Evan Hunter thought The Birds was the moment when Hitchcock tipped his hat to the highbrow critics and attempted to make an “art” film. When Hunter read Hitchcock explaining to journalists that the birds “symbolized the more serious aspects of life,” he was incredulous. “This was utter rot, a supreme showman’s con. . . . While we were shaping the screenplay, there was no talk at all of symbolism.” The production files back him up: in one of his letters to Hunter, Hitchcock had predicted that “we are going to be asked again and again, especially by the morons, ‘Why are they doing it?’ ” Ernest Lehman mirrored Hunter’s exasperation when he was asked about the theory that North by Northwest was a conscious remodeling of Hamlet for the Atomic Age. “It’s those damned French critics, the auteurs. They’re always coming up with all kinds of pretentious crap that has no basis in reality.”
Rather than an out-and-out lie, perhaps Hitchcock had arrived at his decision about what the birds signified only once the film was finished; plenty of art is created with gut instinct rather than intellectual calculation. But if Hitchcock was joining the auteur school in trying to figure out the film’s hidden meaning, he was only pitching in with the rest of his audience. In the months and years following the release of The Birds, Hitchcock received letters from the public asking what the film was about, specifically why the birds had turned. In 1969, as the one-year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination approached, one viewer felt compelled to write Hitchcock to say they had just divined what the film was really driving at. The birds, this person wrote, might be seen as members of an oppressed race, who, after years of being “shot at, caged up, eaten, and literally taken for granted . . . couldn’t endure the degradation any longer!” Sometimes Hitchcock responded to such letters with something along the lines of the explanation that Hunter had read, or a claim that the film was inspired by a real-life case of rabid bats in New Mexico. Just as often, though, he told them he hadn’t the faintest idea why the birds attacked. “Why should I? I am not omnipotent.” Strictly speaking, it was “omniscience” he should have denied; in the filmic world of Hitchcock, power over all life ultimately rested in his hands, even when it confounded him as much as the rest of us.
* There is no known extant copy of The Mountain Eagle.
† Hitchcock was also briefly represented by Leland Hayward and Taft Schreiber.
‡ Hitchcock had been attached to another ABC radio pilot, Once Upon a Midnight, in 1945. The pilot episode was also an adaptation of Malice Aforethought. A series was not commissioned. In 1940, Hitchcock oversaw a radio adaptation of his film The Lodger as the first episode of the long-running series Suspense.
§ Lehman eventually racked up six Academy Award nominations to Hitchcock’s five; neither won any, though both received honorary awards from the Academy.
¶ Hitchcock’s first choice, Ernest Hemingway, declined the offer.
4
THE WOMANIZER
“Hitchcock’s genius is being frittered away on triviality and pettiness.” So stated one British critic in 1931, as Hitchcock’s career began to falter. After the triumph of Blackmail, he applied himself in several directions: adaptations of two serious stage plays (The Skin Game and Juno and the Paycock), a crime thriller (Number Seventeen), a comedy-drama about a bored married couple in search of adventure (Rich and Strange), and two versions of a whodunit, filmed simultaneously (Murder! for Anglophone audiences and Mary for the German market). Each had its merits. None was first-class Hitchcock. There was also Waltzes from Vienna, a delicate drama from 1934 based on a musical about the writing of The Blue Danube and perhaps the trough of Hitchcock’s career.
He only regained his footing when he paired up with the writer Charles Bennett and reunited with Balcon and Montagu to make The Man Who Knew Too Much for the production company Gaumont-British, the first of a glut of espionage thrillers that revived his reputation and brought him to the attention of American studios. In 1939, feeling he had reached the limits of what he could achieve in Britain, Hitchcock packed his bags for Hollywood, on a seven-year deal with the producer of Gone with the Wind, David O. Selznick.
Having discarded an initial plan for a movie about the sinking of the Titanic, Selznick handed Hitchcock the task of adapting Rebecca (1940), a modern riff on Jane Eyre by the English author Daphne du Maurier. It was a canny choice; the novel inhabits territory familiar to the best of Hitchcock’s British output: menace, secrets, and the torment of a beautiful young woman. Despite a tussle for creative control between director and producer that set the tone for their future relationship, Rebecca was a success, fusing Selznick’s glamour with Hitchcock’s atmospheric suspense. Recognition at the Academy Awards followed; the film (and therefore Selznick) won Best Picture, while Hitchcock earned his first nomination for Best Director.
