The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

by An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense (epub)

  Putting a woman through an ordeal was certainly something Hitchcock relished, and which he wove into his public profile. Quoting the playwright Victorien Sardou, he said the key to good drama is to “torture the women!” He knew that statement was provocative, just as he understood that it was essentially true. More than a century on from the Perils of Pauline, our screens are still saturated with graphic depictions of violence done to women at the hands of men, for our entertainment. Hitchcock didn’t create our culture’s appetite for that, but he knew better than anyone how to exploit it—and taunted us for our perversity in enjoying it.

  Moreover, rarely do women in his films emerge diminished from their trials. Hitchcock’s heroes are often obstinate and emotionally stunted, their glaring defects softened by wit and charisma. The women have their flaws, too, but grit and constancy usually see them through the worst that men, full of their anger and violence, can hurl at them. Roger Ebert wrote that “sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated.” He was only partially correct. It’s true that Grace Kelly, as Margot in Dial M for Murder, is subjected to a terrifying attack in her own home. But as Lisa in Rear Window she puts Jeff to shame by acting with physical and moral bravery, proving Thorwald’s guilt and her own fortitude in the process. In Under Capricorn and Notorious, Ingrid Bergman plays women who are drugged and held captive in their own homes. But they are survivors, whose qualities transform the self-absorbed prigs in their midst. We, the audience, are encouraged to celebrate the strength, tenacity, and guile they display in staying upright in a wind tunnel of masculine hostility. The men who become dangerously besotted with women in Hitchcock films are usually rather weak and pathetic characters; we’re not meant to admire but pity Scottie in Vertigo, Gregory Peck’s Anthony Keane in The Paradine Case (1947), and Jonathan Cooper, played by Richard Todd, in Stage Fright. In Marnie, Hedren’s character takes the awful responsibility of shooting her horse to end his suffering after a bad fall. In so doing, she displays a capacity for courage and selfless love entirely beyond the possessive, controlling Mark. William Rothman may be wide of the mark in questioning whether there is a rape in Marnie, but he’s surely correct that Mark thinks he is acting like a perfect gentleman—because Mark is a self-obsessed oaf unable to appreciate the pain he’s causing the woman he professes to love.

  Such is the strange, contradictory nature of Hitchcock’s relationship with women—redolent of Hollywood’s bifurcated treatment of women over the last century. His working life was spent thinking of ways to charm and unsettle female audiences, giving them heroines they would simultaneously aspire to emulate and dread becoming. Yet he used those same opportunities to effectuate his fantasies of control and specialness, making exploitation of women not only a theme of his work but a methodology, at times, even the work itself. “When one is reading criticism defending or attacking Hitchcock’s treatment of women,” writes Tania Modleski, one of Hitchcock’s most thoughtful critics, “one continually experiences a feeling of ‘yes, but . . .’ ” This is probably how Hitchcock felt, too.

  5

  THE FAT MAN

  “Idon’t know who you employ to time your scripts, but whoever did it is misleading you horribly. I will even go so far as to say disgracefully.” In August 1943, Hitchcock found himself immersed in one of his least favorite activities: repelling the encroachments of a Hollywood producer. Several months earlier, Selznick had loaned his star director to Twentieth Century-Fox, who were keen on Hitchcock’s bold idea of making a wartime movie set entirely in a lifeboat. The scripting process for Lifeboat (1944), involving John Steinbeck, had been challenging; now, with filming already under way, Darryl F. Zanuck was insisting that Hitchcock’s finished script was fifty percent too long. Hitchcock was infuriated by this eleventh-hour intervention, especially as he knew Zanuck was incorrect; meticulous in his planning for every movie, Hitchcock had a very firm grasp of schedules and timings. When Zanuck saw a hastily assembled rough cut of the first reel, his tune changed completely: “It has tempo, interest, and a feeling of being very much on the level.”

