Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  “When you tell that little boy the story on your knee, whether it’s Red Riding Hood,” Hitchcock explained once, “you’ve got to make it sound real.”

  “I put myself in the place of a child whose mother is telling him a story,” he told François Truffaut in the course of their book-length interview. When “there’s a pause in the narration, the child always says, ‘What comes next, Mummy?’”

  He often likened film to dreams in which reality mingles with imagination, akin to a bedtime story that continues into a nightmare after sleep. “Hitchcock realism,” production designer Robert Boyle once explained, consisted of “his fairy tales played against a realistic environment.”

  He teased audiences with sly reminders they were in the grip of a manufactured dream.

  Bedtime was on the second floor, in the rooms above the shop. The lights turned low, a boy’s eyes darted to the doorway and the shadowy banisters. “The night always exaggerates things, doesn’t it?” Robert (Derrick de Marney) reassures Erica (Nova Pilbeam) in Young and Innocent. And staircases in Hitchcock films are often “the motor of drama,” as Peter Conrad wrote in The Hitchcock Murders, leading “upwards to doom,” or descending to creepy basements.

  From the royal family down, almost every English house of the time had a dog, if only to ward off intruders. A faithful hound can be imagined lying on the floor as young Alfred, in bed, listened to the sleepy-time tales. Dogs proliferate in Hitchcock films, and sometimes, like Hogarth, who often put his dogs into paintings and etchings, they are his own pets. Dogs in Hitchcock films are invariably amusing, brave, and intuitive about the distress of their owners, and when a canine is killed, as in Rear Window, up is sent an ungodly “hue and cry,” in Truffaut’s words, “as if the death of a child were involved.”

  “Write what you know” is an old saw, often ascribed to Ernest Hemingway, although the sentiment must date back to antiquity. Hitchcock liked to say he wrote with the camera, but it was the same difference: he filmed what was familiar to him, what he knew about or researched. What he didn’t know he didn’t trust, and tended to avoid. His imagination “improved” on the familiar—as in the case of the jail anecdote.

  Donald Spoto, in his “dark” biography of Hitchcock, chose to stress how the family “lived behind and over the crates and shelves of produce, and unless they went around through a back alley to a small rear door, they had to pass through the shop to reach the family rooms. In the middle of a small, dark and unsuccessful garden was the family outhouse. Privacy was even rarer than silence or sustained sunshine.”

  But when parents owned shops it was very common to enter by the front, and only wealthy people boasted luxurious indoor bathrooms at the turn of the century. Although Spoto harped on Hitchcock’s toilet fixation, it’s a national fixation, and one that’s often wielded humorously. “Londoners are fascinated by excrement,” pointed out Peter Ackroyd in London: The Biography, noting that Sir Thomas More could boast of knowing five Latin names for “shit.” Especially in the 1930s and 1940s, the “toilet humor” of many British films (including Hitchcock’s) provoked routine censorship when they were imported to America.

  This familiar thread of English lives became creative grist. Hitchcock films delight in exploiting the taboo of bathrooms. “For Hitchcock, any task performed in there qualified as suspicious,” wrote Peter Conrad. Traitors and criminals are always darting into toilet stalls; women are spied upon as they undress before mirrors; blood drips on shining fixtures.

  Hitchcock certainly had the knack of introducing toilets into films—or conversation. Even at age seventy-eight, working on the last script of his career, the director liked to recall Derby Day at Epsom Downs, where, as a boy, he noticed the enterprising children who dug holes in the ground and put up little tents, charging people for “the right to relieve” themselves. In Cockney singsong, Hitchcock digressed from scriptwork to imitate the twelve-year-old girls advertising, “Accommodations, one penny, accommodations, one penny,” and the rougher sorts of boys who touted the same service for “A piddle and a poop, one penny.” (“Of course, when the food was bad,” Hitchcock told writer David Freeman, “they did quite well.”)

  Authorized biographer John Russell Taylor said that Hitchcock’s childhood entailed mostly cozy memories. Pride of hard work and ownership, family togetherness, stockings at Christmastime that bulged with tangerines and nuts—characteristic of English Christmases.

