Hitchcock holding court at the Screen Directors Guild award dinner, February 1955.
Charles Bennett was in no doubt that Hitchcock’s propulsive creative energy was sadism. When Hitchcock screened Psycho for him, Bennett concluded that “only a sadist could have directed that bathroom scene.” Hitchcock was used to that kind of criticism. “I directed that scene for laughs,” he told Bennett, and said the same to lots of others, implying that those who didn’t like Psycho were suffering from a serious sense of humor deficiency.
If, by this, Hitchcock meant that he intended to fill auditoriums with laughter as Marion Crane’s blood swirls down the shower drain, he was obviously being dishonest. If, however, he meant that he found amusement in the suffering of others—if only the suffering of the audience who he knew would leap out of their seats in fright—then he was speaking the truth, and confirming that, as Bennett charged, sadism—or at least an insistent urge to assert his control over others—was a powerful force within him.
Hitchcock found great sport in seeing others being humbled. It was there in his publicly expressed desire to “knock the ladylikeness out of chorus girls.” In his films, characters are frequently shoved off their perch and lose their dignity, and in real life he seized any opportunity to pierce what he considered pretension or conceitedness. Most examples of this occurred before the move to Hollywood. When, as a young director in London, he overheard a colleague talking at length about his new, modern home, Hitchcock decided to have two tons of coal delivered to the man’s front door, just desserts, Hitchcock thought, for his boasting. Shortly after Joan Harrison started working as Hitchcock’s secretary in the early 1930s, she told the boss that she couldn’t work late one night as she had a party to attend. The following day she was inundated with telegrams inviting her to social engagements. Hitchcock had sent them all.
Disapproval of, and ceaseless jokes about, those who get above their station is surely a function of Hitchcock’s Englishness. The instinct to express that disapproval through shaming punishments, however, may well have stemmed from his experiences of corporal punishment at school, the vivid memories of which stayed with him for life. Uncomfortable with conflict, and lacking the skills to express himself in some other more constructive way, Hitchcock disguised his rebukes in the form of practical jokes—perhaps an echo of his father’s behavior when he pretended to have his young son imprisoned as punishment for going missing.
“My father belongs to that hardy group that plays practical jokes as a rough and spirited game,” said Pat Hitchcock in 1963. Some were ingenious and genuinely funny, such as the time he hired an elderly actress—who was in on the joke—to attend one of his dinner parties where she sat silently throughout the meal as Hitchcock pretended not to know who she was or why she had arrived, leaving the other guests bemused. At another dinner party, he arranged for all the food to be colored blue, fish, soup, and all. These are Dadaist jokes; they have no individual target, and no agenda other than to puzzle and confound. When his jokes did pick on a particular person, they were often people he liked or whose approval he sought—very often women—and they could be decidedly cruel. On the set of Rich and Strange, for example, he pranked his friend the actress Elsie Randolph by having her shoot a scene in a phone booth that he slowly filled with steam, knowing that Randolph would panic because of her allergy to smoke. “He was a darling, but a darling with a sadistic sense of humour,” was Randolph’s gracious verdict.
Of course, it’s possible to see this sadism, especially where women are involved, as a further sign of his desire to control and demean. But perhaps it was the outgrowth of a sclerotic masculinity that rendered him emotionally inarticulate to such a degree that pranks and gags were another substitute for intimacy—like a little boy in the playground pulling on a girl’s ponytail. At work, Hitchcock had his films into which he could pour the strong emotions he felt keenly but had no other means of processing. In his day-to-day life, especially in his twenties and thirties, he used humor as a release for these feelings: lust, fear, insecurity, disgust, even anger, that emotion he swore he hardly ever experienced.
As a successful young director, the boy who had grown up as an unusual loner also found himself in the novel position of being a dominant figure in social situations. At times he misused the power this gave him, leading to some awkward and unpleasant encounters. In his memoirs, Charles Bennett related a remarkable story about a time he and Hitchcock went out for the evening with two young ladies, one of whom was a Florence Foster Jenkins type of character who gained notoriety in London for her dreadful singing. Bennett claims that Hitchcock was giddy with the anticipation of slyly mocking her throughout the evening, only to discover that the woman was as sharp as a tack and was more than capable of keeping Hitchcock in his box. “I had never seen Hitch more unhappy,” said Bennett. “The biter was bit.”
