, you know, it would be wrong to suggest that she was really heartbroken over anything Clark Gable did, you know, and that she was much more detached than we would think.
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Annie Burke
Absolutely. Well, I think it's sort of for me that turn. It sounds like when she was working with Hitchcock in the British studio, she was really coming into her Own as a, as a filmmaker, as an artist with her own vision. And she got to bring that to Hollywood where she came into her own sort of as a celebrity, as a public figure. But she was dating Clark Gable, having really good parties that I really enjoyed reading about. And that maybe those two things together were what allowed her to sort of move out on her own, out of Hitchcock's proverbial silhouette and start the solo career that she had at Universal. Starting at Universal in the Hollywood studio system. So can you tell us a little bit about that move in the 40s to working as sort of her own, as not her own boss, but you know, working on as a solo producer. It's really, I think like it's sort of the heart of the book in many ways, how she became this sort of autonomous creature creative force that was shaped by Hitchcock, but also that would come back to shape Hitchcock in the, in the 50s with the television series.
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Christina Lane
Yeah, it's, it's a really exciting time, you know, for her. Basically 1930, sorry, 1943 to 1944, when she, she signs on with Universal and is making Phantom Lady. You know, she pitches the Cornell Woolrich novel Phantom lady to Universal as kind of this feminist iteration or this feminist twist on, on that novel. And so she, even though she's given only the title of associate producer, the credit, right, of associate producer in that, in that production, she's really, for all intents and purposes doing the work of a producer. And so she also is, is hired there to elevate the right, you know, to kind of take Universal to another level. And the films that they were doing as horror movies, they, they were trying to compete and kind of show that they could do more artistic work in that, in that vein. And what she, she did that with Phantom Lady. She was able to show that with director Robert Siodmak, they were a great team. And she was able to kind of prove herself as someone who could do a more elevated, more artistic and what we now understand to be film noir, you know, but kind of expressionistic take on these, on the suspense or the horror film. And so what the thing about that is that she does Phantom lady and then the truth is that Universal doesn't extend her contract. She does kind of a one shot at Universal and then she has to kind of bounce around a little bit, but finds her footing and winds up doing a whole series of great films either at Universal or rko. And she makes the Strange Affair of Uncle Harry and Nocturne and they won't believe me and Ride the pink horse because she does. By the late 1940s, she has joined Robert Montgomery and his production company and is essentially helping to. As the producer at his production company is really helping him come into his own. And I think the main thing is that as she's hitting her stride, you know, she's working with great writers, great directors, and she's thinking through ideas about what we understand now to be film noir, you know, and thinking through storytelling and trying to do something really different in terms of the films that are coming out at that time. So yeah, go ahead.
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Annie Burke
You coined this term femme noir, kind of like, like a play on film noir. Can you say a little bit about sort of what this new genre she is sort of furthering? I won't say like single handedly pioneering, but she's like a key contributor to. In this, in this moment. And maybe just for those listening, what's your favorite of her solo career in this moment? If we're going to watch one, Joan Harrison sort of inspired Joan Harrison at the helm movie. Which one? Which one's, which one's your favorite?
- [34:55]
Christina Lane
Okay, sure. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, and so what she, you know, again. Right. There are a whole lot of films within that cycle of the gothic, gothic film noir with, you know, kind of the woman, a woman especially someone who might be kind of trapped in a domestic circle, who's investigating the psychological space and kind of discovering her own oppression at the hands of, you know, a husband or a male figure. So there, there are those films. One of the things that, that Joan Harrison's own films are definitely doing is just these reversals or these twists and turns that are, that are really surprise, you know, they have surprise endings or they break conventions in ways that question conventions of like family, you know, family dynamics. They show really some kind of really subverting notions about what a healthy family means, you know, and she did not, she, she would outwardly say that she didn't believe in marriage, the institution of marriage. She would paint romance as being quite perverted and those, you know, and she would, she would try to avoid ending with a happy, like a happy couple. And obviously, I mean, a lot of wars that we see, you're not going to end with a happy couple because you have, for example, a male figure who's destined, you know, he's like faded to have nothing go right in his life. But, but with her it was more than that. It was basically you would have, even if you had a marriage proposal, it would, you know, with Phantom lady, for example.
- [36:36]
Annie Burke
Right.
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Christina Lane
The marriage proposal would happen with the proposing man off screen. So it would still be, you know, you know that we're going to have a marriage, but she would not let you see it happen with the couple together. Just, you know, little, little kind of subversion.
