"The Pearl Necklace" is a lighthearted episode with a dark message underneath about love, money, power, and revenge. It opens outside a large mansion, with an expanse of lawn, a pool, and a tennis court, where an older man in a wheelchair is pushed to a spot where he can watch the end of a tennis match between a pretty young woman and a handsome young man. The older man, Howard Rutherford, looks on disapprovingly as the young couple kiss passionately. He summons the young woman to his side and dismisses the young man.
The woman is Rutherford's secretary, Charlotte, and he informs her that all of his ex-wives have been paid off and he is now worth over eleven million dollars, "'give or take a few.'" When he says that his next wife will inherit it all, she asks whom he plans to marry and he brazenly puts his hand on her bare thigh and tells her that, by marrying him, she will earn much more than her current salary of $85/week. As an enticement, Rutherford reveals that he has a weak heart and has at most a year to live. Charlotte responds that she's flattered but she has plans to marry Mark Lansing, her tennis partner; Rutherford suggests that she discuss his offer with Mark, whom she could marry after Howard dies.
The idea of an older man wanting to marry a much younger woman is not new, but the frank, direct way it is presented here seems almost like prostitution, where Rutherford offers a large sum of money to Charlotte in exchange for sharing his bed.
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| Hazel Court as Charlotte |
After a dissolve, time has passed and Charlotte has married Howard. A maid leaves and Rutherford joins her in their bedroom, where he compliments her beauty and presents her with a necklace that has a single pearl; he expresses his wish that he could give her a pearl for "'every year of bliss that we share together.'" For the third time in as many scenes, Charlotte looks horrified, as she did at Howard's initial proposal and Mark's support for the idea.
More time passes between this scene and the next one, where Howard and Charlotte are seated at either end of a long dinner table. From his pocket, he takes a pearl and rolls it along the table to his wife before drinking a toast to five years together; she looks less than thrilled and Howard asks if she's thinking of Mark. He reminds her that there will be "'plenty of time for that after I'm gone'" and chuckles in a way that suggests that he knows he has tricked her into a longer union than she expected.
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| Ernest Truex as Howard Rutherford |
Later, at Mark's apartment, Charlotte makes a surprise appearance and he expresses worry that she'll be seen. Deflecting her question about why he has taken down her pictures, Mark assures Charlotte that Howard can't last much longer. She is now 30 years old and Mark tells her that she can't quit now, insisting that the wait has been hard for him, too. Just as they declare their love for each other, another woman walks in and asks Mark, "'Hi, lover boy, am I late?'" Charlotte leaves in disgust, telling Mark that he can kiss $11M goodbye.
In the following scene, a decade has passed and a pretty nurse is tending to Howard, who is sitting up in bed. He rolls another pearl along the bedspread to Charlotte to mark 15 years of marriage; she is beginning to doubt him when he says that he could die soon and her necklace is now filled with pearls. Outside the mansion, Mark waits by the pool and receives a chilly reception from Charlotte. He saw news of Howard's illness in the paper but Charlotte's attitude toward her old paramour has changed; she is now warm to her husband but cold to her ex-lover.
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| Jack Cassidy as Mark Lansing |
Charlotte meets Mark's ten-year-old son Billy and Mark explains that he and Billy's mother divorced some time ago. The rich woman is charmed by the boy and invites him to return the next day to play tennis with her; in a sense, he is taking the place of his father, with whom she played tennis in the first scene, over 15 years ago. Later that summer, after a game of tennis, Billy leaves and Charlotte tells Mark that her husband has agreed to send Billy to the same prep school that Howard attended. Mark doesn't know it yet, but Charlotte is grooming the boy as a substitute for both her husband and her ex-lover. "'He's a very attractive boy, very intelligent,'" she remarks, before referring to her former relationship with Mark as "'unpleasant'" and telling him that she wants no further contact with him.
This is followed by two more scenes at the dinner table, where Howard rolls a pearl to Charlotte to mark another year of marriage; the pearls show the passage of time in their increasingly lengthy marriage and Charlotte's reaction now is noticeably more welcoming than it was at first. Finally, Howard looks much older and is barely able to roll the pearl to Charlotte, who looks older as well--he is 90 and she is 50 and he thanks her for "'25 years of unbelievable happiness.'" Howard laughs at the idea that this is the last pearl, since he has been warning of his own impending death for a quarter century; Charlotte tells him, "'I confess, I've grown rather fond of you.'" Howard collapses in his chair, dead at last, and Charlotte drinks a toast to her partner.
