Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  Early on Hitchcock felt like an outsider, apart from other kids on Salmon Lane, or at St. Ignatius; later in America, even after his reputation was firmly established, he still felt apart from the Hollywood crowd.

  The boy who sat on the stone bench, calmly observing and absorbing, found ways to enjoy himself. Hitchcock was more of a doer than people give him credit for, but he was also, from very early in life, a consummate watcher. He enjoyed himself immensely, watching.

  He was at least two people: the watcher and the doer, the insider and the outsider, the image and the reality. He was the short, chubby cliché, but inside the “armor of fat,” as he sometimes called it, he was sweet, sensitive, dashing, and wise. And tough. It was a hard, hard world, and he could be exceedingly tough in finding his way through life.

  Inside the armor was a knight on a quest, whose sword would be a long silver ribbon of film.

  * A “cottage loaf” is the kind with a high-risen top in two sections, designed to be cut or torn in half. Hitchcock probably meant she had large breasts and a big bottom, with a tight-cinched belt between.

  * “I do not know the origin of the word ‘tolley,’” Heenan wrote. “I suppose it to be a derivative of toll, which is a measured stroke of a bell.”

  * “Horatius,” one of four long balladic poems in Lays of Ancient Rome by Victorian author Thomas Babington Macaulay, was learned by many British schoolboys during this era.

  TWO

  1913–1921

  Pressed by interviewers, Hitchcock said that at St. Ignatius he learned important things: “a strong sense of fear,” how “to be realistic,” and “Jesuit reasoning power.” The fear, the realism mixed with fancy, the reasoning power and discipline of ordered thinking—these were the cornerstones of his art. No director was more disciplined, more ordered in his thinking. His unusually meticulous methods were key to his films and success, and also to his character.

  There was a built-in paradox to Jesuit reasoning power—so powerful, Hitchcock knew, that it could prove the unprovable (the existence of God, for example). Hitchcock despised the “implausibles,” those critics who faulted the holes in his films, for they had touched on one of his deeply embedded character traits. When forced to choose between reason or belief in his search for a cinematic effect, he wouldn’t hesitate to suspend reason. “Film should be stronger than reason,” he insisted in interviews. Or, as he told Oriana Fallaci, when a bomb or murderer is in the room “Descartes can go boil his head.”

  The implausibles just didn’t get it: Hitchcock films reveled in their implausibility. Mr. Memory prompted to recite a supersecret formula onstage in front of hundreds of people in The 39 Steps. A man slaying his wife and then chopping her up and burying her head in a communal garden, with windows open all around, in Rear Window. The entire story of Vertigo—desperately hard to believe, except for people who love Hitchcock films.

  Compulsory education lasted only until age twelve in that era, and “Alfie” withdrew from St. Ignatius shortly before turning fourteen. Asked to declare his ambitions, Hitchcock said he thought he might become a navigator. With that half in mind, he enrolled in the autumn of 1913 in the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation on High Street in Poplar. Hitchcock attended lectures in physics and chemistry, took all manner of shop classes, calculated nautical and electrical measurements, and studied the principles of magnetism, force, and motion. (“The worst thing was chemistry,” he subsequently recalled. “I couldn’t get on with that. Melting things in sulfuric acid. Who cares?”)

  The lessons and skills enhanced his résumé, and after a year of classwork Hitchcock was hired in November 1914 by WT Henley’s Telegraph Works, a leading manufacturer and installer of electrical cables, on Blomfield Street. Hitchcock’s lowly position involved calculating the sizes and voltages of cables.

  He continued with night classes until December 12, when his father passed away at age fifty-two, from chronic emphysema and kidney disease. Of William Hitchcock’s fatal illness not much is known; Hitchcock told Truffaut his father was “a rather nervous man,” and John Russell Taylor said William Hitchcock struggled so hard to keep his emotions in check “that he suffered from various naggingly painful conditions of apparently nervous origin, like boils and carbuncles.” On top of it all, father William was a drinker.

