They flee to the top of Mount Rushmore. As they climb down the mountain they are pursued by Vandamm's thugs, including Leonard, who is fatally shot by a park ranger. Vandamm is taken into custody by the Professor. Meanwhile, Kendall is hanging on to the mountain by her fingertips. Thornhill reaches down to pull her up, at which point the scene cuts to him pulling her—now the new Mrs. Thornhill—into an upper berth on a train, which enters a tunnel. Cast Hitchcock's cameo appearances are a signature occurrence in most of his films. In North by Northwest, he is seen getting a bus door slammed in his face, just as his credit is appearing on the screen. There has been some speculation as to whether he made one of his rare second appearances, this time at around the 45-minute mark in drag as a woman in a turquoise dress on the train, but in fact, the woman was played by Jesslyn Fax, who went on to appear in many episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She had previously appeared in Rear Window. Production Writing Hitchcock often told journalists of an idea that he had about Cary Grant hiding from the villains inside Abraham Lincoln's nose and being given away when he sneezes. He speculated that the film could be called The Man in Lincoln's Nose (Lehman's version is that it was The Man on Lincoln's Nose) or even The Man Who Sneezed in Lincoln's Nose. Hitchcock sat on the idea, waiting for the right screenwriter to develop it. The original traveling salesman character had been suited to James Stewart, but Lehman changed it to a Madison Avenue advertising executive, a position that he had formerly held. John Russell Taylor's 1978 biography Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock suggests that the story originated after a spell of writer's block during the scripting of another film project: Lehman repeated this story in the documentary Destination Hitchcock: The Making of North by Northwest that accompanied the 2001 DVD release of the film. Screenwriter William Goldman insists in Which Lie Did I Tell? (2000) that it was Lehman who created North by Northwest and that many of Hitchcock's ideas were not used. Hitchcock had the idea of the hero being stranded in the middle of nowhere but suggested that the villains try to kill him with a tornado. "But they're trying to kill