Hitch: The Life And Times And Alfred Hitchcock

270 Pages·1996·1.67 MB·English

by  John Russell Taylor

Hitch
The Life and Times of
Alfred Hitchcock by
John Russell Taylor
For Nicolas
Contents
Introduction: The Hitchcock Enigma
Part One: England
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Two: America
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
Postscript
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
The Hitchcock Enigma
Two facts are obvious: everybody knows Alfred Hitchcock, and nobody knows
him. Certainly, everybody knows what he looks like. Since right back in the
1930s, when his ‘trade mark’ of a tiny personal appearance in each of his films
became known, he has been a more familiar figure than any other film director
and, along with De Mille, the only one whose name attached to a film meant
more than those of any of the stars in it. But since the various television series
under such blanket titles as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, each episode with a little
jokey on-camera head-and tailpiece by Hitchcock, things have really
snowballed. He has become a rich man, and, more alarmingly, he has become
probably the most universally recognizable person in the world. A friend
travelling with him a couple of years ago put this notion to him jokingly, and
when he argued against it, challenged him to come up with an alternative. Film
stars out of their context were dodgy: imagine Barbra Streisand at your
neighbourhood delicatessen or Robert Redford on a Number 14 bus. Politicians
were arguable outside their own countries—on an American street Mao Tse-tung
would be just another Chinaman. But Alfred Hitchcock would immediately be
recognized in any context, almost anywhere in the world, and as himself, not as
someone who looked vaguely like him. (He himself says, except in England,
where he is never recognized because he looks just like thousands of others—a
statement to be taken, like much that he says, with a pinch of salt.) But the
appearance and the public manner are, if not entirely created and deliberate—he
has never, for instance, learned to be happy with his overweight—at least
carefully cultivated, almost like a disguise. One sometimes has the impression of
Alfred Hitchcock wearing an Alfred Hitchcock mask, or that inside that fat man
there is a fat man struggling to get out. And indeed for one so enormously
publicized and so aware of the value and uses of publicity he has managed to
remain astonishingly private—a shy, retiring family man, at home with his
books and his pictures, his wife, his dog, his daughter and her family close at
hand, and a tiny circle of close friends. Little appears in the papers and
magazines about his home life, beyond an occasional gimpse of his fabled
kitchen and wine cellar. His wife since 1926 has rarely been interviewed, his
daughter, though herself an actress, never as far as I know. It is known, since
French critics in particular make much of it, that he was born and raised a
Roman Catholic, but the importance his religion has assumed in his adult life
remains shrouded in mystery. He is often taken, on the strength of his films and
some of his more outrageous statements, to be a misanthropist, and more
especially a misogynist, yet the accounts of those who have worked with him
picture him usually as the kindest and gentlest of men, and his unit of co-
workers has always included an extraordinarily high proportion of women
(starting with and longest and most importantly featuring his wife Alma Reville),
with whom he obviously gets on if anything better than with men. And who,
without inside knowledge, would suspect that the jolly cynic of public Hitchcock
would be sentimental enough to have made every year it was possible the same
Christmas-New Year pilgrimage to the same hotel in St. Moritz where in
December 1926 he and his wife spent their honeymoon?
This exemplarily conservative, private private life was one of the things most
instrumental in gaining him the respect (sometimes grudging) of the big men in
Hollywood during his first decade there. He might be peculiar and
incomprehensible (and defiantly English), but at least there was no doubt he was
a dedicated professional, more concerned with making a successful picture than
with making a fortune (though the one might happily follow the other). He did
not go to parties, he did not have affairs with glamour stars, he did not really do
anything but make pictures. Very recently, when asked what he would have done
or do in his life if he had free choice, he replied, ‘I don’t know. I love paintings,
but I can’t paint. I love to read, but I am not a writer. The only thing I know how
to do is to make movies. I could never retire—what else is there?’ A mystery he
might be, but he was also a sort of model.
For as well as private Hitchcock and public Hitchcock there is professional
Hitchcock: the Hitchcock who turns all his energies to the preparation of a film,
calculates everything in advance down to the last detail and throws himself
totally into the meticulous realization of his plans; the man of routine and strict
discipline, the still centre of confident purposefulness on set, the man who never
has to raise his voice, never (in this world of flamboyant temperaments) show
anger, to the extent that he believes he cannot even feel anger. He has done all
possible through the years to perfect himself as a machine for making movies,
and in an important sense the dictum of another filmmaker who has known him
well for forty years is true: ‘There is no real Alfred Hitchcock outside his
movies.’
But a real Alfred Hitchcock must in some sense exist outside his films. For all
technical explanations of what his films are and what they do come back to the
same basic attitude: that film is a way of controlling people, a weapon in the
battle of life. Orson Welles has called film the best toy a boy was ever given:
Fellini regards it as an imaginary theatre in which the filmmaker can act out his
fantasies and give them substance. For Hitchcock it seems to be the way that a
frightened man, constantly prey to inexplicable guilts and anxieties, can
overcome them by manipulating other people, a tool to control people mentally
and have them, for the time being, exactly where he suspects they want him.
For Hitchcock is not so much in his films: he is his films. One can
psychoanalyse all one wants, to find evidence that his Roman Catholic education
has left traces which still show up in his films (why else would he be so excited
at the mere idea of kidnapping a bishop in the middle of mass that he would
build his whole 53rd film, Family Plot, on it?), or that some unfortunate
experience or non-experience with a chilly blonde is at the root of all the pictures
in which the icily controlled blonde is inexorably reduced by the end of the story
to a snivelling wreck. But whether these hypotheses are correct or not, the fact
remains that the elements have been precipitated into art which needs no external
explanation. In one sense Hitchcock is the most sophisticated of filmmakers, the
most totally in control of his means and his ends; in another he is one of the