  Despite garnering Hitchcock his second Oscar nomination, the film did not do well at the box office, and was criticized by those who thought Hitchcock had made the American characters look lazy and chaotic in comparison to the steely, resourceful German U-boat commander played by Walter Slezak. Slezak raved about the experience of working with Hitchcock: “Hitch knows more about the mechanics and the physical technique of acting than any man I know.” He was less complimentary about his fellow cast member Tallulah Bankhead—he thought she was a narcissistic fool; she referred to him as a Nazi—and morale among the actors was rarely high. Filming lasted nearly three months, during which the cast was confined to a small boat floating in a huge water tank. When they weren’t feeling seasick, they were drenched, freezing, and struggling with colds. Hitchcock had limited sympathy. As he told one cast member during the production of a previous film, “there’s no law that says actors have to be comfortable.”

  In such circumstances, it was not immediately obvious how Hitchcock would perform his customary cameo. The solution he hit on was pure Hitchcock: clever, funny, and in the service of his personal mythology. Twenty-four minutes into the movie, the character Gus reads aloud from a newspaper; on the page facing the camera is an advertisement for a fictional weight-loss product, the Reduco Obesity Slayer, with photographs of two Alfred Hitchcocks, one his familiar three-hundred-pound self, the other a much slimmer man. This was life intruding on art. Since January 1943, Hitchcock had been on a severe diet, and he used Lifeboat as a way of advertising that fact to the public. The world knew Hitchcock as “a fat man,” and he often played the role for them; he’d been debasing himself by putting fat gags in his publicity articles for years. In an industry filled with the slender and the chiseled, his appearance made him memorable, a way of distinguishing himself from the crowd. It could also act as a masking agent, obscuring the person beneath the flesh. Both had their advantages and disadvantages. Neither gave him what he really craved: control of his own body, materialization of the Alfred Hitchcock who lived inside his head.

  Within the shifted reality of the Hitchcock universe, it takes a brave or foolish person to trust the evidence of their own senses. Observable truth is a false friend; there is no steady fact of existence that cannot be undermined. The treachery extends even to food and drink. In Notorious, Ingrid Bergman’s heroine is poisoned to the verge of death by a cup of coffee; homebodies in Rich and Strange (1931) and The Man Who Knew Too Much feel their discomfort in foreign lands because of the exotic food they are fed. In mid-twentieth-century America, nothing could be more wholesome and nourishing than a glass of milk—except when it’s handed to an unwitting guest at the Bates Motel as part of her final meal. In Hitchcock’s initial design for Suspicion, another glass of milk, glowing like lily-white kryptonite, was delivered by Cary Grant to Joan Fontaine not as a restorative tonic but as a poison-laced murder weapon. Maybe the best episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents—his favorite, and one he directed—has a woman serving the leg of lamb with which she killed her husband to the policemen investigating his disappearance. As the cops blithely dispose of the murder weapon, a delicious home-cooked meal doubles as the execution of the perfect crime.*

  For most of his eighty years, Hitchcock felt the same unease about comestibles, which were both friend and foe, the source of joy and companionship, disgust and shame. The moral and physical complications of eating and drinking were subjects of daily contemplation for him, and oozed into his work as plot points, potent thematic symbols, and vital insights into character. He resented the impact that consumption had on his body, that unruly mass of flesh that could not be compelled to do his bidding. He could “accidentally swallow a cashew nut and put on thirty pounds right away,” he explained on his struggles to make himself the size and shape he longed to be. When the cameras rolled, lissome bodies were prone to follow his every command; a shift of Tippi Hedren’s eyebrow, or a f
lick of Eva Marie Saint’s hair, would happen only if he desired it. Even some obstinate method actor like Montgomery Clift could be made to tilt his head in the way his director said it should. No amount of self-denial or wishful thinking ever gave Hitchcock the same control over his own form. As he was reminded incessantly throughout his adult life, he was “fat,” a term that denoted not simply a physical characteristic but a way of being in the world. The distress his weight caused him—or, more important, his inability to control it—can hardly be overstated. “I don’t feel comfortable in my fat,” he admitted to a journalist in 1964. Not one friend or colleague believed he had ever been anything other than profoundly unhappy about his appearance since childhood. He spoke of his relationship with his body in Kafkaesque terms, a hostage within a captor’s grotesque shell. “I have all the feelings of everyone encased in an armor of fat,” he complained, convinced that his weight made others see him as something less than fully human.

