The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

by An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense (epub)

  In the publicity for the film, Hitchcock boasted about the way he had invented ‘Tippi,’ insisting—without explanation—that her name from now on be held between inverted commas. Hedren was introduced to journalists with a brief biography and details of the exacting tutelage that Hitchcock had provided, including the twenty-five thousand dollars that had been spent on her screen tests, conducted with the exactitude of a real Hitchcock shoot. Even when Hedren spoke to America’s teenage girls through the pages of Seventeen magazine, Hitchcock was with her to explain to the interviewer Edwin Miller how seriously he took building a character and, in this case, the actress cast to play her.

  The minute attentions paid to her acting and the creation of her public persona elicited no complaints from Hedren: “He was not only my director, he was my drama coach, which was fabulous.” The problem was that the ‘Tippi’ project strayed beyond the film set; Hitchcock inserted himself into Hedren’s life in ways she could not accept. He left food he wanted her to eat outside her front door, sent her a peculiar Valentine’s message, and peppered her with requests for her to join him for dinners, lunches, and drinks. When alone, he told her dirty stories and jokes, likely the same ones he told Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman, though Hedren wasn’t anywhere near as amused as those two women appeared to have been. Worst of all, she alleges that one afternoon Hitchcock “threw himself on top of me and tried to kiss me” in the back of a limo directly outside their hotel. “It was an awful, awful moment I’ll always wish I could erase from my memory.” Hedren says the incident was never mentioned by either of them for the rest of the production.

  The situation worsened during the filming of Hitchcock’s next movie, Marnie, in which Hedren took the title role, originally intended for Grace Kelly. Hitchcock’s unwelcome attentions continued, though some cast and crew members felt he had an old man’s hopeless crush on an ingenue, nothing more. Things came to a head when Hitchcock forbade Hedren from traveling to New York to receive a Photoplay award from Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, which infuriated Hedren, and which she interpreted as part of his broader strategy of controlling and possessing her. In the aftermath of this, an ugly encounter occurred between the two that abruptly ended their professional and personal relationship. Hitchcock spoke very rarely about what went on, and when he did his comments were elliptical and evasive. The most he revealed was that Hedren had crossed a red line and “referred to my weight.”

  Hedren’s version of events alleges that Hitchcock sexually assaulted her. The first inklings of this story landed in the public consciousness in the early 1980s, in Donald Spoto’s biography of Hitchcock, a book derided by some of Hitchcock’s most faithful collaborators as fanciful and malicious. A further account was published by Spoto in 2009, on which the movie The Girl (2012) was based, enlarging the image of Hitchcock as a sadistic misogynist who deliberately humiliated Hedren to satisfy his lust and assuage his feelings of inadequacy. Then, in 2016, Hedren published her story in her own words. “I’ve never gone into detail about this and I never will,” she writes of what occurred in Hitchcock’s office. “I’ll simply say that he suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly, and I couldn’t have been more shocked and more repulsed.”

  Hedren’s book was met with fierce criticism from those who maintain that Hitchcock adored women and prided himself on behaving like a gentleman in their presence. Doubts and questions—of a type very familiar to us from recent controversies—were raised. Why had her story shifted over the years? If Hitchcock had been guilty of sexual assaults, why hadn’t she reported them to the police? How could she have previously spoken glowingly of a man she now claimed had abused her? Factual inaccuracies in Hedren’s account were also highlighted. Hedren contends that Hitchcock was intent on ruining her career as punishment for rejecting him, and she alleges that François Truffaut had wanted to cast her in Fahrenheit 451 but was dissuaded from doing so by Hitchcock. Truffaut’s daughter, Laura, has said this is untrue. John Russell Taylor spoke for many skeptics when he accused Hedren of desperate attention-seeking: “How else is she going to stay in the eye of the public than by coming up with increasingly sensational stories about Hitchcock?”

