The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

by An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense (epub)

  Similar questions hang unanswered in several Hitchcock films. Handel Fane masquerades as a woman in Murder!, while the person imitating the cat burglar John Robie in To Catch a Thief turns out to be a teenage girl. In The Lodger and Downhill, Hitchcock had great fun toying with the ambiguity of Ivor Novello’s masculine identity. Novello was a pinup in Britain, Wales’s answer to Rudolph Valentino, but his homosexuality was an open secret in the entertainment world. “I’m glad he’s not keen on the girls,” says Novello’s love rival in the film, a reference to the misogyny of the woman-killing Avenger, as well as Novello’s sexual ambiguity. In one scene, Novello appears in a shot with a flowerpot in the background that seems to be resting on top of his head. “It was just too tempting,” said Hitchcock of his unsubtle joke. “Anyway, with that profile, why should Ivor mind having a flowerpot on his head once in a while.” The homosexual subtext of Strangers on a Train is also plain, as Farley Granger’s Guy is stalked by Robert Walker’s flamboyant Bruno, like a less-clever cousin of the boys in Rope. The screenplay for North by Northwest is fairly explicit in the homosexuality of Martin Landau’s character, Leonard—he of the sumptuous suit—who is described as having “a soft baby-face, large eyes and hair that falls down over his forehead. His attitudes are unmistakably effeminate.” Alarms rang when the censor read that. Hitchcock received a letter warning him that “if there is any inference whatever in your finished picture that this man is a homosexual, we will be unable to approve it under the requirements of the Production Code.” Yet Landau intentionally played Leonard as though he were in love with Vandamm and jealous of Eve Kendall, the woman with whom Vandamm is infatuated. All that, however, is conveyed through Hitchcock’s “negative acting,” in glances, gestures, and tone of voice. Landau had previously played characters full of machismo, and only in the theater, but Hitchcock was sure that he had the ability to play a complex, unspoken masculine otherness, assisted, of course, by the principles of negative acting and well-chosen clothes. “Martin,” he assured Landau, “you have a circus going on inside you. If you can play that in the theatre you can play this role.”

  Hitchcock’s gay dandies suggest a narrow, stereotypical, and pretty bleak idea about gay lives. Almost all of them are marked by psychopathy, mental illness, loneliness, or misery. Perhaps, though, he used them to acknowledge and explore ambiguities of his own identity. His Brummellian style of dandyism—the detached, unemotional, precision of the cultivated English gentleman—lived next door to the more ostentatious Wildean tradition, which had queerness among its many layers. The membrane between the two can seem porous, and there has been speculation about Hitchcock’s sexual orientation. An “odd, weird, little faggish man” was how Samson Raphaelson summed up Hitchcock, a description he meant fondly. Others noted a decided effeminacy in his movements, a lightness of foot that was apparently unexpected because of his size and his reputation for unsmiling immobility. Rodney Ackland, a gay man who wrote Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen (1932) during his London period, claims Hitchcock once told him that had he not met Alma in the early 1920s, he might have “become a poof.” The phrasing is intriguing, as if Hitchcock conceived of gayness as a style that one could adopt, and one that was close to his own. There’s no evidence that he was attracted to men in the way he very obviously was to women; his interest in gayness was likely a manifestation of his masculinity, a feeling of estrangement from dominant ideas of what and who men were meant to be. Hitchcock was forever stimulated by the sight of men and women slipping out of their conventional roles of sex and gender. There is a frisson between Annie and Melanie in The Birds, as there is between Patsy and Jill in The Pleasure Garden—“sapphic overtones,” to quote Patrick McGilligan—which Hitchcock said was inspired by a lesbian couple whom he, as a wide-eyed virgin, encountered in Berlin in 1924. “In the hotel room they made several propositions, to which I stolidly replied, ‘Nein, nein.’ Then we had several cognacs, and finally the two German girls got into bed. And the young girl in our party, who was a student, put on her glasses to make sure she wouldn’t miss anything.” That incident might have been an influence on a multilayered gag in The Lady Vanishes when Caldicott and Charters—two inseparable old public schoolboys—are panic-stricken to find themselves in a tiny room with a young woman who cheerily undresses in front of them.