  The authorized view paints a shop less eerie, less of an obstacle course. “Right behind the house were the ripening sheds,” wrote Taylor in Hitch, “and a vivid early impression is the scene inside them: with the great bunches of bananas ripening by the warmth of gas flares, the sight and the smell and the distinctive hiss. When he was a little older, he was allowed to go out with the deliveries of fruit and vegetables to grocers all over the Epping area, often a whole day round by horse-drawn cart. Another process which fascinated him was the husking of walnuts, which used to come into the shop still in their fleshy green outer coats and be husked ready for sale by the shop workers.”

  That seems closer to the mark. Although maybe it was both: a boyhood not all darkness, nor all sunshine, but like a Hitchcock film, a constant interplay of shadow and light.

  Leytonstone was in the midst of thrilling upheaval. The Hitchcock greengrocery was in the middle of the block on The High Road, between May-well and Southwell Grove Roads.

  Coming out of the greengrocery, heading in any direction, were family butchers, bakers, shoe menders, tobacconists, clothiers, confectioners, drapers, hosiers, and more grocers and fishmongers. There were other Hitchcock relatives living and working in the neighborhood.

  The buses (and later, electric trams) seemed never to stop running, and two train stations were nearby. Railway-mania is a phenomenon among the English, and romance and death ride on trains in many Hitchcock films, as well as on buses, planes, and ships—just about any form of transportation.

  On The High Road the boy heard vendors shouting out the afternoon headlines “wet from the press”—as audiences hear them in The Lodger, Foreign Correspondent, and Frenzy. Shop visitors arrived with the papers tucked under their arms, gossiping about lurid crime cases. It isn’t too much to say that murder was serialized entertainment in England in that day and age.

  Hitchcock liked to quote George Orwell, who, in a famous essay, “The Decline of the English Murder,” concluded that the majority of English murder cases were adultery-related. Killing one’s spouse was a means of divorce. Citing the respected Orwell was Hitchcock’s way of defending himself against critics who were skeptical of his sordid subject matter. But Hitchcock films delved into marital murder, murder for money, political murder—all species of murder.

  Often his murderers were just plain psychotic, which had a unique appeal for Hitchcock. Whitechapel was near Leytonstone, and that is where Jack the Ripper, beginning in 1888 and continuing for months, stabbed, mutilated, disemboweled, and slashed the throats of between five and a dozen female victims. The violence started and ended mysteriously. To this day the identity of the culprit is unknown, although many think he ended up in an asylum, in a small, spare room—like Norman Bates at the end of Psycho. Locals were still whispering about “the Whitechapel murderer” when Hitchcock was growing up. They whisper still today; the Ripper remains “an enduring aspect of London myth,” in the words of Peter Ackroyd.

  Adelaide Bartlett may or may not have poisoned her spouse with liquid chloroform over a decade before Hitchcock’s birth, in 1886; a trial found her innocent. But Hitchcock knew all about the spectacular crime and delighted in recounting its particulars, perhaps because her victim, Edwin Bartlett, was a greengrocer, and her lover was a Wesleyan minister.

  Another sensational murder, closer to home, also involved a greengrocer. Edgar Edwards of Leyton paid a visit to a small-town greengrocer one day in 1902, pretending to be interested in purchasing the operation. In the course of the visit he slew the owners and their baby, dismembe
ring all three; then he took the bodies away and buried them in his garden on Church Road. When he tried again with a second greengrocery—that was his peculiar fixation—Edwards was caught and convicted. Mentally unbalanced, he told the judge that being on trial felt like being on stage; before being hung, he is supposed to have exclaimed, “I’m looking forward to this a lot!”—obviously with a Hitchcockian sense of humor.

  The meek dentist Dr. Hawley Crippen, who decapitated and filleted his wife, then attempted to escape Scotland Yard by sea, accompanied by his mistress in the guise of a man, grabbed the headlines in 1910. The Hitchcocks, like many English families, enjoyed their evening supper, carving up the roast beef, doubly delicious when accompanied by talk of the Ripper, Adelaide Bartlett, Edgar Edwards, Dr. Crippen, and all the many others in all their endless gruesome cornucopia. For the rest of his life Hitchcock was fascinated by real-life murders and murderers, and strove to evoke them in his films.

