That changed soon enough. Alma and Alfred married on December 2, 1926. Hitchcock’s depiction of married life on screen could be rather bleak. During an argument in Secret Agent, Madeleine Carroll slaps John Gielgud, her supposed husband, across the face; he immediately slaps her back. “Married life has begun,” she says. It’s startling to a modern audience, but such scenes were meant as jokes, a version of cliché gags about the misery of being married that are still a staple of sitcoms and stand-up routines. Hitchcock drew immense strength from his union with Alma, though he sometimes failed to give as much as he took. He admitted that when Alma was in labor with Pat in July 1928, he found it so stressful that he took himself off for a walk, returning hours later to find the baby already born.
Being a wife and mother didn’t halt Alma’s career. In 1928, a movie she wrote, The Constant Nymph, was one of the biggest hits at the UK box office. Over the next several years, more of her work made it to the screen without Hitchcock’s involvement, including Nine till Six (1932), a film set in a women’s clothes shop, featuring an all-female cast. Her calling card was the experience of ordinary British women, prompting some researchers to speculate that it was through Alma that Hitchcock developed his interest in strong, rounded female characters and the domestic settings of so many of his films, especially in the first half of his career. When asked what advice she had for other young women hoping to build a career behind the camera, she was succinct: “Be interested,” and be prepared to put the job before everything else. Drive and dedication brought rewards that women of previous generations could have only dreamed of: “I’ve been almost all over Europe,” she marveled, and knew her homeland much better “than most girls get to know this country.”
As her husband’s name grew, so Alma’s involvement in the wider industry receded. It seems she made the decision to concentrate her attention on Hitchcock, in whose career she naturally felt both personally and professionally invested. Alma may have also had the sad, pragmatic realization that scampering up the ladder would be twice as hard for her as it would be for a man of equal capabilities. As her early successes demonstrate, cinema held opportunities for talented women—but the glass ceiling was real. In the late twenties, her own husband had told a journalist that although Alma was of the “utmost value so far as the story, and even the action went, some of the more unwieldy departments of film producing were difficult for her to control,” which he took as evidence that men were immanently more suited to being film directors, even though the majority of filmgoers were female. “Would you expect a girls’ school to be built by girls?” he asked the interviewer.* The chances of fulfilling her ambitions—creative and financial—were higher if she poured her skills and energy into a man with abundant talent, and equally abundant deficiencies for which she could compensate.
History is replete with such pairings; the shrewd and steadfast woman facilitating the success of a talented but fragile man is so familiar as to be drab cliché. What’s important about the Hitchcock-Reville marriage is that Hitchcock energetically advertised the centrality of their union to his work, deliberately weaving his private life into his public image as the patriarch of a bourgeois family of unique distinction; just like the next-door neighbors, but simultaneously very different. In August 1930, Hitchcock wrote several hundred words for a popular magazine to publicize Murder!, a movie he describes as “the product of the Hitchcock combination—Mr. and Mrs.,” and which demonstrates that Alma knows “more about scenario writing than I am ever likely to.” The piece reveals Hitchcock’s working methods at the same time as showing us the Hitchcock family, including the cute toddler Patricia—“who is two and regards me as a joke”—their maid, their secretary, their “little cottage hidden in five acres of coppice,” their swish London flat on Cromwell Road, and even their car, nicknamed Blackmail.
The Hitchcocks on their wedding day, December 2, 1926.
The “little cottage” was in fact a rather large Tudor dwelling, fitted out with luxurious modern bathrooms and kitchen, in the Surrey village of Shamley Green. Ostensibly, this was the Hitchcocks’ domestic sanctuary from London, the film industry, and the pressures of work. Yet, as with their flat on Cromwell Road, it was also a venue in which Hitchcock performed for journalists. According to one reporter who wrote a feature on it, the cottage was “imbued with the atmosphere of the Middle Ages, together with all the comforts of these Modern days,” a reflection of the Hitchcocks themselves: a wholesome, traditional English family at the cutting edge of twentieth-century urban culture. Another journalist was greeted by a smiling Alma—“delightfully vivacious and a charming hostess”—while young Pat introduced her to the pony and the Old English sheepdog. Hitchcock could be seen “parading the garden” in his pajamas, dressing gown, and slippers, a homely, if odd, man of the house.