  Hitchcock as Lady Agatha, the Countess of Windblown, 1957.

  Men in drag have a long history at the heart of British popular culture. In the 1920s, Hitchcock entertained friends by prancing around as “Mabel,” a flapper in a slinky dress, high heels, and a string of pearls. Around the same time, Alma had trouser suits made for her by the same tailor who fashioned Hitchcock’s clothes. Walking through the lobby of a grand hotel one day, a trouser-clad Alma caused necks to crane in disapproval. “They are all talking about your trousers,” Hitchcock said in a booming voice, unable to hide his delight at his wife’s taboo-breaking. Norman Bates’s cross-dressing mirrored Hitchcock’s own enjoyment of posing, often for the camera, in a dress. Once he did a turn as Queen Victoria, and dressed up as the lady of the manor, one of numerous roles he played in a mock murder mystery story printed in This Week magazine in 1957.

  All this sophistication, this knowledge of the parts of life that happen only in the shadows, jars with the other face that Hitchcock showed the world, that embarrassing twin brother, a fearful and superstitious square who knew nothing about the world beyond the movies. Perhaps the doubles, decoys, and lookalikes that litter his films were a recognition that within himself there were competing identities in constant, noisy conversation. He was simultaneously the artist and the crowd-pleaser, the timorous virgin and the man women couldn’t resist—and the fat misfit and the dandy, elegant and precise, for whom obtaining “whatever is perfect of its own kind” was the closest he got to a philosophy of life.

  * This chapter owes a particular debt to Thomas Elsaesser’s essay “The Dandy in Hitchcock,” which was itself written in response to Raymond Durgnat’s thoughts about Hitchcock’s aestheticism and dandyism.

  † Janet Leigh in Psycho and Barbara Leigh-Hunt in Frenzy both had body doubles.

  7

  THE FAMILY MAN

  The gang of three were all together, the talented Hitchcocks on tour. In the spring of 1951, Alfred, Alma, and Pat, now twenty-two, took a trip across Europe. In hired cars—neat and nimble European models, not the lumbering limousines that Hitchcock relied on to ferry him around Los Angeles—Alma and Pat took turns behind the wheel. Averse to driving, Hitchcock indulged his love of maps and assumed the role of navigator.

  Europe held a host of associations for all three Hitchcocks. Transatlantic Pictures, the company Hitchcock had founded with Sidney Bernstein after ending his relationship with Selznick, had closed following the relative commercial failures of Rope and Under Capricorn. Hitchcock dusted himself off, signed a new deal with Warner Bros., and returned to familiar territory, making Stage Fright, starring Marlene Dietrich, and Strangers on a Train. Pat had played small roles in both films, the former cowritten by her mother and partly inspired by Pat’s time at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. This vacation was her chance to see the wider continent, particularly the great cities in which her parents had learned the craft of filmmaking and the art of coupledom more than twenty years earlier. For Alfred and Alma, the trip offered an unusually long stretch of relaxation, warm with sunshine and old memories, but clouded by melancholy reminders of the war. “Florence we just loved,” Alma wrote to Hitchcock’s secretary Carol Shourds, despite the damage wrought by bombing, but Munich “was really very sad. As you know, we lived there some time. It has been smashed up badly.”

  Alfred’s letters to Shourds gave fewer details of the experience of continental travel and more about the brass tacks of business, namely his latest search to find new source material. He sent a report back to Los Angeles titled “Journal of Mr. Hitchcock After His Explorations Through the Jungle of Story Agents and Tellers of Tales,” detailing his
responses to a mound of plays, novels, and short stories sent his way by eager writers and their representatives. One that had been highly recommended to him he dismissed because Alma read it and said she “couldn’t make head nor tail of it,” the swiftest possible route to Hitchcock’s wastepaper basket.

