Alma interrupted rudely, “I do not influence my husband in his profession, Miss Adair…” (And may God forgive me for that statement!) “… so I’m sorry, but I have to ring off. Good-bye.” Alma hung up.
Nancy Adair, in a phone kiosk outside the entrance gate to the Gaumont-British Studios, slammed the receiver down and roughly shoved the door open. She crossed the street to her automobile while the guard at the gate admired her trim figure and her beautiful mane of blond hair. Dressed in a carefully tailored mannish suit in the style recently made popular by Marlene Dietrich, Nancy Adair appeared to be not yet thirty. Her face was a tribute to the art of her beautician, and her temper was a throwback to her late unlamented parents. She got behind the wheel of her car, slammed the door shut, lit a cigarette, and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She was a very determined young woman.
“But it is so dangerous for you to be carrying so much weight!” exclaimed Hans Meyer as he and Hitchcock emerged from the executive building and got into the back seat of the limousine that would drive them to the cottage. Hitchcock had gained weight while losing hair. Now in his late thirties, he considered himself still too young to contemplate mortality.
“You sound just like my doctor, who is a physical wreck.” Hitchcock sat with his hands folded over his stomach. “I don’t want to talk about myself, I want to talk about you and what’s happening in Germany.”
“What’s happening in Germany is a Schrecklichkeit.” It sounded ugly, and Hitchcock winced. “That means a fright, a dreadful horror, something terrifying.”
“Like my first two films. Drive carefully, Edgar!” he admonished the chauffeur as they almost sideswiped a car driven by a blonde woman who pulled out of the opposite side of the street as they came out of the studio.
“Her fault, sir, the bloody bitch,” said Edgar, who chauffeured only for Hitchcock, his regular job being that of studio carpenter.
“As you were saying, Hans.”
“I don’t know where to begin. I’m so lucky to have gotten out.”
“You’re not Jewish, are you?”
“No, but Nazi persecution isn’t restricted to Jews. It includes Gypsies, homosexuals, intellectuals who refuse to bow before Hitler and his gang and are brave enough to speak out against him.…”
“There are some pretty awful films coming out of there,” said Hitchcock, who’d recently had an offer to do a film in Berlin and firmly rejected it.
“How can they help but be awful, they’re either Nazi propaganda or old-fashioned operettas.”
“How did you learn you were on their blacklist?” Hitchcock wondered what had become of the man’s pencil-thin mustache. Clean-shaven and tired, Hans Meyer had arrived in England a fortnight earlier and couldn’t believe his ears when Hitchcock’s secretary said Mr. Hitchcock did remember the young actor who could climb mountains. What was more important, over the past decade, Meyer had made a good reputation for himself playing villains and oddball characters not only in German films, but in French and Italian ones as well. Hitchcock had seen a good deal of his work, and there was the possibility of a part for him in The Lady Vanishes.
“Well, when, after ten years of working steadily your phone stops ringing and your agent doesn’t return your calls, you begin to suspect you have a problem.”
“I should say so. Bloody agents. Now tell me the truth. What have you done to incur the Nazi’s displeasure?”
“I had a falling out with Leni Riefenstahl. You know her work?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve run some of her things. She also climbs mountains.”
“That was how we first met. It was in her film The Blue Light. Now she’s a big favorite with the Nazis. There was a rumor she was for a while Hitler’s girlfriend.”
“I thought he preferred boyfriends.”
“His tastes are eclectic. Actually, the suspicion is that he is asexual, but that is neither here nor there.”
“It is for him.”
Meyer sighed and rubbed his palms on his trousers. “Riefenstahl wanted me to join the Nazis, but I couldn’t stomach that idea. You know, I always dreamed of going to Hollywood.” Hitchcock smiled. “Well, a few actors have made it there, haven’t they?”
“Well, Peter Lorre’s gotten himself a contract despite his bad teeth and his obesity. He’ll probably spend the rest of his career in thrillers.”
Hans Meyer asked, “Do you think Mrs. Hitchcock will remember me?”
‘Indeed, Hans Meyer, indeed. A week doesn’t pass that we don’t recall those awful murders. You see, Alma and I would love to do a film about that time, but we can’t find the MacGuffin.”
“The who?”
Hitchcock explained the MacGuffin. “Ah so!”
“For a while there, we thought of using Rosie Wagner as our MacGuffin, but we could never figure out what might have happened to her. Have you any idea? You apparently were a friend of hers. “
“No, I wasn’t,” said Meyers hastily.
“But you went along in the ambulance with her to the sanatorium.”
“I felt sorry for her. I thought she was dying. She was so alone, that’s what the studio doctor told me. Her mother dead. Her father murdered. So I volunteered to accompany her to the sanatorium.”
“Do you know if she ever came out of that catatonic state?”
“She must have, to have run away from there the way she did.”
“What way was that?” Hitchcock was wondering if at last he was on to something. Edgar the chauffeur was cursing the bad driving of the blonde woman in the car behind him. On two occasions she had seemed to be trying either to pass them or pull up alongside, and both times she’d almost crashed into cars coming from the opposite direction.
“Well, what I heard
