Hitch
The Life and Times of
Alfred Hitchcock
by
John Russell Taylor
For Nicolas
Contents
Introduction: The Hitchcock Enigma
Part One: England
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Two: America
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
Postscript
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
The Hitchcock Enigma
Two facts are obvious: everybody knows Alfred Hitchcock, and nobody knows him. Certainly, everybody knows what he looks like. Since right back in the 1930s, when his ‘trade mark’ of a tiny personal appearance in each of his films became known, he has been a more familiar figure than any other film director and, along with De Mille, the only one whose name attached to a film meant more than those of any of the stars in it. But since the various television series under such blanket titles as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, each episode with a little jokey on-camera head- and tailpiece by Hitchcock, things have really snowballed. He has become a rich man, and, more alarmingly, he has become probably the most universally recognizable person in the world. A friend travelling with him a couple of years ago put this notion to him jokingly, and when he argued against it, challenged him to come up with an alternative. Film stars out of their context were dodgy: imagine Barbra Streisand at your neighbourhood delicatessen or Robert Redford on a Number 14 bus. Politicians were arguable outside their own countries—on an American street Mao Tse-tung would be just another Chinaman. But Alfred Hitchcock would immediately be recognized in any context, almost anywhere in the world, and as himself, not as someone who looked vaguely like him. (He himself says, except in England, where he is never recognized because he looks just like thousands of others—a statement to be taken, like much that he says, with a pinch of salt.)
But the appearance and the public manner are, if not entirely created and deliberate—he has never, for instance, learned to be happy with his overweight—at least carefully cultivated, almost like a disguise. One sometimes has the impression of Alfred Hitchcock wearing an Alfred Hitchcock mask, or that inside that fat man there is a fat man struggling to get out. And indeed for one so enormously publicized and so aware of the value and uses of publicity he has managed to remain astonishingly private—a shy, retiring family man, at home with his books and his pictures, his wife, his dog, his daughter and her family close at hand, and a tiny circle of close friends. Little appears in the papers and magazines about his home life, beyond an occasional gimpse of his fabled kitchen and wine cellar. His wife since 1926 has rarely been interviewed, his daughter, though herself an actress, never as far as I know. It is known, since French critics in particular make much of it, that he was born and raised a Roman Catholic, but the importance his religion has assumed in his adult life remains shrouded in mystery. He is often taken, on the strength of his films and some of his more outrageous statements, to be a misanthropist, and more especially a misogynist, yet the accounts of those who have worked with him picture him usually as the kindest and gentlest of men, and his unit of co-workers has always included an extraordinarily high proportion of women (starting with and longest and most importantly featuring his wife Alma Reville), with whom he obviously gets on if anything better than with men. And who, without inside knowledge, would suspect that the jolly cynic of public Hitchcock would be sentimental enough to have made every year it was possible the same Christmas-New Year pilgrimage to the same hotel in St. Moritz where in December 1926 he and his wife spent their honeymoon?
This exemplarily conservative, private private life was one of the things most instrumental in gaining him the respect (sometimes grudging) of the big men in Hollywood during his first decade there. He might be peculiar and incomprehensible (and defiantly English), but at least there was no doubt he was a dedicated professional, more concerned with making a successful picture than with making a fortune (though the one might happily follow the other). He did not go to parties, he did not have affairs with glamour stars, he did not really do anything but make pictures. Very recently, when asked what he would have done or do in his life if he had free choice, he replied, ‘I don’t know. I love paintings, but I can’t paint. I love to read, but I am not a writer. The only thing I know how to do is to make movies. I could never retire—what else is there?’ A mystery he might be, but he was also a sort of model.
For as well as private Hitchcock and public Hitchcock there is professional Hitchcock: the Hitchcock who turns all his energies to the preparation of a film, calculates everything in advance down to the last detail and throws himself totally into the meticulous realization of his plans; the man of routine and strict discipline, the still centre of confident purposefulness on set, the man who never has to raise his voice, never (in this world of flamboyant temperaments) show anger, to the extent that he believes he cannot even feel anger. He has done all possible through the years to perfect himself as a machine for making movies, and in an important sense the dictum of another film-maker who has known him well for forty years is true: ‘There is no real Alfred Hitchcock outside his movies.’
But a real Alfred Hitchcock must in some sense exist outside his films. For all technical explanations of what his films are and what they do come back to the same basic attitude: that film is a way of controlling people, a weapon in the battle of life. Orson Welles has called film the best toy a boy was ever given: Fellini regards it as an imaginary theatre in which the film-maker can act out his fantasies and give them substance. For Hitchcock it seems to be the way that a frightened man, constantly prey to inexplicable guilts and anxieties, can overcome them by manipulating other people, a tool to control people mentally and have them, for the time being, exactly where he suspects they want him.