  Blending the personal with the professional was standard practice in the Hitchcock household. Hitchcock didn’t simply take work home with him; the work was emotionally and creatively grounded in his family’s domestic existence. People have often compared his approach to work with that of Shakespeare and Dickens, but both those men used their careers as a means of putting distance between themselves and their families, leading double lives of pen and hearth. The opposite was true of Hitchcock, for whom the boundary between domesticity and creativity was not just permeable but invisible. He once said it was his ambition to put murder back in the home where it belonged. At his address, it had never left. In every sense, “Hitchcock” was a family enterprise.

  The movie Hitchcock most frequently cited as his favorite was Shadow of a Doubt, his definitive effort at wreaking havoc among a nice, normal family. The film tells the gothic tale of a suave thirty-something serial killer named Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten) who has earned himself a small fortune by fleecing and murdering wealthy widows out on the East Coast. When the police pick up his scent, Charles flees to Santa Rosa, the uneventful Californian town in which he was raised, to stay with his older sister, Emma Newton, and her wholesome family, a Norman Rockwell painting made flesh. He is hero-worshipped by another Charlie, his eighteen-year-old niece, played by Teresa Wright, who thinks her uncle has been sent by some mysterious force of the universe to enliven her family’s mundane life and bring them closer together. Only when two undercover detectives arrive in town does she discover her uncle’s murderous secrets. Once Uncle Charlie learns that the girl is on to him, he attempts to kill her, first by suffocation, then by having her fall down a flight of stairs. On the day he leaves town, he tries to push the girl from a moving train, but in doing so he accidentally kills himself.

  By dragging his villainy right across the living room rug of his own family home, Uncle Charlie might be Hitchcock’s most diabolical creation. Cotten is creepily brilliant in the role, projecting a dark charisma that makes us warm to this psychopathic misanthrope who snuffs out human lives as though they were candles. His sister, her husband, and their children are simple, unsuspecting people whom he seduces much like he seduced the women he murdered. He lavishes gifts on his family, but these are all things that corrupt their purity, symbols of his dissipated life: he brings alcohol to their abstemious dinner table, and invests a huge sum of money at the tiny bank where his sister’s husband works—every cent of it pilfered from the dead. His brashest attack on familial goodness is the relationship he cultivates with his niece, the innocent girl with whom he shares a name. We first meet young Charlie as she lies on her bed, the same bed she gladly gives to her uncle during his stay. In a private moment in the kitchen, Uncle Charlie looks unswervingly into the girl’s eyes and slips a ring on her finger, a present, he says, bought especially for her, though it’s actually a trophy wrenched from the finger of a woman he killed. The suggestion of incest is never explicit—Hitchcock enjoyed flirting with taboos more than embracing them—but the tension between them makes the two Charlies Hitchcock’s most unsettling doubles.

  Shadow of a Doubt is usually identified as the moment Hitchcock discovered America, cinematically speaking, after four years of living and working there. It was the first time that he made what reads as a truly American film, locatable in American society. An alternative title could have been A Nightmare on Main Street, a Hitchcockian twist on a modern American artistic tradition, in the vein of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, and the man who wrote the screenplay, Thornton Wilder, who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his work of experimental theater, Our Town. Hitchcock and his collaborators researched the setting for the film assiduously, drilling into minute details, and they decided to film the majority of the production on location in Santa Rosa, at a time when very little filming took place away from Hollywood studios. When Wilder finished his draft of the script in June 1942—en route to performing military service—Hitchcock called in another writer, Sally Benton, to provide a modern edge to the town. According to the patter of what became one of Hitchcock’s most frequently told stories, he told Wilder that while he loved the script, their Santa Rosa was “like a town without neon signs.” It was Hitchcock’s intention to capture something of the unpalatable truth about small-town America, creating the perfect stage on which to set his fairy tale of domestic darkness.