At the time, this display of contented domesticity—especially his fulsome praise of Alma’s talents—made Hitchcock seem a bourgeois eccentric; now it gives him the look of a far-sighted critic of traditional masculinity. For a male artist of the interwar era, Hitchcock’s warm public embrace of hearth and home made him an atypical figure. One of his contemporaries, the critic Cyril Connolly, famously wrote that “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” Female artists still searching for a room of one’s own might have advised Connolly to count himself lucky if parenthood had encroached only as far as the hall, but Connolly’s epigram articulates a widely held belief among male modernists. The poet Wyndham Lewis married his wife, Gladys Anne Hoskins, in 1930 but kept her existence a secret, even from close friends, so certain was he that a feminized domestic environment was anathema to artistic productivity. “I have a wife downstairs,” he remarked to one visitor, having never mentioned her during the previous two years of their friendship. “A simple woman. But a good cook.” Hitchcock’s affectionate public take on family life is closer to that of Arnold Bennett’s, the exceptionally popular, middlebrow English novelist who was the bête noire of Connolly, Lewis, and other English highbrows. However, Hitchcock’s involvement in the modern medium of cinema, his interest in the avant-garde, and his determination to introduce elements of it into his work places him in a unique spot, as does the disconnect between the image of the blissfully calm family life he presented to the public and the families he put on screen—disordered, dysfunctional, or embattled. To Hitchcock, “the pram in the hall” was not a blockage, but a portal to what some have described as his “chaos world,” that nightmarish place into which his characters descend.
Right up until the end of his life, Hitchcock publicly asserted that his happy marriage was the girder of his career. Yet it’s uncertain how much of the Hitchcocks’ marriage made it on-screen. Hitchcock was notoriously evasive on what of himself he put into his films, and Alma left scant public record of her thoughts on anything. As Donald Spoto has noted, perhaps the closest we have to a depiction of Alfred and Alma are Emily and Fred Hill, the lead characters in Rich and Strange (1931). Adapted from a novel of the same name by Dale Collins, the film both mocks and celebrates young adults of the Hitchcocks’ generation who are encouraged by movies, magazines, and advertising to believe that happiness is only a spending spree away. Bored stiff with their humdrum domestic routine, the Hills splurge a financial inheritance on adventure abroad. After travels through exotic foreign lands, studded with temptations that almost end their marriage, and dangers that almost get them killed, they discover that excitement and glamour are not for them, and they are relieved to slide back into their sedate lives.
As a pair of thoroughly modern young fogies, Fred and Emily read like a riff on Alfred and Alma, despite the fact that the film is largely faithful to its source novel. In Paris, the Hills find themselves in the Folies Bergère, aghast at the gyrating flesh, a scene apparently modeled on the Hitchcocks’ own experience of the venue, which they visited while working on the script. At some point in the evening, Hitchcock asked a fellow audience member where he and Alma mig
ht see some belly dancing. To their astonishment, they were led to a brothel. “In front of my wife, the madam asked me whether I would like one of the young ladies. Well, I’ve never had anything to do with that sort of woman. . . . So we had been behaving exactly like the couple in the book—two innocents abroad!” When he discussed Rich and Strange with Peter Bogdanovich, Hitchcock described the end of the film: “After it’s all over, they [the Hills] meet me in the lounge. This is my most devastating appearance in a picture. They tell me their story and I say, ‘No, I don’t think it’ll make a movie.’ ” The original script, cowritten by the Hitchcocks with Val Valentine, does feature a scene with the character of an unnamed filmmaker, but, as pointed out by the historian Charles Barr, it does not appear in the extant film. Perhaps Hitchcock’s active imagination had blended fact with fiction for the sake of a good yarn to tell Bogdanovich, or maybe he’d misremembered because the characters had always seemed like a version of himself and Alma. Possibly, the initial idea had been for Hitchcock to play the role, in what would have been a witty way of referencing how close the married couple in the film were to their creators, but it proved too unwieldy or unconventional an ending. In any case, the Hills are sober people with hidden passions, fantasies, and yearnings, who ultimately learn the joy of settling. Rather than chase unattainable objects of desire, they embrace domestic stability. The comforts of home and faithful interdependence trump any desire for passionate release. For Alfred and Alma, this was a cherished precept, the cornerstone of their partnership—and a source of frustration that quietly rumbled through their married life.
