In the first few years as a director, before he became heavily obese, he had been keen to present himself as a rather dynamic figure, braving exotic locations, being loud and busy in the studio. From the mid-1930s, when his weight rose as high as three hundred pounds, his style changed to the point where he was routinely observed to be looking inert, or downright bored by the whole business of filming, even falling asleep during takes, a habit he eventually developed at dinner, too. “He does not deliver a mass of instructions in a loud voice and he does not rush from one part of the set to another,” reported one journalist who had been granted access to the set of The 39 Steps. “It is hard to tell whether he is annoyed or not. . . . He is a mystery to most.” A decade later, a journalist for Good Housekeeping encountered a relatively slim Hitchcock, yet still made note of his size, shape, and mobility as he contrasted the physicality of the director and Ben Hecht during the story conferences for Notorious. While Hecht would pace about or “sprawl artistically on the floor,” Hitchcock, “a 192 pound Buddha (reduced from 295) would sit primly on a straight-back chair, his hands clasped across his midriff, his round button eyes gleaming.”
The turn against Victorian plumpness was arguably even more dramatic in America than it was in western Europe. In the late 1890s, Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations of the so-called Gibson Girl captured a picture of willowy beauty that would influence representations of female perfection for the next hundred years or more. Male bodies were also reshaped—metaphorically and literally—by the example of the heavyweight world champion James Corbett, and by Bernarr Macfadden, the father of bodybuilding. By 1920, the eradication of fatness had become a lucrative industry and something of a moral crusade. If people know one thing about William Howard Taft, president between 1909 and 1913, it’s probably the humiliating story of the time his three-hundred-pound naked body got wedged in the White House bathtub. The tale is almost certainly untrue, but it has persisted because it allows us to mock the man for his weight. In the entertainment world, the public censure of fat was obvious. In 1909, Lillian Russell, once celebrated for her voluptuousness, gave interviews on how she fought the flab, revealing the details of her calorie-burning morning workout. When the German soprano Olive Fremstad made her feted debut in New York, critics praised her voice but ridiculed her size and shape. A few years later, another soprano, the Italian Luisa Tetrazzini, spoke of her surprise at how much attention American journalists paid to the weight and appearance of opera singers.
Hitchcock felt the pressure of that same critical gaze when he first set foot in the United States in 1937. At this point, he had yet to sign a deal with an American studio, and he treated his visit as part fact-finding tour, part publicity campaign to raise his profile. As had been his habit in London, he arranged to conduct a couple of interviews over food and drink. He looked on mealtimes as opportunities to get important work done with journalists, actors, writers, and executives. They were also occasions when he was at his most accessible. Over several years, Peter Bogdanovich built a relationship with Hitchcock through lunchtime conversations, as did John Russell Taylor, the man Hitchcock entrusted to be his biographer. “Working with Hitch meant eating with him,” explains Shirley MacLaine, star of The Trouble with Harry. “I wasn’t blonde, thin, ethereal, so he didn’t want to jump on me”; instead, he lavished her with food and drink: “breakfast was pancakes, fried eggs, fruit, toast, and jam. My lunch was worse because the desserts were heaven, and dinner was something I had to learn how to eat with him: meat, potatoes, appetizers, seven-course meals and Grand Marnier soufflés.” The dining table was a place where Hitchcock felt comfortable and powerful, a fixed setting that encouraged familiarity, sharing, and conviviality while still having the barriers of table and chairs to prevent genuine intimacy, a safe space and a venue for performance.
