The persona of a gastronome tortured by his passion for food and drink wasn’t simply invented for publicity purposes. Those around him on location in the south of France for To Catch a Thief recall Hitchcock’s tussle between abstention and excess. As Grace Kelly remembered it, “He used to diet all week in anticipation of having a glorious meal on Saturday evening. He’d spend all week just thinking about it.” Her partner of the time, the fashion designer Oleg Cassini, joined them for many of those meals and was struck by how Hitchcock directed the occasions with an energy few recalled seeing in him in any other setting. “We would gather at the restaurant of his choice for the precise meal of his choice. We always ate in restaurants rated three stars or better. Still, Hitchcock would review everything in advance: the wines, the soup, the fish, the meat, the sorbet between courses, the dessert, the fruit and the cheese. He would preside over it all, like an emperor, savoring each morsel. I’ve never seen anyone enjoy a meal more.”
Hitchcock transmitted the idea that, for him, dinner with company at a fine restaurant was a total and immersive creative experience, similar to the making of a film. Though he always stressed his preference for well-cooked, simple food, the serving of a meal gave him an opportunity to express the extravagant and theatrical aspects of his personality, dominating the situation by stage-managing it. Marcella Rabwin observed this when Hitchcock threw a dinner party for her at a Los Angeles restaurant. Hitchcock planned the whole menu, and had ingredients flown in fresh from around the world, at a time when such a thing was a great extravagance. There was woodcock from Scotland, beef from Japan, limestone lettuce from Kentucky, and, of course, several bottles of the finest champagne. “It was a meticulously timed event,” recalled Rabwin, remembering how staff at the restaurant shuttled back and forth to collect food from the airport, at tremendous expense. His expenditure on food and drink was vast. In his first year in America, he spent $2,459.30 in restaurants, more than $40,000 in today’s money, and a further thousand dollars each on groceries and liquor.
Knowing how Hitchcock bloomed during the course of a dinner party, Grace Kelly threw one in his honor on their return from filming To Catch a Thief, at which she served the dishes from France that he had most enjoyed. Edith Head, the acclaimed costume designer, thought the gesture revealed a profound similarity between Kelly and her director, both of whose lives were guided by the pursuit of sensory stimulation. “Grace was never THE ACTRESS; she liked acting, and did it well, but it was just another experience; she was a girl who believed in life. She loved beauty, loved prettiness, and wasn’t afraid to tell you so.” Food was also a point of bonding between Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman. “I loved to visit the Hitchcocks,” Bergman said. “Alma was one of the best cooks in the world. I always had second helpings of everything, especially dessert.”
The center of Hitchcock’s gastronomic universe was his home, where he and Alma teamed up to make elegant consumption an immovable part of their daily routine. When Alma unofficially retired from her work on Hitchcock’s movies in the 1950s, she invested her time and creative energies in cooking, something she’d always loved and at which she excelled. She experimented with new recipes, preparing meals for guests or, more commonly, making dinner for Hitchcock and her to share after he came home from the studio. Pat remembers that her father would frequently phone home after lunch to discuss what he could look forward to later that evening; it was over these dinners that Hitchcock would work through script or production problems with his wife. Invariably, the table was beautifully laid, the wine thoughtfully selected. “They took their time,” Pat recalls, “and at the end of the dinner, after a cup of coffee, Hitch stood up, put on an apron, filled the sink with water, sprinkled the soap, and did the dishes.”
In the early 1960s, the Hitchcocks overhauled the kitchen at their Bel Air home to allow Alma a bigger canvas on which to create. The renovations—which apparently cost sixty-five thousand dollars, more than the original cost of the entire house—included the latest and best in terms of kitchen hardware, utensils and gadgets, as well as an enormous walk-in refrigerator-freezer, and a wine cellar that held as many as sixteen hundred bottles, fitting for a man who had recently been awarded the prestigious title of Grand Officer of the Burgundian Order of Tastevin. In his excellent writing about the shifting significance of food to Hitchcock’s public profile, Jan Olsson explains how members of the press were invited to capture this shrine to fine dining in a number of photo-heavy pieces—usually timed to promote a new Hitchcock film—the first being in Look magazine, August 1963. Twenty years earlier, an article like this might have opened with a comment on Hitchcock’s hind quarters, the girth of his belly, or the ruddiness of his cheeks. Instead, the first words quote Hitchcock on the similarities between cooking and filmmaking. “Food, like pure cinema, is putting pieces together to create an emotion. . . . Independently meaningless, together they mean something.” Look presents Hitchcock as front of house, the haughty but humorous maître d’; back of house was Alma, a homely force of creativity who shared with readers two of her recipes, including a dish she called “Terrine à la Hitchcock.” Olsson points out that the Hitchcocks’ rebrand as the neighborhood Francophile sophisticates was well timed, and not only because it mirrored Hitchcock’s emerging reputation as Hollywood’s artiste sans pareil. Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking had been published two years earlier, in 1961, and the first season of her television show The French Chef ran between February and July of 1963, concluding only a month before the publication of the Hitchcock piece in Look. Child’s influence helped demystify “fancy” French food, finding a spot for soufflés and consommés in ordinary American kitchens. This is precisely the way in which the Hitchcocks’ interest in food was covered in the last two decades of their married life. When Pat Hitchcock published a short book about her mother in 2003, she devoted fifty-one pages to Alma’s recipes and menus. It reads like one of Child’s books, albeit with the occasional English treat among the French classics—Yorkshire pudding, pheasant with bread sauce, roast lamb with mint sauce, all Hitchcock favorites.