- [36:55]
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- [37:54]
Christina Lane
Family that vacations together stays together. At least that was the plan. Except now the dastardly desk clerk is saying he can't confirm your connecting rooms.
- [38:04]
Sponsor Voice
Wait, what?
- [38:04]
That's right, ma'.
- [38:05]
Am.
- [38:05]
You have rooms 201 and 709.
- [38:08]
No, we cannot be five floors away from our kids.
- [38:10]
Christina Lane
Eh?
- [38:11]
Sponsor Voice
The doors have double locks. They'll be fine.
- [38:13]
Christina Lane
When you want connecting rooms confirmed before.
- [38:15]
Annie Burke
You arrive, it matters where you stay.
- [38:18]
Christina Lane
Welcome to Hilton. I see your connecting rooms are already confirmed. Hilton for the stay.
- [38:25]
Annie Burke
That sounds a little bit like almost a continuation when I think of the end of Suspicion, which you worked on with Hitchcock, that that sort of happy ending that still leaves some kind of uneasiness in the pit of your stomach that somehow not every thread has been tied up so neatly in terms of all of the reasons that that the wife has thought her husband is trying to murder her the whole time. It all seems a little too tidy and at the same time not entirely convincing. So even when you get a happy ending, it seems like maybe that was something that Harrison gave to Hitchcock or that they formulated together the kind of what I've heard to refer as the uneasy happy ending, or the sort of the purposely. The purposely suspicious clothes that makes you feel as though the filmmaker cannot say, for reasons of code or genre, that maybe this husband really is murderous after all. Or maybe this marriage won't be entirely happy. And then that kind of makes the Viewer meet them in that, in that cynical place or in that dark place, even if the film is not willing to go all the way in saying it. And so Phantom lady, is that a personal favorite or which one do you recommend to me?
- [39:39]
Christina Lane
Yeah, I, Well, I would, I would, I would go with. It's really. Again, you know, I could pick any one of them. Yeah. And make a case for them. But I would say if you're looking for. I would go with. They won't believe me, actually.
- [39:53]
Annie Burke
Agree.
- [39:54]
Christina Lane
Yeah, yeah. And partly because, I mean, just to give you like one sentence, you know, as a reason, you know, so you've got Robert Young. Right. And he's supposedly the main character. He's been called an fatale, you know. Right. The, the kind of home wrecking, destructive, self destructive male character. And he's on trial. So he's the premise by which we're kind of getting the story through his flashbacks. But basically as we move through that, you get these three female characters and they are so well drawn and the performances are really quite great. So I think at first glance it's easy to maybe if you're not really watching that movie, but you have it on in the background, you know, you say, oh my gosh. Well, you know, so three women. But they're, they're almost caricatures. And, and who cares about Robert Young? He's a despicable figure. But if you watch especially the latest version which has just been released this year, and it's, it's got 15 added minutes, the texture and the nuance, you know, both the treatment of him and also with the, the three, the three females, you know, three women in his life. What do you hear?
- [41:07]
Annie Burke
Three women and Despicable Man. You had me at three women and then you had me even more with Despicable Man. No, they won't believe me. That's. I'm going to have to look for that next one. I just want to go into one more aspect of her time in the studios, the sort of makeover montage that I like to think of as punctuating the middle of your book. Joan Harrison seems like she was always sort of a put together, stylish lady, but she got her own kind of star makeover when she entered into solo producing career. They kind of made her into a real life Grace Kelly. Maybe not the real Grace Kelly, but a Grace Kelly character from one of Hitchcock's films. What did like, tell us about that sort of studio Persona management when she came under, even though it seems like she was working primarily Freelance.
- [41:56]
Christina Lane
She still.
- [41:57]
Annie Burke
The studio stepped in to kind of make her into a professional that they could sell to people like Hedda Hopper and the. And the fan magazines.
