Tying some threads together

 My long-awaited copy of Christina Lane's Phantom Lady, her biography of Joan Harrison, arrived from Waterstone's last week and did not disappoint. Harrison was a close associate of Alfred Hitchcock, his wife Alma Reville and their daughter Patricia. She was a writer, script editor and eventually a Hollywood producer in her own right. Her major achievement was probably what is now termed "showrunner" for Alfred Hitchcock Presents which ran for eight years on various networks in the US and was taken up by ITV in the UK. 

Ms Lane's thorough research fills in a lot of gaps in the sketch of Sarett Rudley logged here four years ago. She has turned up a couple of marriages which I missed, for one thing. Sarett (described by Lane as "a ball of fire") worked on the Hitchcock TV series and also on Journey to the Unknown a Harrison series produced in Britain jointly with Hammer after Harrison had moved back to Europe with husband Eric Ambler. Harrison had had a number of affairs with prominent men in Hollywood. It was quite a surprise when she appeared to opt for domesticity with Ambler. There was clearly affection on both sides - the marriage lasted until Harrison's death in 1994 - but Ambler once remarked that "the only person Joan really loved was a woman". Christina Lane proposes that the woman was Sarett Tobias. There is good evidence. Sarett was in a relationship with Richard Mason's first wife when she became his second, and the honeymoon appears to have become a threesome. I would still dearly love to see a photo from when the Masons set up their farm in Wales. Surely some mid-Wales newspaper archive has a photo of the famous author and his attractive wife attending a show?

The other thread was that of Norman Lloyd, socialist and veteran of the Federal Theater Project, an offshoot of FDR's "New Deal". He was an obvious candidate for the Hollywood blacklist and had to retreat from cinema and TV to the New York stage to make a living. Though he had long been a friend of Hitchcock, it was at Joan Harrison's insistence that Lloyd came back to work in TV, on the Hitchcock series, overcoming network reservations. It was not just because Lloyd was a favourite tennis partner; Harrison hated the blacklist and managed to bring many writers and actors back in from the cold. Lloyd was later an executive producer on Journey to the Unknown, which sadly lasted only one season in spite of good critical reviews. There is more on Norman Lloyd, who died last year, on IMDb.

I thoroughly recommend Phantom Lady.