  Hitchcock at Oktoberfest, Munich, September 1960.

  Hitchcock being Hitchcock, he found a way to profit from his grievance, by pouring his appearance into his personal mythology and making it a marketable commodity. And, as people uncomfortable in their own skin often do, he pretended to find the whole subject hilariously funny, making a joke of himself before anybody else had the chance. In a speech he recycled on several occasions in the sixties and seventies, he addressed the question interviewers had asked for decades: “Who is the real Alfred Hitchcock?” First, he told his audience, the “real Hitchcock” is not the person your eyes tell you he is; that fat man is an impostor. In a characteristically deadpan riff, he said the confusion initially arose when he’d asked for a stunt double to perform his first cameo. “The casting department, with an unusual lack of perception, hired this fat man! The rest is history. He became the public image of Hitchcock.” The misconception lingered until some years later he gave “an accurate and detailed description of my true self,” and the casting department hired Cary Grant, although the public still considered him to be the short, tubby man with a bald head and dour, emotionless face.

  As sensitive as he was about his appearance, Hitchcock had a deep-seated desire to be seen; he invested creative effort in publicizing his face and body, and appreciated that his distinctive looks could be made to work to his advantage. On one level, the jigsaw of his silhouette that he dispatched as Christmas gifts in 1927 (the year in which he first became a celebrated public entity) might be read as a self-deprecating joke; in nine strokes of a pen, he rendered himself—the round-shouldered blob that he saw, and despised, every time he looked in the mirror—worthy of artistic reproduction. Yet it was also a revealing display of self-promotion. From that moment, Hitchcock commandeered his body to help curate his public image, creating for himself a new, semi-fictional persona, a character more layered and complex than most of those that appeared in his films. At the peak of his celebrity, he dashed off the silhouette when approached by autograph hunters—including Andy Warhol, who had him draw his profile on a batch of Polaroid photos when the two met for lunch in April 1974. Warhol, like Hitchcock a former ad man, would have appreciated the savviness with which Hitchcock reproduced and exploited his silhouette, which was also used to publicize many of his Hollywood films and was seen at the start of every episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

  He was pained not only by his size but also by his shape, the “cottage loaf” body that he said he inherited from his mother. A photograph of one of the Hitchcock boys shows in all likelihood his brother, William, on a horse next to his father outside the family shop; it displays the same physique Hitchcock lamented: stocky, large head, round torso, and limbs just a little less than proportionately long. The boy in the photo is perhaps eight or nine, roughly the same age at which Hitchcock would relish the aroma of the local bakery, where he’d be given free biscuits, a treasured memory he retrieved as an old man. It was also around this time that a schoolmate told him he was “funny-looking.” Whether or not the child meant to cause harm, it lanced right to the bone. Hitchcock never developed the emotional robustness that would allow him to brush negative comments aside. Iffy reviews, rejections, and sleights—real or imagined—burrowed their way inside and stayed there, even at the height of his success. On this occasion, young Alfred went home and stared into the mirror, turning his head to one side to inspect the contours of his face. When his mother came up to him, he asked her whether she agreed that he looked odd. “You’ll grow out of it,” was her simple, devastating response.

  The sense of existing within a body that was not truly his might have emanated from this exchange, as did his fixation with his profile. The habitual drawing and redrawing of the silhouette was an attempt to bring this disruptive impostor under control, and an inversion of the Hollywood cliché of being photographed only on one’s “good side.” He publicized his “funny-looking” profile relentlessly, even though he could be cutting when those around him expressed a similar fixation with their appearance. One of the anecdotes he enjoyed sharing with journalists was of the time a young actress, knowingly beautiful, asked which he thought was her best side. “You’re sitting on it,” Hitchcock replied.