  Hedren’s memoir was published a year before the torrent of allegations against Harvey Weinstein and numerous other powerful media figures catalyzed #MeToo. The sharpened focus provided by that phenomenon impels even those unconvinced by Hedren’s allegations to take heed of the ways in which Hitchcock was known to have behaved around at least some women during his years in the film industry. Brigitte Auber, who played Danielle in To Catch a Thief, valued the friendship she struck up with Hitchcock, somebody she looked to as a kindly mentor. One evening in Paris, after the two had met for dinner, they sat in a car outside the apartment where Auber lived with her boyfriend. Hitchcock lunged at her, kissing her on the lips, though she immediately pulled back, stunned, much as Hedren claims to have done during the filming of The Birds. He was instantly contrite and embarrassed, and attempted to revive their friendship in the coming years, though Auber was unable to see him in the same light ever again. “It was an enormous disappointment for me,” she told biographer Patrick McGilligan. “I had never imagined such a thing. The quality of our relationship was entirely different.” McGilligan rejects the darker characterizations of Hitchcock, yet he acknowledges that the director was “capable of questionable behavior” and claims that Hitchcock “had at least two friendships with actresses” turn sour in the mid-1950s in similar fashion, but only Auber was prepared to speak publicly about her experiences. McGilligan also describes Hitchcock’s penchant for groping women and for “thrusting his tongue inside [a woman’s] mouth.”

  Hitchcock instructs Tippi Hedren on the set of Marnie.

  Despite the protestations of Hitchcock’s ardent defenders, it’s difficult to see why Hedren would have fabricated the entire story, and taken the trouble to keep it alive more than half a century later. Hitchcock spent decades publicizing the pleasure he took in possessing and molding beautiful young women; the fact that many of those women had nothing but good things to say about him—and several of them continue to talk fondly of him to this day—does nothing to mitigate the experiences of others who felt preyed on. Hitchcock alone bears responsibility for his acts of predation, though his behavior was thoroughly facilitated and normalized by the culture within which he lived and worked, one we are only beginning to fully reckon with. Socially awkward, self-absorbed, and sexually frustrated, Hitchcock made passes at and assaults on young women because he failed to control his urges, but also because in the environment he inhabited, men of his standing were afforded license to behave in that way. In Hitchcock’s case, this latitude enabled his pursuit of a fantasy version of himself—the suave, sexually successful alpha male with women in his thrall—in denial of the obnoxiousness or the absurdity of his conduct. Those who were around him in his dotage at Universal were aware of unusual arrangements he had with at least one of his young secretaries, who would disappear into the boss’s office for lengthy spells. One Hitchcock biographer alleges that the woman was shaken by “ugly, intimate demands” of an unspecified nature and left Hitchcock’s employ in distress. Others offer a different perspective. One former colleague, the screenwriter David Freeman, remembers asking her what she was up to behind the closed door; “I’m being erotic for Mr. Hitchcock,” she replied. Precisely what occurred, and what degree of coercion was involved, is probably impossible to prove at this remove. Money may have changed hands, either as a token of affection or as an inducement for silence. When the woman concerned arrived for work in a flashy new car, colleagues drew their own conclusions about how she had managed to pay for it. At least one of her contemporaries believed that she appeared unfazed by the whole thing, and maybe thought it worth the effort considering the remuneration she received.

  Perhaps. But even if this more benign version of events is accurate, that for a time this was a known part of
Hitchcock’s office routine evinces the huge allowances that were made for his behavior. In the sixties and seventies, he was a living institution at Universal, its third-largest shareholder, and widely regarded as “a god of cinema.” Indulging a peccadillo in the privacy of his oak-paneled office was considered no more than the old boy deserved. “It was a different era,” said David Freeman, a much younger man who wrote Hitchcock’s final script in 1979. “People would keep their mouths shut about it. Certainly the people on the staff. Peggy Robertson ran that company and she knew what was going on and she knew also that no one would benefit from the world knowing this.”

  Robertson was indefatigably loyal to Hitchcock the man and the entity, and would hear no criticism of his treatment of women. But from personal experience she knew that powerful men in the movie business had license to indulge themselves. Decades after the event, she recalled starting her career on a film directed by Gabriel Pascal and being horrendously embarrassed by Pascal’s insistence that she sit next to him in restaurants while he fed her. Though it gave the crew “lots of laughs and sighs of relief that they weren’t the ones who were getting fed,” she hated it. “But there was nothing I could do, you know? Who was I, the lowest person there, lower than the clapper boy.”