When he arrived at the 21 Club in midtown Manhattan for his interview with H. Allen Smith, one of New York’s best-known celebrity interviewers, Hitchcock had surely approached it as an opportunity to charm, and to display himself as a bon vivant of an irrefutably English variety, in line with his idiosyncratic films. Instead, America viewed him as a glutton. If Smith’s account can be believed, Hitchcock devoured a lunch of three steaks and three helpings of ice-cream parfait, supplemented by three pots of tea and some post-blowout brandy. Perhaps the gorging had been an act. Hitchcock loved to stage elaborate practical jokes at dinner parties, designed to baffle and disgust his companions. It’s not completely unthinkable that the 21 Club lunch had been intended as something of this ilk. If so, the joke got lost in translation. He was reported to have been unhappy that his capacity for consumption, not his filmmaking brilliance, dominated the coverage of his American debut. Eight days after Smith’s article was published, the New York Times ran a piece that likened Hitchcock to Falstaff, describing his hail-fellow-well-met personality at the dining table, which probably got closer to the Rabelaisian side of his character that he had been hoping to transmit. But it was accompanied by a mocking description of his body: “His free-floating, unconfined waistline is a triumph in embonpoint. . . . When he smiles, his chins all smile with him, one after another.” It set the tone for the next forty-three years in which American journalists used Hitchcock’s body as a creative-writing homework task, each endeavoring to sketch with words the most gratuitous depiction of his physical form. Writers compared him to Disney characters, clouds, four-legged animals, and various inanimate objects. One declared that “Alfred Hitchcock has a posterior like those London busses on which his characters so often flee,” while another went for an extended nautical metaphor, likening Hitchcock’s profile to the “forepart of a sailboat with a balloon jib set. His mast, or backbone, is tilted slightly to the rear to balance the weight of his flying belly and he moves forward in a unique waddle. . . . His red face floats like a pennant at the forepeak, cushioned on three ample chins.”
In her 1943 article, “300-Pound Prophet Comes to Hollywood,” for the Saturday Evening Post, Alva Johnston split her wonderment for Hitchcock’s moviemaking skills with the memory of how his peculiar body had transfixed the public on his arrival. “The newcomer was a sensation with his cycloramic torso, setting-sun complexions, round, wonder-struck eyes, and cheeks inflated as if blowing an invisible bugle. People reacted to him like children at sight of balloon giants in Macy’s Parade. . . . He drove about a tiny Austin which fitted him like a bathing suit.” Nearly twenty years later, at the apex of Hitchcock’s commercial and critical standing, another writer for that same publication claimed that the director “holds two distinctions on the movie-TV industry—one centered on his odd physiognomy, the other on his impudent vocal cords.” Apparently, Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, and all his other outstanding achievements over the preceding decades were overshadowed by the sight and sound of a man who was written about as though not an entirely real person, halfway between a forbidding mythical creature and a children’s cartoon character.
Even his employers joined in. The critic Casey McKittrick has mapped how David O. Selznick and his employees actively encouraged promotional materials that emphasized Hitchcock’s size in his early years in Hollywood. McKittrick’s study of Selznick International Pictures official records—dominated by Selznick’s long-winded memos that exasperated Hitchcock—lead him to believe that the company’s top brass used Hitchcock’s sensitivity about his weight to force him to “comply with their wishes and to shame and disarm him when contract disputes arose.”
Rather than trying to ignore or fight against these things, Hitchcock took possession of his body and guided America’s interest in it, starting in 1943 when he went on a lengthy and very public weight-loss regimen. In various conversations, Hitchcock cited different triggers for this, including a story that he had caught sight of his reflection in the window of a shop in Santa Rosa during the filming of Shadow of a Doubt in 1942. For a second, he wondered how this fellow could have allowed himself to grow so big—and
then realized that he was looking at himself. He voiced disgust at his own body in a very Hitchcockian way, noticing how the flesh around his ankles had started to spill over the top of his socks, a tiny detail that conjures an arresting image. However, the issue of his size had become much more than aesthetic: he was experiencing chronic back pain and struggled to get insurance because of his obesity, he had an abdominal hernia (a problem he refused to have corrected until 1956) and, most alarmingly, a heart that was sixteen percent enlarged. His physical health surely contributed to his supposed impotence, too. Pressures to slim began to accumulate. In late 1942, his mother passed away, and in the first week of 1943, he received the news that his brother had also died. Suicide was ultimately found to be the cause of William’s demise, but initially Hitchcock was told that he had succumbed to a heart attack. The shock of those two bereavements—even though he and William were never especially close—could only have sharpened his sense of mortality, especially now that he was forty-three, no longer anyone’s idea of “the boy director.”
