Hitchcock’s father with his son William, Alfred’s older brother, outside the family shop, c. 1900.
Aged six or seven, Hitchcock moved with his parents and siblings to Limehouse, by the Thames in the heart of London’s traditional East End. His father bought two fishmonger shops, above one of which the family lived at 175 Salmon Lane. Both Hitchcock parents were of Irish descent. William was brought up in the Church of England, but Emma came from devout Catholic stock. When they married, William converted, and all three of their children were raised in the Catholic faith. The teachings and rituals of the Church played a central role in family life. Borrowing the words of the First Epistle of Peter, Hitchcock’s father affectionately referred to Alfred as his “lamb without a spot,” while Emma, if Hitchcock’s recollection can be trusted, had her youngest boy stand at the foot of her bed each night to confess his sins.
Aged nine, Hitchcock was sent away to Salesian College in Battersea, a boarding school at which the discipline was apparently so harsh and the food so awful that his parents removed him after just one week. From there, he attended Howrah House, a convent school run by the Sisters of the Faithful Companions of Jesus. At the age of eleven, he entered St Ignatius College, a Jesuit school in Stamford Hill, north London, named in honor of the founder of the Society of Jesus, the sixteenth-century diplomat and soldier St Ignatius of Loyola, who wrote a hugely influential handbook of spiritual direction, advocating a chivalric vision of Christianity in which men poured all their mortal energy into fighting for the glory of God. Jesuit schools gained a reputation for austerity and discipline, a reputation that Hitchcock thought just. Punishment at St Ignatius College, as was common in Jesuit schools of the time, included strokes on the hand with a ferule, a foot-long leather-covered rubber strap. The ferule ritual was “highly dramatic,” remembered Hitchcock, as “it was left to the pupil to decide when to go, and he would keep putting it off and then he would go at the end of the day to a special room where there would be a priest or a lay brother who would administer the punishment—like sort of, in a minor way, going for execution.” When the moment of punishment eventually arrived, the pain was intense. If a boy had been sentenced to twelve strokes of the strap, he would need to “spread it over two days because each hand could only take three strokes” at a time.
The experience contributed to his reverence for ritual and his dread of authority. Those of Hitchcock’s generation might have countered that similar acts of corporal punishment were familiar to senior schools of all varieties in England, and those educated in other denominations—Christian Brothers, for example—endured more severe, and more arbitrary, discipline. Even so, it’s evident that the experience left a lasting mark. He told some that his fear of the priests and their methods was the “root” of his work. Wittingly or not, Hitchcock would one day pass on the fear of violent chastisement to a little boy in his care. The actor Bill Mumy was seven years old when he played the central role in “Bang! You’re Dead,” an episode in the seventh series of Hitchcock’s highly popular television series of the fifties and sixties, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. By the end of a long day filming, Mumy was losing concentration, and fidgeting when he was asked to stay still, prompting Hitchcock to rise from his chair and cross the floor. Mumy recalls Hitchcock’s frame, huge to a small child, clad in priestly black and white, descending on him, sweating, and breathing heavily as he whispered into the boy’s ear: “If you don’t stop moving about, I’m going to get a nail and nail your feet to your mark, and the blood will come pouring out like milk—so stop moving.” Mumy was petrified, and years later when he worked in the same building as Hitchcock at Universal, he avoided even walking past his office. “It has been a big deal for me for over fifty years,” he said in 2013, “tattooed on my id,” in the very way that Hitchcock’s own encounters with authority figures clung to him throughout his life.
Hitchcock left school a few weeks ahead of his fourteenth birthday, as was the norm for children of his background. From there, he pursued his interest in science, technology, and engineering by enrolling at the London County Council School of Marine Engineering and Navigation. After a year of study, he entered the world of work, in November 1914, at W.T. Henley’s Telegraph Works Company, where he was initially employed in the dull task of estimating the sizes and voltages of electrical cable. Eventually he was moved into the advertising department, and he took evening classes in art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. It was at this point, in his late teens, that his creative life began.