- [42:05]
Christina Lane
They did, yeah. So when she signs on for Phantom lady, it's clear that. That she does. She gets a makeover. And she is. I mean, she is sold across the country, Right. In trade magazines. And these publicity. Basically, these still photos. Right. In these publicity shoots that are done of her as she. She. Her hair is. Right. Is dyed much more blonde. She becomes kind of a peroxide blonde. She loses a great deal of weight. I was actually told. Kind of off, you know. Right. I don't put this in the book, but that she was doing a lot of enema. Kind of. Yeah, yeah. She was doing a lot of stuff to her body to lose a lot of weight. That really wrecked her later. And she. But, I mean, she was always actually very petite. Right. I mean, she didn't really need to lose. Nobody needs to lose. Right. Nobody needs to lose weight. But it was never as though she needed to go through a makeover. But the studio clearly saw an opportunity to create a star, just as they could do with Joan Fontaine and they could see. Sell her as a property. But I. I also try very hard in the. In the book to suggest. Because I. I see ways in which she helped write, you know, her. The copy. Right. I believe that she had some agency in the way in which. I mean, the Mistress of Suspense. Right. The way in which she was trying to. To put her own. Kind of put her write herself in the image of Hitchcock. There. There's no doubt in my mind that she was participating, at least to a certain degree, in the construction of her image. And it's interesting to see some of the. There's certain photos of her in England when she's working behind the scenes. There aren't that many, but there are a couple. And she looks so different. Even the ones when she's on the set of Born Correspondent, there's such a contrast between the way that she, you know, she just kind of presents herself, the way that, you know her as an. Or the way that she is, versus the way that she. The way that she has become just a different Joan Harrison by the time she's working for Universal and she doesn't. And from then on. Right. That is Joan Harrison in the. Even in the 1970s, she's still. She's still the. The person of the 1940s. So she's bought into that image.
- [44:32]
Annie Burke
Mm. So it sounds like she's having a glamorous if taxing time in the studios. What motivated her to leave solo film production in the mid-1950s to work on television's Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which I Believe premiered in 1955.
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Christina Lane
It did, yes. So, you know, there's this period of time which is really, really difficult, Right. Really difficult for her when she, it's, it becomes clear that she may become subject to the blacklist. And the late 1940s, kind of right around 1949, she gets word that. I mean, I, I, this is, you know, this is nothing that I can show you in documentation, but it just seems my reading of, of what's going on is that, that she, she. The reason that she leaves Los Angeles and goes to Europe is because she's really fearful for what may happen to her career. And one of the reasons that I say that is because she signs a. She signs a contract with Columbia and she's due to make films with Harry Cohn. And within two months she's gone. You know, and there are reports of her talking, you know, with Evelyn Keys and, you know, and kind of like in low whispers, right? And all of a sudden, and it's suggested that they're either complaining about Harry Cohen or like something's going on and all of a sudden she's just gone. And so the suggestion is that she was being told, either by him because he would often signal to his own. His own contract stars or writers that they were about to be about to be about to be put. That they were. Yeah, that they were about to be called before to testify. So he would actually let them know.
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Annie Burke
Well, this is a real. That's a really compelling historiographic problem, history of history, which is whenever the blacklist involved is involved, it feels like there's sort of this, like, lost track of audio, like a radio silence. Because so often that was just the kind of thing you wouldn't necessarily want to put in writing that, you know, what meetings you've been to, why someone might suspect you. So that does seem like this. The silence is somewhat damning, not necessarily about her, but about, like, what's motivating her and what fears she might be having and why people might be turning her away. And it does seem like television became something of a refuge for a lot of blacklisted. I'm not so sure, so experienced about producers, but certainly blacklisted writers sometimes worked for television under different names or on one offs. It was harder in film. So that does. Harrison, as I recall, did hire blacklisted writers where she could and tried to help them.
- [47:32]
Christina Lane
Out.
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Annie Burke
But what was. So in the mid-50s, she came back into the hitch, into Hitchcock's folds, possibly motivated by sort of a threatened career due to political, for political reasons. Back in Hitchcock's employ, they were brought together by super agent growing agencies. Lou Wasserman, what was her job on Alfred Hitchcock Presents? What was her role on the show?
- [48:01]
Christina Lane
Yeah, so she was the producer of the show and she was there to make sure that, you know, again, she was running everything. So, so Alfred Hitchcock was, you know, it was almost as though he was there for branding purposes. I mean, it's not that he didn't do anything on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, you know, but he was, he was there. He directed maybe 20 episodes out of the 300ish episodes. And he had very little to do with the running of the day to day show. So that was Joan Harrison's role is she did everything from choosing the writers, choosing the material, choosing location, doing all the legal rights, and then obviously editing and getting each episode to airing the broadcast. Her main function, the reason that they knew that they needed Joan Harrison, when I say they, I mean Lou Wasserman and Hitchcock was that she was the only person who could make sure that every show was had like the Alfred Hitchcock signature. Right. That kind of, she could certify that this was a Hitchcock show.
- [49:11]
Annie Burke
Well, I mean, just based on the sort of the years that this show ran, it would be hard to argue that Hitchcock was playing sort of a day to day important role, considering these are the years that he made Vertigo, north by Northwest, Psycho, he was busy. And so it sounds like, you know, a lot of the responsibilities of the show were delegated to Harrison. And knowing the work that Harrison had done with him and then on her own in the 40s, how did that come through in the shows? When you see Alfred Hitchcock Presents, do you see a lot of Harrison there?
