The imposition of his tastes and standards in clothing was a way of infusing the atmosphere with a sense of himself, making everybody work toward the goal of realizing the same Hitchcockian end. “Look Hitchcock, think Hitchcock” was the ostensible goal, but it was also evidence of his strong manipulative streak, reshaping those around him by pushing them through the filter of his personality. Peggy Robertson felt the force of Hitchcock’s cosmetic expectations, and she admitted to basing at least some of her wardrobe choices on what she thought he would or would not like to see her in, much like Eva Marie Saint had done on the day of their first meeting. Speaking many years after Hitchcock’s death, Robertson recalled one occasion on which she bought a sober navy-blue dress, thinking it would please him, but was crestfallen when he paid her a compliment in a tone of voice that she inferred to be a criticism. Another time, she bought a pair of sensible brown shoes that Hitchcock seemed to genuinely like when she wore them to work for the first time. “I was so thrilled by this,” Robertson remembered, “that I went out the next weekend and bought about three pairs of these terribly expensive shoes, just glowing with happiness that I was getting some approval.” But, ever wary of dispensing praise to those he thought were searching for it, the compliments dried up immediately. “He never said another word about my shoes in my life. Not one. He knew, he could tell.” It’s testament to the power of the myths that Hitchcock spun around himself as being a man of unmatchable taste and talent that important members of the Hitchcock enterprise would go to such lengths to gain his approval—especially when they knew it to be a virtually impossible task.
The dandy attitude of perfecting life through devotion to small details seeped into every part of Hitchcock’s existence. The Californian homes he kept with Alma were decorated and furnished without typical Hollywood ostentation, but with an immense attention to particulars. When Hitchcock remodeled one of his bathrooms in the 1950s, he gave workmen the most precise instructions and was insistent about the use of a particular type of green-and-white marble he had sourced in Vermont. The artwork that studded his walls was deliberately chosen to reflect the Hitchcocks’ public and private selves, a mixture of their premodern English heritage and their very modern present; the grittily figurative balanced with the exuberantly abstract, works by Utrillo, Epstein, Klee, and a Picasso that, to Hitchcock’s irritation, turned out to be counterfeit. A look in the Hitchcocks’ cutlery drawers and china cupboards would reveal not only beautiful implements of the finest Sheffield steel, Waterford crystal, and Delftware, but something antique and silver to cater for any conceivable dining need. There were asparagus servers, grape scissors, cream ladles, and butter spreaders; teaspoons and demitasse spoons; spoons for sugar, berries, ice cream, after-dinner coffee, and salt; nut picks, berry knives, butter knives, and fish knives; forks for salad, fruit, luncheon, and dinner; pie slicers, cheese planes, and cake breakers; carvers for roast meat, and separate ones for game and poultry. These are just a few entries from an eleven-page inventory of silverware drawn up in 1962 for one of the Hitchcocks’ two homes.
That there was a right way of doing things, and a thousand wrong ways, seemed axiomatic to Hitchcock. On the set of North by Northwest, he appeared genuinely affronted when he saw Eva Marie Saint pour herself coffee into a Styrofoam cup. In all seriousness, he pointed out that such conduct was incompatible with being a movie star. “Someone should bring it to you in a china cup and saucer.” More indecorous behavior occurred the night Paul Newman came to dinner in the early 1960s. Not only did Newman take off his jacket and hang it on the back of his chair the moment he reached the table, he declined the offer of the wines Hitchcock had paired with the food and asked instead for a beer—which he drank straight from the can. This was not leading-man behavior; Cary Grant would have rather been seen dead than swigging beer from a can. Hitchcock’s opinion of Newman never entirely recovered.
Ritual, performed with easy, understated style was crucial to his public image. His tendency, which he followed most insistently after his break from Selznick, of starting and finishing filming at civilized hours kicks against our culture’s dominant notion that to be successful in any given field one must be gripped by “drive,” “passion,” and “inspiration,” all of which eat up the clock. Hitchcock’s timekeeping was a dandyish display of effortless mastery; he was in charge of his production, not the other way round. “It’s only a movie” became something of a catchphrase of his, an expression intended to convince us that at the core of Hitchcock was an unruffled insouciance. “I’ve come to believe that a hidden future is one of God’s most merciful and exciting gifts,” he once wrote, expounding his theory of never taking anything too seriously. “We can live in a state of chronic despair, or we can live with faith in the future, even though it is hidden from us.” Of course, this is completely at odds with the other things that he spent half a century telling us about himself, that he was a bag of nerves, terrified of everyone and everything. It also runs counter to his obvious obsession with his work, one that he took home with him and chewed over every night. In describing his routine during filming, he said he would rise early to think through the challenges of the day ahead. His family recalled that this tended to occur about three in the morning, not the sign of a pacific mind.