The year 1943 proved a turning point for Hitchcock, personally and professionally. A week after William’s death, Shadow of a Doubt was released, a film that Hitchcock had shaped as producer as much as director. Lifeboat followed, and was in many ways the most ambitious project he had undertaken. In between, he lost an enormous amount of weight and would never be so big again. In shedding something of his old self, he birthed another new life of Hitchcock: The Dieter.
Hitchcock remarked that when audiences saw the mocked-up ads for Reduco in Lifeboat, he received numerous inquiries about where this miracle weight-loss treatment could be obtained. The truth, of course, was that Reduco, rather like Lifeboat itself, was a fictional product based on the general flow of real-world events. To lose the pounds, Hitchcock had not turned to a miracle cure but to a course of abnegation, skipping meals and denying himself the treats that gave him such pleasure. His was something of a crash diet, in which he essentially missed breakfast, save for a cup of black coffee, and restricted himself to the same at lunch or, at most, a minute steak (just the one) and a green salad, with something similar for dinner. No space was made in his schedule for exercise of any sort, but he cut out various things he blamed for his rotundity, especially potatoes and his beloved ice cream. His Achilles’ heel was alcohol, as it had been for his father and his brother. Joel McCrea, the star of Foreign Correspondent, said that he saw Hitchcock down a pint of champagne at lunch breaks in 1940. Around the same time, Samson Raphaelson was taken aback by the great quantities of gin and orange Hitchcock got through as they worked on the script of Suspicion. When he wanted to lose weight, Hitchcock was able to cut back on the booze, but he admitted that his taste for it made controlling his weight an uphill struggle. His wife knew it, too, and guests saw him sneaking drinks when he thought Alma wasn’t looking.
The daytime sustenance of coffee and steak remained his default menu for long periods of the rest of his life, though dinner was a different story. Those who lunched with him often felt it was expected of them to follow the ritual. Anthony Shaffer, the screenwriter of Frenzy, grew sluggish after several days of midday steak and suggested that they might try something different the next day. Twenty-four hours later, Shaffer was presented with an extensive array of dishes. Hitchcock was joshing, but perhaps the joke was also meant as a rebuke for what Hitchcock inferred as criticism of his eating habits. Shaffer went back to the daily steak and never mentioned it again.
Hitchcock wasn’t the first or last Hollywood star to deliberately change their body shape, but nobody had publicized it in quite the way he did. Not only did he crowbar the subject of his weight loss into a film about wartime calamity on the high seas (in which the survivors risk dying through thirst and starvation), he also put it into living rooms across the United States in the form of a spread in Life magazine, which comprised a series of photographs before, during, and after his reduction from two hundred and ninety-five pounds to two hundred and thirty-eight pounds over an eight-week period. And, as the text in the article makes clear, the story was to be continued: by time of publication, Hitchcock was down to around two hundred pounds, and his ultimate goal was one hundred and sixty-eight. The photos are very Hitchcockian in their execution. In each shot he poses with his trademark blank expression—one that manages to convey dourness and flamboyance simultaneously—next to a potted plant; as the plant grows in each snap, so Hitchcock shrinks. Aside from being terrifically clever and funny, there’s also a feel of great contemporaneity in these photos; they could be ripped from the pages of a modern supermarket tabloid, or an Instagram story published by a social media influencer. This piece, which was ultimately incorporated into his Lifeboat cameo, was planned months in advance of the film’s release, suggesting that from the time he decided to lose weight, Hitchcock had mulled the publicity opportunities, thinking of how he might use his body to deepen his relationship with the American public.