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| Michael Burns as Billy at 10 |
In the show's final scene, Mark confronts Charlotte in a rage, telling her that her plan to marry someone new is indecent, quite a change from his initial support for her marriage to Howard. Mark's son Billy enters, now a young, handsome man of twenty who embraces Charlotte and tells his father that "'our marriage was made in Heaven.'" The show ends on a close up of Charlotte as she smiles knowingly.
There is no crime or murder in "The Pearl Necklace," except perhaps Mark's crime in destroying Charlotte's love for him. The only suspense lies in waiting for Howard to die. There is no mention of sex, yet it is behind everything that occurs, especially Charlotte's marriage to Howard and her impending second marriage to Billy. She flips tradition on its head by planning to marry a man thirty years younger than herself and, by doing so, enacts revenge on Mark. Earlier, Howard admitted that he and Charlotte are proof that money can buy happiness and the real surprise in this story comes early, when Howard keeps on living and Charlotte and Mark's plan to inherit his money falls apart. The next surprise comes in the form of Mark's girlfriend, and the final surprise is that Charlotte is going to marry Billy. It's a transgressive ending that shows how far things had come on American television by 1961!
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| David Faulkner as Billy at 20 |
"The Pearl Necklace" is directed by Don Weis (1922-2000), who started in movies in 1951 but worked mostly in episodic television from 1954 to 1990. He directed The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953) and episodes of The Twilight Zone, Batman, The Night Stalker, and many others. His five episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents also included "Santa Claus and the Tenth Avenue Kid." An interesting article about Weis's career was published here.
This episode is not based on another source but is instead an original teleplay by a husband-and-wife team of writers. Peggy Shaw (1922-2014) began writing for TV in 1958, often with her husband, Lou Shaw, and their credits together ended in 1962. She continued writing as Peggy Shaw until 1965, then took a seven-year break and wrote for TV as Peggy O'Shea from 1971 to 1993, serving as head writer for three soap operas: Search for Tomorrow (1975-1976), One Life to Live (1979-1983 and 1984-1987), and Capitol (1983-1984). She won a Daytime Emmy in 1987. It's not clear if she and Lou Shaw remained married after they stopped writing together, but "The Pearl Necklace" was their only teleplay for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
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| Diane Webber as the other woman |
Lou Shaw (1925-2015) wrote mostly for TV from 1958 to 1986 and co-created the series Quincy, M.E., for which he wrote many teleplays from 1976 to 1983, winning an Edgar Award in 1978 for one of them. He also wrote a novel. Like his wife, this was his only teleplay for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
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| Shirley O'Hara as the maid |
Jack Cassidy (1927-1976) was a year younger than Hazel Court when he played Mark Lansing. He was a star on Broadway, in film, and on TV from 1944 until his untimely death in 1976. He won a Tony Award in 1964 for his role in She Loves Me and also appeared in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ("The Photographer and the Undertaker"). Later, he was on Night Gallery and a regular on the series, He & She (1967-1968). He was the father of music and TV star David Cassidy and he was married to Shirley Jones from 1956-1975. He died in a fire at home that started when he fell asleep with a lit cigarette.
In smaller roles:
- Michael Burns (1947- ) was actually thirteen years old when he played ten-year-old Billy Lansing; he appeared on TV and in films from 1960 to 1986 and was a regular on It's a Man's World (1962-1963) and Wagon Train (1963-1965). He was also seen on Thriller and he was on two other episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including "Special Delivery." Burns grew up to be a history professor and writer.
- David Faulkner as twenty-year-old Billy Lansing; he was on various TV shows from 1959 to 1983.
- Diane Webber (1932-2008) as the other woman; she was a nude model who appeared in Playboy and many other men's magazines. Her screen career lasted from 1959 to 1974.
- Shirley O'Hara (1924-2002) as the maid; she played small parts on film and TV from 1943 to 1980 and was on the Hitchcock show three times, including "Death of a Cop." She also appeared on The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.
Sources:
Grams, Martin, and Patrik Wikstrom. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. OTR Pub, 2001.
IMDb, www.imdb.com.
"The Pearl Necklace." Alfred Hitchcock Presents, season 6, episode 29, CBS, 2 May 1961.
Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org.
Listen to Al Sjoerdsma discuss season two of Alfred Hitchcock Presents here!
In two weeks: "The Impossible Dream," starring Franchot Tone!
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