But the dandy is an identity born to the English leisure class, populated by soft-handed playboys. Beau Brummell’s family were stinking rich with “new money,” and to compensate for his lack of aristocratic genes, Brummell made a fetish of idleness. In the democratic age, this poses a problem for dandies whose identity has been constructed through industriousness and aspiration. Hitchcock got around the problem by building inactivity into the fabric of his hard-working life. He affected a pose of boredom in his director’s chair, and teased interviewers with flippant answers to serious questions. “Let’s play” was the attitude he communicated to his screenwriters, despite the fact that he demanded unstinting professionalism and dedication from anyone working for him. Herbert Coleman, his assistant director and associate producer in the 1950s, wrote in his memoirs that his marriage was put under great strain by Hitchcock’s expectation of total commitment to the project of “Hitchcock.” Coleman was aggrieved when Hitchcock told a colleague that Coleman “knows more about producing a movie than anyone I’ve ever known. . . . But he has one fault. He thinks more of his family than he does his job.” Ernest Lehman was of the opinion that the dandyish loafing was a strategy of self-deception designed to take Hitchcock’s mind off the carousel of demands that his filmmaking entailed. Hitchcock made films, so Lehman reckoned, “to keep the franchise of his reputation, his fortune and his lifestyle. But his greatest pleasure, his true raison d’être may have been just to feel comfortable, to sit and spin tales and play with ideas, to be at ease, eating, drinking, sans anxiety—and let’s face it, making movies was hard work and produced considerable anxiety in him.”
The leading men in Hitchcock’s films often have a relaxed attitude to work, or find themselves in a situation of enforced inactivity. In the four movies he appeared in, Cary Grant plays a grifter sponging from his wealthy wife; a secret service operative who spends his time eating, drinking, and riding horses; a retired jewel thief luxuriating in his ill-gotten wealth; and a louche advertising executive. In the latter of those roles, the ad executive Roger Thornhill, he exhibits an industrious streak, but that’s glimpsed only in the opening scene in which he steals a cab while off-loading work to his secretary. In these roles, Grant replicates the ideal of the high achiever who never breaks a sweat that Hitchcock aspired to be. His characters could be described by Thomas Elsaesser’s feeling that Hitchcock lived his life as a “protest, the triumph of artifice over accident, a kind of daily victory over chance, in the name of a spirituality dedicating itself to making life imitate art.”
Sauntering hand in hand with the dandy’s disregard of effort is his denial of emotion. An “unshakable resolve not to allow himself to be moved” is how Baudelaire phrased it.
In his perfect state, the dandy succumbs to neither sadness nor anger nor joy; he is dispassionate and aloof in all circumstances. It is the most distinctively English part of the dandy’s take on masculinity, one that Hitchcock embodied in the expressionlessness of his public persona. Home-movie footage used in a 1999 BBC documentary shows Hitchcock at home in the 1930s, fooling around in front of the camera, pulling faces and pantomiming, at one point pretending to be a baby in a playpen, his fist wedged in his mouth. On first viewing, it’s a peculiar sight; despite being one of the most photographed people of his lifetime, the images that have come to define him are those in which he stares into the camera unsmiling, devoid of emotion. For a similar reason, the ending of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” about a man tormented by his doppelgänger, is strangely gripping viewing. As the camera cuts from the final scene of the drama, and back to Hitchcock in the studio, we see him writhing in the grip of two identical-looking medical orderlies. “I’m Alfred Hitchcock! I am, I can prove it . . . I insist!” he shouts, his face twisted in fear and anger. It’s an eerie sight, the world’s most imperturbable man suddenly all at sea. As this hysterical Hitchcock is led off, another Hitchcock, the blank canvas we all know, walks into the frame, reassuringly deadpan. He apologizes for this unseemly eruption of emotion and explains that the gentleman being removed was an obvious fraudster. Off camera, there is a gunshot. Hitchcock remains unmoved. “Poor chap. If you’ll excuse me, I need a moment to pull myself together.”
