Now the deputy helped Mr. Hitchcock scramble up the wall.
“This would be a good place for a stairway,” Hitchcock said. He carried Aunt Edith’s handbag, but his wig was gone, his makeup washed away. He was in shorts and shirtsleeves beneath the tattered remains of the dressing gown. An embroidered elastic strap stuck out of the handbag.
“I guess we won’t be able to return the gown,” Jack said.
“Aunt Sarah will be greatly disappointed,” Hitchcock replied.
“Aunt Sarah?” Jack’s mom said.
The brutish ox woman was led away in handcuffs. Aunt Edith followed her, Deputy Whatley holding her arm. “But I tell you I never gave you a drugged chocolate. That’s preposterous!” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” the deputy said.
Alice Trapp tapped her pen on her clipboard. With a final, unfriendly glance at Jack’s mother, she scratched a final check mark, turned on her heel, and left.
Aunt Edith stopped abruptly when she was escorted past Hitchcock. “Where’s my Poopsie?” she said.
Hitchcock opened the handbag and pulled on the leash. “You mean the weasel?” he asked.
“Weasel!” said Aunt Edith. “I’ll have you know that’s a purebred—”
“Shanghai wharf rat,” Deputy Whatley finished.
“I beg your pardon!”
“That’s a Shanghai wharf rat,” the deputy continued. “We just arrested a man in Chinatown for selling them as ‘Alpine chinchillas.’ Who’d believe a thing like that?”
Aunt Edith looked at Muffin. Her nose twitched, but her eyes got watery. “Mummy loves him anyway,” she said, and held out her arms, shackles rattling.
But Muffin must have sensed where Aunt Edith was headed, and he’d had enough of cages. With a twist and a chirp, he leapt from Hitchcock’s grasp and disappeared down a sewer grate, dragging his pink leather leash behind him.
Deputy Whatley led Aunt Edith away.
Mom’s eyes followed them. “You say she hired Stefano to kidnap me, and then she was kidnapped and held hostage herself, by someone else?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “By a bellman at our hotel.”
Mom’s eyes returned to Jack. “Then I feel more pity toward her than anger. But only a little bit more. And all this was because your father was some kind of heir to a fortune?”
Jack nodded. “He was. And I am. She kidnapped you to get me. But the trust required that a numeric code be provided. She couldn’t find it, so she couldn’t pay off Stefano. Then the bellman thought she had the code and kidnapped her to get it.”
She pulled Jack close. “Oh, Jack. Kidnappers, thieves, and murderers! How did you manage?”
“I had expert help,” Jack said.
“A dubious expertise,” Hitchcock said, “yet I am glad it helped.”
Jack wrapped his arms around a surprised Hitchcock. “Mr. Hitchcock, I don’t think I can ever thank you enough.”
Hitchcock dropped gracefully to his knee. “We’ll work something out, my dear boy,” he said. “Perhaps for starters you could lend me your mother. I believe I have a part on my show for which she’d be perfect.”
Jack hugged the director again.
“And call me Hitch. After all we’ve been through, that seems more proper.”
Hitch pulled away from the tight embrace and put his hand on Jack’s heart. “Your father’s tags,” he said.
They no longer hung from Jack’s neck. Jack marveled that he hadn’t noticed their missing weight since he’d let them fall. “I lost them on the bridge,” he said.
“But my dear boy,” Hitch replied, “then you’ve lost a fortune.”
Jack looked at his mother, thinking how he, himself, was already rich. He closed his eyes and envisioned the silver charm, letting it rotate in his mind.
Then he opened his eyes, turned to Hitch, and winked.
“IPSE DIS,” he said.
THERE WERE TWO ALFRED HITCHCOCKS.
The first Alfred Hitchcock was a real person. He was a husband, father, and film director who created some of the most thrilling and frightening movies ever brought to the screen. He was born in 1899, not long after the cinema itself, and he and the industry grew up together, each deeply affecting the other’s development.
