PATRICK McGILLIGAN
FOR TINA
WHEN ONE OF HIS FRENCH FOLLOWERS
SOLEMNLY ASKED ABOUT THE DEEPEST LOGIC OF
HIS FILMS, THE MASTER SHRUGGED, “TO PUT
THE AUDIENCE THROUGH IT.”
—“The Man Behind the Body,”
Holiday, September 1964
CONTENTS
PART 1 LONDON: THE ENJOYMENT OF FEAR
ONE 1899–1913
TWO 1913–1921
THREE 1921–1925
FOUR 1925–1929
PART 2 THE HEIGHT OF HITCHCOCKERY
FIVE 1929–1933
SIX 1933–1937
SEVEN 1937–1939
PART 3 HOLLYWOOD: FEAR AND DESIRE
EIGHT 1939–1941
NINE 1941–1944
TEN 1944–1947
PART 4 THE TRANSATLANTIC DREAM
ELEVEN 1947–1950
TWELVE 1950–1953
PART 5 PARAMOUNT: THE GLORY YEARS
THIRTEEN 1953–1955
FOURTEEN 1956–1958
FIFTEEN 1958–1960
PART 6 CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
SIXTEEN 1960–1964
SEVENTEEN 1964–1970
EIGHTEEN 1970–1980
CODA
NOTES
FILMOGRAPHY
INDEX
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY PATRICK MCGILLIGAN
TELEVISION CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PART 1
LONDON
THE ENJOYMENT OF FEAR
ONE
1899–1913
He might saw a woman in half, as one of his favorite real-life murderers did. Or, with a wave of his wand, scare a swarm of birds out from under his English gentleman’s hat.
All of his tricks were in a single trunk plastered with travel stickers—his life, as it were. There were umbrellas, door keys, tiepins, rings and bracelets, a glass of poison, a ticking bomb, long kitchen knives and a host of other glittering stuff. Sometimes it seemed that he juggled only a handful of items with endless hypnotic variation. But just when you thought he’d shown you all he had, he reached into the deep bottom of the trunk and found something there to mesmerize you afresh.
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was the ultimate magician of the cinema, an illusionist as pleased by his own mastery as he was by his audiences’ reactions. He perfected a mask of jovial sangfroid, but he couldn’t have been happier when the audience collectively sighed, laughed, screamed—or wet their seats.
His name was as English as trifle. The “Alfred” stood in honor of his father’s brother. The “Joseph” was a nod to the Irish Catholicism of his mother—the name of the carpenter of Nazareth and husband of Mary.
The “Hitch” was a derivative of Richard, Coeur de Lion, most popular of the Angevin kings. “Richard” was popular throughout the kingdom in variants, among them Dick, Rick, and Hick; the initial R was commonly nicked into H. The “Cock” meant “little” or “son of,” as in “son of Richard,” or “son of Hitch.”
Little Hitch.
He shortened the name for friends and introductions. “It’s Hitch,” he drawled, relishing the trap about to be sprung, “without the cock.” As he made a game of identity in his wrong-man movies, Alfred Hitchcock made a game of his identity in life.
Few directors forged their careers as resolutely, as self-consciously, as Alfred Joseph Hitchcock. Starting from boyhood, he was drawn slowly but steadily toward his métier—just as steadily as his family moved along East End suburbs, down the river Lea, in the last years of the nineteenth century, toward the greater opportunity of central London.
Leytonstone, where Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born, was north of the Thames and south of beautiful Epping Forest, where Tennyson lived when he wrote “Locksley Hall.” A hamlet attached to Leyton (Lea Town), Leytonstone (Leyton’s Town) was once the fiefdom of rich merchants who built grand houses on estates that bordered country meadows and marshlands. Eventually the rich moved away, abandoning their mansions and estates to make way for vast numbers of cheap houses built by greedy developers for the nineteenth-century explosion of city workers. By the turn of the twentieth, the area was thriving commercially, booming with shops, churches, and schools, and fast losing its rural character. The population of Leytonstone doubled twice after the 1861 census.
