Regardless of its truthfulness, the tale speaks to his feeling that women were an exotic and unknowable species. It seems that even with Alma, there was some part of her being—her sexual self—that existed frustratingly beyond his ken. The bewilderment, fascination, and longing women caused in him were all diverted into his films. The ultimate manifestation of this is the fabled Hitchcock “blonde.” His interest in blonde women is first hinted at in The Pleasure Garden, then confirmed by The Lodger, in which all the Avenger’s victims are fair-haired, while Madeleine Carroll, star of The 39 Steps and Secret Agent, was the woman Hitchcock pointed to as the first true Hitchcock “blonde.” Though taxonomized by their coloring, the definitive characteristic of these women is ineffable mystery. Like a scratched record, Hitchcock recurrently expressed a dislike of “women with sex hanging all over them like baubles,” favoring instead “a woman who does not display all of her sex at once—one whose attractions are not falling out in front of her . . . she ought to maintain a slightly mysterious air.” “Anything could happen to you with a woman like that in a taxi.” He evoked this image of a reserved woman turning into an insatiable nymphomaniac on the back seat of a taxi so often that it’s possible it stemmed from a real-life experience that, as Hitchcock told friends and colleagues, happened to him after a Christmas party in the twenties or thirties. Equally, it could have been a morsel of risqué gossip of the sort he loved to hear, and spread, about colleagues; or, simply the reverie of a frustrated, inexperienced man, with an immensely vivid interior existence. Without explaining how he came to formulate the theory, he repeatedly avowed that Latin women, though famed for their supposed hot-blooded passion, had little interest in sex, while the “typical American woman” is “frigid” and “a tease, who dresses for sex and doesn’t give it—a man puts his hand on her and she runs screaming for mother.” The most sexual women of all, he opined, were those of northwestern Europe, the Germans and Scandinavians, and especially the straitlaced English: aloof, decorous, and passionless on the surface, but quivering with hidden passions—Hitchcock could’ve been talking about himself.
The quintessential incarnation of this type of woman was Grace Kelly, who starred in three of his films, Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955). Interpretations of Hitchcock’s behavior around actresses and his motivations in casting them differ, but his infatuation with Kelly is beyond dispute, as it had been with Ingrid Bergman the previous decade. The appreciation was mutual: Kelly and Bergman both declared themselves smitten with Hitchcock, his gracious manners, his humor, and his talent. In all three of her films with him, Kelly encapsulates the notion of femininity that exhilarated her director: the ice maiden concealing a volcanic sexuality. In To Catch a Thief, she is even given her own “back-of-a-taxi” moment when her ladylike character, Frances Stevens, abruptly steals a kiss from an astonished John Robie (Cary Grant) before shutting her bedroom door in his face. Hitchcock was thrilled to learn that in real life “the snow princess,” as he called Kelly, appeared to embody his fantasy. “She fucked everyone,” he is reported to have said on the set of Dial M for Murder, including “little Freddie the writer,” referring to a dalliance between Kelly and the screenwriter Frederick Knott, which, as the author Steven DeRosa notes, might tell us as much about Hitchcock’s view of writers as it did his views on sexually active women.
In each of her three films there is something extraterrestrial about Kelly’s characters. She doesn’t enter Rear Window so much as she manifests, from nowhere in the pitch black, as though beamed in from another dimension. Having roused her crochety boyfriend (Jeff, played by James Stewart) from his sleep with a soft, slow kiss, she switches on threeshe switches on three lights, with a ritual recitation of each one of her three names—“Lisa. Carol. Fremont.” Now she is illuminated: an angelic visitation in evening gown and high heels. And, lo, she delivers a miracle of a gourmet meal, transported fresh from one of Hitchcock’s favorite Manhattan restaurants, turning a fusty bachelor pad into an oasis of midtown opulence.