Upon this skeleton of facts, Hitchcock’s experience of childhood is fleshed out largely by stories that emanate from his own memories. In his mind’s eye, he was a timid, solitary, though not unhappy child who sat on the sides, watching rather than participating. Sports, and rough and tumble games, were not for him. “I don’t remember ever having a playmate,” he recalled, and he was too young to hang on the coattails of his siblings. He thought himself agreeable enough, though, according to one biographer, schoolmates tended to think him strange and teased him for smelling of fish. Lacking friends, he retreated (perhaps contentedly so) into books and maps, indulging a fascination with travel, learning train timetables by heart and tracking the journeys of ships across the oceans. By the age of eight, so he insisted, he had traveled every route on the London General Omnibus Company.
His most vivid memories—or, at least, the ones he publicly declared—were concerned with fear, the fuel on which the Hitchcock juggernaut ran. He claimed to be scared of just about everything: policemen, strangers, driving, solitude, crowds, heights, water, and conflict of any sort, all caused him excessive vexation. “An alarm clock about to go off” is how he described himself to Hedda Hopper, the legendary chronicler of Hollywood. “There’s a lot of work going on inside.” “It was amazing to see these fears,” said Robert Boyle, the production designer on North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964), not because there was anything outlandish or weird in the things Hitchcock was frightened of, but because he had such an ability to communicate the physical and emotional experience of being afraid common to us all. “The difference between his fear of authority and his fear of heights is that he could put it up there on screen,” said Boyle. He was, as biographer Donald Spoto put it, “a visual poet of anxiety and accident.”
Genetics or learned behavior might explain the derivation of his worrisome nature, which sounds a lot like what clinicians now speak of as generalized anxiety disorder. His father, William, seemed to relax only at the theater, Hitchcock recalled. “I think he worried a lot. Selling produce that can spoil in a day must be nerve-wracking.” Typical of Hitchcock to find melodramatic edge in the life cycle of a pilchard; even the experience of selling fish, fruit, and vegetables crackled with suspense.
In general, however, Hitchcock preferred an explanation that was simultaneously more pat and more spectacular, attributing his anxieties to the impact of specific moments in his childhood of which he had patchy, but powerful, memories. Principally, these were emotional recollections, strikingly vivid snapshots of unusual moments, which he wheeled out as set pieces over the decades. The best known of these stories is what we might call Hitchcock’s genesis myth, the moment he supposedly acquired his fears of authority, abandonment, and the contradictory horrors of guilt and arbitrary injustice—all the unruly emotions that surge through his most famous work. “I must have been about four or five years old,” he told his fellow film director François Truffaut. “My father sent me to the police station with a note. The chief of police read it and locked me in a cell for five or ten minutes, saying, ‘This is what we do to naughty boys.’ ” John Russell Taylor, Hitchcock’s authorized biographer, stated that Hitchcock’s sister, Nellie, confirmed the story was true, but he never directly quoted her version of events.
Certain discrepancies in the story’s various retellings encourage one to wonder whether the incident was as fresh in Hitchcock’s mind as he claimed. Usually, he said he had been five or
six years old at the time, but to Truffaut he suggested that he could have been as young as four, and to the journalist Oriana Fallaci he remembered being eleven. To an Australian newspaper he said, “I’m told I was frightened by a policeman as a small boy, so maybe that’s why I like thrills.” Perhaps, then, this was a memory inherited from relatives who spoke about the incident, and which his imagination had given form to retrospectively—entirely plausible for one with such a vivid and eventful interior life. Sometimes he claimed to have no clue what infraction had triggered his custodial sentence. Other times he speculated it was because he had followed the tram tracks from his home—captivated, as always, by the adventure and romance of travel—but come sunset, he’d been unable to find his way home in the dark. That his father should respond to the return of a missing child by having him put in prison—albeit briefly—seems astonishing, though surely not a sign of uncaring cruelty. Hitchcock once joked that his father had been riled at having to delay his dinner, before adding, “perhaps he was angry because he was worried about me.” If true, it’s redolent of the way a middle-aged Hitchcock responded to a similar situation, more than forty years later, when his wife was late for dinner because of heavy traffic she encountered after a Sunday outing with Anne Baxter, the leading lady in Hitchcock’s film I Confess (1953). “There he was, sitting like Jove, furious at us,” remembered Baxter of the angry, stressed man they discovered on their return. “He didn’t forgive me for that dinner delay for a long time.”