- [49:45]
Christina Lane
Yes, yeah. She, you know, she was most interested in basically kind of the underbelly, right. The very kind of, the very kind of the violence, right. And the sexual and the violent impulses that are always kind of streaming there underneath in terms of the domestic sphere and the family. And not that every single episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents has to do with families and couples, but a lot because, because that show was being broadcast into the home. It was often kind of speaking to audiences about, about the, about domestic spaces, you know, and that's what she was most interested in. So there was almost this kind of one to one conversation that she was having with families, about families. I think it was really interesting in that Sense. And also, you know, her. We often think about Hitchcock as being so interested in the fact that you're your own neighbor. Right. The very ordinary looking and ordinary seeming person could be the most violent criminal. And so, you know, she was even, I think, before they met. She was also very interested in that idea that you shouldn't assume, you know, that violent, hardened criminals look a certain way, you know, but that they really are right next door. And that's the theme of this, of the series.
- [51:11]
Annie Burke
Seems like one of the sort of best known episodes that feels like you might be referencing. Was written by, adapted from his own story, Roald Dahl's Lamb to the Slaughter, starring Barbara Bel Geddes. Can you give us a little bit of insight into sort of the Harrison imprint on that, on that episode?
- [51:33]
Christina Lane
Yeah, that's a perfect example, right. Of basically a wife who is, who has murdered her husband. And this is. The police come in to investigate. And so we've got a leg of lamb. Well, it's not, it's not, it's not a leg of lamb. But she serves the weapon. Yeah. Because it's a frozen leg of lamb that she battered her husband with. And so she basically serves. Yes, she cooks it up. Right. She cooks up the leg of lamb and has the police or the investigators sit around her table. And it's just the idea of bringing them in and treating them very civilly while she feeds them that very leg of lamb. And, and I. And. And the husband's body is, Is. Well, we know Grant.
- [52:26]
Annie Burke
I mean, she, she bludgeons him with the lamb shelter and then the police eat the evidence. But that I remember is that's one of the episodes that Hitchcock directed. But it feels like pretty representative of the kinds of themes that we're talking about. We have murderous husbands and that one is a pretty memorable murderous wife played by the actress who plays Mitch in Vertigo. So it definitely. You talk about that kind of continuity across film and television. We have Hitchcock sort of portraying her as a, as a beleaguered minor character, second banana in Vertigo. And then she sort of becomes this really delightfully unhinged main character in the television series. So Harrison is able to, you know, in certain ways render something even more dark and grotesque on television, which is kind of surprising. She's like a murderous. She's a murderous Donna Reed. She's. So she works on that show. The show becomes an hour long show, but then she leaves at some point and she decides to move on. And we're sort of entering into the Twilight of Joan Harrison's career at this point. And her ending is like, not very dramatic. It doesn't, it's. It's not. It ends sort of with a whimper and not a bang. Can you tell us a little bit about sort of the final years from in Hollywood after her marriage to suspense writer or sort of novelist Eric Ambler?
- [54:01]
Christina Lane
Because I think it tells us a.
- [54:02]
Annie Burke
Lot about sort of not just Joan Harrison, but how women do get left out of this history and why.
- [54:08]
Christina Lane
Yes, yes. And what happens is. So the series ends and 1965. And with that she actually tries to get another series off the ground with her husband with Eric Handler. They write a series and they pitch it, but it goes nowhere. And this is what starts to happen is she. She would love to continue to work and she has other ideas, but she's now, you know, she. She has always lied about her age. So people don't really know how old she is, but she's in her 50s, going to. Into her 60s. And so she's perceived as being kind of outdated, you know, in the. As we move from old Hollywood to new Hollywood, right. Classic Hollywood into the new Hollywood, a lot of people in her generation are perceived as being kind of out outmoded, but for women it's doubly worse. And so she, for, you know, for a couple of things are happening. One is when she marries Eric Ambler, who is this really, you know, quite, quite renowned spy novelist, she also creates a lot of tension with Hitchcock because Hitchcock sees her as betraying him, you know, and so she kind of makes that choice where she's now isolating herself in a certain sense. And, and so while she does actually she makes a series with Aaron Spelling for ABC in the early 1970s, you know, there are a couple of like, fits and starts. She really is unfortunately not very productive. And in terms of being kind of forgotten, right, and being written out of history, as she basically is living out her life in. In London with Eric Ambler and winds up becoming more and more ill. She's increasingly sick. What's happening is Alfred Hitchcock is enjoying more and more success. There's lots of retrospectives, biographies are being written. You know, more and more books are coming out celebrating his incredible legacy. Meanwhile, he's helping to write his own history. And so as he tells his story, he's really not giving much credit to really anybody. But the last person that he's thinking to credit is Joan Harrison. You know, he's. He's definitely not pointing out her, her contributions and no one is looking for her. You know, Even I would say women who, in the 1970s, second wave feminists, you know, those women who are looking for role models are, are. They tend to look for directors. You know, it's kind of an autourist moment. And so they're not looking for women producers as role models. And she definitely is not a woman to stand out and say, hey, you know, here I am. Please tell my story. But it's. It's the fault, I think, of traditional history. Right. Traditional historians. It's definitely kind of a masculinist view of film history.