In Hitchcock films, men and women are separated not only by biology but also by plains of experience: men—excluding the insane ones—inhabit a world governed by fact and rationality, while women, as Richard Allen argues, have access to mysterious reserves of instinct and intuition. In Spellbound and Notorious, Bergman’s characters have an abundance of this quality, as do Daisy in The Lodger and Blanche in Family Plot, the director’s third and fifty-third films, respectively. Throughout Rear Window, Lisa performs small miracles. Even Stella (Thelma Ritter), the nurse attending to Jeff’s broken leg, showcases the mysterious powers of female perception when she tells Jeff how she predicted the Wall Street crash when she was nursing a director at General Motors. “When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go.” “Well, Stella,” replies Jeff, “in economics a kidney ailment has no relation to the stock market.” “Crashed, didn’t it? I can smell trouble right here in this apartment. . . . I should have been a Gypsy fortune teller instead of an insurance company nurse.” Like Midge, Barbara Bel Geddes’s character in Vertigo, and Jane Wyman’s Eve in Stage Fright (1950), part of Thelma’s role is to embody “ordinary” womanhood. Arguably, these women reflect the women Hitchcock knew best, Alma in particular, those on whom he relied but who did not represent his ideal of feminine sexuality. Yet even these “ordinary” women have something unfathomable about them.
Hitchcock was one of a vast roll call of twentieth-century male artists who wondered aloud about who women are and what they want. What’s unusual in Hitchcock’s case is the eagerness with which our culture adopted him as an authority on the subject. During his most high-profile years, from Notorious to The Birds, his opinion was sought by interviewers—male and female—on various aspects of women’s lives. How should they dress? How should they speak? Do they possess the necessary qualities to be good film directors? Do their fears differ from men’s? On one occasion, asked to distill the essence of femininity, he submitted that as he wasn’t a woman, he probably wasn’t best placed to answer. Usually, however, he was only too happy to give his two cents. He once claimed, without any apparent mischief, that it was a “very well known fact” that if “a woman is surprised in the nude, what does she do? She covers her breasts. Why not shield the area between her legs first? Never. Always the breasts.” On another occasion, he offered tips on how women should dress in order to bag themselves a husband. “A woman who wants to subdue a man would do well to subdue herself first,” he offered before getting into specifics: “Never dither about a color. Try it against the face and contemplate the effect. . . . The new lilacs and mauves are very becoming, but do make certain that you get the shade right for you.”
Hitchcock with Ingrid Bergman, during the filming of Notorious.
Hitchcock at work on Rear Window with Grace Kelly and script supervisor Irene Ives.
Only rarely did an interviewer ask where the maestro got his information. More commonly, his attunement with the feminine disposition was accepted as a self-evident function of his work. It led to a great many pieces by or about Hitchcock in women’s magazines, and various invitations to support an array of causes linked, in one way or another, to women. In the sixties and seventies, there were multiple overtures from the organizers of beauty pageants, such as Miss World, Miss California, and Miss Zodiac, entreating Hitchcock to preside over the judging. He was also sounded out about becoming the owner of a franchise in the first iteration of women’s professional basketball in 1978. Hitchcock swerved all such offers, but the notion that he had a powerful, sympathetic connection with women was a key part of his mythology. “It’s easy for him to make a woman say ‘yes,’ ” wrote the interviewer June Morfield in 1962. “You see, he has a way with them . . . once a woman gets involved with Hitchcock, she’s rarely ever the same again.”
Accompanying the image of Hitchcock as an expert on femininity was his reputation as a creator and controller of
women. On May 10, 1958, a piece titled “Hitchcock Gives Free Rein to the Gentle Sex” appeared in TV Guide, with a nod to that week’s episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. A mocked-up photograph displayed seven actresses from the series as puppets, each having their strings pulled by Hitchcock, their puppeteer. The day before that piece was published, Hitchcock attended the premiere of his latest movie: Vertigo, about male obsession and female objectification, in which James Stewart’s retired police officer John “Scottie” Ferguson attempts to remold his lover, Judy, into a replica of Madeleine, the deceased object of his desire. Only in the final tragic minutes of the film does Scottie come to realize that Judy and Madeleine are the same woman (both played by Kim Novak), and that he has been unwittingly embroiled in a murder plot. Each generation of the last century has had its own “Pygmalion” movies about men trying to create their perfect woman: My Fair Lady; Weird Science; Pretty Woman; Ex Machina. The distinction between those films and Vertigo is that the director of the latter had for many years proudly boasted that transforming women was one of his great achievements. In this role, he likened himself not to Henry Higgins but, with tongue in cheek, to Svengali, the malevolent character from George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, who not only turns a young woman into a star but exploits and abuses her in the process, possessing and controlling her in a way that robs Trilby of the person she once was.