Other, similar stories of childhood trauma became pillars of Hitchcock lore. One time he apparently woke to find his parents out of the house, gone for a walk or to the pub, sending young Alfred into a dread that he had been abandoned. Again, the adult Hitchcock supplied an intense sensory memory: standing alone in the dark of the kitchen, weeping, he pushed slices of cold meat into his mouth in a vain attempt at self-comfort until his mother and father returned. In rehearsing the story in public, he said the episode had instilled in him a fear of the dark (tricky for a man head over heels in love with the cinema) and an unconquerable dislike of cold cuts. In another of his favorite origin stories, he explained that his passion for scaring audiences began before he could walk or talk, when his mother leaned over his cot and said, “Boo!” This one wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. It was a neat way of explaining that enjoyment of fear is hardwired into the human brain, and that none of us ever truly ceases to be the mewling infant in the cradle. These were the operating principles of his life in film.
Talk-show hosts and newspaper journalists never tired of giving Hitchcock an opportunity to tell these anecdotes, and Hollywood publicists made sure they were written into his official biographies when materials were sent to press around the release of a latest film. It was as though each new picture was a reliving of Hitchcock’s childhood, another chance to paint with the camera the fear that first flowered in the belly of the boy he used to be. Paul Cézanne had Mont Sainte-Victoire to return to time and again; Hitchcock had the dark interior of an empty terraced house and the clank of a prison-cell door.
The factual basis for many of these childhood yarns is impossible to verify. One might hazard that they are a little too perfectly Hitchcockian to be true, or at least to be taken as the starting pistol for Hitchcock’s career in shadows and suspense. As his parents had taught him, Hitchcock valued neatness in all things. He stated to others that his idea of pure happiness was “a clear horizon. Nothing to worry about on your plate”; maintaining “a tidy mind” was a goal for which he labored daily. The empirical accuracy of these memories, however, is less important than their emotional tone. Hitchcock was telling us that he associated childhood with fear, uncertainty, confusion, and brief moments that change everything.
In a profound sense, Hitchcock thought there was an irreducible part of himself that remained a child all his life. Not only was it, by his reckoning, the basis of his unusual personality, it was also his source of abundant creativity. His inner child, he believed, provided the dominant themes of his work, as well as the rare talent that allowed him to explore those themes on screen with such fluidity and originality. “I believe it’s intuitive to visualize,” he explained, “but as we grow up, we lose that intuition,” though he fancied himself something of an exception: “My mind works more like a baby’s mind does, thinking in pictures.” It’s an inversion of the traditional romantic myth of the child genius. Rather than exhibiting an uncanny adultness as a boy, Hitchcock’s contention was that he maintained childhood qualities that bloomed in adulthood. That he had held on to a childlike nature was evident to many of those who knew him. Russell Maloney of The New Yorker observed that Hitchcock worked with the “mind of an intelligent child who gets angry when his adventure story bogs down midway with talk of love, duty, and other abstractions.” Others noted his juvenile sense of humor that stayed with him even as he entered his eighties. “I was very close to Hitchcock,” said Arthur Laurents, screenwriter of Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). “He was a child, you know, a very black-comedy child.”