  According to Taylor, fifteen-year-old Alfred was tracked down at school “and told the news by his brother” William Jr.; then he went over to his sister’s to commiserate with her. Nellie was then working as a model for a department store and living on her own. Taylor said Hitchcock’s sister greeted him strangely, “by saying almost aggressively to him, ‘Your father’s dead,’ giving him a surreal sense of disassociation.”

  William Jr., only twenty-four, assumed management of both fish shops on Salmon Lane, and for the time being, the youngest member of the family continued to live above one shop with his mother.

  England had been plunged into war earlier, in the summer of 1914, and London was increasingly choked with fear and rumors. Enemy submarines were spotted in the Irish Sea. Bomb-toting Germans were said to be planning sabotage in London. The newspapers were full of favorably slanted war news, although the lists of the casualties were long.

  Hitchcock wasn’t eligible for the draft until he was eighteen, and then it may not have been his weight that excused him from military service with a C3 classification. It may have been the combination of a glandular condition, his relative youth, and his father’s death. But as he would prove during World War II, what Hitchcock lacked in physical fitness he made up for in patriotism. He signed up for a cadet regiment of the Royal Engineers in 1917. He and a co-worker joined a corps of men receiving theoretical briefings in the evenings, while engaging in weekend drills and exercises. Their actual military stint was limited, however, to marching around Hyde Park in puttees, which, as he told John Russell Taylor, he never could get properly wrapped around his legs.

  Afterward, Hitchcock said he and his friend would adjourn to a feast of poached eggs on toast. “Aha!” interrupted Taylor. “You said you never ate eggs.” “Well,” Hitchcock conceded, “I suppose I did eat one or two eggs when I was very young.”

  He once told a French interviewer that the first time he experienced genuine fear—as opposed to the enjoyment of fear—came when enemy bombs dropped on London. He was at home with other family members, and they all fell to the floor. His mother took refuge under a table and cowered there, murmuring prayers. But there was a Hitchcockian element of comedy in this terrifying scene, which he recounted, expertly mimicking his mother and other relatives. Despite the imminent danger, tea was still served, and his mother stopped her prayers long enough to say, “Only one sugar for me!”

  Another time, Hitchcock remembered, he came home to Salmon Lane amid the shrill blare of sirens warning of a Zeppelin raid. (This must have been in 1915 or early 1916, the period of the most intense Zeppelin attacks.) “The whole house was in an uproar,” he recalled, “but there was my poor Elsa Maxwell-plump little mother struggling to get into her bloomers, always putting both her legs through the same opening, and saying her prayers, while outside the window shrapnel was bursting around a search-lit Zeppelin—extraordinary image!”

  His World War I memories mingled horror with comedy, much like his films. But living through wartime in his formative years deeply influenced a body of work that is filled with crazed assassins and spy plots, bombs that destroy innocents, and villains with German accents. And it reinforced a psychology that already understood life as fragile and arbitrary.

  The war and his father’s premature death, coming as Hitchcock embarked on his first job, formalized his break with the family profession, and put a grim seal on his boyhood.

  Founded by William Thomas Henley in 1837, Henley’s was an early manufacturer of electroplating apparatuses and insulated conductors, and later of telegraph and electrical cables, including both shore ends of the Atlantic cable as well as a Persian Gulf cab
le. Recently the company had shifted its emphasis from telegraph cables to cables for light and power, and to production of all types of electrical distribution equipment. Besides home orders, Henley’s had contracts and foreign branches around the globe, including in Europe, east India, China, Australia, and South America.

  Hitchcock swiftly graduated to the sales section, where he honed his design and draftsmanship skills. There he would cultivate his habit of diligent planning, with notes, drafts, and multiple revisions. There he would also learn various means of publicity and promotion. No one ever had a better procedural grounding for film than Hitchcock did at Henley’s. The job educated him technically, artistically, and commercially.

