* This, of course, is following another of Hitchcock’s favorite tricks of allowing the audience to stay half a step ahead of the protagonist, replacing mystery with suspense.
† His quickfire sketches were highly effective; he even used them to communicate with the deaf artist A. R. Thomson, when sitting for his portrait. “Language in Pictures,” Gloucestershire Echo, April 26, 1933, 4.
9
THE ENTERTAINER
“Good evening.” With that bland but unmistakable greeting, Hitchcock began a new life on the night of October 2, 1955, as the star of his own television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Each week, he appeared before millions of families like a comic-strip character come to life. Against a stark white background, he popped into the camera’s eye in a little world of his own and began his introduction to that week’s story. Roughly half an hour later, when the episode had finished, Hitchcock reappeared, said his sardonic goodbye, and the cameras cut away. There, it seemed, he stayed in stasis until the cathode tubes awoke him seven days later to perform his next turn, perhaps armed with a tea set, or a deerstalker cap, or a giant pipe that blew bubbles from its chamber.
His stint on television with the thirty-minute episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62), followed by The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65), coincided with what is often described as Hitchcock’s “golden age,” the years between 1954 and 1963 in which he made Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. But it was television success that elevated him to new heights of fame, where he was stopped in the street by children in search of autographs, and he became a recognizable face, voice, and body in most households in the United States and beyond. In his weekly turns before the camera, Hitchcock exhibited many parts of his public and private identities: his Englishness, his dandiness, his fatness, his devilish lust for murder and disorder. Most clearly, they showed Hitchcock the comedian and the people pleaser, a Hitchcock whose only intention was to raise a smile, albeit without offering one himself. It was what he referred to as “that degrading side of me—the actor.” The television Hitchcock was a show-off whose adventure in film had been a prelude to the moment when all eyes were fixed on him, the acclaim of the audience filling his ears.
Hitchcock the entertainer.
Some of those who had toiled alongside Hitchcock on his greatest movies, who knew how much of himself he gave to his film work and who appreciated the depth and breadth of his talents, were a little disappointed to see him play a pantomime version of himself on the small screen. Most understood his reasons for doing so. First, television had Hollywood running scared. According to figures from the US Census Bureau, weekly attendance at the movies dropped from ninety million in 1946 to forty million in 1960. To stem the flow, studios lurched to gimmicks, including 3D movies. Hitchcock was handed one of these in 1953, Dial M for Murder, and found shooting for 3D a waste of time and effort. The film performed well at the box office, though, as Hitchcock predicted, most screenings exhibited the film in two dimensions.
An alternative way of engaging with the threat of television was to embrace its possibilities. Hitchcock was persuaded of this approach by Lew Wasserman, his agent and the president of MCA, the media company that represented a roster of stars and had already made great inroads into the new medium. Wasserman arranged a deal that Hitchcock couldn’t resist: $129,000 per episode in return for his opening and closing monologues and minimal involvement in production, directing two or three shows each season. After years of feeling underpaid—in Britain because the business there lacked the resources of the United States; in Hollywood because moguls such as David O. Selznick had the power to strike deals in their favor—Hitchcock felt he was finally getting his due.
The remaining factor in Hitchcock’s entry into television was his yearning for attention. It was a curious aspect of his personality that while he guarded his privacy and had great belief in the rightness of his decisions, he craved the approval of strangers. Almost overnight, Alfred Hitchcock Presents gained him the kind of public acknowledgment he’d always desired. From being a widely recognized film director in the early fifties, by the end of the decade he was one of the most famous men in America. “People swarmed out of nowhere to see him,” Pat Hitchcock remembered. “It was like being with Elvis Presley.”