  A longtime friend of Hitchcock’s, Marcella Rabwin, described him as “absolutely charming. He was so sweet. He was so nice. He did everything right.” Yet she also knew he was indulged in various ways because he was considered brilliant: “He was sarcastic and he was cruel and he was many of those things, and we all overlooked it.” Rabwin had experience of other such brilliant and domineering men, having been assistant to David O. Selznick, the “woman’s film” impresario who launched Hitchcock’s career in Hollywood, and who also thrived on controlling and changing actresses. “Every relationship my father had was a Pygmalion relationship,” said Selznick’s son, Daniel, but none more so than with the actress he eventually married, Jennifer Jones. Daniel thinks the filming of the Selznick movie Duel in the Sun was the “apotheosis of David’s fantasy of Jennifer. At one point during the filming, he had her go to some place outside of Tucson and crawl across sharp pebbles so that her knees got completely bloodied. In a hundred and ten degree heat. And she was prepared to do whatever was required.” As the last few years of revelations and reckonings have taught us, this dynamic is not only part of Hollywood’s distant past but its present, too.

  If the events of the filming of Marnie have gained piquancy in recent years, the same is true of the movie itself. At the time of its release in 1964, critics were not kind. A reviewer for the Tatler found fault in the principal characters, Sean Connery’s Mark Rutland embodying “the vanity of men,” while Hedren’s “properly cold Marnie left me properly cold, too.” The New York Times was similarly put off by casting and characterization, as well as by the “glaringly fake cardboard backdrops” and an “inexplicably amateurish script.” In the subsequent half-century, the film has undergone an astounding shift in reputation. Today, many critics consider it Hitchcock’s purest work of art, a complex, textured film in which technique and thematic preoccupations combine without commercial compromise. Robin Wood, the doyen of Hitchcock critics, said, “If you don’t like Marnie, you don’t really like Hitchcock . . . if you don’t love Marnie, you don’t really love cinema.”

  Adapted from Winston Graham’s novel of the same name, Marnie is about a brilliant but damaged woman who thieves her way around the country, robbing huge sums from her duped employers before leaving town and relocating under a new identity. In Philadelphia, a mutual attraction develops between Marnie and her new boss, the dashing but arrogant Mark Rutland. What Marnie doesn’t know is that Mark has an inkling of her criminal past. When she steals from him, he quickly tracks her down and blackmails her into marrying him. They take a honeymoon on a cruise ship, where their bond develops, but Mark becomes infuriated by Marnie’s complete aversion to sex—although it’s hard to imagine many women rushing into bed with a man who has coerced them into marriage. In their cabin one night, Mark is overcome with lust and frustration, and pulls Marnie’s nightdress down. Seemingly ashamed of his actions, he apologizes immediately and wraps his dressing gown around her. Marnie is now frozen, catatonic, as Hitchcock women often are in the wake of a traumatic experience. Mark begins to kiss her, and then he rapes her. The next morning, Marnie attempts to drown herself in a swimming pool but is saved by Mark at the last minute. From here on in, Mark, by turns caring and obnoxious, makes it his objective to cure Marnie of her kleptomania and her sexual phobias, which he seemingly does in a melodramatic final scene in which Marnie locates the childhood trauma that has disordered her mind.

  Even by Hitchcock’s standards, Marnie is an ambiguous, polarizing film. When working on his first draft, Evan Hunter questioned the rape scene, arguing that it was dramatically unnecessary and bound to ruin any sympathy the audience had for Mark. Hitchcock was undeterred: “Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face!” When Hunter submitted a version of the script with the rape omitted, he was let go soon after. His replacement, Jay Presson Allen, later told Hunter that she thought the rape was Hitchcock’s “reason for making the movie.” It presaged events more than a decade later when Ernest Lehman objected to Hitchcock’s plan to begin the script of The Short Night—his final, unfinished film—with a rape scene. Lehman was ultimately replaced by David Freeman, who had no such qualms. Likewise, Allen had no worries about how Hitchcock’s female audience would respond to Marnie. “I’m very fond of Evan,” she remarked in 1999, “but I think he was psychologically a little naïve. There’s a vast audience of women out there who fantasize the idea of rape.” In another forum, she told an interviewer that writing the scene “didn’t bother me at all . . . I just thought she [Marnie] was kind of a pain in the ass and I didn’t blame him [Mark].” That, coming from the film’s scriptwriter, might be the kind of sentiment that the writer Bidisha detected when, in an article in the Guardian in 2010, she cited Mark’s treatment of Marnie as a crystalline example of Hitchcock’s “full-on misogyny, rampant woman-blaming and outright abuser apologism.”