  Henley’s was a vast operation, with several hundred employees at the Blomfield Street office block alone. Like a film studio, the company was not only a business enterprise but a social enclave—a small world unto itself. The calendar of sponsored employee events included sports and dramatics, recreational clubs, company mixers, river trips, picnic parties, and other get-togethers.

  Hitchcock liked to say that as a young man he was shy and solitary, but there he is at company outings, beaming in group photos. He liked to say he was a fat young man, but his weight fluctuated, and in some photographs he looks almost debonair, a round, sleek egg of a fellow. He still had hair, he affected a mustache, he sported bow ties on occasion, and in those youthful days he often wore a homburg.

  Unlike at St. Ignatius, there is no question as to how Hitchcock fit in at Henley’s: he was decidedly well known and well liked. “The only thing that matters,” Hitchcock once wrote to his friend and producing partner Sidney Bernstein, “is who I work with day-to-day.” He was speaking of the film world, but he might as well have been speaking of Henley’s, where he first learned the importance of camaraderie on the job. Whatever his nature as a young boy, at Henley’s he became the opposite of a loner: an inspired leader and motivator of people.

  Throughout the war Hitchcock worked in the sales section, gradually realizing he didn’t want to be an engineer. So, with the self-motivation that defined his character, he enrolled in art courses at Goldsmiths’ College, a well-known, forward-looking branch of London University. The teachers sent him out to railroad stations to sketch people in various attitudes. He studied illustration and composition. Among his classes was a mesmerizing lecture presided over by the illustrator E. J. Sullivan, renowned for the detail and craftsmanship of his line drawings in newspapers, magazines, and books.

  It was at Goldsmiths’ that Hitchcock first began to pay attention to the history and principles of art: composition, depth of field, the uses of color, shadow and light. He began to frequent art galleries and museums, especially entranced by the French moderns.

  Art courses sharpened his interest in theater and film. Hitchcock now became an inveterate “first-nighter,” and the West End plays he saw during the years before he entered the film industry and in the 1920s made a lasting impression.

  He saw The Lodger onstage in 1916, and John Galsworthy’s The Skin Game a few years later. He always remembered that Jolly Jack Tar had a suspenseful bomb in the plot. The people in the theater were nervous about the bomb going off. A woman stood up in the gallery and shouted to the actors: “Watch out for the bomb!” More than one Hitchcock film could have had that as its advertisement: “Watch out for the bomb!”

  He was bewitched in 1920 by James M. Barrie’s Mary Rose, a sentimental ghost story set in a haunted English manor and on a mysterious island. He never forgot Fay Compton’s stirring lead performance, and for the rest of his life he would dream of filming the play.

  He often saw plays alone, and because neither his mother nor his sister had the same fascination with “pictures” (as he stubbornly called them for most of his life), he now went to many films alone too. “I did not miss a single picture,” he later boasted to interviewers.

  The British film industry was falling apart during World War I, and it would take a decade to recover its vitality. American pictures and stars dominated Hitchcock’s calendar, and later, his memory: asked his opinion of the greatest chase ever filmed, Hitchcock would consistently cite the icefloe sequence with Lillian Gish in D. W Griffith’s Way Down East, from 1920, along with Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (“the ride of the hooded men”) and Intolerance (“the chase to save a man from the gallows”). He loved Chaplin, whom he would come to know personally, and fifty years after seeing The Pilgrim (1923) he could describe certain scenes shot by shot.

  He grew to admire the “technical superiority” of American films. “While British films presented a flat image, background and foreground figures blending together,” he noticed, thinking for the first time about the camera work and pictorial quality, “the American films employed backlighting which made foreground figures or characters stand out in relief against the backgrounds.”

  Shuttling back and forth between plays and pictures, Hitchcock felt the first stirrings of ambition and a personal aesthetic. Attending the theater, he thought about film; attending pictures, he thought about stage plays. Although he adored theater and in his career adapted a number of plays into very good films, Hitchcock began to feel that film should be a different experience, almost “anti-theater.”