The second Hitchcock was a fictional character—a jovially macabre uncle always ready to poke fun at the first Hitchcock’s efforts. This public character was invented by the director himself, with the aid of his publicity staff and writers—most notably James Allardice, who created the introduction spots for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television show and wrote many of the director’s public speeches.
Like Alfred Hitchcock, A Hitch at the Fairmont is a blend of fact and fiction. The character of the director in the book is a product of my own research into the real Hitchcock and my musings on the delightful personality he used to entertain the public. He’s the person I would have liked to have run into if I were living at the Fairmont Hotel in 1956—especially if there were a mystery to solve. And while the things he, Jack, and the rest of my fictional cast experience are made up, the events have a basis in reality.
In many Hitchcock films the main characters are unwillingly bound together, sometimes physically with handcuffs (as in The 39 Steps or Saboteur) or sometimes metaphorically by things like familial ties (Shadow of a Doubt) or hasty bargains (Strangers on a Train). In my book I chose the nonphysical route, shackling Hitchcock and Jack together with a fictional device: the police won’t help because they believe Hitchcock is pulling a publicity stunt. The truth is that Hitchcock really was known as a practical joker. For example, he once had a dinner party where all the food had been dyed blue, just to see what his guests’ reactions would be. And, though it didn’t happen in Los Angeles, just like in this book he did once have a draft horse delivered to an actor’s dressing room. My fictional director runs from the confrontation with the police because he is afraid of them. The real Alfred Hitchcock said many times in public that he feared the police and recounted the story of being locked up as a child as part of a lesson on behavior concocted by his father and a policeman friend.
If my own fascination with Alfred Hitchcock and his films was one motivation for writing this book, so was my desire to learn more of the history of my adopted hometown, San Francisco. The city of my imagination doesn’t veer far from the real one in which I live. After all, cities are made of more than just buildings and streets. They are made of stories that get richer, deeper, and perhaps truer as the years pass. Here are some of the historical facts about San Francisco that shaped the story in my book.
Although there are no networks of avenging Shanghai survivors, nor any orphanages that supplied kidnappers with a source of unwilling slaves, shanghaiing was a part of San Francisco history. It was practiced during the Gold Rush days all along the West Coast of America. Ships arrived with goods and immigrants as a result of the rush, but soon found themselves with no crew, as sailors jumped ship to strike out for the California hills in search of gold and silver. A brisk business in kidnapping able-bodied men and pressing them into forced service aboard ships thrived. Crimps (unscrupulous men paid by the body to find men for a ship) would render their victims unconscious and forge their signature on the ship’s rolls. It was illegal for any sailor who had signed on to leave the ship before the voyage was finished. The crimp would collect the victim’s first few months’ wages from the captain of the ship. One story even told of a crimp who, desperate for more bodies, sewed rats into the clothing of a dead man to fool the captain into believing the corpse was alive so he could collect his fee. The last official shanghai took place in 1915. A number of laws, culminating in the Seamen’s Act of that year, gave more rights to sailors and effectively ended the practice of shanghaiing. But human trafficking and forced labor exist in parts of the world to this day.
My research for this book provided me with many interesting opportunities, and one of the best was the rare privilege I had to tour the Fairmont Hotel, from the
ten-thousand-dollars-a-night penthouse (where a door slammed right after my guide told me the suite was haunted) to the very room Alfred Hitchcock stayed in to the “back of the house” (the area used by the staff). While I have changed some aspects of the physical layout of the hotel, many—like the rollaway beds standing like tombstones, and the “secret” passage used by the staff—appear just as they are in real life. The “back of the house” is a maze of tiny hallways, twisting stairways, and cavernous rooms stuffed with everything needed to keep the current hotel running, as well as forgotten remnants from the hotel’s past. There are whole rooms devoted to dirty dishes (and others to clean ones). There are boilers and high-voltage electrical works, linen rooms, seamstress tables, racks of uniforms, carpentry shops—the list goes on. It would be easy to stash someone down there, with confidence that they would not be found.
