THE
TWELVE
LIVES
OF
ALFRED
HITCHCOCK
An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense
Edward White
W.W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
For public libraries and independent cinemas
Contents
Introduction
1 THE BOY WHO COULDN’T GROW UP
2 THE MURDERER
3 THE AUTEUR
4 THE WOMANIZER
5 THE FAT MAN
6 THE DANDY
7 THE FAMILY MAN
8 THE VOYEUR
9 THE ENTERTAINER
10 THE PIONEER
11 THE LONDONER
12 THE MAN OF GOD
Acknowledgments
Alfred Hitchcock Filmography
Abbreviations
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Credits
Index
Introduction
In the spring of 1921, Alfred Hitchcock began his career in the movies. Some months earlier, he had read that the American production company Famous Players-Lasky was to open a branch in London, his hometown, and was looking to recruit designers of intertitles, the story and dialogue cards for silent films. Having spent the last couple of years designing print advertisements for W.T. Henley’s Telegraph Works Company, the movie-mad Hitchcock, barely into his twenties, had skills perfectly suited to the job.
The company’s first production was to be an adaptation of a novel, The Sorrows of Satan. Hitchcock obtained a copy of the book, and—with the assistance of some of his advertising colleagues—designed intertitles for the proposed film. Immediately, he faced a setback. When he submitted his designs, he was told The Sorrows of Satan had been scrapped. So, away he went—and returned with new designs for the production that had been announced in its stead. Impressed by the boy’s ingenuity, the bosses decided to try him out on a casual, freelance basis. The money wasn’t much, so he moonlighted, continuing his regular job alongside his film work, while slipping his manager a cut of the extra income in return for a blind eye. His first assignments went well enough that Famous Players-Lasky eventually offered him a full-time contract. It appears he left Henley’s on April 27, 1921. Electrical cabling’s loss was world cinema’s gain.
The story, told by Hitchcock himself, evinces so much of what would present itself over his sixty-year career in motion pictures. There is his buoyant ambition, his vivid visual imagination, his interest in telling stories with as few words as possible, a reliance on source material, and the use of others to achieve a Hitchcockian end. Perhaps more than anything, in telling the anecdote Hitchcock was depicting himself as he was wont to do: an outsider who navigated obstacles with talent, zeal, and cunning.
Within six years of starting his job at Famous Players-Lasky, the hustling novice was forging a legend. In 1927, Hitchcock became a sensation following the success of his first three films, The Pleasure Garden, The Mountain Eagle, and The Lodger.* But moviemaking was only half his genius. According to Hitchcock, on Christmas morning that year, several of his friends and family unwrapped a curious stocking filler: a tiny jigsaw puzzle of the wunderkind’s silhouette. The nine-stroke self-portrait—an exquisite Art Deco flourish—was typical Hitchcock, as was the decision to issue it as a Christmas present. From now on, Hitchcock’s physical self was to be a promotional tool and a work of art, a walking, talking logo for what critics once called “the Hitchcock touch” but what we might term “the Hitchcock brand,” a riveting fusion of his personal fame and mythology and the themes, aesthetics, and atmosphere of his movies. For the next half-century, Hitchcock’s persona was the active ingredient in the most celebrated of his fifty-three films,† the way Oscar Wilde’s was in his plays, and Andy Warhol’s was in his art. Hitchcock stands alone in the Hollywood canon: a director whose mythology eclipses the brilliance of his myriad classic movies.
Today, Hitchcock is cited as the representative figure of his medium. As the historian Paula Marantz Cohen says, Hitchcock’s career provides “an economical way of studying the entire history of cinema.” His work spans the silent era, talkies, black and white, color, and 3D; expressionism, film noir, and social realism; thrillers, screwball comedy, and horror; the cinema of Weimar Germany, the golden age of Hollywood, the rise of television, and the ferment of the sixties and seventies that gave us Kubrick, Spielberg, and Scorsese.