  Most film directors rely heavily on master shots and dissolves, but to Hitchcock these would come to feel like stage-bound techniques—like curtains opening and closing. He began to develop his own ideas about how to tell a story visually, how to fill up what he called “the white rectangle.” He even had his own musical language: High shots were like tremolos. A quick shot jumping in was a staccato movement. A close-up of a person (or the “big head,” as he liked to call it) was for shock impact, or emotional value; that was more of a loud note, a sounding of brass.

  Unusual for his time, Hitchcock rarely resorted to “camera coverage”; he rejected the safe convention of opening on a proscenium-type view, then shifting to a medium shot, before cutting to a close-up. Hitchcock wanted to control the perspective; he preferred to open with the big head, perhaps close with the master shot. And his camera hovered over the action—he hovered—as though he were onstage with the actors, breathing down their necks.

  Plays depended on interesting talk and music. Film was silent, and depended on images—interesting pictures. Watching plays and films as he practiced and studied art, he found himself thinking more and more in pictures, and of how the “orchestration” of pictures might tell a story.

  Although he remained responsible and attentive to his mother, by the time he was seventeen or eighteen Hitchcock had moved from Salmon Lane into a London flat that was owned by one of his uncles. By the time World War I ended, he had been mired in sales at Henley’s for four years. He was nineteen.

  Though he performed his duties well, Hitchcock had developed into “somewhat of a square peg in a round hole,” according to W A. Moore, the head of Henley’s advertising department. “I was kind of lazy,” Hitchcock admitted in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich forty years later, “so I’d pile them [requests for estimates] up on my desk and they’d go up to a big stack. And I used to say, ‘Well, I’ve got to get down to this,’ and then I polished them off like anything—and used to get praised for the prodigious amount of work I’d done on that particular day. This lasted until the complaints began to come in about the delay in answering. That’s the way I still feel about working. Certain writers want to work every hour of the day—they’re very facile. I’m not that way. I want to say, ‘Let’s lay off for several hours—let’s play.’”

  Moore befriended the “square peg,” listening to Hitchcock’s pleas to be transferred to another department. “Routine clerical work was never his great feature,” Moore noted. “Art and strong imaginative work—creative work—were interwoven with his nature.”

  In late 1917 or early 1918, in accordance with his wishes, Hitchcock was sent over to advertising. His new job was more picture-oriented: designing, laying out, and pasting up the adv
ertisements and brochures for Henley’s products.

  The tasks weren’t always exciting, but there were lessons to be learned. “You will notice in many ads,” Hitchcock reflected in a later interview, “the picture is contrapuntal to the words. You will see a shot of a locomotive rushing through the countryside and you’ll find it’s an ad for face cream. ‘A smooth ride over your skin.’”

  And there was opportunity for personal flair. “One example of his inventiveness,” narrated John Russell Taylor, “was a brochure for a certain kind of lead-covered electric wire designed specially for use in churches and other historic buildings where it would be virtually invisible against old stonework. The brochure was upright, coffin-shaped, and Hitchcock designed it so that at the bottom of the cover was a drawing of an altar frontal, with two big brass candlesticks on top of it, and then above, at the top of the page, the words ‘Church Lighting’ in heavy Gothic type. No mention of electricity, and of course no indication of wiring, since the whole point of the selling line was the discreetness.”

  In the advertising branch Hitchcock found himself surrounded for the first time by artists and writers. The myth that Hitchcock was an odd loner—a fat boy aloof from others, contemptuous of ordinary activity—is disproved by what happened next. Not yet twenty, Hitchcock emerged as a leader, a young man who attracted collaborators, spurred teamwork, and united people to pursue a common goal.

  It was no accident that within a year of his transfer Henley’s launched a new magazine featuring, apart from company news and gossip, “Contributions—Grave or Gay”: cartoons, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays. The Henley Telegraph, which sold for sixpence (“By Post: Eight-pence”), was beloved by employees and even hailed outside the company. The Organizer, a London business periodical, found it one of “the best written, best edited and best produced” of the city’s house organs.