Joan Fontaine was also nominated for her performance as the unnamed heroine. Casting the part had been an arduous process. Hitchcock and Selznick traded strong opinions about the many auditionees, each trying to steer the production in the direction of his vision. “Too big and sugary,” Hitchcock said of one actress; “Too Russian looking,” of another. “Grotesque” was all he had to say about a third. Fontaine, always favored by Selznick, got the part but had a fraught time with her director. “We liked each other,” she believed, “and I knew he was rooting for me,” but he had “a strange way of going about it.” Hitchcock wanted Fontaine to act like the anxious, lachrymose wreck described in the script, and he went to remarkable lengths to ensure she did. He told her that other cast members didn’t like her, and that her leading man, Laurence Olivier, thought her role should have gone to his wife, Vivien Leigh. When Fontaine struggled to cry during one scene, Hitchcock asked if there was anything that might help. She ventured that if he slapped her in the face, that might do the trick. “I did,” recalled Hitchcock, and Fontaine “instantly started bawling.”
Rebecca announced Hitchcock in America as a director of “women’s pictures” but also as a director of women, a man with a rare talent for creating, and re-creating, female stars. In December 1940, one magazine told its readers that Fontaine was not a “gorgeous genius” but a “puppet, walking and talking exactly as her Svengali Alfred Hitchcock demands!”
Perhaps no other male artist of the twentieth century dedicated as much time and effort to exploring the lives and identities of women. Certainly no aspect of his legacy is so heatedly contested. Caught between feelings of admiration and resentment, identification and estrangement, an instinct to worship and a desire to control, Hitchcock had a complex, contradictory set of ideas about women and his relationship with them. He surrounded himself with women, sought out their friendship, gave them responsibilities and opportunities that few men of his station did, and proudly championed their work. At the same time, it was through women that he revealed the darkest, most discomfiting parts of himself—and embodied the culture in which he existed, as a filmmaker and as a man.
Hitchcock’s life spanned a remarkable period of change in the lives of women. Born in the age of Victoria, he was raised in the era of the suffragettes, when the popular newspapers that carried those tales of curious murders which he devoured also gave blanket coverage to the “suffragette outrages” of the 1910s, in which campaigning women cast off gender norms in acts of violent civil disobedience. In London, grand locations became scenes of disorder and terrorism, anticipating the way in which Hitchcock would use world-famous landmarks as the venue for perilous climaxes: in the National Gallery, Mary Richardson took a blade to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus; bombs were planted in St Paul’s Cathedral and the Metropolitan Tabernacle; Egyptian mummy cases were smashed at the British Museum, the very place where Hitchcock staged his first great chase scene, at the end of Blackmail, one of his several films about the travails of a preyed-upon woman. The response of officialdom to the suffragettes’ actions included brutal reprisals that had a hint of Hitchcock about them: imprisonment, beatings, the forced feeding of hunger strikers, carried out
to punish lawbreakers and to humiliate those who transgressed the social code by not being sufficiently ladylike.
Cinema, in its fledgling state, gave space to women that more traditional industries and art forms did not allow. Charlie Chaplin first appeared as “The Tramp” in a film of 1914 costarring and directed by Mabel Normand, an instrumental figure in his breakthrough success. When the American publisher Houghton Mifflin published a book titled Careers for Women in 1920, it contained a chapter about the job of film director. Of course, the film business was never a haven of equality; even at this early stage, exploitation and marginalization of females was endemic. Yet women made themselves a crucial part of the landscape, as creators and audiences. For young women with increasing freedoms and disposable incomes, movie theaters were places of entertainment and empowerment, where images of their own lives, as well as projections of their fears and fantasies, could be enjoyed. Often, they would go to see stars such as Mary Pickford, a global phenomenon whose movies made her both rich and powerful.