Similarly, several contemporaries recall Hitchcock making young, inexperienced, or naive members of his production teams the target of his teasing, sometimes in nasty, unfunny ways. Once he offered to give the unit manager on The 39 Steps, Dickie Beville, a lift to the theater in London where he was due to meet his wife. A little while into the journey, Beville realized that Hitchcock was driving them out of the city altogether, heading to the Hitchcocks’ cottage in Surrey. Beville’s wife was to be stood up. Another, more infamous, story has a few variations, but always involves Hitchcock spiking a crew member’s drink with a laxative and then conspiring to leave him on his own overnight, in handcuffs, in some public place, where the inevitable consequences of the laxative would kick in, leading to the kind of humiliation that Hitchcock himself would have found soul-destroying. Alma, who herself liked a practical joke—she once spiked Hitchcock’s drink with Benzedrine—thought very dimly of her husband’s extreme pranks. “Would any of Hitch’s friends dare to play such jokes on him?” she once asked aloud. “Not if they wanted to remain his friends, they wouldn’t.” As Hitchcock said of himself, “I’m very sensitive; a sharp word . . . hurts me for days.”
Hitchcock relished the power he had to effect discomfort in others, while keeping himself safe from ridicule. Having grown up with a strong sense of vulnerability because of his sense of differentness from those around him—his size and shape, his profile, his solitary nature—and anxious that he would be laughed at because of it, the ability to be the one who made others squirm and feel like outsiders had an intoxicating effect on him. Whether his behavior was sadism or simple teasing, it was ultimately about his desire for control—of his body, his emotions, his reputation—and his fear of losing it.
This unpleasant strand of his joking never entirely left him, but it diminished greatly once he moved to America. The bantering, informal sets over which he presided in London were different from those more professional environments in Hollywood, where he was unable—certainly in the first few years of his American career—to be quite the dominant figure he had been in England. More prosaically, he simply grew out of the rougher, more juvenile stuff as he aged.
Since the details of his nastier jokes have come to light following his death, a lot of those close to Hitchcock have reacted with incredulity that the man’s humor could be construed as anything other than the mischievousness of a cheeky, overgrown schoolboy. His daughter has claimed that sensationalist gossip has bred a false impression that her father was a sadist. She takes particular exception to a story that during the filming of the fairground scenes in Strangers on a Train she took a ride on a Ferris wheel that Hitchcock ordered to have stopped at the moment her carriage was at the very top, leaving her hanging in midair for several minutes. She insists the gag lasted for a few fleeting seconds, and she was never screaming with fear, as the misreporting has it. There is no evidence to counter her recollection of the incident, nor any reason to doubt it. Yet the story to which she objects appears to have first surfaced in publicity material written by Warner Bros. and sanctioned by her father. The same is true with several tales of Hitchcock’s
humor; a good deal of his reputation as the dark, sadistic joker was directed by himself. Talking about a lifetime of pranking, embarrassing, and compromising people, Hitchcock told an interviewer that “the moment any opportunity occurs, I’m in there. . . . I love hearing or seeing . . . the nice discomfort of the recipient of the joke.” As is the case with his complex relationship with women, his teasing, cruel humor wasn’t an aspect of his personality that was obscured from the public, but was taken in hand and marketed as part of the Hitchcock legend. He knew how it would make him look; he enjoyed the notoriety.
When he came to write his biography of Hitchcock, Patrick McGilligan discovered that one infamous anecdote about Hitchcock’s brutal sadism couldn’t possibly be true. Hitherto, Robert Goold, an old boy of St Ignatius College, had maintained that during his schooldays Hitchcock had been one of two boys who had restrained him, pulled down his trousers, and attached firecrackers to his underwear, terrifying him and very nearly causing him serious and painful injury. But McGilligan’s research showed that the dates didn’t tally; Hitchcock had left St Ignatius before Goold had enrolled. Goold conceded that it must have been a false childhood memory; ironically Hitchcockian, in its way.