But the significance of Hitchcock stretches far beyond cinema. In many senses, Hitchcock was the emblematic artist of the twentieth century—not necessarily the most talented or the most accomplished, but one of vast influence, whose life and genre-straddling, multimedia work vividly illuminate key themes of Western culture from the Roaring Twenties to the Swinging Sixties. A story of Hitchcock is also a story of the emergence of the United States as a cultural behemoth; the insistent rise of feminism; the changing roles of sex, violence, and religion in popular culture; the pervasive influence of psychoanalysis; the growth of advertising and promotion as a cultural force; and the vanishing gap between art and entertainment. He and his work are cultural touchstones, seminal to cinema, television, art, literature, and advertising, as familiar to viewers of The Simpsons as to critics of the Venice Biennale. Anxiety, fear, paranoia, guilt, and shame are the emotional engines of his films; surveillance, conspiracy, distrust of authority, and sexual violence were among his most abiding preoccupations. On both counts, his work speaks with urgency to today’s audiences. In the 1960s, his films entered academia in the form of film studies; now, Hitchcock is a subject of inquiry in manifold disciplines: gender studies, queer studies, urban studies, fat studies, religious studies, criminal justice studies. While he lived, he could seem a man out of time, a Victorian relic in the thick of the twentieth century. But, decades after his death, this singular person lives among us in many guises.
This book offers twelve of those “lives,” twelve close-up portraits of Hitchcock, each from a different angle, each revealing something fundamental about the man, the public entity he crafted, and the mythological creature he has become. This is about the life Hitchcock lived, but also the various roles he performed and inhabited; the versions of himself that he projected, and those that the rest of us have projected on him. Among the dozen diverse incarnations, we will see Hitchcock the irrepressible jester, the lonely and terrified child, the problem-solving innovator, the global citizen who never left London, and the transgressive artist for whom violence and disorder were a creative life force. Throughout the chapters, Hitchcock’s peers, those who influenced him, and those who followed in his footsteps will slide in and out of view. An important part of the Hitchcock brand is the idea of Hitchcock the all-powerful creator of his filmic universe. It is both true and not. His talent cannot be denied, but without the intervention of creative collaborators, journalists, publicists, and we, his public, the thing we know as “Hitchcock” would not exist.
Each of the twelve lives flits across the decades, making connections between Hitchcock young and old. The Hitchcock of popular imagination is dominated by his image at the time of his greatest success in the 1950s and early 1960s. But long before the creepy uncle of Psycho, there had been another Hitchcock, an impudent young urbanite of the Jazz Age who captured interwar London on screen and brilliantly exhibited ideas and impulses at the core of his later, more exalted work. The economist David Galenson once theorized that there are two poles of genius: the prolific, precocious Picasso, and the ruminative, late-blooming Cézanne, endlessly retreading the same ground. Hitchcock may be the only
major artist of the last one hundred years who could convincingly be used as a model for either.
Paradoxically, but perhaps inevitably, this emblematic figure was a complete one-off. His public image, developed and exploited across multiple media, borrowed from Victorian aesthetes, Edwardian music-hall entertainers, Hollywood moguls, and the European avant-garde. He emerged into the public eye as a distinctively English sort of modernist. Steeped in a national culture of nostalgia and tradition, he pursued innovation and new technology while nudging elements of the taboo, the experimental, and the marginal into the mainstream. An interpreter of the modern and the urban, Hitchcock constantly stressed the importance of technique and process, using the camera, the studio set, and the editing room to play with movement, speed, and time. Like all true modernists, he delighted in undermining shibboleths, and shocking respectable sensibilities. He was a flaneur and a mythmaker, who embraced self-promotion as an end in itself; not just a filmmaker but an impresario, an entertainer, and the creator of spectacle, with his mythology at its center. The bigger that mythology grew, the more Hitchcock used it to tease us, with in-jokes, irony, and self-parody. By the time the cultural revolutions of the 1960s began, the modernist whiz kid had morphed into a wily old cynic on the path of postmodernism.
