The two schools of dandyism rear their heads in Jamaica Inn, the last film Hitchcock made before signing with Selznick. Falling between two Hitchcock classics, The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca, the film gets little critical attention and is generally regarded as noteworthy only because of Charles Laughton’s performance as the deranged villain, Sir Humphrey Pengallan. “We can’t recall when we’ve ever held a monster in such complete affection,” stated the New York Times reviewer back in 1939, although one of the leading experts on Hitchcock’s English period is not alone in believing Laughton’s face-pulling histrionics to be “virtually unwatchable.” Peter Ackroyd might be correct when he says that Jamaica Inn is “Laughton’s picture, not Hitchcock’s.” Even so, it articulates something about style and masculinity highly germane to its director.
The film features a character called Dandy, a member of Pengallan’s criminal gang. On the page, Dandy could be read as a flamboyant Wildean—proudly showing off his new lace cuffs in his first appearance—though there’s no hint of lavender in Edwin Greenwood’s performance. Pengallan is closer to a Brummellian dandy, an aging Georgian rake who, echoing the real Brummell’s biography, ridicules his erstwhile friend, the newly crowned King George IV, as “a painted bag of maraschino and plum pudding.” Outwardly respectable, Pengallan lives by a moral code that rejects mainstream concepts of law and order in favor of a dandyish sense of his own superior being, foretelling the attitudes of Brandon and Phillip in Rope. On surveying booty spirited from a recent shipwreck, he outlines his worldview to his oafish henchman:
Look at this exquisite stuff. Worth the miserable lives of a hundred rum-rotten sailors. It’s perfection of its own kind. That’s all that matters, Merlyn—whatever is perfect of its own kind. I’d rather transport all the riff-raff in Bristol to Botany Bay just to save one beautiful woman from a headache. And that’s something you don’t understand and never will, because you’re neither a philosopher nor a gentleman.
Hitchcock wouldn’t have shared the social elitism of that speech. But the idea that life finds its apogee in “whatever is perfect of its own kind” encapsulates very neatly his idea of style, in objects and in manners.
Barely into adulthood, Hitchcock resolved to dress the part of the man he felt was waiting within, obscured by that “armor of fat” and “cottage-loaf” shape. While still working his entry-level jobs in his teens and early twenties, he acquired the sharpest suit he could afford, cultivated a thin mustache, wore a natty homburg, and, whenever finances allowed, forwent homemade sandwiches for a proper lunch at an upscale restaurant on the Strand. His friend and collaborator Samuel Taylor saw this as evidence that Hitchcock had always known “the kind of human being and the kind of character he was going to be.” With an unerring sense of occasion, he relished any event for which he had to dress up, whether a work function, an opening night of a new play, or a boxing match. Reminiscing about some of the fights he witnessed at the Albert Hall in London in the interwar years, he marveled at the aesthetic incongruity between the brutality in the ring, soaked in bodily fluids, and the sophistication of the watching crowd dressed in evening gowns and black tie. What a contrast, he remarked in 1962, to “the Hollywood people” of the present day: men who go out at night in “a shirt . . . without a tie . . . and a light suit, and a woman goes in an evening dress—that awful combination.” When his income leaped during the second half of the 1920s, Hitchcock took himself to Savile Row and Jermyn Street, where Brummell had been a century earlier, to set in place what would constitute his “look” for the rest of his days: dark business suit with white shirt, dark tie, and highly polished black shoes.
The young dandy at work. Hitchcock c. 1926.
A true dandy believes that good taste is timeless; Brummell and Wilde both disregarded fashion, which Wilde described as “a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months.” With the exception of silly getups he wore for a few of his television shows and the odd publicity shoot, these bespoke suits were the only clothes the public ever saw Hitchcock in. Even those closest to him could be caught off guard at the sight of a dressed-down Hitchcock. While on a family vacation in Hawaii at some point in the 1970s, he emerged from his hotel room in what seemed to the rest of his clan like a new skin: a mint-green shirt. Seeing the stunned reaction from his daughter and granddaughters, Hitchcock explained that Alma had bought it for him. He didn’t seem thrilled to be venturing into uncharted territory at this stage of life, and Pat wondered whether her mother hadn’t bought it as a practical joke. One Hitchcock biographer observed that Hitchcock’s commitment to his suits, even when sweltering under a blazing sun or studio lighting, made his clothing a kind of “disguise,” a fancy-dress costume similar to the eccentric clothing favored by other imposing directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and Josef von Sternberg. True, dark suits became a trademark for Hitchcock in the way other modern artists developed sartorial identifiers—Picasso with his Breton shirt, Dalí and his waxed mustache. Yet Hitchcock’s clothes were the opposite of a disguise. They were a visual statement on how he approached living and filmmaking: with precision, rigor, and efficiency, and with as much understated elegance as he could muster. In the words of Philip Mann, a biographer of some of the great dandies of the last hundred years, “The dandy does not wear his clothing as fancy dress. . . . It is a uniform for living.”