From then on, Hitchcock incorporated his weight struggle into his public reputation. Nearly five years later, he penned an article about his latest movie, Rope, in which he announced that for his next cameo the “Hitchcock countenance will appear in a neon ‘Reduco’ sign on the side of a miniature building,” seemingly sure that his readers would instantly understand the reference. Until the end of his days, Hitchcock’s weight would hit peaks and troughs; a period of gain would be followed by a spell of self-denial. The fluctuations were spotted by the press, and Hitchcock was available for comment.
As Jan Olsson notes, Hitchcock’s was “one of the most written-about bodies in the twentieth century,” as scrutinized as any of the actresses whose appearances he obsessed over. But among his generation he was rare—possibly unique—in being a famous, powerful man whose attempts to maintain a healthy weight and find peace with the way he looked became a topic of public discussion and part of his public image, even while he lived. The cameos and the wry news pieces sometimes gave the appearance of a man with a rhino-thick skin, for whom the subject of his obesity was a bit of fun. That was evidently untrue. He was comfortable with ridicule, but only so long as he was directing it. Whitfield Cook recorded in his diary the sight of Hitchcock performing “the breast ballet,” a dinner-party turn in which—under the influence of much red wine—Hitchcock would whip his top off and gyrate his pectorals for the amusement of his guests. He also did “the whistling sailor,” a ventriloquist’s gag achieved by drawing a face on his naked belly, with the mouth around his navel; then, in the words of one who witnessed it, he “whistled, at the same time wobbling and shaking his stomach, and the big pink visage below his red face seemed not only to whistle but to change its expression.” Those who saw these performances found them hysterically funny; knowing Hitchcock’s talent for performing, they probably were. Yet, knowing also how sensitive he was about his appearance, it’s difficult not to find the idea of Hitchcock presenting himself as a big fat joke more than a little sad.
Hitchcock reveals his weight loss, January 1943.
In other people, he always found fatness a matter of humor and ridicule. Before the filming of Torn Curtain, Hitchcock tinkered with a scene in the script in which the erratic behavior of a member of the public threatens to have the lead characters captured by the East German authorities. As originally written by Brian Aherne, this disruptive member of the public is a small woman, scrawny and disheveled, but Hitchcock found the scene comedically lacking. Under his correcting pencil, the skinny woman became obese, the implication being that fat bodies are inherently funny in a way that thin ones are not. That overweight people struggled to be taken seriously was a lesson he had learned over and again. “I don’t look like an artist,” he pondered aloud when asked why he had never won an Oscar. “I don’t look like I’ve starved in a garret.”
An ironic concomitant of the consumerist boom of the Truman-Eisenhower era was rapid growth in the weight-loss industry. Hitchcock’s apparent switch from prewar feaster to postwar faster gave him a conne
ction with millions of other Americans, especially women. In 1940, he was still telling journalists that he ate “simply but a lot.” By the 1950s, he was speaking of himself as a gourmet who was also an inveterate calorie counter, carefully planning his meals in order to make sure he had space for an evening martini. Discernment, restraint, and matchless self-discipline now became a key part of his public image. In 1955, for example, the Los Angeles Times published his tips for getting rid of “that turkey and eggnog waistline,” and he provided the paper’s West magazine with a list of his favorite Los Angeles eateries, all of which he said were chosen purely on account of their culinary sophistication. For the popular women’s magazine McCall’s, he raved about the brilliance of Escoffier, spoke nostalgically about the dining habits of his Edwardian childhood, and hammed it up for the cameras, sitting glumly before a meager plate of food, which, as Jan Olsson has outlined, became a common pose for Hitchcock during the fifties. The days of ice cream for breakfast and six-course lunches were gone. In fact, he suggested, they had only ever existed within the minds of mischievous or gullible American journalists who had reported his quips about liking steak à la mode as if fact. In moments of self-criticism, he blamed his lack of willpower for not being able to lose weight permanently. Other times, he proffered more forgiving theories. “I don’t get the jitters; that’s why I’m overweight,” he once claimed. “I don’t work or worry it off.” On several counts, that explanation was patently false.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 14