Though Hitchcock often insisted he was a very straightforward sort of fellow, his complex personality remains a source of fascination and contention. He had an enormous ego and fragile self-esteem; his capacity for self-disgust was equaled by his self-regard. While he possessed great surety in his abilities and opinions, he was in constant need of affirmation, from those closest to him as well as from the complete strangers who constituted his audience. He had an unmatched ability for communicating emotional experience, yet he displayed little conscious understanding of his own emotions and seemed to feel always wary of and threatened by other people. Hitchcock promoted competing, contradictory ideas about himself; he asked us to believe that he was both a nervous wreck and a man of sangfroid. He took pride in his refinement and sophistication, at the same time battling to control his appetites. He felt empowered and appalled by his masculinity. Although he saw himself as an ally of women, his name has become synonymous with male predation and abuse of power. He presented himself as full of knowledge, knowingness, and control, but he lived and died baffled by himself, frightened by what he knew about this world and what he didn’t about the next.
Such contradictions have encouraged astonishingly diverse interpretations of Hitchcock. The reading of him as lecherous ogre competes with the image of Hitchcock the uxorious husband. Hitchcock the brooding artist is countered by Hitchcock the vaudevillian. The dyspeptic misanthrope identified by some contrasts with the hopeless romantic that others recognize when they delve into the Hitchcock filmography. Since his death, these disparate images have grown like bamboo forests around Hitchcock’s name—but, in each case, it was he who planted their seeds. For decades, the question has been incessantly posed: “Who is the real Alfred Hitchcock?” At times it seems more apt to ponder, which Alfred Hitchcock is your Alfred Hitchcock?
Like the lines of his famous self-drawn silhouette, each of these chapters will contribute a different component of Hitchcock’s identity. Only when all twelve are seen together will the full picture be complete. But, at the bottom of each is a man and his obsession with every facet of motion pictures: color and costume, the minutiae of production design, the use of music and sound, the writing of the script, the intangible chemistry of a well-chosen cast, the transformations that could be achieved by lighting, and the magic that could be performed in the edit by the judicious use of a pair of scissors. “I’ve never known any man who enjoys making films more than Hitch,” said Norman Lloyd, a good friend and colleague. “It’s so much part of him. His enjoyment of it is an example of how life should be.” Whether any of Hitchcock’s many lives could or should be an exemplar for our own remains a tantalizing question.
* All three premiered in 1926, but it was not until the following year that they were released nationwide.
† Fifty-four if one counts a German-language version of Murder!, which he shot simultaneously alongside the Anglophone version.
THE
TWELVE
LIVES
OF
ALFRED
HITCHCOCK
1
THE BOY WHO COULDN’T GROW UP
A year and a half after the end of World War I, Londoners were used to ghosts walking among them. The absent were present in every street of the capital; lives finished but unre- solved, stalking those left behind. J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan and the most celebrated playwright of his day, was one of many who was haunted by his loss: the war had claimed his friend Charles Frohman, the Broadway producer who had been instrumental in his theatrical success, as well as George Llewelyn Davies, one of the brothers on whom Barrie had based the Lost Boys.
In April 1920, Barrie premiered his new play at London’s Haymarket Theatre. Unlike Peter Pan, the eponymous heroine of Mary Rose is a girl who wants to grow old but can’t. As a child she went missing, only to rematerialize three weeks later unaware that more than a couple of hours had elapsed. Years passed without incident, though she remained curiously childlike on the inside. Entering adulthood, Mary Rose goes missing again, reappearing decades later—but without aging a day. When she learns from her family that her baby is now a man, and is himself missing in the Great War, the shock kills her. Her ghost, the sweet girl stuck in a time before everyone’s innocence had been destroyed, returns to haunt the family home, searching frantically for her son. Never had one of Barrie’s tales of supernatural mystery seemed so earthbound.