When Hitchcock left for New York in March 1939, he faced the photographers with Alma and Pat, now aged ten, beaming broadly by his side in a pose of familial happiness they would repeat countless times over the next forty years. Once in America, Alma and Alfred made it their mission to re-create a slice of southern England in southern California. For Life magazine, Hitchcock set out his requirements. “What I want is a home . . . a snug little house, with a good kitchen, and the devil with a swimming pool. Only try to find one here.” Californian houses, he felt, lacked homeliness; the article featured a photograph of him looking forlornly into a small fireplace, not a patch on the great hearths he was used to back in England. A “snug little house” doesn’t really describe the eighty-five-acre ranch the Hitchcocks bought up among the redwood forests and orange groves of Scotts Valley, beneath the Santa Cruz Mountains. Alma’s green thumb cultivated an impressive garden. One friend said she was reminded of Alma’s flowers on a visit to Nottingham, Alma’s birthplace, the city center decorated with colorful hanging baskets.
“The Ranch,” though, was just a country getaway. For Monday-to-Friday living, the family at first made a comfortable makeshift home in a house rented from Carole Lombard, whom Hitchcock directed in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), a screwball comedy about a married couple whose tempestuous relationship is equal parts hugs, kisses, and smashed dishes. Lombard’s sudden death in a plane crash in January 1942 necessitated a permanent relocation for the Hitchcocks. Ultimately, they found what they were looking for at 10957 Bellagio Road in Bel Air, a newly built house that is often described as being modest by Hollywood standards, which Pat remembers as being calm, cozy, but always immaculate.
Just as the London flat and the Surrey cottage had been before the move, these tranquil family homes became the epicenter of the Hitchcock endeavor where so much of the important work happened: scriptwriting, story conferences, thinking, debating, planning—and auditioning for Hitchcock’s favor. Those who were asked to visit the ranch knew they had been given special access and were rewarded by seeing Hitchcock in his natural habitat. When Frederick Knott adapted his play Dial M for Murder into a script for Hitchcock, he was invited to stay, along with Grace Kelly, the star of the movie. The blurry snapshots that Knott took of the trip are beautiful in their incongruity, revealing a wide-eyed Kelly shoving an enormous hamburger into her mouth, and, even more unusually, Alfred Hitchcock in his garden tending to the roses, wearing a pair of slacks and a white polo shirt. “When Hitchcock liked you . . . you became part of his extended family,” said Arthur Laurents, who felt like an adopted child during the time he worked with Hitchcock, eighteen years his senior. He adored the Hitchcock home—“it was lovely being with people who loved each other”—but being subject to Hitchcock’s domineering charm sometimes felt a little like “Oh God, I have to go to Daddy’s.” He learned that paternal favor was not unconditional. When Laurents told Hitchcock he didn’t want to work on Under Capricorn, he realized he had done more than turn down an offer of work; he had erased himself from the inner circle. Being accepted into the Hitchcock team as a close creative collaborator was also an acceptance into Hitchcock’s private world. A rejection of the former was frequently taken by Hitchcock as a snub to the latter. “It wasn’t like a big studio,” Peggy Robertson recalled, “it was more like a family.” If a member of the family decided to move on, as happened when Herbert Coleman pulled away to take up his first directing job, the patriarch felt wounded. By 1955 Coleman had become such a trusted part of Hitchcock’s life that when the director left town while renovations were done to his house, Coleman was named as the person to field any questions from the contractors. Hitchcock “was very sad about it,” explained Robertson of Coleman’s decision to leave, “feeling Herbie was deserting him. But that’s what he wanted to do.” It took a lot for Hitchcock to let people in; coming and going as one pleased was rarely allowed.