Like Stratford, where Hitchcock’s father, William, was born, and West Ham, home of his mother, Emma Jane Whelan, Leytonstone was part of the outer London county of Essex. The Essex boomtowns owed their existence largely to the Great Eastern Railway Line, which offered cheap “workmen’s fares” to central London (about six miles from the Leyton station), and proximity to the river Lea. Down the Lea a tremendous variety of agricultural goods traveled through a series of locks leading to Regent’s Canal, en route to the docks and warehouses of the Thames. The Hitchcocks owed their livelihood to the worker boom, the railway, the boats, and the river Lea.
William Hitchcock was born in 1862 to Joseph Hitchcock, a “master greengrocer” in Stratford. Part of West Ham, Stratford was separated from Bow in Middlesex by the Lea, over which stretched the Bow Bridge, the first stone bridge built in England. Joseph Hitchcock was already among the second generation of Hitchcocks to thrive in greengrocering. Besides William, Joseph Hitchcock had at least six other sons and daughters: Mary (known as Polly), Charlie, Alfred, Ellen, Emma, and John.
Polly, the eldest, married a man named Howe, and bore two children. Charles, the eldest son, fathered five, including Teresa and Mary, Hitchcock’s cherished older cousins, whom he treated as aunts. Charles’s son John, a Catholic priest, was known to all as Father John; he served as head of the parish of Our Lady and St. Thomas of Canterbury in Harrow, from 1929 to 1944, and is remembered there for doubling the size of the church and erecting a modern school.
Of the director’s namesake, William’s brother Alfred, not much is known, except that he was a bulwark of the family business. Alfred was to run a fish shop on busy Tower Bridge Road, immediately south of the Thames, and spearhead the London side of operations.
Ellen married a man from Cork and died giving birth to their third child. Her husband became legendary in the family as the first relation to emigrate to America, while the daughter who survived Ellen’s death, also named Ellen, briefly moved in with the Leytonstone branch when the future director was a young boy.
Through shipping and intermarriage the Hitchcocks were well aware of the wider world, especially outposts of the United Kingdom. When she was just twenty years old, Emma left in 1899 for South Africa to marry James Arthur Rhodes. Taken off the boat in Durban harbor in a large wicker basket (like the kind that figures into the climax of Torn Curtain), Emma was then carried to safe ground on the backs of Zulu warriors. Like other Hitchcocks, Aunt Emma was a devout Catholic; she attended Mass for much of her life via rickshaw. The longest-lived and the farthest-flung, intrepid Aunt Emma became a favorite of young Alfred Hitchcock.
The baby of the original brood, John Fitzpatrick, had a pair of devilish eyes that twinkled in an angelic face. The burgeoning family fortune bought him education at the Douai School for Boys in Woolhampton; the priests who administered the school hoped that John might take the vows. Not to be: a financial wizard, John returned to the greengrocery trade to buy a string of stores near open street markets, which he turned into fish shops, often fronted by pavement stalls. These shops were then linked into a fish-greengrocery combine called John Hitchcock Ltd. Uncle John was married to a well-educated linguist who had taught English in France and Germany. Though childless, they doted on their nieces and nephews.
The circumstances of Alfred Hitchcock’s childhood have been p
ortrayed elsewhere as Dickensian, but the truth was closer to a vision of Frank Capra. Hard, hard work was necessary, expected and valued, but work was rewarded. The Hitchcocks were a jolly clan, full of fun. Uncle John could be coaxed into elaborate charades; he loved to play tricks on people. The Hitchcock women were “characters,” some of them known to swear like troopers; the director’s spinster aunts in particular inspired a multitude of Plainspoken Janes in Hitchcock films. The family adored gossip and scandal, risqué stories, Cockney humor. They attended sporting events, music hall, concerts, plays, and, in time, moving pictures. They enjoyed parties where everyone drank too much and then got up to sing the sheet-music hits or the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.
“At family gatherings,” Hitchcock reflected years later, “I would sit quietly in a corner, saying nothing. I looked and observed a good deal. I’ve always been that way.”
The Hitchcocks were staunchly Catholic, but they showed irreverence for everything, including Catholicism. The Hitchcocks had a number of priests in the family; relatives or not, clergymen were in and out of the home, drinking, singing, laughing, and making mischief.