From the mid-sixties on, the references to Hitchcock’s weight dramatically reduced in the pages of the American news media, or at least they were sublimated into the image of Hitchcock as serious connoisseur, an image he was careful to maintain. In 1966, he sent a disgruntled telegram to a press officer in London, complaining about a letter that had appeared in London Life, a new and very fashionable publication. The offending missive had referred to Hitchcock ordering steak and kidney pudding when it should have been steak and kidney pie. Unhappy that he might appear to be ignorant of the difference, Hitchcock pressed to have a correction issued.
By the seventies, the decade in which America’s “obesity epidemic” began, Hitchcock’s body no longer seemed as unusual as it had at the end of the Great Depression. Surely, his advanced years and stellar reputation had earned him a break from the gossip, innuendo, and ridicule. Nevertheless, the long struggle with his weight had taken its toll. Hitchcock’s final ten years were a slog. He suffered from excruciating pain in his arthritic joints, likely exacerbated by years of supporting so much weight and his fanatical opposition to exercise of any sort. Weekly checkups with the doctor had been part of his life since 1942, but in 1965 these increased to two, sometimes three, times a week. He had a pacemaker fitted in 1974, and took pleasure in showing people the machinery he had to connect to himself when sending the hospital his latest readings. Boozing was not advised in this condition, but the more his health faltered and his productivity declined, the more he reached for liquor to stem the anxiety. He tried to be subtle about it. He’d ask a secretary to bring more ice for his drink, her cue to break out a cube of frozen vodka; the maid knew that when he requested orange juice, he really meant something more medicinal; he’d find a way to bring afternoon drinks into the morning, and he secreted a bottle of brandy in his bathroom for emergency swigs. He was in no condition to make films, and Alma, who fell
victim to her own debilitating health problems in the seventies, was too frail to cook. The two cherished pillars of their creative lives, cinema and food, had been knocked away from beneath them. In a couple of heartrending letters to friends and family in the late seventies, Hitchcock chose to express the emotional difficulties both were experiencing in terms of the impact it was having on their diet.
Gourmand and gourmet; Hitchcock at the 21 Club in Manhattan, 1956.
Lunch usually consists of a sandwich of thin bread, one we enjoy most is a roast beef spread, and we always keep a ham. She has a toast breakfast, afternoon tea with a chocolate biscuit and then dinner. If Pat doesn’t provide it, I go out and with the help of the day nurse usually prepare something like a fillet steak or half a chicken, which is easy to handle. . . . This is a very sad letter, but there’s little else I can tell you. Naturally, she never leaves the house, but I try to take her out one night a week to our favorite restaurant, but manoeuvring her is quite a business. That is why she can only manage it once a week.
Ultimately, though, Hitchcock kept control of his body and ensured that it lived beyond the grave. While his television shows aired, the silhouette of his profile was as recognizable to viewers across the Western world as Mickey Mouse’s ears, Marilyn’s hourglass figure, or Elvis’s curled upper lip. In 1956, a year after Alfred Hitchcock Presents premiered, and several years after their association had ended, David O. Selznick requested permission to use the silhouette to promote some Hitchcock movies that Selznick wanted to re-release. Hitchcock refused. Later, a PR executive suggested that they freshen the image and create a new silhouette design. Again, Hitchcock said no.
In June 1972, the audience of The Dick Cavett Show applauded as the host, in imitation of Hitchcock, appeared in silhouette at the back of his set. He held the pose for a few seconds, at which point Hitchcock emerged from the opposite direction, just as he did at the start of his own programs. The studio erupted with cheers and whistles. Facing a svelte, debonair man half his age, Hitchcock knew the body being celebrated was his. Traitorous, deceptive, and unreliable though it may have been, it could not have belonged to anyone else.
* “Lamb to the Slaughter,” written by Roald Dahl.
6
THE DANDY*
Of the ten movies that Hitchcock made during his seven-year contract with Selznick, only three were produced by the mogul who brought him to Hollywood: Rebecca, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case, starring Gregory Peck, Ann Todd, and the Italian actress Alida Valli, whom Selznick hoped would be his next great female star. On paper, The Paradine Case seems promising Hitchcock material: the story of a suave English barrister whose infatuation with the woman he’s defending in a murder trial imperils his marriage, his sanity, and his client’s life. Selznick, however, wasn’t content for Hitchcock to shape it as he saw fit, and intervened at every crucial juncture, rewriting James Bridie’s script, vetoing Hitchcock’s ideas for shooting the crucial courtroom scenes, and excising roughly an hour from Hitchcock’s cut. It was one of the most stressful and chastening experiences of Hitchcock’s career.