  Of course, such suppertime talk wouldn’t be at home in any Frank Capra picture, except perhaps Arsenic and Old Lace. Despite a generally happy, comfortable boyhood, Hitchcock was a sensitive lad who experienced the culture of murder fascination with fear as well as pleasure—or, as he liked to put it, linking the two, “the enjoyment of fear.” He often said his films were about “ordinary people in bizarre situations,” and he himself was the prototype. He was the ordinary man who imagined himself into murderous situations, enhancing his fantasies in the categories of suspicion, suspense, fear, and desire.

  Writing in 1969 to a local reporter researching his roots, Hitchcock begged off any sweeping statements and said his only clear memory of Leytonstone was “the Saturday night when the first electric tram made its maiden journey” down the streets on an intensely cold December day in 1906. Shortly thereafter, when Hitchcock was only six years of age, the family moved down the Lea to Salmon Lane, Limehouse, in Stepney borough, taking over two existing stores, at 130 and 175 Salmon Lane.

  The latter address stayed a fishmongery, while the Hitchcocks resided above 130, which doubled as a fish-and-chip shop. (It was quite common for fishmongers to double their business with such shops, which was a good way of getting rid of fish that was beginning to go off.) The two shops were about one hundred yards apart on opposite sides of the street, and only a long stone’s throw from the town hall. William Hitchcock began to specialize in fish now, and left greengrocering behind.

  Just as Hitchcock would later push his career toward the United States, his family’s business constantly expanded toward wider markets. Not only did the Hitchcocks run two fish shops now—fresh and fried—they also bore some responsibility for dispersal of goods to ships and for the growing John Hitchcock Ltd. chain of greengroceries and fish and fried fish shops (now stocked by their own fish hatchery). The chain also included a number of poulterers, game dealers, butchers, and ice manufacturers. By 1925 John Hitchcock Ltd. would peak at a prodigious count of sixty-nine retail shops in the London area.

  The boy’s formative years, roughly from 1907 to 1915, were lived in the shadow of warehouses and wharves and the muddy, smelly Thames. Gliding constantly up and down the river were pleasure boats, fishing boats, tugboats, barges, and cargo ships. Picture a neighborhood not unlike where Marnie’s mother lives: a street of densely populated buildings ending at the docks, with ships looming. The only grass that could be found was between the cracks. It was a brick-and-mortar district, as one London chronicler noted, without stone lions or public monuments. Color the district gray, gray everywhere, with thronged shops, loud tramways, and the teeming streets and riverside.

  The color was in the people. Fish-and-chips are a staple of English working-class life, and in Limehouse Hitchcock lived and breathed Cockney culture, soaking up the jokes, speech, and mannerisms of London’s East Enders. But Salmon Lane was also a remarkably cosmopolitan neighborhood of immigrant Irish and Jews, with a Chinese quarter, incipient Communists, and outcasts and refugees from around the globe.

  It was deep-dyed London, and proximate to all points in the city. Hitchcock soon became addicted to the city trams and rode them everywhere; he later boasted of riding to the end of every route by age eight, memorizing the stops and favorite places. (Years later in Hollywood, when the slate board reading 24–1 went up, Hitchcock would murmur, “Hampstead Heath to Victoria,” that being the route of the 24 bus in those days.) The boy could take the bus to Ludgate Hill, visit the Old Bailey, and sit in the back rows of a courtroom and watch the latest murder prosecution unfold. And a few miles from the Old Bailey was Madame Tussaud’s, with Jack the Ripper, and, in due time, Dr. Crippen among the constantly updated exhibits.

  Another magnet was the West End, with its theaters, news shops, and bookstores for rummaging. Reading on his own began to supplant bedtime stories. Walter Scott (the bookworm daughter is reading Ivanhoe in Shadow of a Doubt), G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, John Galsworthy Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes, and John Buchan were among his favorites growing up. He also came under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, who told “a completely unbelievable story … to the readers with such a spellbinding logic that you get the impression that the same thing could happen to you tomorrow.”