  Other critics argue that Marnie is actually a conscious attack on the patriarchy, the most forceful example of Hitchcock’s compassionate respect for female suffering at the hands of traditional masculinity, an identity from which he had always felt alienated. Mark Rutland, argues the academic William Rothman, “has a singular bond with women . . . a capacity to identify with women, no less than to desire them, that he has in common with Hitchcock himself.” Moreover, Rothman questions “whose will, if anyone’s, is being imposed on whom” during the “so-called rape.” Marnie’s total inertia, her complete lack of any emotion after Mark rips off her nightdress, “gives him grounds for believing that after his sincere apology she now trusts him, and gives us grounds for believing, as he does, that he is making love to her, not raping her.” That opinion seems hard to square with what we know of the film, and what we know of rape. Marnie is, to use Rothman’s words, “entranced, turned inward,” and totally unresponsive when Mark takes hold of her; that she’s not screaming and scratching his eyes out does not indicate she’s consenting.

  Similar debate has been had—though less frequently, and less passionately—about the scene in Blackmail in which Alice stabs Crewe as he forces himself on her. It seems to have been filmed unambiguously as an attempted rape, but certain critics have expressed doubts. That Hitchcock’s films cause such debate about the simple facts of what is shown to us on-screen could be attributed to their director’s commitment to ambiguity, his aversion to a black-and-white world of easy answers. It also reflects the gap between attitudes of our own time and those of Hitchcock’s filmmaking prime. In the 1980s, Robin Wood posited that audiences of that decade might struggle to fully comprehend Hitchcock’s classic films of the 1930s, because assumptions about gender and sex had shifted so much. Something similar could now be said of Hitchcock’s films of the sixties. One need only
read the Truffaut interviews for evidence of how the critical atmosphere has changed in the last sixty years. At several junctures, Truffaut analyzes Hitchcock’s female stars in a notably sexualized way. Of Teresa Wright’s performance in Shadow of a Doubt, he says her “portrait of a young American girl was outstanding . . . she had a lovely face, a nice shape, and her way of walking was particularly graceful.” He’s even more effusive about Kim Novak in Vertigo, whose “carnal qualities” and “animal-like sensuality” were perfectly suited to the role. “That quality is accentuated, I suppose, by the fact that she wears no brassiere.”

  This does not mean that the debate about Hitchcock’s treatment of women, on-screen and off, is merely twenty-first-century political correctness. In 1972, on the release of Frenzy, the New York Times pushed back on the reams of positive reviews with an article, “Does Frenzy Degrade Women?” As early as 1935, Film Weekly ran a piece in which Barbara J. Buchanan asked Hitchcock, “Why do you hate women?” The question was prompted by Hitchcock’s recent film The 39 Steps in which Madeleine Carroll is handcuffed to her costar Robert Donat and hauled around the Scottish countryside as he tries to clear his name and uncover a nefarious spy ring. Buchanan said this denied Carroll “her dignity and glamour,” a suggestion that, ironically, if judged solely by today’s standards might be construed as more than a little patronizing toward women. Hitchcock denied that he hated women—though he did, jokingly, call them “a nuisance”—and said Carroll was put through the mill in order to strip away the surface layers and reveal the real person beneath. “Nothing pleases me more than to knock the ladylikeness out of chorus girls!” Paralleling his situation with Fontaine on Rebecca, and Hedren on The Birds, stories also spread—some by Hitchcock himself—that he had deliberately caused Carroll upset when the cameras were off, pretending to have lost the keys to the handcuffs, meaning she was cuffed to Donat for a large chunk of the first day of filming. He assured the public that his scheme was all in aid of improving her as an actress, and she “entered into the spirit of the whole thing with terrific zest. . . . I remember, though, that she had a friend watching on the set one day, who came up to me and reproached me for my rough handling of her!”