Having delved into the lives of Leopold and Loeb (here), I turned my attention to Patrick Hamilton, the author of Rope, the play that has traditionally been cited as having been based on their case. I felt there were some loose threads left hanging in my comments about him. So I untied a few knots, at least in my own understanding about the play and its idiosyncratic author (below, in his apartment at the storied Albany.)

Rope was staged to great acclaim in London’s West End in 1929 and starred a very young Brian Aherne in the key role of Wyndham Brandon, the mastermind of the murder which takes place moments before the curtain rises. The hit was then brought over to New York (sans Aherne, below) where it was renamed Rope’s End (after Complex was ruled out) so as not to be confused with an earlier play named Rope. The drama was a smash on Broadway and ran for several months. Times drama critic, J. Brooks Atkinson (he still used the initial then), said in his review that “those who can stomach it must be prepared to relish an evening of pure morbidity.”

Reading the actual play, I discovered a few surprising things (at least to me). First the play is not more explicitly homosexual than the film by Alfred Hitchcock done several years later. That seems to be a fallacy which has been passed on for decades by critics dissing the movie. The play is more subdued, even stilted. Aherne’s character states melodramatically: “I have done murder…I have committed passionless – motiveless – faultless – and clueless murder. Bloodless and noiseless murder.” Underscoring the point again, he describes it as “an immaculate murder.” His motive for such a clean, thoughtless act? “I have killed for the sake of danger and for the sake of killing. And I am alive. Truly and wonderfully alive.” The final speech in which Rupert Cadell chastises his friends for their brutality is basically a moral argument that murder is wrong because it hurts other people.  Ultimately it reads like a defense of capital punishment. The “rope” used to strangle the victim becomes in the end the instrument of justice since the two boys, curses Cadell, will certainly hang for their crime.

The gay element one could argue, parsing words, is hinted at but only in the most superficial brush strokes. The house shared by Brandon and Granillo is “furnished in a luxurious and faintly bizarre manner.” Brandon has large hands and “his build that of the boxer.” Granillo, the queenier one who frets a great deal, is of Spanish descent and wears a diamond ring. He is described as “something between a dancing master and a stage villain.” It’s Rupert Cadell, the all-knowing friend that uncovers their nefarious doings, who is the predominantly gay character. He is “a little foppish in dress and appearance and this impression is increased by the very exquisite walking-stick which he carries indoors as well as not.” He is lame in his right leg, due to a war injury (no doubt a symbol of impotence). “He is enormously affected in speech and carriage… His affectation almost verges on effeminacy, and can be very irritating.” It sounds to me as if Hamilton were channeling Lord Henry Wotton from The Picture of Dorian Gray.

If anything it is the film which accentuated the gay relationship between the two protagonists. Whether this was deliberate on the part of Arthur Laurents who co-wrote the screenplay with Hume Cronyn has been oft debated. Perhaps it was inevitable with two predominantly gay stars in the leads: Farley Granger and John Dall (above, with the hopelessly miscast Jimmy Stewart). Or possibly it was Hitchcock himself who emphasized the more perverse elements of the story line through his witty direction. But reading the actual play (seen below with John Barrowman in a recent staging), I was surprised to find that there is little of the camp humor and coy double entendres of the film. It is basically a lurid thriller about the unfeeling upper class.

The other fallacy regarding the play is the much-touted claim that Patrick Hamilton based his play on the Leopold and Loeb case (or the Loeb-Leopold case as it was commonly called back then before Loeb was murdered and Leopold became the more dominant character merely by having survived.) Hamilton denied that his play was inspired by any criminal case. He said at the time that he had never heard of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. And reading the play one is struck by the fact that aside from the “thrill-kill” aspect of the murder there is very little in common with the Chicago case. First of all, the Oxford roommates have killed a man their own age, rather than a boy. They have not stripped him naked and stuffed his body in a culvert and demanded ransom from his parents. Instead they have placed the body in a chest on which they serve dinner. Only the boy’s father is invited to attend the cocktail party they throw in the victim’s honor. And third, the character of Rupert Cadell, who gives the all-important moral speech at the climax of the play, is a complete figment of Hamilton’s imagination.

Why then have writers (myself included) persisted in saying that Rope is based on the Leopold and Loeb case? Patrick’s brother Bruce wrote a memoir of their close friendship (The Light Went Out, 1972) in which he states candidly that “The idea of murder for ‘kicks’, given body by his reading of Nietzsche, came from the Loeb-Leopold case in America.” He claimed that Hamilton had written the play in a white heat, “the first draft scribbled on old envelopes and odd scraps of paper in saloon bars and small Lyons teashops.” Hamilton, he says, had become obsessed with the “divine hysterias” of Thus Spake Zarathustra. But in his preface to the published version, Hamilton went to great pains to deny any connection. So was he in denial?