Indeed, Pickford was a turbine that powered Famous Players-Lasky, the Hollywood production company. When Hitchcock started his career at the firm’s London branch, he worked alongside, and beneath, many women, including those who dominated the scenario department. One of those women—identified in some places as Anita Ross but named by Hitchcock as Elsie Codd—wrote the script for Number Thirteen (alternately titled Mrs. Peabody), Hitchcock’s first attempt at film directing, which fell apart during production in 1922. In his predirectorial days, the films he worked on were also heavily focused on female characters. One of those, The White Shadow (1924), starring the American actress Betty Compson, was thought lost until three of its six reels were discovered in New Zealand in 2011. Identifying precisely what contribution Hitchcock made to the film is difficult. The publicity that followed its discovery claimed he was assistant director, screenwriter, art director, and editor, though the British Film Institute gives the credit of editor to Alma Reville, and Hitchcock’s writing work was tweaking and polishing a screenplay already drafted by Michael Morton. Even so, a twenty-four-year-old Hitchcock was heavily involved in the production. The movie is far from a classic—even Balcon admitted that the production team was “caught on the hop,” as it tried to capitalize on the recent success of Woman to Woman, also starring Compson. Still, the surviving reels are intriguing, as they contain themes we now associate with Hitchcock’s directorial work: doubles, mistaken identity, and the danger that lies in wait for young women who will not be tamed. The story concerns twin sisters: Georgina, a chaste, biddable girl, and Nancy, a bobbed-haired rebel “without a soul” who smokes, drinks, gambles, and flirts with men. When Nancy runs away to live a bohemian life of excess, the saintly Georgina protects her sister’s reputation by assuming her identity. Frustratingly, the extant reels end just as the search for Nancy homes in on the Parisian nightclub she frequents. However, the scene is set for moral redemption; when Georgina unexpectedly dies, her soul possesses Nancy, who reforms her ways.
When Hitchcock’s screenplays became more sophisticated—at least partly because he engaged better screenwriters than himself to craft them—the distinction between the good girl and the bad girl was blurred in complex female characters. An early draft of this character came in Hitchcock’s silent film The Manxman (1929), in which Kate, played by Anny Ondra, wrestles with the competing binds of familial duty, social respectability, and individual fulfillment. Perhaps the best example of the type is Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia Huberman in Notorious, written by Ben Hecht. Alicia is the fast-living daughter of a convicted traitor who is persuaded by the American spy Devlin (Cary Grant) to infiltrate a coterie of Nazis in Rio de Janeiro. As part of her mission, she seduces and marries Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), who possesses vital secrets about Germany’s nuclear weapons. The hypocritical American intelligence officers who have recruited her look down on Alicia as “a woman of that sort,” but Devlin, who is hopelessly in love with her, comes to understand her bravery and her moral worth. At the movie’s climax, Devlin saves Alicia from being killed by the Nazis—and in so doing realizes that Alicia has also rescued him. The “fat-headed guy, full of pain” has been taught how to love by the virtuousness of a promiscuous woman.
Characters such as Alicia were crucial to Hitchcock’s success; his identity as a filmmaker rested on his relationship with women, and he held as an article of faith that his audience was predominantly female. In 1931, he said he chose his leading ladies “to please women rather than men, for the reason that women form three-quarters of the average cinema audience.” It was a contention he never abandoned; “80 percent of the audience in the cinema are women,” he remarked in 1964. “Even if the house is fifty-fifty, half men, half women, a good percentage of the men have said to their girls: ‘What do you want to see, dear?’ So, men have very little to do with the choice.”
The need to create movies that women would flock to see was one of the reasons his filmmaking team had a strong female presence at its core. Joan Harrison, the producer of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was a twenty-six-year-old Oxford graduate when Hitchcock hired her to be his secretary in 1933. As often happened with those whom Hitchcock liked and trusted, Harrison’s role quickly grew; she was asked to vet and appraise source material, and soon became part of his scriptwriting team, relocating to the United States when the Hitchcocks moved there. Peggy Robertson came into the fold in the late forties as a script supervisor but became a high-powered assistant, performing tasks more typically associated with a producer or a production manager. Aside from those pivotal figures, there was a roster of female writers, from famous names such as Dorothy Parker, who lent her talents to Saboteur, to the big-screen novice Czezni Ormonde, Ben Hecht’s associate whom Hitchcock engaged for the post-Chandler rewrite of Strangers on a Train.
