Ernest Lehman; Writer For Films

To earn money, he was briefly a press agent, trying to persuade Walter Winchell and other powerful columnists to print gossipy news about his clients. He pulled from this experience to write "Sweet Smell of Success," the story of a monstrous columnist and a slimy publicist that was first published as a short story in Cosmopolitan. In 1957, it became a film with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis.

He clashed with Lancaster, and plans for Mr. Lehman to direct were canceled. He fled for several weeks to Tahiti, professing a nervous breakdown. "I'm told that when I phoned in sick from the hospital, Burt grinned," he later said. "So he was perfectly cast as the columnist."

Nor did he like working with writer-director Billy Wilder to adapt the screenplay for "Sabrina" (1954), a romance about a chauffeur's daughter amid Long Island's smart set.

He successfully fought Wilder's demand that Audrey Hepburn, as the daughter, be shown sleeping with the far-older Humphrey Bogart in one scene.

Mr. Lehman spoke glowingly about Hitchcock, whom he met when they began work on an adaptation of a seafaring disaster film. Both men soon wanted to abandon ship, and their discussions evolved into "North by Northwest."

As part of his approach to writing, he visited the locations of scene settings. At one point, he visited what would be the film's climactic scene at Mount Rushmore.

"First I tried to climb Mount Rushmore," he told the Los Angeles Times. "That was a ridiculous procedure for a screenwriter. Halfway up, I looked down and realized I could be killed if I slipped."

After a string of award-winning films in the 1960s, Mr. Lehman made a disastrous directorial debut with "Portnoy's Complaint" (1972), based on the randy novel by Philip Roth. Returning to screenwriting, he wrote Hitchcock's final film, "Family Plot" (1976), and "Black Sunday" (1977), about a terrorist plot at the Super Bowl.

Films turned far too coarse for his taste, and he later turned down "The Silence of the Lambs," among other offers. He liked to say he was working on a memoir called "How the Hell Should I Know?: Tales From My Anecdotage" or "Names I Never Dropped Till Now."

His first wife, Jacqueline Shapiro Lehman, died in 1994. He married Laurie Sherman in 1997 after meeting her through an online chat room and wooing her as a friend with such lines as, "I like distant intimacy." He is survived by Sherman; two sons from his first marriage; a son from his second marriage; and two grandchildren.