Most of the time, in his last months, Hitchcock preserved his good humor, Dr. Flieg recalled. But the stretches of misery and depression also lengthened and worsened.
According to Donald Spoto’s book, Ingrid Bergman paid Hitchcock a final visit, very close to his eightieth birthday, in August 1979. “He took both my hands,” the actress informed Spoto, “and tears streamed down his face and he said, ‘Ingrid, I’m going to die,’ and I said, ‘But of course you are going to die sometime, Hitch—we are all going to die.’ And then I told him that I, too, had recently been very ill, and that I had thought about it, too. And for a moment the logic of that seemed to make him more peaceful.”
Death surrounded him. It came in the newspapers; it came by mail and by phone. Michael Balcon: October 17, 1977. His sister, Nellie: January 30, 1979. Victor Saville, only a month after making an appearance at Hitchcock’s American Film Institute tribute: May 8, 1979. Peggy Robertson had the sad task of bringing him the news each time. Besides Alma, these were the relatives and friends he had known the longest, back in his youth and the boy wonder days. Each death brought new outbursts of tears.
Hume Cronyn came to visit, trying be cheerful. Hitchcock held his hands, weeping, knowing that whichever one of them outlived the other, it would be the last time they met.
At the end of 1979, the last year of his life, came the second award: his listing on Queen Elizabeth’s annual New Year’s Honors as an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
“The possibility of a knighthood, I suspect, played a larger part in Hitchcock’s inner life than he acknowledged,” wrote David Freeman. Officially an American citizen since 1955, Hitchcock was still British to the core, and knighthood allowed him to be known, in the last months of his life, as Sir Alfred. With a flash of the old Hitchcock, he irreverently dubbed himself “the short knight,” and there was a brief flurry of attendant studio publicity and office activity resurrecting Hitchcock’s fifty-fourth, “The Short Night.” But that likelihood was as illusory as the fleeting notion that the director might somehow be able to travel to England for a formal ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
Instead, Lew Wasserman and Universal—which had cocooned Hitchcock for the last twenty years; which had made the studio a safe haven as well as gilded cage for him; which had kept up the pretense of pre-production on the fifty-fourth Hitchcock film in spite of internal certainty that the director was finished—performed one last act of corporate noblesse oblige by hastily rounding up old friends and associates for a knighthood luncheon.
Cary Grant and Janet Leigh, along with a phalanx of studio officials, came to honor Hitchcock, and photographs were taken of him looking all but gone. British consul general Thomas W. Aston bestowed the knighthood. Asked by a reporter why it had taken the queen so long, Hitchcock managed a winking reply. “I guess she forgot,” he said.
Around this time, stopping by the office to say hello to the director, David Freeman found the staff in tears, and furniture movers streaming in and out, carrying boxes, files, books, old films—“the detritus of his business,” in Freeman’s words. Hitchcock had once and for all informed the front office that he couldn’t—and wouldn’t—make another film, and “the studio jumped at the chance to close down, or at least reduce, his costly operation,” according to Freeman.
“The staff was furious at him for not making an announcement to them himself,” wrote Freeman, “and more importantly, not helping them look to their futures. His own sense of himself was so wrapped up in being a film maker that when he wasn’t one anymore, he just closed up his shop and released his staff. The people around him had trouble seeing past his recent cruelties and drunken behavior; they saw venality where there was only human frailty. They left angry and hurt, and when they were gone, he came back.”
Hitchcock then sat in the middle of his office, having the studio barber trim his sideburns as the workmen gradually emptied out the place. Even after that day, though, Hitchcock couldn’t stay away. The director began showing up at the barren office, briefly aided by a temporary assistant. According to Freeman, Hitchcock “resumed his rituals, unencumbered by the fiction of being a film maker, or the trappings of power and authority. There was only one phone line left, and when it would ring, the bell would echo, oddly, off the walls.”