- [57:15]
Annie Burke
Well, that's a really sad ending for Joan Harrison, who had such a colorful career. But it's so great that you've managed to sort of recuperate her as an artist and also just sort of as an important businesswoman, sort of possibility for women to look at in that moment when they're reading about her in a gossip column. That she really did sort of. She did really loom large in her moment, even if she was sort of forgotten quickly afterwards. And now finally is getting her due. We only have time for one more question, and I want it to be about sort of the way that this book has allowed you to pivot your readership as a professor, as an academic, to a more general audience. Your book won the Edgar Award, which is given by the Mystery Writers of America. So congratulations.
- [58:06]
Christina Lane
That, that's a.
- [58:07]
Annie Burke
That's a great achievement, and it's a testament to how your book really is achieving what so many scholarly writers want to do, which is find that crossover audience. So knowing that your book did want to appeal to sort of readers beyond the subfield or an academic specialty, how did that change the way you wrote it and the way you sort of sought out a publisher, the way you promoted it, just in general, how did that change the way that you did things from, say, your first book?
- [58:39]
Christina Lane
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I. I knew that I wanted to find as wide of a readership as possible because I wanted to bring Joan Harrison's, you know, life and career to as many people as possible. So it was a strategic choice. And, and, and for that reason, I mean, one of the things that I had to do is make much more cool, grander claims.
- [59:02]
Annie Burke
Right.
- [59:02]
Christina Lane
That I probably would have made. You know, as an academic and as a scholar, we are trained to qualify everything, you know, and to kind of hold back on the kinds of statements that we make. And the, you know, we, we, for very good reason, we are always kind of trying to make sure that we stay within. Within certain statements in certain Realms and to. To essentially to sell this idea. Right. To sell the project. So at every single stage, I really needed to make. Make a big. Right. You have to kind of do. Do things bigger and be ready to stand by the statements. I was never going to make a statement I couldn't stand by. Right, of course, but I really did have to make basically re. Re engineer the way that I thought because otherwise it's, It's. You kind of have to advertise in a different way. And so what that meant, and, And I guess is also that I was constantly checking my research and like, trying to find three, four, five, six sources, because if I was going to say something like, for example, Joan Harrison was a creative producer. She was functioning as a creative producer by 1938. 8. You know, I wanted to make sure I could really stand by that because I thought that was a huge, huge discovery, like a research discovery. Now that's not going to sell, right? That's not going to sell a book. That was actually more of a historical claim that no one else could had like, been making in terms of that collaboration, that professional collaboration. She had been dismissed, you know, so much so often in the Hitchcock scholarship that I wanted to be able to put that book out and have it make, like, matter in both realms, you know, So I wanted to be able to say something like she was a. An original Hitchcock blonde. That would be kind of the. A selling point in the more commercial market. And I found enough evidence for that. But then the idea that she was functioning at such a high level to do that, I was checking in Tom Schatz's research. I would check his books and then I would go back and check his original sources and go into the archives. And what I wound up doing by the time I was in my final drafts is I was asking those Hitchcock scholars that I respected the most to read, you know, to read my, My manuscript because I didn't want the book to come out and at that stage have those folks say, oh, well, Christina, you really should miss. You really blew it there. And, and that's, that's what I was balancing, right? I was balancing kind of the scholarly heft of it with the other kind of commercial. The, the jingles.
- [62:07]
Annie Burke
Definitely. Well, you. You nailed it. Christina, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. My very first guest on New Books Network. You're. You're very generous with your time and thank you for sharing so much about your book. Highly recommended to everyone listening. Thanks again and see you next time.
- [62:28]
Christina Lane
Thank you very.
- [62:43]
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