Rather than a malicious lie, Goold’s story was likely the fusing of distant recollections with Hitchcock’s predilection for undermining dignity in the name of entertainment. He loved to scare, disturb, and discomfort, and he based his entire career on knowing that, deep down, we yearn for these things, too. As a born entertainer, his mantra was to give the audience what they want—whether they like it or not.
* The other appeared in Life magazine, July 1942, in which Hitchcock played the part of a bartender in a six-page photo-essay, “Have You Heard?” about the potential deadly cost of wartime gossip.
† He tried to get a similar sequence into Blackmail, in which two bobbing heads seen in the back windows of a police van would look like a pair of giant eyeballs, shifting from side to side.
10
THE PIONEER
Prominent among Alfred Hitchcock’s enviable talents was his ability to reinvent himself while remaining exactly the same. It was a running joke on his television series, in which he appeared in multiple, unconvincing guises. He was Hitchcock the Pilgrim, Hitchcock the Baby, Hitchcock the Scarecrow—even Hitchcock the Beatle, wearing a mop-top wig for an episode in 1964. No matter how elaborate the costume, there was never any disguising the wearer.
As the fifties drew to a close, he used his education—and the expertise of those around him—in the swiftness and economy of television production to induce the most memorable reinvention of his career, as the maker of horrifying black-and-white slasher flicks. Psycho was a game changer in Hollywood, especially its sparse, expressionist score by Bernard Herrmann, and George Tomasini’s quick-cut editing, both of which exerted a huge influence on other filmmakers’ work. Having self-financed the production, Hitchcock had also challenged the business model of the old studio system, and made himself a phenomenal profit in the process. In the wider culture, Psycho was not so much a landmark as a lightning bolt. Upon its release, it was derided by establishment critics, who dismissed it as grubby melodrama. Andrew Sarris was one of a younger breed who thought very differently. “Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America,” he wrote in the Village Voice. “Besides making previous horror films look like variations of ‘Pollyanna,’ ‘Psycho’ is overlaid with a richly symbolic commentary on the modern world as a public swamp in which human feelings and passions are flushed down the drain.” At sixty, Hitchcock had made a film that kept pace with the fast-changing expectations of young audiences, those for whom violent dislocation was an increasingly familiar cultural experience.
It would be pleasingly neat if Hitchcock had always intended to follow Psycho with The Birds, a bestial nightmare that evoked the Cold War–era terror of destruction from the skies. In fact, Hitchcock came to The Birds rather belatedly. For a long while, he harbored hopes of getting Audrey Hepburn to play a lawyer-turned-undercover-hooker in No Bail for the Judge, or tempting Grace Kelly, now the Princess consort of Monaco, to take the title role in Marnie, turning Her Serene Highness into a kleptomaniac with a psychosexual disorder—a Hitchcockian act of reinvention if ever there was one. When neither of those worked out, he switched horses and pushed ahead with an adaptation of “The Birds,” a short story by Daphne du Maurier first published in 1952. The action was transposed from du Maurier’s native Cornwall to California, and the story became one of Hitchcock’s trademark tales of a beautiful, independent woman stripped of her poise and dignity, beaten down by terrifying forces she can’t control or comprehend. Around that familiar conceit, Hitchcock arranged a carapace of cutting-edge filmmaking that makes The Birds one of the most influential movies ever made.
As much as Psycho, The Birds is a prime example of Hitchcock as modernist showman, working in the tradition of impresarios and publicists such as Sergei Diaghilev and Edward Bernays, as well as groundbreaking filmmakers. With his use of advanced special effects and sound design, a marketing campaign built around his celebrity, and an attempt to create a movie star out of somebody who’d never before had a professional acting job, Hitchcock revealed himself to be a man motivated by the desire to outdo himself, to innovate, reinvent, and avoid the steady creep of boredom.