The Hitchcocks were not lower- or working-class; they were shop owners, their fortunes always on the rise. The home of Uncle John was the family locus: a posh Victorian, five bedrooms on three floors, located on Campion Road in Putney, and equipped with chauffeur, maid, cook, and part-time gardener. All the Hitchcocks gathered there to celebrate important birthdays and holidays. Every summer Uncle John rented a boarding-house in Cliftonville, a seaside town on the southeast coast, with rooms set aside for family members. Even after Hitchcock was famous, he still came to visit Uncle John on holidays and at summertime, sometimes staying at a local hotel with his wife and daughter. When he made a short film for a benefit in Cliftonville in 1963, Hitchcock’s narration pointed out that he became class-conscious not in Leytonstone, but at the seaside, where he was struck, as a young boy, by the disparity between the locals and the vacationers.
Indeed, in direct contrast to much of what has been written about him, Hitchcock was part of a large, loving family, with whom he remained close throughout his life. The extended Hitchcocks knew him as “Alf” or “Alfie” (the English nieces and nephews called him “Uncle Alf”). Family members were encouraged to visit him at the various film studios, and especially in the 1920s were invited to gala functions with him, where they mingled with royalty and celebrity. Relatives came to stay with him in London, and later in California, for weeks at a time; he would pay their travel expenses, and whenever he was traveling arrange to meet up with them in distant places. He was always warm, welcoming, interested in catching up on news, no matter how busy, no matter if they were interrupted by journalists or fans. The famous Hitchcock phoned ordinary Hitchcocks regularly, and sent long, personable letters, thoughtful Christmas gifts, and substantial amounts of money when needed.
Uncle John, the tricky, flamboyant Hitchcock, inspired flamboyance in his nephew. Hitchcock’s father, William, existed in the shadow of his younger brother’s success and legend. There is a lasting impression that William Hitchcock was a habitual drinker, and not always an efficient shop owner. On occasion, it is likely, he would have had to be bailed out by Uncle John.
Yet William married well, and his wife complemented his weaknesses with her strengths; their example of friendship and partnership reinforced Hitchcock’s own feelings about marriage. Hitchcock’s mother, Emma Jane Whelan, was second-generation Irish, Catholic, literate, the daughter of a policeman and one year her husband’s junior. Hitchcock once described his mother as having “a cottage-loaf figure,”* which grew plumper as she grew older. When William was twenty-four and Emma was twenty-three, they were married and took over a greengrocery in Stratford.
Emma Jane Whelan Hitchcock has been described in her later years as “a smartly dressed, sedate person, very quietly spoken with an aristocratic manner.” She had a black-Irish sense of humor, and could be sharp-tongued on occasion. She was very sensible, and likely kept the books for her husband, organizing the schedule and routine for a business that depended on timing and freshness.
In 1890, the third year of their marriage, Emma gave birth to a boy christened William Jr.; in 1892 she bore a girl the parents named Ellen, or Nellie. In 1896 the burgeoning family moved to Leytonstone, less than two miles north along the river Lea, where the Hitchcocks ran a greengrocery at 517 The High Road. On August 13, 1899, in the private rooms above the shop, Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born.
That was the year “W Hitchcock” took out an advertisement in the Express and Independent Almanack asserting the “NOTED QUALITY” of his “ENGLISH AND FOREIGN FRUIT,” various kinds of potatoes, and other products. Customers were assured “ALL ORDERS PUNCTUALLY ATTENDED TO”—“FRESH EVERY DAY.”
The more remote the years, the more difficult it is to be precise in reconstructing a life story—and speculation differs as to what sort of life Hitchcock led as a young child at 517 The High Road.
According to some published accounts, Hitchcock’s father was a strict disciplinarian who could be stern and forbidding. Perhaps Hitchcock’s most famous childhood story is this: William Hitchcock reportedly taught his son a lesson at a tender age, sending Alfred off to the local police station with a note that said the boy had been naughty. The policeman locked him in a cell, telling him, “This is what we do to naughty boys.” Hitchcock said he always remembered “the clang of the door which was the potent thing—the sound and the solidity of that closing cell door and the bolt.”