The series was almost as big a hit internationally as it was in the US. As he liked to say, he recorded his opening and closing monologues in “French, German, English, and American,” ensuring he was an A-list celebrity across the developed world. He became accustomed to the stardom and relished it. Herbert Coleman and Samuel Taylor accompanied Hitchcock on a reconnaissance of locations in Finland, where he was thrilled to be mobbed by a group of schoolchildren and to receive an impromptu standing ovation from the patrons of a roadside diner. Coleman spent a lot of time traveling with the Hitchcocks in the fifties and sixties and registered how Hitchcock basked in the attention he received. When they flew to Rome in late 1956, Hitchcock was delighted by the number of photographers waiting to greet him at the airport, but he was puzzled as to why he couldn’t find any of the photos in the newspapers the next day. According to Coleman, the event had been arranged by Paramount Studios, which had been unable to raise any interest in covering Hitchcock’s arrival because his visit to the city a short time earlier had been extensively reported. Mindful of not upsetting their cherished asset, Paramount had paid some photographers to work their flashbulbs without any intention of selling the pictures.
Inseparable from Hitchcock’s desire for celebrity was his impulse to entertain, in his unique way and on as large a scale as possible. The tension between wanting to be an artist and being an entertainer who gives the people what they want lingered from his first film to his last. “Hitchcock admits to catering for the low-brow,” averred one critic who wrote one of the first published reviews of a Hitchcock film, in the spring of 1926, though that same year his work was branded the “last word in screen art” by another reviewer. Eleven months later, Hitchcock pasted into one of his many scrapbooks a review of The Lodger that calls the movie “only for entertainment,” a phrase underlined and put in quotation marks. If made by Hitchcock, these markings might be the exasperation of a young filmmaker whose artistic efforts did not get their due; more likely, Hitchcock was satisfied that a film that was initially derided by the moneymen as art-house drivel had defied its doubters. Ivor Montagu remembered that Hitchcock had once told him that canny filmmakers “make pictures for the press,” because pleasing them is the only way to safeguard one’s reputation—and to gain power and influence within the industry. It was for the reviewers that he stuffed his films with “the Hitchcock touches,” to satisfy their desire to see cleverness on screen. Michael Balcon had different recollections of Hitchcock’s attitude during his British period, saying that he and Hitchcock “were in the business of giving the public what it seemed to want in entertainment. We did not talk about art or social significance.” Though Hitchcock went through phases in his career of trying to recalibrate his style and redesign the parameters in which he worked, he never swerved from the notion that his priority was to keep the public on the edge of their seats, and to find ways of lending one’s artistic impulses to that end. This, he avowed, was the mark of real talent. To Truffaut he put it plainly: “You have to design your film just as Shakespeare did his plays—for an audience.”
Audiences, of course, were available not only in movie theaters; Hitchcock could sniff them out anywhere. To entertain those around him, and establish himself as a mercurial personality on set, early in his career he developed a series of routines and habits—an off-camera Hitchcock touch—such as ending breaks in filming by smashing a teacup on the floor. Antic eccentricity was gradually replaced by something more sedate, though no less performed: the Zen-like master who professed to be bored by the business of shooting a film, and took more pleasure in gath
ering cast and crew to listen to him recite a lewd joke or an anecdote about the movie business of yore. The dinner table was another space for performance, as were the countless interviews during which he repeated so many of the same quips and anecdotes, the lines of a part only he could play.
Had he possessed more confidence in his appearance, it’s possible he would have pursued a more conventional type of performing; one could imagine him in the “character” parts he gave to those such as Peter Lorre, Hume Cronyn, Edmund Gwenn, and, in his silent films, Gordon Harker, actors who were never romantic leads in a Hitchcock movie, yet whose differentness he admired and relied on to add oddness and humor. In essence, this is what happened from the late fifties, when he starred in numerous trailers for his latest big-screen releases in the guise of the comedic persona from the television shows. Inhabiting a character was a process he clearly enjoyed; on at least two occasions, he posed in character for pieces in American publications, including one in which he took on all the roles in an Agatha Christie–style murder mystery.* Ingrid Bergman explained that although Hitchcock didn’t like to talk about acting, he was given to performing dialogue from scripts, or giving practical demonstrations of how he thought an emotion should be projected. For the magazine Pageant he was photographed in various poses, as he acted out Bergman’s part in Notorious, curled up coquettishly in a chair, crossing his legs in as ladylike a fashion as he could muster.