  Sometimes, he tried to convince Americans—and perhaps himself—that it was only Hollywood’s unattainable standards of beauty that made him seem physically unusual. There had never been a time in his life when he could have been described as slim, but “in England, everyone looks as I do, and no one would remark on it,” he said in 1979. That was a characteristic exaggeration, provably false but resting on an important kernel of truth. The England of Hitchcock’s infancy was a place and time that cast larger bodies as models of good health. “Plumpness” was the word; in the East End of 1899, razor-sharp cheekbones and catwalk builds were generally associated with poverty and tuberculosis. Both Queen Victoria and her son Edward VII were renowned for their heft and their gargantuan appetites. Like Hitchcock, who “was not one to toy with his food,” Victoria chomped her way through meals at an astounding clip, and she and Edward both gorged on rich multicourse meals. The era also experienced a transformation in British dining, especially in London, led by chefs such as Auguste Escoffier, who introduced what is now considered classical French cooking, service à la Russe, and the model of the modern restaurant. There wasn’t much haute cuisine served up chez Hitchcock, which was a household of potatoes, roast meat, and fish and chips that they sold from one of their outlets on Salmon Lane. Yet Hitchcock would always regard this pre–World War I moment as a culinary high point, not because it was gluttonous but because it seemed to him the ultimate in simple sophistication, an ideal he cherished in all aspects of life. As one colleague put it, “his pleasure was in artistic efficiency.” He collected menus from the period and enjoyed reading them, a practice that seemed like some refined form of torture when he was on one of his periodic spells of dieting. When he threw a dinner party for Joan Harrison and her husband, novelist Eric Ambler, the food was re-created from one of his favorite menus, dating from 1892.

  Despite anything he may have said to the contrary, his size and shape very obviously marked him out from the crowd in England. The birdlike Alma was always worried about his weight, and periodically went on his diets with him, a sign of the love and dedication she invested in all things Hitchcock. “He is much too heavy,” she said in 1972. “He tries to diet now and again, but it is awfully hard for him. He does so love ice-cream.” In 1917, his exemption from military service was possibly on the grounds of his obesity, which must have been a source of simultaneous relief and embarrassment in an environment of nationalist fervor when all young men were expected to prove their masculine worth. Any sense of estrangement would have been even more marked in the 1920s, when slimness for both men and women became the ideal as never before. In the artistic world of Weimar Germany, where Hitchcock began his directing career, the slim line was revered. Even the monsters in German cinema were tall and slender. The shadow cast on the wall by the creeping figure o
f Nosferatu, an image to which Hitchcock referred so often in his own work, stretches up, not out; his limbs are as long and spindly as Hitchcock’s were short and stubby. If Hitchcock felt he was a thin man trapped inside a fat man’s body, he may also have felt like a twentieth-century man trapped in a nineteenth-century shell.

  In day-to-day life, rather than a modern machine that powered him forward, Hitchcock experienced his body as an anchor. In 1938, a short report appeared in London’s Daily Herald about a cricket match he played in, presumably for a team representing Shamley Green, the Surrey village where the Hitchcocks had a cottage. The journalist was struck by Hitchcock’s imperious demeanor on the pitch, noting that he bowled the ball with a languorous underarm action, “feet planted firmly on the ground, from which position he did not move. The ball was brought back to him by hand.” Aside from the incongruous image of Hitchcock decked out in white flannel on a sports field, this is instantly recognizable as the Alfred Hitchcock of Hollywood fame, rooted to the spot, haughty and immobile as others buzz around him. It sounds remarkably similar to descriptions of him in other situations requiring some degree of physical exertion. He and Alma spent many Christmases in St. Moritz, where Hitchcock contented himself with watching others having fun in the snow. “Hitch insists on getting into ski pants,” explained Alma, “which takes him about an hour, and then he sits on the porch smoking the whole time!” The writer Whitfield Cook recalled going to a nightclub in Los Angeles with the Hitchcocks and Grace Kelly. “I danced with Grace and Alma . . . Hitch just sat and watched.” Others remembered Hitchcock’s tendency to arrive at a party, plant himself in one spot, and wait for others to approach him. In all those settings Hitchcock developed a particular social style to accommodate his weight, one of nonchalant mastery in which ordinary folk flitted this way and that while he stood—or sat—like a lone molecule of calm.