great primitives, allowing himself with extraordinary lack of self-consciousness
to be totally known through his films. But through the force of his talent, it
comes to much the same thing.
So ultimately it does not matter what sort of man Hitchcock is, whether or not
the real Alfred Hitchcock can be persuaded to stand up. But even if such
questions make no noticeable difference to our appreciation of the films, there is
still human curiosity that impels us to unravel the puzzle. And puzzle Hitchcock
undoubtedly remains. How to reconcile the various contradictory images: the
dignified, rather formal professional and the shameless publicist who will do
anything, no matter how outrageous, for a picture in the papers; the devotedly
married man who never went out with a girl before his wife and the questionable
old party of the later movies, clearly fascinated by the highways and byways of
sex; the intimidating deadpan commentator on the follies of others and the
grinning, vulnerable schoolboy who sometimes startlingly peeps out for a
moment from behind the façade? There have to be, at the very least, three Alfred
Hitchcocks. There is the public Hitchcock, the television performer, the well-
publicized character. There is the professional Hitchcock, the dedicated
filmmaker who concentrates everything on his movies and allows nothing to get
in the way of his concept and its scrupulous realization. And there is the private
Hitchcock, the unpublicized family man who rarely departs from a home life of
classic modesty and simplicity, the epitome of English middleclass virtues.
Which is the ‘real’ Alfred Hitchcock? Why, all of them, of course. The
connoisseur of slightly ghoulish jokes and deadpan outrageousness is just as
genuine as the intensely private person who can occasionally be glimpsed when
he gets talking about his earliest childhood memories or when he sparks to
enthusiasm describing some of his own favourites among his eclectic art
collection—a group of Rowlandson watercolours, a Sickert landscape, the Klees.
It is Hitchcock’s strength as an artist and as a man that he is all of these things
wholeheartedly and none of them completely. Jorge Luis Borges, reviewing
Citizen Kane, summons up the shadow of G. K. Chesterton (another Edwardian
English Catholic, by the by) to quote the observation that the most frightening
labyrinth is a labyrinth without a centre. Many people have found Hitchcock
frightening, some of them perhaps for precisely this reason. It has been my aim
in this book to enter the labyrinth and try to find its centre.
I came to do so in rather a roundabout way. Like most people, I suppose, I
knew the name of Hitchcock before I had any idea what the director of a film
actually did—though I do not believe I ever shared the notion of a schoolboy I
recently heard in a bookshop observing categorically to a friend, apropos of
Hitch, ‘Of course he doesn’t do any work on his films, you know—he only
directs them.’ The Thirty-Nine Steps was one of the earliest films I ever saw,
closely followed on my insistence by Jamaica Inn, though my parents thought it
likely to be too frightening for me. Shortly before I became film critic of The
Times in 1962 I met Hitch for the first time, and in subsequent years I got quite
friendly with him, in the way that a critic may get friendly with a filmmaker.
But I did not really get to know him until I went out to Los Angeles to teach in
the University of Southern California. I was no longer directly involved in the
film industry, and I was another Englishman in a strange city. Hitch was very
kind to me, and we got into the habit of lunching quite regularly together—just
comfortable, social lunches in which we would talk at random about films we
had been seeing, about England past and present and, naturally, about Hitch’s
own earlier life and experiences, all of which, as a shameless fan, I gobbled up.
It occurred to me early on that though there were several books about Hitch’s
films, there was nothing really about Hitch the man—even Truffaut’s marathon
interview touched on personal matters only very incidentally to the discussion of
his work. So, I thought, someone should write a biography of Hitch. And why
not me? I had written extensively on his films, I had closely studied the
neglected area of British film history; more important, my own English family
background had some points of uncanny similarity with Hitch’s, and I was well
placed to understand the ins and outs of his vital early years.
I put the idea to him. He was hesitant. He said that he had often been asked,
and had always said no. To me he was not going to say no, but he didn’t want to
say yes just yet. And there the matter was left. I noticed, though, that during the
next eighteen months he gradually began to lead into things with ‘When you’re
writing this book …’ So at last I plucked up courage to ask him again, and this
time he agreed without hesitation. As I was to learn, this is the way he goes
about most new projects: he rushes into nothing, but takes his time to test the
ground, ‘audition’ the people concerned, and come up only when he is good and
ready with his answer. But once he has decided, he commits himself completely
to his decision. He answered all my questions, however impertinent, he got me
together on many occasions with his wife and daughter, he smoothed the way for
me to talk to many people who had worked with him through the years but who
never gave interviews, except that if Hitch were in question they would.
He rarely writes personal letters, and has never encumbered himself with
much in the way of personal memorabilia. There is a lot of documentation on his
recent films, but little or nothing on the earlier ones which he did not personally
produce; he has no photographs of himself much before 1930 (indeed, no
childhood pictures of him seem to exist anywhere), or of his earlier homes. In
many areas of detail a biographer has to rely largely on Hitch’s memory.
Fortunately, this is phenomenal. Like any famous raconteur, he has stories that
he likes to tell and is asked to tell over and over again. But even these, though
consistent in their essentials, are never told in the same way twice: there is
always a different perspective which brings out new details. And in other
contexts one can point him in almost any direction, asking him about things
which obviously he has not had occasion to think about for fifty years or more,
and he will come up with precise names and dates in a way few of us could
match with the events of the last few months.
In addition, I had the unique opportunity of following one complete film,
Family Plot, through all the stages from its first idea to the première showing.
Since no one has done this before, and a step-by-step account of Hitch at work
has, as well as its inherent interest, a lot of light to throw on his personality and
the way his mind works, I have, in Chapter Fifteen, gone into what might
otherwise seem a disproportionate amount of detail on this film. But this book is
an exploration, in which I have tried to take none of the answers for granted.
Part One
England