Social events at the Hitchcocks’ could be riotous fun; food and drink were always plentiful and sumptuous, and the guest lists sometimes glittering. When Pat graduated high school, her parents threw a party at Bellagio Road, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman among the attendees. Notwithstanding Alma’s total command of the kitchen, Hitchcock directed life at home much as he directed the work of a movie, to the extent that he arranged Pat’s wardrobe as though she were one of his leading ladies. When Pat reached adolescence, the very age when most fathers step back from such things, Hitchcock took her shopping for clothes, usually without Alma. “He had very definite ideas for me,” says Pat, “of what was appropriate to my personality.”
It was around this time that Pat had her first involvement in a Hitchcock film, running lines with Edna May Wonacott, the little girl who played the Newton family’s youngest daughter in Shadow of a Doubt. In that same year, 1942, Pat was cast in the Broadway production of Solitaire. Two years later she landed the lead role in Violet, a comic play by Whitfield Cook, which received a lukewarm critical reception and was not a hit with the public. Cook’s agent wrote him to say that the sparkling writing was let down by the disappointing child cast in the lead role. Several reviews suggest the reverse was true, and that the fifteen-year-old did an admirable job with flimsy material. “Papa Hitchcock will have no scolding to do for Pat whoops it up like a seasoned trouper,” wrote one reviewer.
Naturally, the Hitchcock connection was the source of much publicity. In October 1944, Hitchcock joined Alma at a performance of the play in Boston, immediately before he went to work on his war propaganda films in England, where he experienced the nerve-shredding tail end of the Blitz. As usual, reporters couldn’t resist remarking on what an unusual-looking couple Pat’s parents were, Alma being much shorter than her husband and not even half his weight. Of Pat’s acting ambitions, Hitchcock said, apparently playfully, that although he did not approve, “her mother does thoroughly. . . . I’ll put off as long as possible having to direct my own daughter”—a clear indication that he knew it was only a matter of time.
Alfred, Alma, and Pat out for a walk with their dogs, Edward IX and Mr. Jenkins. Beverly Hills, 1939.
The occasion came in 1949 when he cast Pat in the role of the absurdly named Chubby Bannister—one of Hitchcock’s teasing little jokes—in the movie Stage Fright, again written by Whitfield Cook. The script was based on the novel Man Running by Selwyn Jepson, but it was Alma who suggested making the protagonist a st
udent at RADA, the august acting school in London at which Pat studied. To develop the treatment and write the screenplay, Hitchcock recruited Cook to collaborate with Alma and him. Since their first association in Violet, the Hitchcock family and Cook had grown increasingly close. From 1945 on, he was a frequent guest for dinner or cocktails, and would often meet one or more of them for nights out at restaurants and the theater. In 1948, Cook and his mother even spent Christmas at the Hitchcocks’ home, returning the favor the following week by hosting the family at his New Year’s Eve party. It was clear that a strong bond formed among all of them, and Hitchcock rated Cook as a writer; prior to engaging him to work on what would become Stage Fright, there was talk of collaborating on a vehicle for Shirley Temple. A short story that Cook wrote, “Happy Ending,” includes a tableau about a man with a “late-Victorian sense of humor,” his wife and their daughter, which, although not modeled on the Hitchcocks, is remarkably similar to many people’s descriptions of the family at the dinner table:
Every evening he’d bring home some joke or story or problem to be brought forth with the dessert. Sometimes the stories were vulgar. Risqué, Mrs. Prann called them. “Percy,” she’d say, “don’t be risqué. Remember Dora.” And Percy, looking coy and drawing his chin down almost inside his high, illfitting collar, would say, “Oho, Dora knows a thing or two; she’s a big girl now.” And Dora would give a sickly smile.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 19