Eva Marie Saint doesn’t remember the first Hitchco*ck movie she ever saw, but the 90-year-old star of North by Northwest does recall the most indelible Hitchco*ck moment. “I remember Janet (Leigh) and I were talking about it once, and she said she couldn’t take a shower without locking the door,” Saint told us about Psycho’s most infamous scene. “I said, I have a secret, I can’t either. It was so dynamic and the music has so much to do with it.”
The music had everything to do with it on Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl, where Saint hosted The Big Picture: Hitchco*ck!, a salute to the master of suspense and film composers such as Dimitri Tiomkin, Alfred Newman, and, of course, Bernard Herrmann, whose music for Psycho slices like a steak knife through the popular imagination.
Herrmann also scored Hitch’s previous movie, North by Northwest, starring Saint, Cary Grant, and James Mason. It was the last of a string of classics the director made in the 50s, including Psycho, Rear Window, and Vertigo; the films starred a string of blonds like Grace Kelly, Doris Day, Vera Miles, and, in 1959, Saint, in North By Northwest, despite the studio’s insistence on using Cyd Charisse.
“He didn’t talk about acting. He worked with me from the outside in,” Saint recalled about working with Hitch. “My hair, my makeup, my shoes, my jewelry, my purse, my gloves, everything. And just from creating that exterior for me, he gave me the sense of a spy lady. But we never talked about emotion. He told me not to use my hands, I have a habit of doing that, and to lower my voice. And always, in my scenes with Cary Grant, look directly into his eyes, which was not difficult.”
When it came time to shoot her big kiss with Grant, Saint says she could only think of one thing. “I was hoping I wouldn’t step on his feet,” she confessed with a smile. “That was the scene on the train and we had to move like the train was moving and there was a still man taking photos while we were doing the scene. He was up about 12 or 15 steps, he got so involved in the kissing scene he fell off the ladder. He didn’t hurt himself so we can laugh about it. So then we had to do it again, which wasn’t bad.”
Not bad at all for a woman who played opposite nearly every matinee idol of the 50s and 60s, from Paul Newman in Exodus, to Montgomery Clift in Raintree County, Warren Beatty in All Fall Down, and Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.
Her years studying first at the American Theatre Wing at the New School and later at the Actors Studio prepared her for that last one, an indelible collaboration with the Studio’s legendary founder, Elia Kazan, and American Theatre Wing alum Marlon Brando, who three years earlier had revolutionized acting in A Streetcar Named Desire.
In On the Waterfront, Brando plays a dockworker by day, boxer by night. In a pivotal moment while wooing Saint, she accidentally drops a glove. As he stoops and picks it up, Brando brings a physical dynamic to the scene that was nonexistent on the page. During rehearsal, Saint dropped the glove by accident and Brando picked it up, and instead of giving it back, tried it on.
“Any other actor might have just picked that up, gave it to me and then we proceed with the dialogue,” she offered. “But no, he caressed that glove, very sensuous the way he did it.” When they showed Kazan, he asked them to do it for the camera. “For Marlon to have picked up that glove in rehearsal, I thought that was a pivotal moment. The glove keeps her there and it shows his feelings for her in a very subtle, or maybe not-so-subtle way.”
She was 30 when she won the Oscar for that movie, and only two days away from giving birth to her first child. By the time she worked with Hitchco*ck on North by Northwest, she was 35 and had just given birth to her second child. And while other actresses might have strayed in the arms of all those matinee idols, Saint has been with husband Jeffrey Hayden for 63 years. In fact, he was the reason she decided to do North by Northwest, when she was initially underwhelmed by the script.
“I vividly remember him saying, ‘Honey, I think you should find a quiet spot. I’ll take care of the children and I want you to really think about this and reread this script,’” she recalled. “He was so right. And that’s what husbands are for.”