For practically the entire length of his career, Hitchcock extolled the virtue of what he called “negative acting, the ability to express words by doing nothing.” Naturally, this had much to do with the technique of filmmaking. “The screen actor,” he said in 1937, “has got to be much more plastic” than the theater performer. “Mostly he is wanted to behave quietly and naturally . . . the best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well.” Consequently, Hitchcock considered one of his most important duties as a director to cleanse an actor’s face of all but the most essential display of emotion. Working with Kim Novak had been a challenge, he told Peter Bogdanovich, because she communicated an array of extraneous emotion through her face. “You have got a lot of expression in your face,” he told Novak. “Don’t want any of it . . . it’s like taking a sheet of paper and scribbling all over it.” Speaking shortly before his relationship with Tippi Hedren broke down, he said that controlling her every facial gesture was one of his key achievements on The Birds. The evidence of that is plainly apparent in Hedren’s close-up reaction shots in the early scenes of the movie, in which the blankness of her expression communicates her character’s inscrutability. Some critics have suggested that, despite their gender, Melanie Daniels and Marnie Edgar are two of Hitchcock’s most successful dandies—stylish, enigmatic, and as distant as the moon.
In violent, disturbing ways, Hedren’s emotionally frozen characters are thawed out, leading to their apparent salvation at the movies’ conclusion. The puzzle of how to make the emotionally unavailable available was a big part of Hitchcock’s films, especially those led by Cary Grant and James Stewart, each of whom represents a different part of Hitchcock’s idea of maleness, perhaps of himself. Grant is a fantasy of charm and sexual confidence; Stewart captures men as people struggling with fear, obsession, and guilt. Uniting them—with the exception of Stewart’s married character in The Man Who Knew Too Much—was their remote bachelordom, a dandy persona concealing the tender emotional self beneath. By the end of each of the Stewart and Grant films, that brittle exterior has been breached, for good or ill. This is a crucial point about Hitchcock’s portrayal of dandyism: it offers its own critique. Unlike masculine types of the same era played by Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne, for example, it’s not at all certain whether we’re meant to approve of Hitchcock’s dandies. He wants us to care about them, but we’re nudged to ask ourselves whether all this studied superficiality and hard-fought urbanity is really worth it.
It was a question Hitchcock asked of himself. Wouldn’t it be a happier life if he dropped the dandy act and opened himself up to others, even if in doing so he risked some form of self-diminishment? In private moments, he sometimes complained that on set he felt as though he were riding through a desert on top of a camel, unreachable and alone. Wasn’t it ridiculous, he asked, that people should always call him Mr. Hitchcock, almost in the same breath as insisting that standards be maintained? “One cannot become too familiar with the people with whom one has to work,” he remarked in his later years. “One can’t take the risk of exposing oneself as just an ordinary man.” John Landis was at the very start of his movie career in the 1970s when he met Hitchcock, and he described the experience as like encountering a mythological creature, such was his reputation and his bearing. Likewise, David Freeman thought meeting Hitchcock was akin to visiting the Eiffel Tower for the first time. “You hear about it all your life, and when you finally see the damn thing, it looks so much like the postcards that it’s difficult to see it afresh.” On occasion, some brave young soul insisted on treating Hitchcock like a regular person. Bruce Dern claims that on the first day of working on Family Plot he sat next to Hitchcock and said, “I don’t give a shit if you like this or not, but I’m sitting next to you for ten weeks.” Apparently, the brazenness went down well, and Dern believes Hitchcock felt hurt when he wasn’t approached on set, despite his tendency to surround himself with a huge invisible wall of unapproachability. He was torn between protecting his specialness and yearning to be one of the gang, something he never mastered. “A lot of people think I’m a monster,” he said. “I’ve had women say, ‘Oh, you’re nothing like I thought you were.’ I’d say, ‘What did you expect?’ They’d say, ‘Well, we thought you’d be very unpleasant and this and that’ . . . a complete misconception. . . . I’m just the opposite. I’m more scared than they are.” Being misunderstood is an occupational hazard of the career dandy, who must always remain the same on the outside, irrespective of what springs and swirls within.