  A murderer in the family. Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt.

  As much of a milestone as it was in terms of building Hitchcock’s reputation in Hollywood, Shadow of a Doubt is a point of continuity between the two halves of his career. For all that he talked about his terror of police and our collective nightmares about murder, mayhem, and the bomb under the table, the most insistent theme of his work is a seemingly happy home cruelly torn asunder. It’s the connective tissue between The Lodger and The Birds, The Manxman and I Confess, Young and Innocent and The Paradine Case, and both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It’s also the substance of The Wrong Man, starring Henry Fonda and Vera Miles. Hitchcock developed the film from an article he read in Life magazine about the true story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero (known as Manny), the victim of a case of mistaken identity who was sentenced to prison for a spate of robberies he did not commit. Although he was eventually set free when the real culprit was identified, the stress took an immense toll on Balestrero’s family, leading his wife, Rose, to a breakdown and a rupture in their marriage. The case fascinated Hitchcock, who decided to shoot the film as though a dramatized documentary, building the story solely on the facts and basing the dialogue on interviews with those involved. Throughout research and writing, Hitchcock stressed that depicting Rose’s mental decline would be the hardest and most important part of the script to perfect. As Manny, Henry Fonda’s anxious bewilderment is unerringly convincing. But it’s Vera Miles’s performance as Rose that provides the emotional center of the film, the chilling awfulness of seeing a family unravel when subjected to a sudden, arbitrary assault from the vicious universe outside the front door.

  The terror to which Hitchcock subjected his ordinary families may be rooted in his own experience. The sudden loss of his father at the end of 1914, and the instant changes in his family’s circumstances, pushing him more fully into the adult world, may well have rippled through his work. Domestic life turned suddenly sour is a staple of his British films. The comedy The Farmer’s Wife is all about a widower in search of love once his daughter has flown the nest, and Champagne sees how a millionaire father and his galivanting daughter survive financial ruin. More gravely, Sabotage and The Skin Game both deal with appalling family secrets that lead directly to a tragic death: Stevie’s murder in the former, the suicide of Chloe (played by Phyllis Konstam) in the latter.

  Shadow of a Doubt was made around the time Hitchcock lost his mother in late 1942. Her name was Emma, as is the Newtons’ hardworking matriarch in the movie. In subsequent films, damaged or overbearing lone parents—plainly malevolent in the case of Anna Sebastian in Notorious—became a noticeable and important fixture in Hitchcock’s work, perhaps evidence, whether he consciously intended it or not, of the filmmaker exploring his own familial attachments on screen, communicating what life had been like after his father’s passing. There were complex feelings of resentment and frustration in the family home of his adult life, too—yet that place was also a happy refuge and an artistic springboard.

  It would be difficult to overstate the importance of home in Hitchcock’s life and work, and above all the person responsible for that was Alma. She provided not just creative partnership but also emotional ballast, tethering her husband’s neuroses and protecting his large, delicate ego. To observers
of the Hitchcocks’ marriage, it seemed that Alma’s sense of ambition was sated by her extensive involvement on the films that bore her husband’s name. But there are traces of dreams she had for herself. There was her nascent acting career—one of her roles was the daughter of David Lloyd George in a biopic of the former prime minister—which ran in tandem with her work in cutting and continuity, pursued with the same enthusiasm that Hitchcock evinced in his entry-level jobs. Mirroring Hitchcock’s precocious instructions on how to write good intertitles, a twenty-three-year-old Alma wrote an article for Motion Picture News about the secrets of “cutting and continuity,” which she averred were “art indeed, with a capital ‘A.’ ” By 1925, the year she accepted Hitchcock’s proposal of marriage and first worked as his assistant director, she had enough of a reputation to be profiled in a London magazine. “Alma in Wonderland: A woman’s place is not always in the home” revealed what it called “two deadly secrets” about her: she owns “horn-rimmed glasses” and “she has never had the time to get married!”