That particular piece of horseplay was self-deprecating in a way, mocking himself as a gargoyle compared to the divine Bergman. But it also poked fun at actors, the preening peacocks who Hitchcock insisted—only half-jokingly—were the bane of his professional life and whose craft he seemed genuinely ambivalent about as a form of creative endeavor. In the first couple of decades of his directing career, Hitchcock could feel threatened by big-name actors and had testy relationships with them on set. Both John Gielgud and Michael Redgrave were luminaries of the London stage when they took starring roles in Hitchcock films, Gielgud in Secret Agent (1936), Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes (1938). Both always insisted they were cinephiles. Indeed, Gielgud had first become aware of Hitchcock through London Film Society screenings of European movies, and Redgrave shared Hitchcock’s love of German cinema, having spent time in Heidelberg during his youth. Films made in London, however, were a different matter. “British films before 1939 were regarded as something of a laughing-stock,” explained Redgrave, and actors of his background considered movie work lucrative enough to take, but not legitimate enough to take seriously. “You sell to the cinema what you’ve learned in the theatre,” was Ralph Richardson’s dictum.
Hitchcock was acutely aware of how he and his industry were viewed by thespians, and he cheekily used it in his favor when trying to convince Gielgud to sign up, telling him—misleadingly—that his part of novelist turned assassin was a modern-day version of Hamlet. Inevitably, relations were fraught between Hitchcock and actors who thought they were slumming it on his set. On the first day of filming, he told Redgrave that he hadn’t been the first choice for the role, which Redgrave took as an aggressive attempt to put him in his place. Similarly, Gielgud complained that his director made him “sick with nervousness” and that he seemed intent on asserting his superiority rather than bringing the best out of his cast. For his part, Hitchcock dismissed Gielgud’s background in theater as “absolutely no use to him here . . . rub out everything and start again.” It wasn’t only female stars Hitchcock felt he had the power to deconstruct and rebuild.
Famously, it was in Redgrave’s presence that Hitchcock compared actors to cattle, as though they were dumb beasts who needed to be herded at the point of a prod. It was one of those deliberately “shocking” outbursts that helped bolster his reputation as a forceful, opinionated director, endlessly quotable. On the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in 1940, Hitchcock arrived one morning to find three calves awaiting him, each with the name of a cast member around its neck, a joke present from the movie’s star, Carole Lombard. The line “actors are cattle” stuck with him for the next forty years, and he was asked about it in countless interviews. With tongue in cheek, he frequently protested his innocence. “I would never say such an unfeeling, rude thing about actors at all. What I probably said was all actors should be treated like cattle.” As with so many of his other famous quips, Hitchcock never appeared to tire of it, nor did he express irritation when it was raised time and again in the media. It was nothing more than an opportunity to deliver a well-rehearsed comeback, followed by an inevitable giggle from his audience.
Whether or not Hitchcock said “actors are cattle”—Michael Redgrave was certain that he did—the phrase does get close to how Hitchcock regularly felt frustrated by those employed to pose before his camera. When films didn’t perform at the box office, he was quick to pin the blame on bad acting performances, or the casting of an actor who had been foisted on him by studio executives. Farley Granger felt that Hitchcock had been “cold and sometimes cruel” to Ruth Roman during Strangers on a Train because she had been a studio pick that Hitchcock didn’t want for the role of Anne Morton. He also professed to be frustrated or perplexed by what he considered to be the neediness of actors, many of whom were unsettled by the lack of feedback they received on their performance, an instance of Hitchcock’s legendary stinginess with praise. Doris Day described making The Man Who Knew Too Much as “something that I’ll never forget,” though partly because of the baffling behavior of the film’s director who didn’t seem interested at all in working with actors. “He was very pleasant, he was very quiet, and he didn’t seem to direct,” recalled Day. “Jimmy [Stewart] would say, ‘Now, just relax, Doris, of course he liked it. When he doesn’t say anything he’s okay.’ . . . We would go to dinner and laugh and he was warm and loving, just really sweet. But I didn’t understand him on the set.” Despite his own vanity and his own need for external validation, Hitchcock had little patience for it in others.