After a few minutes—maybe five, maybe more—he was released.
Although his sister confirmed this incident to Hitchcock’s official biographer, John Russell Taylor, she wasn’t an eyewitness. And when Hitchcock told the story to interviewers, as he did relentlessly over the years, the story grew and mutated. The infraction changed. His age changed: sometimes he was as young as four, other times as old as eleven. “Hitch told it so often, and it was convenient for the press,” said Robert Boyle, his production designer later in America; “he probably came to believe it himself.”
Certainly his films believe it, and many times, in many ways, replay the scene.
It’s worth remembering, however, that Hitchcock’s maternal grandfather was a constable—and that in at least one version the policeman in the boyhood’s story was a family friend, in on the joke. Police, like priests, were hardly strangers to the Hitchcock household. Still, Hitchcock always insisted the incident gave him a lifelong fear of arrest, jails, and policemen—a fear confirmed by many adult anecdotes.
Though policemen may have been thornily lodged in his subconscious, a stern, forbidding father is at odds with Hitchcock family lore. A kinder, gentler William Hitchcock is conjured by another Hitchcock anecdote, that Alfred was so well behaved as a boy, his father dubbed him “my little lamb without a spot.”
William Hitchcock helped instill in the spotless lamb the boy’s early passion for show business. He led the family to the nearby Borough Theatre in The High Road Stratford, one of Greater London’s largest, a three-thousand-seat palace with playbills starring the likes of Beerbohm Tree, Henry Irving, and Ellen Terry. The Empire Theatre on Broadway also presented touring shows. The Theatre Royal on Salways Road, built by actor-manager Charles Dillon, began to project “animated pictures” between acts as early as 1897.
The first play Hitchcock recalled seeing, roughly in 1905, had its villain bathed in a “ghostly” green light accompanied by sinister music. The heroine was colored in rosy light. The boy was struck by such visual effects, and the man, directing films, would also dress and light people in symbolic colors. Think of Judy bathed in Madeleine’s hues in Vertigo.
The family also made a habit of the symphony—”The Albert Hall on Sundays, and the Queen’s Hall during the week.” Asked once to choose his favorite orchestra pieces, Hitchcock listed Roussel, Elgar, and Wagner, Dohnanyi’s “Variations on a Nursery Suite” (“because it opens like the most
grandiose, huge, spectacular movie, probably by De Mille, and then reduces itself to a little twinkling on the piano; it always appealed to my sense of humor”), and Artur Rubinstein’s playing of Schumann’s “Carnaval.”
The hardworking Hitchcocks loved all manner of entertainment and took special delight in carnivals and circuses. They always attended the annual Easter Fair in nearby Wanstead Flats, which had magicians and marksmanship contests and amusement rides.
Sunday mornings, William Hitchcock led the family to Mass, and after Mass sometimes on picnics to Epping Forest, with young Alfred dressed, according to one account, “in knee-length breeches, wide lace collar and straw hat.” Later they might stop at the nearby Green Man, a local inn and pub that dated back to the seventeenth century, and once served as a refuge of such fabled highwaymen as Dick Turpin and Jack Shepherd.
Both parents were kind and loving. Although Hitchcock recalled that his mother used to ask him to stand at the foot of her bed every night and recount his daily activities, it would be rash to consider this purely in a negative light. Even calling this an “evening confession”—wasn’t this, besides the language of Catholicism, the Hitchcock sense of humor? His nightly confession was no less than proof of a mother’s abiding affection. “You know how families always spoil the youngest,” the mother says in Shadow of a Doubt, speaking of the fatally spoiled Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten).
The family owned classic books: certainly Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a favorite of Victorian illustrators, as well as a well-thumbed Bible. The Bible can’t be bettered for gruesome stories, Hitchcock often said, and he routinely cited Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood among the bedtime tales that made violence fascinating to him at an impressionable age. Imagine William or Emma Hitchcock reading their youngest to sleep. Or consider the possibility that father or mother was an enthralling raconteur who embroidered the familiar stories. Hitchcock, who spent his life in service of his urgent leanings as a storyteller, frequently likened the film director’s job to that of a storyteller with a captive audience of children.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 1