For Hitchcock is not so much in his films: he is his films. One can psychoanalyse all one wants, to find evidence that his Roman Catholic education has left traces which still show up in his films (why else would he be so excited at the mere idea of kidnapping a bishop in the middle of mass that he would build his whole 53rd film, Family Plot, on it?), or that some unfortunate experience or non-experience with a chilly blonde is at the root of all the pictures in which the icily controlled blonde is inexorably reduced by the end of the story to a snivelling wreck. But whether these hypotheses are correct or not, the fact remains that the elements have been precipitated into art which needs no external explanation. In one sense Hitchcock is the most sophisticated of film-makers, the most totally in control of his means and his ends; in another he is one of the great primitives, allowing himself with extraordinary lack of self-consciousness to be totally known through his films. But through the force of his talent, it comes to much the same thing.
So ultimately it does not matter what sort of man Hitchcock is, whether or not the real Alfred Hitchcock can be persuaded to stand up. But even if such questions make no noticeable difference to our appreciation of the films, there is still human curiosity that impels us to unravel the puzzle. And puzzle Hitchcock undoubtedly remains. How to reconcile the various contradictory images: the dignified, rather formal professional and the shameless publicist who will do anything,
no matter how outrageous, for a picture in the papers; the devotedly married man who never went out with a girl before his wife and the questionable old party of the later movies, clearly fascinated by the highways and byways of sex; the intimidating deadpan commentator on the follies of others and the grinning, vulnerable schoolboy who sometimes startlingly peeps out for a moment from behind the façade? There have to be, at the very least, three Alfred Hitchcocks. There is the public Hitchcock, the television performer, the well-publicized character. There is the professional Hitchcock, the dedicated film-maker who concentrates everything on his movies and allows nothing to get in the way of his concept and its scrupulous realization. And there is the private Hitchcock, the unpublicized family man who rarely departs from a home life of classic modesty and simplicity, the epitome of English middle-class virtues. Which is the ‘real’ Alfred Hitchcock? Why, all of them, of course. The connoisseur of slightly ghoulish jokes and deadpan outrageousness is just as genuine as the intensely private person who can occasionally be glimpsed when he gets talking about his earliest childhood memories or when he sparks to enthusiasm describing some of his own favourites among his eclectic art collection—a group of Rowlandson watercolours, a Sickert landscape, the Klees.
It is Hitchcock’s strength as an artist and as a man that he is all of these things wholeheartedly and none of them completely. Jorge Luis Borges, reviewing Citizen Kane, summons up the shadow of G. K. Chesterton (another Edwardian English Catholic, by the by) to quote the observation that the most frightening labyrinth is a labyrinth without a centre. Many people have found Hitchcock frightening, some of them perhaps for precisely this reason. It has been my aim in this book to enter the labyrinth and try to find its centre.
I came to do so in rather a roundabout way. Like most people, I suppose, I knew the name of Hitchcock before I had any idea what the director of a film actually did—though I do not believe I ever shared the notion of a schoolboy I recently heard in a bookshop observing categorically to a friend, apropos of Hitch, ‘Of course he doesn’t do any work on his films, you know—he only directs them.’ The Thirty-Nine Steps was one of the earliest films I ever saw, closely followed on my insistence by Jamaica Inn, though my parents thought it likely to be too frightening for me. Shortly before I became film critic of The Times in 1962 I met Hitch for the first time, and in subsequent years I got quite friendly with him, in the way that a critic may get friendly with a film-maker.
But I did not really get to know him until I went out to Los Angeles to teach in the University of Southern California. I was no longer directly involved in the film industry, and I was another Englishman in a strange city. Hitch was very kind to me, and we got into the habit of lunching quite regularly together—just comfortable, social lunches in which we would talk at random about films we had been seeing, about England past and present and, naturally, about Hitch’s own earlier life and experiences, all of which, as a shameless fan, I gobbled up. It occurred to me early on that though there were several books about Hitch’s films, there was nothing really about Hitch the man—even Truffaut’s marathon interview touched on personal matters only very incidentally to the discussion of his work. So, I thought, someone should write a biography of Hitch. And why not me? I had written extensively on his films, I had closely studied the neglected area of British film history; more important, my own English family background had some points of uncanny similarity with Hitch’s, and I was well placed to understand the ins and outs of his vital early years.
I put the idea to him. He was hesitant. He said that he had often been asked, and had always said no. To me he was not going to say no, but he didn’t want to say yes just yet. And there the matter was left. I noticed, though, that during the next eighteen months he gradually began to lead into things with ‘When you’re writing this book …’ So at last I plucked up courage to ask him again, and this time he agreed without hesitation. As I was to learn, this is the way he goes about most new projects: he rushes into nothing, but takes his time to test the ground, ‘audition’ the people concerned, and come up only when he is good and ready with his answer. But once he has decided, he commits himself completely to his decision. He answered all my questions, however impertinent, he got me together on many occasions with his wife and daughter, he smoothed the way for me to talk to many people who had worked with him through the years but who never gave interviews, except that if Hitch were in question they would.