Though the hotel was built with the Fair family’s wealth from the silver mines of Nevada’s Comstock Lode, there was no lost heir of the family fortune. (And in any case the legal knots associated with any claim on the Fairmont Hotel would have been tangled indeed, as ownership of the hotel had passed from the Fair family by 1956, when our story takes place.) But the Fairmont Hotel did play a large role in San Francisco history. It was nearly complete in April 1906, when the great San Francisco earthquake struck, followed by days of raging fires. The hotel had been built using a steel substructure and the relatively new technology of reinforced concrete, which uses embedded steel bars to provide extra strength. So the building proved capable of surviving the quake. Unfortunately, all the interior fixtures were destroyed in the fire that followed. Nevertheless, the owners continued construction, and when the Fairmont Hotel opened on the one-year anniversary of the quake, it was heralded as a sign that the city had been reborn. The hotel continues to be a vibrant part of San Francisco culture. It has played host to presidents, royalty, foreign dignitaries, and even Hollywood directors. And the members of staff are as friendly as can be. There is not, nor has there ever been, a kidnapper among them.
Most of the story ideas for Hitchcock’s films came from novels or stories he’d purchased, then reworked and reenvisioned with his brilliant, inventive collaborators, including his wife, Alma, and a crowd of screenwriters. I had fun in this book imagining that Alfred Hitchcock’s adventure with Jack inspired elements of the films he made after 1956. This is, of course, fiction. But within that fiction is a smattering of facts. For example, in 1961 there really was an enormous flock of birds that descended on a seaside town near Santa Cruz, California, and Hitchcock would certainly have known about it, since he had a home nearby. Undoubtedly he did his own blend of fact and fiction when he created his classic film The Birds from that true incident and from a story by Daphne du Maurier. And while the plot of Vertigo came from a French novel, D’entre les morts, and not from Jack remaking Hitchcock in the image of his aunt, the director was known to dress up as a woman for publicity stunts and possibly even for a secret cameo (in North by Northwest).
Vertigo is considered Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece and was recently named the greatest film of all time by the British Film Institute. It is also the intersection of my fascination with Hitchcock and with San Francisco history. During the time period in which A Hitch at the Fairmont takes place, the director would have been preparing to film Vertigo, and in my imagination, he himself came to San Francisco to review his choice of filming locations.
The cinema as it exists today would not be the same without Alfred Hitchcock. He invented or popularized many of the techniques of filming and storytelling still in use. Indeed, so prevalent are his methods that his name has become an adjective, “Hitchcockian,” used to describe a certain manner of film. Hitchcockian films are stories of innocent, average people falsely accused of crimes or thrust into dangerous circumstances. There is often a cool female heroine who, no damsel in distress, uses her courage and wits to aid, or thwart, the hero. She is usually blond. The plot is set into motion by a MacGuffin, some goal or object the hero must obtain, though its identity is not integral to the story. Hitchcockian movies employ interesting camera angles and techniques to heighten the tension in the story. And always at the heart of a Hitchcockian film is a human story about human emotions.
I THINK I’VE SEEN THAT ONE:
An Abbreviated Filmography of Alfred Hitchcock
The chapter titles in this book are taken from famous and not-so-famous Hitchcock films. Here is a list of those films and a little bit about each one.
Warning: There may be spoilers ahead, particularly if you want to look for Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearances in the films themselves without any help.
Chapter 1. Young and Innocent (1937)
Summary: Robert Tisdall, falsely accused of murder when the belt from his raincoat is found at a murder scene, convinces Erica Burgoyne to help him find his missing raincoat and the true murderer.
Most Thrilling Moment: Erica drives her car into an abandoned mine to escape pursuit. The floor collapses in a cave-in, swallowing the car, and nearly the heroine.
Innovative Technique: A long shot from high overhead in the hotel zooms in to the murderer’s eye twitch.
Cameo: Hitchcock is outside the courtroom with a camera.
Chapter 2. Spellbound (1945)
Summary: When Dr. Anthony Edwardes takes over a mental hospital, Dr. Constance Petersen becomes suspicious. She soon discovers that the man is an imposter who believes he killed the real Edwardes and took his place. Using psychoanalysis and dream interpretation, she helps him prove his innocence.