A critical and commercial disappointment at the time of its release, Vertigo is now widely regarded as one of Hitchcock’s crowning triumphs, and the definitive statement of his interest in women. In Scottie, some see a stand-in for Hitchcock himself, a wry, witty, self-contained man whose life is governed by phobias and anxiety, and who becomes fixated with turning a girl-next-door into a ghostlike vision of feminine mystery and cool sexuality. In the years immediately preceding Vertigo, Hitchcock had been in search of a new blonde heroine. He’d been stung by the departure of Ingrid Bergman, who moved to Italy with the director Roberto Rossellini, and then by Grace Kelly’s decision to ditch her film career in order to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956. In 1957, after directing her in The Wrong Man (1956) and “Revenge,” the first episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitchcock signed Vera Miles to a five-year deal. The contract forbade any commercial engagements requiring her to dress in swimwear, lingerie, or anything Hitchcock considered beneath the dignity of a lady. Hitchcock had her lined up to star in Vertigo, but his ill-health forced the production to be pushed many months back. By the time the wheels were ready to roll again, Miles was pregnant and no longer able to participate. Ultimately, he gave the female lead to Kim Novak, whose excellent performance is integral to Vertigo’s peculiar charm, but Hitchcock complained both during production and for many years after that “it was very difficult to obtain what I wanted from her because Kim’s head was full of her own ideas.”
Hitchcock next turned his attentions to Eva Marie Saint, an Oscar winner for her role in On the Waterfront, and seen at the time as the antithesis of the demure Hitchcockian blonde. Hitchcock reveled in the task of refashioning her for his purposes, inhabiting the role of a “rich man who keeps a woman: I supervised the choice of her wardrobe in every detail.” The success was tinged with sadness. “I took a lot of trouble with Eva Marie Saint,” he vented to Hedda Hopper, “grooming her and making her sleek and sophisticated. Next thing she’s in a picture called EXODUS and looking dissipated.” He was referring to Saint’s performance in Otto Preminger’s epic about the founding of Israel, after which she appeared in an equally earthy role as the downtrodden Echo in John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down. Saint’s decision to take these parts seemed to cause Hitchcock genuine distress. In a passage of their interviews that did not make its way into François Truffaut’s book, Hitchcock explained the effort required to transform an actress—even a highly accomplished Oscar winner—into a Hitchcock blonde: “you go to work on these girls and teach them how to use their face to convey thought, to convey sex, everything.” All too often, however, his creation was sullied by some other director, unworthy of the siren he had made: “all the heartaches I’ve had, and the pain, and the emotion I’ve poured into the thing, ends up nothing . . . the effort: completely wasted.”
This was the measure of Hitchcock’s possessiveness, as well as the belief he had in his ability to realize female perfection. In this way, he sounds less like a dirty old man angling for the fulfillment of a sexual fantasy, and more like certain male fashion designers who come to see their muses as flesh-and-blood mannequins on whom to project aesthetic ideas only tangentially connected to the person beneath the fabric. It’s a type of male relationship with femininity that Paul Thomas Anderson explores in Phantom Thread, his 2017 film about the fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock, who bears some striking parallels with Hitchcock beyond their similar surnames, including a gargantuan appetite, a loyal partner named Alma, and a penchant for stitching messages into his garments as a physical sign of himself in each of his works. To realize his narrow vision of feminine beauty, Woodcock relies on the diligent efforts of a talented and industrious team, mostly the women we see busily walking up and down his spiral staircase, an allusion—intentional or otherwise—to the chorus girls running down a set of stairs in The Pleasure Garden, the opening shot of Hitchcock’s first film.