  An unabashed “trolley-jolly” in London, he was also a “timetable buff” for “imaginary voyages” to other lands. The boy hung a world map on his bedroom wall and bought Lloyd’s Register and Cook’s Continental Tours, embarking on pretend “trips on the Trans-Siberian Railway.” The little colored flags he stuck on his map displayed the courses of ships at sea, and every day the boy moved them around to reflect the itineraries.

  In Leicester Square Hitchcock found a shop that sold Life and Judge, two magazines that mingled literature with humor. From boyhood he explored America in these and other U.S. publications. “I would say that I was—if it is a word—Americophile,” Hitchcock once averred.

  As the youngest child, he was pampered and excused from shop work, leaving him plenty of time for reading. William Jr. had been targeted for the trade, and soon was running one of the Salmon Lane shops; eventually, Hitchcock’s brother took over the Tower Bridge Road location from his uncle Alfred. While Hitchcock had affection and respect for his older brother, their nearly ten-year age difference kept them from being close. He said once that he had a keen memory of being the sibling too young to follow along when his older brother and sister took off on their bicycles in the afternoons.

  He was closer to Nellie. He occasionally chaperoned his sister to dances, and accompanied her to stage plays or the new “animated pictures.” The average motion picture lasted forty seconds in the year Hitchcock was born, lengthening to about eleven minutes by the time he moved to Salmon Lane. Up to that time, besides crude, flickering images sandwiched between revue acts, the Hitchcock family could have seen only “the new photoelectric marvel of Animated Photographs” shown in traveling bioscopes mainly at fairgrounds, church bazaars, disused shops, and boarded-up public baths.

  But by 1907, picture palaces were thriving and multiplying. A few more years would pass before Hitchcock made a distinction in his mind between a good and bad picture, but from his earliest filmgoing in London, the pictures he remembered most vividly were those which took him on unforgettable journeys, which aroused his fears and desires, which defied logic.

  He fondly recalled the “Phantom Rides,” a spectacle featuring footage snapped from the cowcatcher of a train speeding through scenic locales, plunging through winding tunnels and up high mountains. He also remembered “Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World,” a variant invented by an American fire chief, which sat the audience in an artificial train car, with scenery projected ahead of the “passengers” as the car weaved and emitted natural sounds to simulate a genuine railway ride. The London franchise of Hale’s Tours opened on Oxford Street around the time of the Salmon Lane move, and broke precedent by charging all patrons the same price: sixpence. Each “train trip” was very short—several had to be spliced together to make
a complete show—and comedy sketches were interspersed. One interesting thing about Hale’s Tours was that it featured sights and monuments from around the world but, because it originated in the United States, highlighted visits to American locales and landmarks, such as the Black Hills.

  Another early picture that Hitchcock recollected by specific title was “A Ride on a Runaway Train,” which exhibited in London and the provinces in the summer of 1908, when he was only a lad of nine. One of a series produced by American showman Lyman Howe, “A Ride on a Runaway Train” also boasted a camera mounted on the front of a locomotive whizzing around mountains, but its footage was shrewdly undercranked so that “the motion accelerated when projected on the screen,” in the words of film historian Charles Musser. The apparently runaway train met its fate in “a plunge into a tunnel and a suggestion of destruction in a terrific accompanying crash,” according to Musser. It’s an ending that Hitchcock would reprise in Number Seventeen and, even more explosively, in Secret Agent.

  When Hitchcock recollected “A Ride on a Runaway Train,” he liked to throw in this Hitchcockian detail: audience members became so excited watching the thrill film that they peed themselves. Theater employees used to count the seats afterward, betting on how many wet seats they’d find. “The aim is,” Hitchcock explained years later, describing his hopes for Psycho and The Birds, “there’s not a dry seat in the house.”

  There would be many thrill rides in Hitchcock films, sometimes with his camera mounted on the cowcatcher. The effect of reality mixed with camera trickery, which first took his breath away with “A Ride on a Runaway Train,” planted one important seed of his art.

  “You do see yourself as a switchback railway operator?” an interviewer once asked him.