In the afternoons he still ordered up screenings, although the logbook was no longer maintained, and there is no record of the last films he watched. A dog lover since boyhood, the director loved Benji, and watched the dog-thwarts-kidnappers film repeatedly. The New Wave had waned, and he no longer tried to keep up with youthful trends. He probably watched the latest Walt Disney and James Bond pictures, which always amused him. He would have forced himself to see Universal films because he was loyal, and a major stockholder. In the past his own films had always been on the schedule, whenever he had a writer to indoctrinate—and perhaps that was still true even now. Perhaps Hitchcock watched his own favorites—although he never much dwelled on favorites—reminding himself once and for all of the power and immortality of his life’s work.
By late winter, however, he had stopped showing up at Universal. After one last act of duty and friendship (a taped introduction to the forthcoming American Film Institute Life Achievement Award tribute for James Stewart), he left Bellagio Road only once more, checking into Cedars Sinai for diagnostic tests in March. In his final weeks, he took to bed. Alma was incapacitated. His wife was adrift from reality, and he had watched and directed his last film. For Hitchcock, film had been friendship and society, as well as the work that consumed him. Film had been his entire world for all his adult life. Now, uncharacteristically, he even lost interest in the newspaper, in television, in industry or Hollywood gossip.
According to Dr. Flieg, Hitchcock suffered aches and pains, mild hypertension, a heart condition, kidney problems, and a general physical deterioration, but his constitution was strong and he was not dying. He could have lived out months, even years, with care and comfort, said Dr. Flieg. Yet always a man of tremendous willpower, now the director willed himself to die. A man who loved food and drink, now he refused either, taking only sips of water. He stopped getting out of bed; he refused to see or talk to friends; he stared coldly at the few who braved a visit, and more than once confronted them with irrational anger and epithets.
When Dr. Flieg stopped by, Hitchcock even screamed insults at his physician: he wasn’t going to pay his medical bills anymore, Hitchcock said, so the doctor may as well leave. Dr. Flieg replied, “I love you, Hitch, and I don’t care whether I’m paid or not. I’ll still be coming to see you.”
In his last days, Hitchcock virtually withered away, lying almost motionless in his bed. Then, at 9:17 A.M. on April 29, 1980, three months shy of his eighty-first birthday, he passed from this earth. A memorial Mass for Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was held at the Church of Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, “on a bright sunswept day,” in the words of the New York Times, with Father Thomas Sullivan conducting the service and Lew Wasserman delivering the eulogy. Father Sullivan comforted mourners by telling them that Hitchcock’s films were the work of a man he personally knew to be unafraid of death, who “knew that we only live twice—and that the best is yet to come.” Among the six hundred people gathered in the church were director Mel Brooks (who had lampooned Hitchcock to Hitchcock’s great delight in High Anxiety), Louis Jourdan, Karl Malden, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh, François Truffaut, and “set workers from the director’s studio days,” according to the New York Times.
Up front, physically crippled and mentally impaired, sat Alma in a wheelchair. She is said to have had only the vaguest idea where she was, or what she was doing there. For the next two years, although she needed round-the-clock medical supervision, Alma Reville Hitchcock was generally “happy as a clam,” in her daughter’s words, and unaware that her husband was dead. “Hitch is in the next room,” Alma would whisper to visitors, or, “He’s at the studio. Don’t worry, he’ll be home soon.” Surpri
sing everyone, Mrs. Hitchcock lived until July 6, 1982.
* LeRoy directed I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, the only sound film Hitchcock listed in 1939 as among his ten favorite films.
* “We cleaned up the story,” Hitchcock shot back in one interview. “In the original [book], the murderer was found by fingerprints left on a potato. The potato had been stuffed into a questionable area of the victim’s body.”
* “Hammor horror”—as in the low-budget, blood-and-gore horror films in lurid color churned out to huge success by England’s Hammer Films.
* The relatively obscure actor playing the psycho killer had caught his attention in Twisted Nerve (which also featured Billie Whitelaw) and, before making his final decision, Hitchcock attended the West End play Foster was appearing in.
* In the book the incriminating clue is a spare room key. Hitchcock, sensitive to having used keys before, changed it to a tiepin for the film, and then linked the tiepin to Rusk’s dandified appearance.