The academic Thomas Elsaesser believes the essence of Hitchcock’s dandyism isn’t in the design of his suits, which were entirely prosaic, drab even. Rather, it’s the fact that Hitchcock “always wore them, in every climate, in his office, on the set, in the Californian summer, in the Swiss Alps or in Marrakesh.” Certainly, Hitchcock’s commitment to correctitude over utilitarianism is vital to his sense of style, but if one thing makes him a dandy, it’s his unswerving attention to tiny details that nobody but he would ever notice. One friend, permitted to peek inside the Hitchcock wardrobe in the 1970s, discovered a row of what seemed to be identical suits. On closer inspection, however, there were slight differences between them; some were black, others a shade of blue so dark as to make the difference negligible, and there were slight differences in measurements and cut, too, to mitigate his yo-yoing weight. Hitchcock sometimes said he dreamed of buying an off-the-rack suit but that he was prevented from doing so by his irregular proportions. It’s unlikely he really meant it; the last thing Hitchcock wanted to be was a middle-of-the-road everyman. As Roland Barthes put it, the true dandy thinks of his suit as a “uniform in its essence, yet adaptable in its details,” enabling him to stand out from the crowd while appearing to remain predictably unchanged. It’s a notion that could apply to many of Hitchcock’s films as well as to his sense of dress.
Appointment books kept by his secretaries from the mid-1950s on give an insight into Hitchcock’s daily routine that we don’t have for earlier periods. Listed among the meetings, viewings, and scripting sessions are regular and frequent haircuts and shoeshines in the office, and multiple measuring and fitting sessions with a tailor. For a while, the tailor was Frank Acuna, who had made clothes for Cary Grant, too, though at the time Hitchcock used his services he was best known for designing Liberace’s outfits, which, naturally, were at the other end of the dandy spectrum from Hitchcock’s, though Liberace claimed Brummell as his sartorial godfather. “Whenever I need some new ideas,” Liberace told the New York Times in 1970, “I invite Frank over for a screening of the movie ‘Beau Brummell,’ starring Stewart Granger. . . . When I see something I like, I say, ‘Make that!’ ”
The real-life Brummell, however, would have appreciated Hitchcock’s restraint far more than Liberace’s peacocking. Hitchcock’s approach to dressing was as Brummell had intended: a rational, efficient means of obliterating dirt and disorder. The conquest of the modern and the measurable over backwardness and uncertainty.
When color films began to be produced in the 1930s, Hitchcock repeatedly said that he was keen to work in the medium, but only for “dramatic and
emotional effect, as a symbol of action and thought.” One of the many half-truths about Psycho, perpetuated by Hitchcock himself, was that his decision to shoot the film in black and white stemmed from his belief that the sight of Marion Crane’s blood gurgling its way down the shower drain would have been distasteful in color. In fact, the decision was motivated more by practical concerns regarding budget, but the power of vivid blood-red was something Hitchcock had thought about for years. As early as 1937, a decade before he shot his first color film, he imagined “red drops of blood dripping on to a bunch of white daisies—just that would bring out the stark horror of a murder much more strongly.” Or, how about a girl with a lipstick who “smears her lips and you see her face take on an artificial health from the rouge she puts on it.” In Spellbound, shot in black and white, Hitchcock stained two frames in red at the moment Dr. Murchison turns his gun on himself and commits suicide. Proustian flashes of red were likewise incorporated into Marnie, the color triggering a sense memory of the killing she committed as a child.