That’s a question Hamilton’s biographers pondered. There have been two biographies, one by by Nigel Jones (Through a Glass Darkly, 1991) and Sean French (Patrick Hamilton, A Life, 1993). French doubts Hamilton’s denial of being influenced by the infamous Chicago case. “Books about famous trials were, with trashy westerns, always his favorite leisure reading. His contention that he was not influenced by the Leopold and Loeb case is simply not credible.”

Jones’ book questions whether Hamilton himself might have had homosexual tendencies. “We have Bruce’s word that Patrick did not have physical homosexual affairs, although he admitted to his brother in later life that this was less from a lack of desire than from a failure of nerve and intrigue.” Like many Englishmen of his class, who went to boarding school, Hamilton had been exposed to adolescent affairs between boys. But he seems to have ignored it. “I myself had passes made at me as a boy,” he said, “but they just didn’t take.” French agreed with Jones’ assessment, categorizing Hamilton’s marriage as basically “a platonic relationship,” adding “There is no evidence of any homosexual side to Hamilton after his schooldays, but Bruce had various fears about his brother’s sex life…”

If anything, the odd relationship between the two men in Rope seems to be more a reflection of the strange bond between Patrick and his brother Bruce. In letters Patrick wrote him, in breathless prose — “Your truly loving, loving, loving, loving, loving…” etc  — his intimacies take on an almost incestuous tone. The friendship was deeply co-dependent. As Bruce puts it, “he and I became all in all to each other.”

In fact it is fascinating to read Patrick Hamilton’s letters to his brother which are kept at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, particularly those that touch upon the enormous success of Rope. Patrick seems to have felt that his having “made it” on the stage would solve the pair’s financial woes. Indeed, Hamilton lived off the royalties from it, and other hit plays, for the rest of his life. “How can I begin to describe to you the uncanniness of my success?” he wrote Bruce (quoted with permission). “It is all a strange Byronic dream. For it is not only the money, it is the fame. And by this, I do not mean a petty notoriety… I have done exactly what Noel Coward did with The Vortex. I am known, established… the world is truly at my feet… And all through Rope. It’s all too funny.” He ends the letter by saying “Remember that we have come into our estate.” Clearly for Hamilton, Rope represented a means to draw an even closer tie to his beloved brother.

Reading about Hamilton’s unusual life and childhood (his father had married a prostitute, and he in turn had a mad affair with one and was a flaming alcoholic) I was struck by how much of the material I’ve haphazardly written about on this blog over the years stems from his imagination! I did not know, for instance, when I first posted about Rope that Patrick Hamilton had written the novel Hangover Square on which the film starring Laird Cregar which I wrote about in my piece about The Lodger had been based. The film was a horrible bowdlerization of the novel, having changed time periods, characters and plot to concoct a Victorian vehicle for its stars Cregar, George Sanders and Linda Darnell. Hamilton hated it so much he reportedly was sick after seeing it. But the link to Rope is there in its macabre themes of insanity and murder.

So too Gaslight which Hamilton first wrote as a play for the London stage. It was made into a marvelous British film, above, starring Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook (of Red Shoes fame). Then it ran for years on Broadway renamed Angel Street. Later it was turned into a Hollywood vehicle for Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. (A curious side note: in the film of Rope, the characters gossip about Ingrid Bergman who was Hitchcock’s pet obsession at the time. In the play they discuss Joan Crawford!) As for Gaslight, the original British film was bought up by the American producers and reels destroyed. Luckily a few copies survived. The original is in many ways superior to the George Cukor version, although it lacks the other’s soaring romanticism and cinematic flair. What it does reveal, however, is Hamilton’s fixations on class, money, power and influence, themes which were at the heart of his play Rope.

Patrick Hamilton also wrote The Gorse Trilogy, a trio of clever novels about an amoral, good-looking cad who takes advantage of the men and women around him. It was turned into a marvelous TV series called The Charmer starring handsome Nigel Havers. It’s witty, shocking and brilliantly acted.

In America, Patrick Hamilton is barely known. Ironically when I went to look at copies of the three biographies of him which the University carries here, the library did not carry a single work of his. In England, by contrast, his reputation has grown enormously. He’s a highly praised writer whose star rises and falls depending on attention being paid to his very diverse novels rather than his plays, which are only occasionally mounted. Hangover Square, despite the lingering effect of its Hollywood version, remains a cult favorite. Recently many of his books were reissued by Black Spring Press and other firms.

So what did Patrick Hamilton think of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope? (That was the official title). According to his brother, “Although he had taken part in the early stages of the making of the picture, he had disliked it intensely, and felt that he had been bamboozled over it.” Patrick himself stated “I was heartbroken by the film of Rope… [Hitchcock] finally produced a film which I think (and all intelligent friends agree) was sordid and practically meaningless balls…”

What Patrick Hamilton could not have predicted is that it is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope that has stood the test of time, balls and all, while his well-made play remains merely a curious relic.