Unlike the highly skilled people who worked in roles behind the scenes, an anxious actor like Day, or—worse still—one with ideas that didn’t tally with Hitchcock’s thoughts on how a part should be played, could challenge his feeling that all those around him were pulling in the direction of “Hitchcock.” He made an effort to be as diplomatic as possible with actors he didn’t like, but he struggled with those who brought what he perceived to be obstruction and complication to his set. He found Charles Laughton’s process of discovering his character on Jamaica Inn almost more than he could bear, while during the filming of I Confess, he was infuriated by Montgomery Clift’s repeated questioning of the script and his character’s motivation. Particularly galling for Hitchcock was the interference of Clift’s acting coach, whose constant presence on the set Clift had guaranteed in his contract. Similarly, when Paul Newman sent a long memo critiquing his scenes in Torn Curtain, he challenged the certainty Hitchcock needed to feel that the production was progressing according to his blueprint. Roy Thinnes sent Hitchcock a comparable—though far shorter and more diffident—note about his concerns regarding Family Plot, and it’s possible this played a part in Hitchcock’s decision to fire Thinnes, one of four leading actors in the film, very shortly after. Anthony Perkins found the experience of working with Hitchcock to be the most purely enjoyable and creatively rewarding experience of his life, gratified that Hitchcock was amenable to various suggestions about characterization. Yet Perkins’s ideas—such as having Norman Bates chew candy corn throughout the movie—fit in with Hitchcock’s preexisting notion of the character and what he hoped Perkins, the doe-eyed heartthrob, would bring to the role. When faced with an actor who had strong ideas about how to develop their character that deviated from his design, Hitchcock was less indulgent. William Devane, who replaced Thinnes in Family Plot, recalls Hitchcock’s reaction when Karen Black insisted on playing scenes in a way the director didn’t like, especially by improvising dialogue. “I’d look over at him,” Devane recalls, “and he’d raise his fingers like a pair of scissor
s. . . . That was the deal with him. You said your lines, you hit your marks . . . if he didn’t like something, he’d cut it.” To quote Hitchcock, “do what you want, there’s always the cutting room floor.”
“Hitchcock” is one of those rare words that have traveled from proper noun to adjective. Perhaps taking their cue from the ideas that the man himself pressed home in his innumerable interviews, most critics invoke Hitchcock’s name as shorthand for rising tension, slow but unyielding psychological torture, exquisitely unbearable suspense. Those things, of course, are vital to his work, but Hitchcock wouldn’t be Hitchcock if the brooding darkness weren’t undercut by humor. The Girl on the Train, Split, and Nocturnal Animals are among many films in recent times to have been labeled “Hitchcockian,” either by reviewers or by publicists, because of their noir qualities—yet there’s barely a laugh to be had in any of them. The undercurrent of humor in Gone Girl, directed by the Hitchcock aficionado David Fincher, is much closer to true Hitchcock territory. Although Jordan Peele’s comedic style and thematic concerns are a long way removed from Hitchcock’s, his balancing of the disturbing, the suspenseful, and the humorous puts Get Out in the Hitchcockian tradition, too. In Hitchcock’s mind, humor wasn’t simply a garnish of color or light relief; it was the silver thread that ran through most of his best work. “Next to reality,” he told an interviewer in 1936, “I put the accent on comedy, which, strangely enough, makes a film more dramatic.” In a self-authored exploration of his work published that same year, he suggested that he excelled as a writer and director of comedy: “I always look for a subject that has plenty of action. I introduce the comedy myself.”
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 23