** Hitchcock wasn’t far off. In February 1975, writing to Michael Balcon, he confided that Frenzy would end up grossing $16 million. “The London cost, including studio overhead, was $1,250,000. Of course, by the time the studio added the overhead of the cost of my office and staff here and my own salary we got up to $2,200,000. This picture, Frenzy, was also sold to television for $2 million, for three runnings.”
* Movement and cutting: the staircase sequence was also a special effect. Indeed, it annoyed cameraman Gil Taylor that after all the bother necessary to create the shot on location in London (laying tracks, etc.), Hitchcock later insisted on reshooting part of the scene on a set back at Universal. The editing made it all look seamless.
* Frenzy was named as one of the best pictures of the year by the National Board of Review and the Golden Globes, which also nominated Hitchcock as Best Director and Anthony Shaffer for Best Screenplay.
* Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) has an artificial leg, and at one point in the film she takes it—and everything else—off, displaying herself nude to her aged guardian Fernando Rey.
* Like Hitchcock, Lehman never won a competitive Oscar, despite three nominations, and would have to wait for an honorary Oscar until age eighty-one, in 2001. His Oscar was the first ever voted to a screenwriter not for any individual film, but for his body of work.
** Actually, though La Bern’s publisher did rerelease his book as Frenzy, Canning stuck with his title through all editions.
* The working title kept shifting between “Deceit” and “Deception.”
* Aghast at being cornered by the unhappy Thinnes at Chasen’s one night, Hitchcock had to tell the actor something by way of explanation. “You were too nice for the part, too nice,” the director insisted.
* “What particularly appealed to Hitchcock,” said François Truffaut, in his more oblique defense of the film, “was the passage from one geometric figure to another. First, two parallel stories are introduced, then the gap between them gradually narrows, and finally they mesh, winding up as a single story.”
* Characteristically, Hitchcock had been dreaming of this scene for years, and had in fact described a variation to Truffaut almost fifteen years earlier: “There’s just so much one can do with a love scene. Something I wish I could work out is a love scene with two people on each side of the room. It’s impossible, I suppose, because the only way to suggest love would be to have them exposing themselves to each other, with the man opening his fly and the girl lifting her skirt, and the dialogue in counterpoint.”
* The menu featured lobster, wrote David Freeman in his book, and “Hitchcock hadn’t eaten shellfish of any sort in fifty years. He claimed it made him ill to look at it. The lobster was taken away and they found him a steak, something he considered edible.”
CODA
No matter how much Alfred Joseph Hitchcock streaked his films with comedy and entertainment, they portrayed a world tilting toward madness and horror. The films tried to balance darkness and light, and the life was a similar balancing act. “Hitch had moments of delight and triumph,” said Hume Cronyn, “and also moments of confusion, despair and failure.”
Some film directors achieve their art by imagining their deepest, darkest fantasies; others do so by means that cannot be analyzed so simply or straightforwardly.
John Russell Taylor’s authorized biography, Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock was published in 1978, but its sympathetic portrait was challenged by Donald Spoto’s Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius, published two years after Hitchcock’s death. Spoto saw the director as an extreme example of a dark fantasist, “a macabre joker, a frightened child, and a tyrannical artist,” whose obsessions led him toward a lifetime of bloody-minded crime films that trapped beautiful blondes squirming in his grip.
Some who knew Hitchcock tended to agree, based on Spoto’s evidence. These, it must be said, were frequently those who knew the director least, or knew him last, during his most difficult years. Sam Taylor, his friend and the screenwriter of Vertigo and Topaz, annoyed some in the Hitchcock circle by praising the Spoto book, although he told this author that he read it only up to the pages where he and Hitchcock met.
After the book was published and received prominent acclaim in the New York Times, people who knew Hitchcock intimately sent protest letters, only a few of which were printed. Some of these people had excluded themselves from Spoto’s research in a backdoor effort to unite against the emerging dark portrait.