The movie was the last he was obliged to make under the terms of the Selznick deal, and it was with relief and excitement that he went on to his next project. Rope was produced by Transatlantic Pictures, a production company newly established by Hitchcock and his old friend from London, Sidney Bernstein. To underline his sense of agency, Hitchcock made a radical departure from his familiar shooting and editing techniques in favor of a series of unbroken long takes, artfully cut to make it appear as one fluid, unbroken piece of film. It was an exceptionally ambitious scheme, which pushed the technology of the day to its limits, and the merits of which are keenly debated. To some, Rope is a technical masterstroke. Others think of it as a moment when Hitchcock betrayed the principles of his art. “It’s inherently uncinematic” is the implacable opinion of fellow director David Fincher. “It’s not a movie.”
Hitchcock’s other major production decision was to shoot in color for the first time, a visual leap perfectly suited to the film’s content. Rope centers on Phillip and Brandon, a couple of dandies who attempt to execute the perfect murder for the aesthetic pleasure it will bring them. They are two of Hitchcock’s murderers as artists, for whom everything in life—including the effectuation of death—is an opportunity for creative perfection. “I’ve always wished for more artistic talent,” says Brandon. “Well, murder can be an art, too. The power to kill can be just as satisfying as the power to create.”
All the action takes place in their beautifully appointed Manhattan apartment, a place that can only be understood in color. Theirs is a world of well-cut clothing and fresh-cut flowers; antique furniture and crystal glassware; rare books, piano recitals, and dinner parties. Even the stunning view from their living room window, the New York skyline of sunsets, skyscrapers, and electric lights, would lose its power if painted in black and white. It was a material existence that Hitchcock understood, for it mirrored his own. It was he who guided the selection of the artworks to be hung on the apartment walls; he who stipulated the color of Phillip and Brandon’s suits. Despite looking like a staid British bank manager, Hitchcock apportioned great depth to the surface of things. He wasn’t showy or decorative in his dress, but he was committed to the perfection of appearance as a way of exerting control over himself and the world around him. In his work and through the living of his life, he reconciled the two strands of the nineteenth-century figure of the dandy, and in so doing asked questions about what it means to be a man in the modern world.
Perhaps the reason it seems so peculiar to discuss “Hitchcock the dandy” is that the common conception of dandyism has drifted quite some way from its roots. Type “dandy” into a search engine, and one is given the definition “a man unduly concerned with looking stylish and fashionable,” augmented by a use of the word in a sentence: “his floppy handkerchiefs and antique cufflinks gave him the look of a dandy.” The dandy evoked here is a descendant of the fin de siècle variety typified by Oscar Wilde, flamboyant young men let loose in the dress-up box. No sartorial flourish was too extravagant for these aesthetes: hats, capes, and scarves, all in bright colors and fancy fabrics, decorated by jewels, trinkets, and feathers. Wilde, the unignorable poster boy for 1890s dandyism, first made a name for himself in America by proselytizing a new dawn in male clothing. He urged men to cast aside somber formality and dress themselves with verve and imagination.
Foppish Wilde set in train an eye-catching lineage of extrovert dandies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly among the English—Quentin Crisp, Brian Jones, and Russell Brand all qualify. But Wilde’s image was an unconventional elaboration of the original dandy, Beau Brummell, a social-climbing celebrity of Georgian Britain who, ironically, had helped to establish the masculine uniform against which Wilde rebelled.
In Brummell’s philosophy, sobriety and austerity were key; there was no place for flashy adornment or garish color. Exquisiteness, not extravagance, was the watchword. Brummell used his body not as a playground for his imagination, but as a mannequin on which to perfect the male ideal by obsessing on tiny details. He was known to spend hours in front of the mirror fussing over the knot in his cravat and the tilted angle of his hat. His look was predictable but flawless.
Like Wilde, Brummell looked to the example of the ancient Greeks for his idea of the perfect man, embodied by the long-limbed, muscular silhouette that proliferated in their art. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English country dress had emphasized the belly, narrowed the shoulders, and shortened the legs, favoring those—such as Hitchcock, as it happens—with John Bull–like frames. Brummell tossed tradition aside and redesigned gentlemen’s clothing to make the chest, shoulders, and legs the key male attributes. Under his influence, the template of the modern men’s suit was created, and, by extension, something of the modern man: a machine for civilized existence.
Brummell and Wilde represent two distinct traditions
of dandyism; Wilde was Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust to Brummell’s Thin White Duke. However, beneath the differences in attire they were united by the belief that the perfection of outward appearance reflects an inner spiritual mastery, and that manners and style are vital to the living of an elevated, hygienic existence in the modern city, a place in which you’re only ever a misstep away from the sewer. Hitchcock displayed kinship with both traditions, including in his physical appearance: not just the clothes he wore, but how he wore them. Whether consciously or not, his daily routine was remarkably in step with Brummell’s precepts for the well-lived masculine life.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 15