Principally, there was Alma, variously an assistant director, writer, unofficial coproducer, and a ubiquitous adviser whose opinion Hitchcock trusted unwaveringly. Alma was also the hub of Hitchcock’s private life. In Britain and America, the couple very often mixed business with pleasure by hosting cocktail parties and dinners—cooked by Alma, a marvel in the kitchen—for the latest Hitchcock collaborators. In his pomp, Hitchcock was a regular at fashionable Hollywood restaurants, such as Chasen’s, Perino’s, and Romanoff’s, but usually sat beside his wife. With the exception of his mother, he doesn’t appear to have been particularly close to any woman until he and Alma began to work together in London and Germany, though he openly declared that he preferred the company of women, and particularly disliked being part of a big group of men. Being “one of the boys” sat uncomfortably with him; since childhood he had felt unnerved or diminished by competitive masculinity, something that imbued—in his mind, at least—a kinship with women. Donald Spoto has described Hitchcock as a loner who “never had the gift of friendship,” yet a sincere and deep friendship is precisely what Hitchcock formed with Alma, in whom he found somebody who shared his sense of humor as well as his artistic and commercial ambitions, understood his fears and insecurities, knew how to buoy him up, but was also prepared to speak her mind when she thought he was in error. One writer who interviewed the Hitchcocks in their old age was impressed by a “fruitful kind of friction passing between them, as Alma interrupts one of Hitchcock’s professorial monologues to interject her own peppery opinions.”
Early and sustained success as a filmmaker gave Hitchcock extensive control over his working environment. Women therefore played a more prominent part in his life, professional and private, than might have been the case had he stayed in advertising, or pursued some other career. Hitchcock’s films repeatedly latched on to what he thought were women’s giddiest hopes and deepest fears: the fantasy of romance and adventure; the terror of rape and murder. In the process, he turned to Alma and the women around him for advice and insight. Yet the experience of watching some Hitchcock movies is that of observing a man trying to divine what he thinks are the endless mysteries of woman
kind, especially in matters of sexuality. “Although I think Hitchcock’s camera was sympathetic to women,” said Jay Presson Allen, one of the women who wrote for him, “I don’t believe he necessarily understood them.”
In relation to women, Hitchcock can sometimes appear like a curious brew of J. Alfred Prufrock and Benny Hill: English repression meeting English bawdiness, which may be two sides of the same coin. Shyness and insecurity in his physical appearance prevented Hitchcock from having romantic or intimate relationships with the women whose company he so enjoyed. At various times, he said he was very sexually inexperienced, and that he had lived much of his life in a state of impotent celibacy. Of the many things that he and Alma gained from their relationship, sexual fulfillment was not among them. Hitchcock told some that he’d had sex just once in his life, and joked that he’d had to use a fountain pen on the night Alma conceived. His occasional outbursts of “outrageousness” on set with his leading ladies—slapping Fontaine during Rebecca, for instance, and apparently exposing himself to Madeleine Carroll on Secret Agent—were done with the justification of getting an emotional response to aid their performance. One wonders whether, along with his stream of dirty jokes and innuendo, they were also his substitute for physical intimacy.
Alma and Hitchcock aboard the SS Mary, on a trip to America, June 1938.
According to his own testimony, he was unusually cosseted at the time he took the reins on The Pleasure Garden, aged twenty-five, having never been out with a woman, not even Alma. During the filming of the drowning scene, he was baffled when the woman playing the victim refused to go into the water. It was left to the cameraman “to tell me all about menstruation. I’ve never heard of it in my life!” It might strike one as an unlikely story; Hitchcock was a movie director during the Roaring Twenties, “not a backward, pre-adolescent country boy from an earlier century,” in the words of one skeptic. Yet such ignorance is not entirely inconceivable. After all, E. M. Forster confessed to the pages of his diary that only at the age of thirty—a year after the publication of A Room with a View—did he learn “exactly how male and female joined.” Forster’s powers of observation were at least as formidable as Hitchcock’s, and his learning was immense; if he could have gone through his twenties in such a state of obliviousness, then why not the equally shy, socially awkward Hitchcock?
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 10