In Anderson’s movie, Woodcock’s career as a maker of new women is threatened by changing tastes of the wider culture, a shift in ideas about women and female beauty. When Hitchcock gave his confession to Truffaut, he was facing something similar. His work with Grace Kelly coincided with Marilyn Monroe’s rise to stardom in films such as Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and The Seven Year Itch. In her book American Beauty, Lois Banner identifies Monroe as the apogee of two distinct types of femininity that dominated in the 1950s: voluptuousness, which connoted a certain sexual brazenness, and girlish, garrulous naivete. Both of these identities were anathema to Hitchcock’s idea of the perfect woman. In a draft of The Trouble with Harry from 1954, John Michael Hayes details a vapid blonde bombshell character, ultimately excised from the shooting script, that resembles the Marilyn stereotype, that combination of hypersexuality and innocence identified by Banner. In the months and years after Monroe’s death, Hitchcock proffered the opinion that “poor Marilyn had sex written all over her face.” It was, in part, to counteract the rise of the brasher sexual identity projected by Monroe that Hitchcock persisted with his model of the cool, elegant blonde, to the extent that he cast the unknown Tippi Hedren to play Melanie Daniels in The Birds. In clinging to his ideal woman, Hitchcock was asserting himself on the movie industry and the wider culture.
According to Hitchcock, it was Alma who first alerted him to Hedren, whom she had seen in a television ad. In appearance, Hedren was a facsimile of a Hitchcock heroine: slim, with a pale complexion, a bone structure of Palladian exactness, and, of course, a head of shimmering blonde hair. Equally important, she had the “high-style, lady-like quality which was once well-represented in films by actresses like Irene Dunne, Grace Kelly, Claudette Colbert.” Hedren was thirty-one and had never acted before. To most directors, this would have been a serious concern, but to Hitchcock, Hedren’s inexperience had its advantages; she would certainly be more pliant in his hands, and he would not have to undo bad habits inherited from previous directors. Without meeting her or even seeing her act in anything other than her commercials, Hitchcock offered her a five-year deal, on the relatively modest sum of $500 per week. Hedren accepted, assuming it was television work that Hitchcock had in mind. A few weeks later, the director had her perform an expensive three-day screen test in full costume, acting out scenes from Rebecca, Notorious, and To Catch a Thief. Hitchcock then invited her to join him, Alma, and his agent Lew Wasserman for dinner at Chasen’s, the Hitchcocks’ favorite restaurant, where he told her that she was about to become a movie star. “Shortly after our drinks arrived, Hitch turned to me and without a word, handed me a small gift box,” recalled Hedren many years later. “I opened it and found myse
lf staring at an exquisite, delicate pin—gold and seed pearls, crafted to depict three birds in flight,” Hitchcock’s way of saying that the lead role in The Birds was hers. “I was stunned. I’m sure I gasped.” Telling a story that she had heard many times before, Pat Hitchcock says, “Tippi started to cry. Alma cried. Even Hitch and Lew had tears in their eyes.” Hedren’s account is virtually identical, with one difference. According to her, Hitchcock’s “eyes were dry. He just stared back at me—very, very pleased with himself.”
For different reasons, The Birds was a difficult shoot for Svengali and his Trilby. Hitchcock fretted about the pressures of making the film through his own production company, as he had done with his previous movie, Psycho. Unlike that film, The Birds was a vast logistical undertaking, the most formidable of his career, exacerbated by the fact that he had cast an acting novice in the lead role. Having been led by Hitchcock step by painstaking step through the entire script, Hedren navigated the filming well, and produced a remarkably accomplished debut performance in a film that migrates from romantic comedy to shrieking horror. But in the infamous scene in which Melanie Daniels is savaged by birds in an attic, Hedren experienced genuine trauma. Before filming had begun, she had been assured that no live birds would be involved in the action; the most terrifying thing she’d have to contend with were a few mechanical ravens. But as the day approached, it became obvious to Hitchcock and his team that it would be impossible to capture the realism and intensity they were after without the use of real animals. As Hedren remembers, she found out about the change of plan on the morning of the shoot. “It was brutal and ugly and relentless,” she says of the five days she spent on the floor of the set while birds were thrown at her head. The crew members who have spoken about it over the years attest that they all, Hitchcock included, felt bad about the situation. In 1980, Hedren said it was “very hard for Hitch at this time, too. He wouldn’t come out of his office until we were absolutely ready to shoot because he couldn’t stand to watch it.” However, she now suggests that the episode was part of Hitchcock’s effort to dominate her.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 11