Among those who attended the play’s first run was Alfred Hitchcock, an advertising designer for an electrical cabling firm, with a dream of making it in the movies. Taking a trip to the West End for a night of spectacle and sensation at the theater was one of young Alfred’s great pleasures. Before the war, he went frequently with his parents, though now he tended to go alone, one of the many solitary, immersive experiences that stimulated his intense imaginative life.
In certain ways, Barrie foreshadowed the artist Hitchcock would become. Rambling back and forth across the territory of perennial obsessions, they both told campfire tales of the magical that were more complex and unsettling than they first appeared. Reviews of Mary Rose sound remarkably similar to the kind that attended Hitchcock’s career. “This eerie and beautiful play,” reads one piece filed in London, “holds you spellbound at the theatre, and sends you home with something of a shiver.” The writer took a swipe at the snooty curmudgeons who turned their noses up at Barrie’s work, as well as those who dredged his plays for hidden meanings, those “people who can see metaphors in scaffold-poles and symbols in coal scuttles,” precisely the same complaint that certain critics would one day level at obsessive watchers of Hitchcock’s films. Another reviewer complimented Mary Rose as a “slice of a delightful cake”; one of Hitchcock’s repeated boasts was that while some filmmakers make slices of life, he made slices of cake.
Mary Rose left a lifelong impression on Hitchcock. It so influenced him when making Vertigo (1958) that he tracked down the music used in the original production to give to the film’s composer, Bernard Herrmann, as inspiration. A few years later, he developed a script for a film adaptation of the play, but it was too offbeat for his studio, and the movie never happened. His connection to Mary Rose was strong but intangible, something to do with the transporting strangeness of the theater, the bewitching ethereality of Fay Compton in the title role, and the devastation done when the cocoon of childhood is ripped open. Like so many others in the audience of 1920, the adolescent Hitchcock had experienced loss and grinding anxiety in recent years, intense emotional experiences that never shuffled out of frame. A little like Mary Rose herself, part of Hitchcock remained a child forever. In his own words, “the man is not different from the boy.”
Hitchcock struggled with endings. Psych
o, with its deus ex machina lecture in developmental psychology, thrown into the filming schedule at the last minute as a way of explaining Norman Bates’s murders, is the textbook example. Sometimes the problem was caused by the delicate sensibilities of the censors, or the intransigence of meddling producers. Other times, Hitchcock felt constrained by his audience’s requirement for narrative neatness. Rarely did he exhibit such difficulty with beginnings, especially when the story being told was how Alfred Hitchcock became “Alfred Hitchcock.”
The basic facts of his early life are plain enough. He was born on August 13, 1899, above his father’s greengrocer’s shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, Essex, east of London. By the time of Alfred’s arrival, Emma and William Hitchcock already had two other children: William (after his father) was nine, and Ellen (or Nellie) seven. Hitchcock’s father was the type of person evoked by the common nineteenth-century description of England as “a nation of shopkeepers”: a man for whom being one’s own master was a source of pride, and the ability to convert one penny into two a moral virtue—though it seems he left a good deal of those pennies behind the bar of his favorite pubs. His younger brother, John, was a better example of the breed, with a successful chain of food shops that paid for a five-bedroom home, attended by a small domestic staff, in the well-to-do London district of Putney. Although an extrovert personality with a keen sense of fun, Emma was a redoubtable matriarch. In her home, cleanliness and neatness were insisted on as the outward manifestations of inner goodness. “A wonderful character . . . very forceful,” is how Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia, remembered her grandmother. “You can imagine a young person could be scared of her. . . . She made them toe the line.”
Despite the emphasis on hard work and self-discipline, the Hitchcocks were not puritans. In addition to the theater outings, classical recitals, fairs, and circuses were common family activities. There were also plenty of day trips along the Thames and into the Essex countryside, as well as seaside holidays in Cliftonville in Kent where his uncle John rented a large house in the summer.
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