The idea of lending Hitchcock’s gifts to a tale of humans besieged by the natural world had floated around for many years before The Birds went into production. In 1953, his friend and sometime business partner Sidney Bernstein recommended buying the rights to The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham’s dystopian novel about humans under attack from a species of giant plant. Bernstein and Mary Elsom—an Englishwoman engaged in scouting potential Hitchcock material—pitched the book as an H. G. Wells extravaganza, ripe for exploitation by the latest special effects, including 3D. Hitchcock didn’t bite. He was wary of science fiction, and despite his enthusiasm for adopting and adapting new technology, he was never sold on the viability of 3D as a storytelling tool. When sound and color were introduced in the twenties and thirties, he instantly saw the potential of each to help build a narrative and add new layers to the Hitchcock touch. However, 3D, he believed, was just the opposite, a gimmick that reduced rather than expanded a filmmaker’s options.
Another concern Hitchcock had with 3D is that it failed to deliver on its central promise. Rather than drawing the viewer into the world of the film, it reminded them of the artificiality of what they were seeing, which could only detract from a distinctive and convincing diegesis. As daring as it was, Psycho had forced Hitchcock back to basics, drawing on his core filmmaking principles for a black-and-white movie made on the kind of budget he hadn’t handled since wartime. There were no real stars, no stunts, and no dramatic chase sequences across world-famous monuments. Faced with such constrictions, he made the most of what he had when it came to selling the film in a novel, now legendary, advertising campaign, intertwining his celebrity with the gothic dread of the film’s fairy-tale universe. In an unforgettable trailer, he led cinema audiences around the Bates house, like a realtor from the Seventh Circle of Hell. His face appeared in promo posters; he, rather than Janet Leigh or Anthony Perkins, recorded radio ads. It was also he who shaped how the film should be exhibited in cinemas across the country. He insisted that nobody be allowed admission to Psycho once the film had begun, a break from the custom of the day that he told exhibitors was needed to extend an atmosphere of “mysterious importance” from the screen to the lobby. It was Hitchcock’s likeness that moviegoers saw in cardboard-cutout form as they waited in line, pointing grimly at his watch, and it was his voice they heard in prerecorded messages warning them that any attempts to enter the auditorium once the film had started “will be met by force.” Hitchcock’s reputation was front and center in creating an atmosphere of specialness around the film, priming audiences for the spooky world they were about to enter. There were no preview screenings, and the cast and crew had
been asked to take an oath promising not to divulge any of the awful secrets of the film’s plot—a fact that was used for publicity purposes, along with the revelation that the usually press-friendly Hitchcock had ordered a closed set during filming. The ratcheting suspense had its desired effect. From the opening week, there were reports of not merely shrieking inside the auditorium, but crying, fainting, and seats wetted by patrons who had lost control of themselves.
The excitement spread across the planet. When Hitchcock embarked on a world tour to promote Psycho, he and his personality were exploited every bit as extensively. In Australia, he made headlines by expressing his dislike of the way in which women were treated in the antipodes. “Your women are marvellous,” he told a journalist in Sydney, “yet they are so downtrodden by your men.” Considering that Psycho is all about American women being treated horrendously by American men, that was a bold statement, indeed. Less provocatively, he also posed for photographs in his hotel room to accompany an article about his efforts to locate a missing shoe, which at least one newspaper deemed newsworthy.
The Australian leg of the tour ended with a dinner in Hitchcock’s honor, on Friday, May 13, at which the creepy turned to camp. The dining room was draped in black, colored only by sprays of white lilies and chrysanthemums, and according to the Melbourne Herald, “sombre organ music filled the room.” Hitchcock arrived by hearse, greeted by eight young women dressed all in black, while guests—several of whom were “leading psychiatrists”—posed for photographs in front of a huge copy of Hitchcock’s silhouette. The publicity tour underlined what the opening of the film in the United States had demonstrated: Psycho was less a movie and more a cultural happening, expanding on a tradition of the riotous early performances of Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris, and the Armory Show exhibition in New York in 1913, which introduced the American public to cubism, fauvism, and futurism, and allied Europe’s groundbreaking modern art with an American genius for marketing and working the public into a lather.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 25