Famous Scene: Hitchcock employed surrealist artist Salvador Dalí to design the dream sequence, a sharp-imaged scene full of symbolism.
Cameo: Hitchcock comes out of the elevator at the Empire State Hotel carrying a violin case.
Chapter 3. The Lodger (1927)
Summary: When a mysterious man residing at a boardinghouse begins creeping out at night, his landlord thinks he may be the Avenger, a killer stalking the streets of London.
Famous Scene: In this silent film Hitchcock wanted to show the nervous pacing of the lodger. To do it he built a glass floor and filmed the character walking from below. He superimposed this shot above the heads of the landlords (and their swinging chandelier) as they listen from the room beneath his.
Cameo: Hitchcock appears as the man at a desk in the newsroom with a telephone, and again in front of the mob that has chased the lodger.
Chapter 4. The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Summary: Iris Henderson befriends an elderly English woman on a train traveling in Europe. When Iris wakes up from a nap, she discovers the woman has disappeared, and everyone on the train denies they ever saw her.
The MacGuffin: A secret message encoded in a tune.
Cameo: Hitchcock appears near the end of the film in Victoria Station walking between the train and some luggage, smoking a cigarette.
Chapter 5. Torn Curtain (1966)
Summary: During the Cold War American scientist Michael Armstrong defects to East Germany to spy for the West.
Famous Scene: Armstrong must kill his Communist handler, Gromek, and do it silently so as not to alert Gromek’s companion. Unlike most movie murders, it is difficult, it was filmed with no musical score, and it takes more than three minutes to achieve (with the aid of a knife, hands, a shovel, and a gas oven).
Cameo: Hitchcock is holding a baby in the hotel lobby early in the film.
Chapter 6. The Trouble with Harry (1955)
Summary: A dark comedy in which the trouble with Harry is that he is dead but won’t stay buried. Several of the citizens of Highwater, Vermont, believe they were the one who killed him, and so they bury and then disinter him multiple times.
Did You Know? This was Shirley MacLaine’s first film.
Cameo: Hitch walks past the limousine of a wealthy man who wants to buy Sam’s painting.
Chapter 7. The White Shadow (1924)
Summary: A story of twin sisters, one good, one evil
.
Did You Know? Hitchcock was an assistant director. This film was considered lost for decades, until the first thirty minutes of it was discovered in the New Zealand Film Archive in 2011. Half the film is still missing.
Chapter 8. Vertigo (1958)
Summary: Ex-policeman “Scottie” Ferguson is asked by an old college pal, Gavin Elster, to follow his wife, Madeleine, whom Elster fears is going mad. Scottie falls in love and, after Madeleine kills herself, finds a woman who looks like her, and makes her over in Madeleine’s image.
Innovative Technique: The “vertigo effect” is achieved by a “dolly out–zoom in,” meaning the camera is physically pulled (dollied) away from the subject while the lens zooms in. It creates a visually jarring effect to mirror the psychological turmoil of the characters. The technique was developed by cameraman Irmin Roberts for Vertigo and has been used in countless films since, including Jaws, E.T., Battlestar Galactica, and GoodFellas.
Cameo: Hitchcock walks by the shipyard office of Gavin Elster carrying a trumpet or bugle case.
Chapter 9. To Catch a Thief (1955)
Summary: Retired jewel thief John Robie must prove that he is not the cat burglar currently stealing from wealthy tourists on the French Riviera.
Famous Scene: Francie Stevens, the character played by Grace Kelly, speeds along a windy road in a sports car. Years later, as the real-life Princess Grace of Monaco, Grace Kelly would die in a car accident on a similar road not far from where the scene was shot.
Cameo: Hitchcock sits on a bus next to John Robie.
Chapter 10. The Ring (1927)
Summary: The ring in my story is a piece of Aunt Edith’s jewelry, but the movie title refers to a boxing ring. In the movie two boxers fall in love with the same woman.
Did You Know? This was the first film on which Hitchcock worked with Alma Reville, his future wife.
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