The conversation between the seen and the unseen, the surface and the subterranean, is the core of Rope. The story of an audacious attempt at the perfect crime mirrors Hitchcock’s own impudence in attempting to make a movie that appears to be filmed in one continuous take, revolutionary at the time. Both schemes are exercises in exquisiteness achieved through hidden effort, in one case painstaking, in the other sadistic.
Seen but unseen—or, to be more accurate, unspoken—a gay subtext runs through the film. Loosely based on the real-life murderers Leopold and Loeb, the film’s central characters, Phillip and Brandon, are partners in an unspeakable crime, a nudge and a wink at their homosexual relationship, the joint enterprise that the censors of the time considered even more harmful to public morals than the annihilation of an innocent life. The code of their sexuality was in the casting: with glee and knowingness, Hitchcock arranged that the two leads were played by gay men: John Dall as the manipulative Brandon and Farley Granger as the easily led Phillip. The screenplay was written by Arthur Laurents. Barely in his thirties at the time, Laurents was as open about his gayness as one could safely be in the late 1940s, a time in which the harassment and criminalization of gay men was pursued with vigor, following years of relative tolerance between the world wars. As both men detail in their respective memoirs, Granger and Laurents were an item during the production of the film, a fact that Hitchcock knew but decided to keep silent about. Indeed, Granger, Laurents, and Dall were all certain that the gay theme of the story held a strong attraction for Hitchcock, who “built sexual ambiguity into his presentation of the material,” though he never spoke a word of it to any of them.
Screamingly obvious to modern audiences, but apparently not to those of 1948, the crude coding is most evident in the style of these young aesthetes’ lives, the way Brandon fusses over the placing of candlesticks, the extreme refinement of their manners, the intensity of their homosocial world, even the execution of their murder. A
s the camera enters their apartment, the screen is filled with the face of their victim, David, at the moment of his asphyxiation, a shot that evokes the opening shot of The Lodger. The sexual connotations of that scene are obvious here, too; David’s face, and the breathlessness of his murderers, are unsubtle parallels with some other intense physical act, and Brandon can’t wait to light a cigarette the moment it’s all over. When David’s body is tossed into the chest, he lies there throughout the rest of the film—like the beating heart beneath the floorboards in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”—a suspenseful reminder of the secrets these gadflies have lurking in the private spaces of their home. The moment of murder isn’t seen—only heard—in Patrick Hamilton’s play on which the film is based, but Hitchcock insisted it be added to hammer home the disjuncture between Phillip and Brandon’s sophistication and brutality—the flimsiness of civilization that Hitchcock’s murderers always reveal.
Hitchcock and Laurents built the script with Cary Grant in mind as Rupert Cadell, Phillip and Brandon’s darkly witty former tutor who uncovers their crime and is horrified to discover that his ironic reproaches of conventional morality have been taken seriously by his young students, and inspired their crime. The inclusion of Grant would’ve made this the dandiest, and gayest, film Hitchcock ever made. But both he and Montgomery Clift, originally in line for the role of Brandon, passed on the opportunity. “According to Hitchcock,” wrote Laurents in his memoirs, “each felt his own sexuality made him too vulnerable to public attack.” Laurents was disappointed to hear of Grant’s refusal to participate, as he felt Grant was “always sexual” in his acting and would have added an extra dynamic between the characters. That mightn’t be quite the right judgment on what Grant offered. “Not once was Grant sexual on screen,” observes the critic David Thomson. “Instead, he knew that watching was erotic, that the glow of imagery was suggestive, but no one was actually going to do it.” Perfect for a Hitchcock film. Stewart’s interpretation lacks the sparkle and ambiguity that Grant surely would have brought to the role, the qualities he gave to all his best performances. Hitchcock recognized Grant’s capacity to simultaneously seduce and confuse an audience, apt for this film about forbidden male desire. As one of Grant’s biographers notes, when he soared to fame in the thirties and forties, the public asked itself questions about this exotic creature: was he “a new kind of man, or not a ‘man’ at all?”
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 17