In Hitchcock’s remembering, there was no meandering path between his childhood and adulthood, only a straight superhighway. “My wife says my design for living is work,” he said, “which could be true because I planned my life’s work as a child.” The novelists, playwrights, and artists he claimed to have adored as a schoolboy remained crucial influences all through his career; he never divulged an old guilty pleasure, some youthful obsession that he later looked back on with embarrassment. Along with Barrie, Hitchcock named the spy novelist John Buchan and a gamut of middlebrow English authors as the great cultural influences of his youth, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, whom Hitchcock discovered as a sixteen-year-old when he read his biography. It was “the sadness of his life,” one marked by childhood abandonment, that drew him to Poe’s writing. His adolescent reading of Poe’s stories revealed to him a truth on which his whole career was based: that people love—need, perhaps—to be scared in safety. “And, very probably,” he reflected, “it’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films.” Poe’s work also inspired The Avenging Conscience (1914), a film by D. W. Griffith that had a huge impact on Hitchcock when he saw it as a teenager.
Possibly, this was an honest reflection of the person he had always been, someone of unwavering tastes and sensibilities. Aged twenty, he founded and edited Henley’s in-house magazine, the Henley Telegraph, in which he published a series of his own short stories, mainly melodramatic tales with a comical twist that are reminiscent of his later work, including occasional pieces published under his name in popular fiction magazines. His childhood fascination with timetables, maps, and machines stayed with him, too. In scripting sessions in the 1970s, the final decade of his life, he induced exasperation and amusement in his writers when he would obsess over some seemingly trivial detail to do with the San Francisco Bay Area Transit system, the distance between London landmarks, or at which remote Finnish train station a scene should be filmed.
Hitchcock as a jailbird baby, in Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Ironically, though he attributed his facility as a filmmaker to the little boy within, in his years of greatest fame he presented himself as the type of person one couldn’t imagine ever being young. When, as an adult, he encountered children, he often failed to make allowance for their age, as though he had no conception of the ways in which they might have differed from grown-ups. Some of those who visited Hitchcock and his wife at their home noted that their little girl, Pat, was treated as an adult rather than a child, and there are several stories of him doing the same with children who appeared in his films. One day during the making of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring Doris Day and James Stewart, a colleague gave it to him straight: “Your problem, Hitch, is you don’t know how to direct children. You use the same language with Chris [Olsen, a child actor] you use when you’re talking to Jimmy, Doris, or any adult.” In conference on the script for The Birds—Hitchcock’s famous film
about a sedate Californian community suddenly besieged by flocks of vicious birds—Hitchcock questioned whether it was realistic for Cathy, the daughter of the Brenner family, to hug Tippi Hedren’s character when thanking her for a birthday gift. “I really don’t know much about their behavior. Do they really fling themselves into people’s arms?” he asked, sounding as though he were talking about some exotic species he’d only ever witnessed from afar, despite at this point being a proud grandfather of three young girls.
If he did feel distant from children, and experienced some discomfort when looking back on his own early years, it might explain the lack of sentimentality with which he put childhood on screen. Cruelty to innocent children is a recurring theme in cinema, as it is in so much other folk and popular culture. When Hitchcock was growing up, in the very earliest days of motion pictures, there was a rash of wildly popular films of babies and toddlers caught candidly by the camera, sometimes in moments of distress. One was When Babies Quarrel, essentially a silent precursor of “Charlie Bit My Finger.” Another was Cry Baby, in which, as an advertisement for the film explains, a “pretty little fat baby boy is seated on a high chair. The expression on his little round face shows that he is expecting something very good to eat. When he finds out he is not going to get it, his expression quickly changes from disappointment to grief. As he cries, he rubs his eyes with chubby hands and the big tears roll down his cheeks. Very realistic.” Hitchcock was plugged into the urge within audiences to see childhood innocence undermined, the crux of every Brothers Grimm tale. The Birds is the stellar example: the elementary school pupils of Bodega Bay being chased through the streets by a murder of demented crows is perhaps cinema’s most famous depiction of children being hurt or terrorized, and one of its most disturbing; the Child Catcher locked his victims away but didn’t attempt to peck out their eyes.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 2