He rarely writes personal letters, and has never encumbered himself with much in the way of personal memorabilia. There is a lot of documentation on his recent films, but little or nothing on the earlier ones which he did not personally produce; he has no photographs of himself much before 1930 (indeed, no childhood pictures of him seem to exist anywhere), or of his earlier homes. In many areas of detail a biographer has to rely largely on Hitch’s memory. Fortunately, this is phenomenal. Like any famous raconteur, he has stories that he likes to tell and is asked to tell over and over again. But even these, though consistent in their essentials, are never told in the same way twice: there is always a different perspective which brings out new details. And in other contexts one can point him in almost any direction, asking him about things which obviously he has not had occasion to think about for fifty years or more, and he will come up with precise names and dates in a way few of us could match with the events of the last few months.
In addition, I had the unique opportunity of following one complete film, Family Plot, through all the stages from its first idea to the première showing. Since no one has done this before, and a step-by-step account of Hitch at work has, as well as its inherent interest, a lot of light to throw on his personality and the way his mind works, I have, in Chapter Fifteen, gone into what might otherwise seem a disproportionate amount of detail on this film. But this book is an exploration, in which I have tried to take none of the answers for granted.
Part One
England
Chapter One
In 1899 the London borough of Leytonstone was not a borough, and was not even in London. Somewhere out there in the indeterminate east, near the Wanstead marshes, it was just shaking itself out of its traditional condition as a sleepy Essex village and receiving the dubious benefits of strip development along the main road from London to the North Sea packet-boats which docked at Harwich. Fifteen years earlier, at about the time when William Hitchcock, master greengrocer, was setting up his wholesale and retail fruiterers business in a modest London stock-brick shop with living quarters above at 517 the High Road, the area seems to have been noted mainly as the most convenient point to alight from the train for East Londoners on pleasure bent in the woody wilderness of Epping Forest. The maps show open spaces all round—Epping Forest, Wanstead Park, Leyton Flats, the Great Shrubbage—and, slightly less alluring, Bethnal Green Workhouse Schools, a large infant orphan asylum, and the new City of London Cemetery, placed there no doubt because land was still readily available before the tide of lower-income housing covered it all in brick and mortar, and the area still offered fresh country air to the orphans and workhouse children from London’s teeming East End.
In any case, it was a good place for an enterprising young tradesman to be in the 1880s. The population was soaring, and covered a whole social spectrum, from the old Essex gentry and the prosperous middle-class inhabitants of Walthamstow and Epping to the newly arrived workers spreading out from neighbouring East Ham and Leyton. The wholesale side of William Hitchcock’s business covered a considerable area, supplying small local shops and general stores with fruit and vegetables; the retail side also flourished, to such an extent that he rapidly took over another shop on the other side of Leytonstone High Road. His three brothers were all fishmongers, and as he continued to expand, persuaded him to join them in the fish shops as well, building up finally a chain which extended all over South London, to become one of the major elements of the giant 1930s combine Mac Fisheries. In the 1890s, though, most of this was still in the future.
In 1890 William started a family with a son, William, followed in 1892 by a daughter, Nellie, and then, seven years later, his third and last child, Alfred Joseph, born on 13 August 1899.
It was, as things turned out, rather a good year for English show business. Two other notables in particular sprang from the same sort of solid, respectable lower-middle-class background: Charles Laughton, born six weeks earlier in Scarborough, Yorkshire, and Nöel Coward, born four months later about as far west of London, in Teddington, as Alfred Hitchcock was born east of it, in Leytonstone. Both offer, in their careers and personalities, a number of curious parallels and contrasts. Coward seems at first glance remote from Hitchcock, but their unpredictable mixtures of sentimentality and cynicism, their fierce English patriotism combined with easy cosmopolitanism, their extreme social mobility and command in many areas of society other than that in which they originated, their ability to create their own fantasy worlds and impose them without question on the public, all indicate an improbable similarity. Laughton, great if unpredictable actor, rotund like an overgrown baby, cynic and sensualist, actually crossed paths with Hitchcock professionally on a couple of occasions, and had one even more important attribute in common with him than had Coward: he was born and brought up a Roman Catholic.
For the Hitchcock family were that relative rarity in their class and with their background, long-standing English Catholics. In the East End of London, a melting-pot of nationalities, there was at that time and since a considerable Catholic population of, mostly, recent Irish extraction. And there were still pockets of the old Catholic gentry surviving not too far away, in East Anglia. Also there were in more intellectual circles a number of converts swept in by the great Catholic revival of the mid-nineteenth century, the period of Newman and Manning. But the Hitchcocks did not belong to any of these groups. No record seems to have survived of how and why they were Catholic—all members of the family now know is that they always seem to have been, and so stood slightly apart from their neighbours and peers, who tended to be Church of England or, if they began as Nonconformists, shifted allegiance to the Established Church as they moved up in the world. And religion was important in the family; the parents were devout, regular churchgoers and very strict with the children, who had to go every week some miles down the road to Sunday school at St. Francis, Stratford, had to make regular confession and received an almost entirely Catholic schooling. Latterly, the parents seem to have drifted from such strict devotion, but this was the rather severe, restrictive and self-consciously special atmosphere, of a family apart, keeping itself very much to itself, into which Alfred Hitchcock was born.
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