When it came to costume, Hitchcock planned color schemes early in the scripting process, with a view to expressing psychological and emotional truths about his characters that would aid the storytelling. Edith Head, the legendary costume designer who worked on eleven Hitchcock films, beginning with Rear Window, said, “Hitchcock thinks in terms of color; every costume is indicated when he sends me the script. . . . He’s absolutely definite in his visual approach, and gives you an exciting concept of the importance of color.” Taking his dandyish instincts for clothes to the screen, Hitchcock gave Head what she termed “an education in restraint.” When he identified Vera Miles as his new protégé, it was through the color of her clothing that Hitchcock worked to transform her into the movie star of his imagination. “She’s an extraordinarily good actress,” he told Edith Head, but “she uses too much colour. She’s swamped by colour.” On his instruction, Head compiled an entire wardrobe for Miles, solely in black, white, and gray. In costuming his female stars, Hitchcock applied the same basic rules that governed his own dress. He forbade garishness and favored “classic” looks over the latest fashion, resisting an actress’s personal taste if he found it unsympathetic. His concerns began and ended with what best communicated unspoken information to the audience. The most famous example occurred during the shooting of Vertigo when he insisted that, in the Madeleine part of her dual role, Kim Novak would wear a gray suit. Novak was not keen, and told Head that she was happy to wear any color except gray. Head explained that “Hitch paints a picture in his films, that color is as important to him as any artist,” but Novak was not persuaded. “Handle it, Edith,” was Hitchcock’s unequivocal response. “I don’t care what she wears as long as it’s a gray suit.” Ultimately, Novak relented—she didn’t have a great deal of choice—and saw the benefit of having Madeleine dressed so differently from Judy, the second character she played in Vertigo. The gray suit created a barrier between the two characters and “helped me stand so straight and erect . . . it helped me feel uncomfortable as Madeleine,” a sensation that is almost palpable in Novak’s performance.
Hitchcock was rarely happier than when dressing his female stars, an activity that for him, as for James Stewart’s character in Vertigo, held a sensual pleasure equal to undressing them. Being aware of the avid interest Hitchcock took in women’s clothing, Eva Marie Saint made a conscious effort to dress in a demure outfit she had heard would please him, a beige dress with white gloves, on the occasion of their first meeting to discuss her potential role in North by Northwest. Hitchcock didn’t ask for a screen test, but he did have her perform lengthy tests for her hair, makeup, and costumes, which was an unprecedented experience for Saint. “I think Hitchcock was the only one who demanded that every bit of everything—whether it was the hair, makeup, the whole look—would be tested on camera.” Unhappy with what he saw—Helen Rose, not Edith Head, designed the costumes on this production—he and Saint flew to the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan, where they picked out every item of clothing she would need. Saint was struck by Hitchcock’s attention to cosmetic detail. “He had such an overall look for me, for Eve Kendall,” she remarked half a century later. “But it wasn’t just the clothes. It was the accessories, the hair, definitely the hair, the makeup, the beads around my neck and that sort of thing. And the shoes. I loved all that and the fact that he cared that much. It helped me as an actress to conjure up what he had in mind for Eve Kendall.” Saint had her own ideas for her costume design, too, which Hitchcock accommodated. It was she who picked out a black dress covered with swirls of red roses, one of the most memorable outfits in North by Northwest, a movie full of beautiful clothes.
Unquestionably, Hitchcock paid vastly more attention to female clothing than male. Even so, he understood the power that clothes had to frame a man’s identity—as one might expect of someone who had Liberace’s costumier make his suits. One of those playing alongside Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest was Martin Landau in his first screen role, as Leonard, the dandyish sidekick of James Mason’s villain, Phillip Vandamm. Hitchcock thought it important that Leonard be dressed almost identically to Cary Grant’s character, so he arranged for Grant’s tailor, Quintino, to make Landau’s wardrobe. In Chicago, Landau was summoned by Hitchcock to LaSalle Street Station, where he was filming a scene with Cary Grant. “Martin, put on one of the suits you are going to use in the movie—I’d like to see it being worn in the surroundings.” That he requested to see Landau wearing the suit on location before filming is a sign of Hitchcock’s dedication to clothing, but also of his teasing sense of humor. He guessed that Grant would not be impressed to see a supporting cast member—one who had never even been in a movie—wearing suits made by his tailor, cut identically to his own. On location, somebody approached Landau: “Excuse me, Mr. Landau, but Mr. Grant wants to know where you got that suit.” When Landau replied that it came from the Universal costume department, he was told, “Mr. Grant says that’s impossible.” Apparently, Grant could tell just by looking exactly who had tailored Landau’s suit, and he was not pleased about it.