A dismayed Hume Cronyn wrote the Times to say that Spoto’s Hitchcock was not the Hitchcock he knew, and to emphasize instead “his generosity, kindness, professional courage, sympathy and the debt I owe him for support and opportunity.” Publicist Albert Margolies (“with my knowledge of him based on twenty years as his press agent and forty as his friend”) also chimed in. Whitfield Cook wrote too, and privately added in a note to Cronyn, “The author’s surmises are often ridiculous. Difficult Hitch sometimes was, but never a monster.”
John Houseman said the biography was melodramatic, simplified, and prurient in parts, but regardless “ends up as a serious book—one that will be of interest to scholars and film buffs.” Norman Lloyd (who didn’t cooperate with Spoto) and Herbert Coleman (who did, but insisted he was misquoted) hated the book, calling it false. Pat Hitchcock O’Connell, who has proved herself every bit her father’s daughter in her shrewd management of his image and estate, also denounced the book, and has stated repeatedly that “Spoto took things and twisted them.”
But the book sold well around the world, undoubtedly eclipsing François Truffaut’s in its number of readers. And Spoto’s portrait has stuck in people’s minds, perhaps because it is easier to imagine a manipulative egoist and monster, a shriveled soul inside a grossly fat man, than to understand the practical artist who gave his life to film.
Some directors die penniless, few die wealthy, and almost none die owning their own films. Most of the directors of Hitchcock’s generation are forgotten, their names and movies treasured by only a small audience of aficionados. Hitchcock was not only the ultimate film director; he also mastered the pitfalls and politics of studio filmmaking that dogged him both in England and America, and emerged as the industry’s consummate professional.
Spoto was indeed “conservative” when he estimated Hitchcock’s net worth, upon his death, at $20 million. His 150,000 shares of MCA stock alone were worth more than that, before the city and county bonds, the oil shares and other stocks (including his beloved cattle), and, most important, the rights and percentages attached to his post-Selznick films. Earnings from the films alone would add up, over time, to more than $20 million, although when the Hitchcock estate sold Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trouble with Harry, and Vertigo to Universal (which already owned Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, and all the late films starting with Psycho) in 1983, no price tag was announced.
The value can be guessed by the unusual campaign of restoration and rerelease of Hitchcock’s best-kno
wn American films, along with the continued promotion of the video, laser-disc, and DVD reissues. Only a small fraction of older films ever undergo the expense of restoration and the gamble of theatrical rerelease; the expense is exorbitant, and the investment is too often impossible to justify. Vertigo reportedly cost an estimated $1.5 million when it was restored by Robert Harris and James Katz for Universal, Rear Window another $600,000. When the latter was rereleased in 1983, before restoration, it grossed $9.1 million. (Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “the most elegantly entertaining American film now in first run.”) Vertigo had a limited rerelease in 1996 and wasn’t as profitable, but Universal’s marketing ensures other dividends on Hitchcock’s reputation.
Seeing Vertigo again reaffirmed that it was “as intensely personal as any entry at Sundance,” wrote Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, “an audaciously, brilliantly twisted movie, infused with touches of genius and madness.” In 2002, Sight and Sound, the film journal of the British Film Institute, conducted two international polls, one of critics and another of filmmakers, in order to compile Top Ten Lists of the all-time greatest movies. Vertigo was named by 144 critics as the second greatest film of all time (up from number 4 in 1992, the last such poll), and 108 directors gave it a sixth-place tie. (Citizen Kane was number 1 in both polls.)
There is no real U.S. equivalent of the British Film Institute, but in 1998 the American Film Institute canvassed “a blue-ribbon panel of leaders from across the film community” for the Top 100 American films of all time. Hitchcock boasted four among the top hundred. Billy Wilder also claimed four. Only Steven Spielberg, with five, had more. Psycho ranked the highest among Hitchcock’s entries at number 18, but North by Northwest (number 40), Rear Window (number 42), and Vertigo (number 61) also made the list. (Citizen Kane also placed number 1 in the AFI’s Top 100 poll.) Most, though not all, critics would agree that these are Hitchcock’s four greatest films, though not necessarily in that order—and also not so far below certain other films on the AFI’s highly controversial list.*
Alfred Hitchcock Page 107