Grant needn’t have worried. The suit he wore for virtually the entire movie has passed into dandy folklore. In 2006, GQ magazine voted it the best man’s suit in Hollywood history. “North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant,” writes Todd McEwen, “it’s about what happens to his suit.” Dragged thousands of miles across the country, it takes a beating but never needs more than a light sponging to restore it to its crisp, elegant best. McEwen wonders whether making Grant look scruffy was the only atrocity Hitchcock would refuse to commit on film: “it would be too traumatic to see this suit getting totaled, that would be way beyond Hitchcock’s level of sadism.” A decade after North by Northwest, Grant gave GQ his thoughts on how to dress well, while protesting, with blatant false modesty, that he wasn’t at all well dressed and barely had any interest in clothes. He insisted he had never “gone to any special trouble to acquire clothes that could be regarded as noticeably fashionable or up-to-date . . . simplicity, to me, has always been the essence of good taste.” An entirely Hitchcockian sentiment. Edith Head noted a similarity between Grant and Hitchcock’s instinctive feel for color, too. In preproduction for To Catch a Thief, Grant planned a color scheme for his own costumes around the plans Head and Hitchcock had made for Grace Kelly. “She’s wearing a pale blue bathing suit for the beach scene? Good, I’ll wear plaid shorts. She’s wearing a gray dress? How would it be if I wear a dark jacket and gray slacks?” Hitchcock was happy to allow Grant to dress as he chose; some believe that his leading man embodied Hitchcock’s fantasy version of himself. He once described Grant as “the only actor I ever loved.” Grant agreed that something special existed between his director and him, “a rapport and understanding deeper than words,” which manifested itself in their shared tastes, manners, and sensibilities.
“Perfection of its own kind.” Hitchcock with Cary Grant during the filming of North b
y Northwest.
One might say that Grant became an avatar for an inner Hitchcock that could not be outwardly expressed. He had a body shape that fit the dandy ideal—slim, long-limbed, with a broad chest and shoulders—and also expressed a confidence in his looks that was entirely alien to Hitchcock. In both To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest a fifty-something Grant was happy to film scenes in various states of undress. Baring his mahogany-tanned body in the beach scenes of To Catch a Thief, Grant displayed more naked flesh than any star in any Hitchcock film.‡ Hitchcock expressed a career-long aversion to making films that starred middle-aged men. He cited this as the reason why he never made a film of the Dr. Crippen story, and why he stopped casting James Stewart after Vertigo. But the rule didn’t apply to Cary Grant, whom Hitchcock seemed to look on as entirely unique, ageless, and timeless. Enviably handsome and youthful though he was, Grant clearly looks older than the thirty-odd years he’s meant to be in North by Northwest, and on first viewing it can be confusing to see him referring to Jessie Royce Landis as “Mother,” when they look more like brother and sister. Hitchcock never lost faith in Grant’s ability to defy the aging process, and hoped to cast him as the leading man of future films, too. As late as 1979, long after Grant’s retirement, Hitchcock wrote to him asking whether he might “have the privilege of photographing you again one day, because you can be, you know.”
The importance of clothes on a Hitchcock production strayed beyond the gaze of the camera. Male technicians who arrived on set wearing short-sleeved shirts, or—heaven forbid—lacking a tie, would receive a message that such slovenliness was not permitted. The same applied to writers, though Hitchcock would rarely brave the subject himself, it being a little too close to confrontation for his liking. At the end of Evan Hunter’s first day on The Birds, Peggy Robertson appeared at his side in the parking lot. “Hitch thinks it might be better if you didn’t dress for work quite so casually.” Either an urgent conversation had been had the moment Hunter exited the boss’s office, or Robertson, expert Hitchcock whisperer that she was, had intuited the situation. Either way, the next morning Hitchcock was pleased to see Hunter had left his sports jacket at home and had a tie around his collar. Neckties were important to Hitchcock; without one, a man seemed as good as naked. When one fledgling director asked him for some advice, Hitchcock looked the kid up and down and said, “Real directors wear ties.”
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 16
