The scene sounds very much like one Arthur Laurents detailed in his memoirs, in which Hitchcock handed Laurents a cocktail that Hitchcock said was “gin and menstrual blood.” Alma responded, “Oh, Hitch!” Pat exclaimed, “Oh, Daddy!” “Both giggled indulgently and he was beamish.” At times, though, Hitchcock’s schoolboy jokes, heavy drinking, and showing off, especially in front of women half his age, could embarrass Alma and test her patience. Several acquaintances witnessed her sending withering looks and sharp words in his direction.
Cook may have become more than a family friend. In the fall of 1948, Alma returned to Los Angeles from England, where Hitchcock was filming Under Capricorn, and embarked on what appears to have been an affair with Cook, one that may have lasted just a few weeks in Hitchcock’s absence, or possibly carried on for many months. When Patrick McGilligan first mooted this possibility in 2003, it was met with bafflement from previous Hitchcock biographers, who had never found any sense that Alma was much different from the ever-dutiful companion to the great genius that she presented to the press. But Cook’s diaries support McGilligan’s suggestion of something more than close friendship.
Cook, at this point a single man, appears to have had a very active romantic and sexual life, and he logged his encounters with Alma in an elliptical, lightly coded fashion, similar to the way in which he recorded assignations with other partners: “Unexpected evening!”; “Chez moi later.” One entry, however, seems unambiguous: “Dinner with A at Ready Room. Sex later complicated by overseas call,” perhaps, as McGilligan thought, with Hitchcock on the other end of the line. McGilligan also notes that on the evenings they met in September that year, Cook and Alma steered away from their usual LA nightspots, once driving all the way to Santa Barbara for dinner, suggesting that they were keen not to advertise the time they were spending together.
If this was an affair, it seems to have been one born not of a great shared infatuation but of some emotional unease Alma was experiencing—though exactly what is a mystery. In a diary entry from October 1948, Cook perfunctorily describes an evening out with Alma, ending simply with “Tears later.” It’s possible she had grown despairing of Hitchcock’s current infatuation with Ingrid Bergman, with whom he was working on Under Capricorn. Hitchcock told a select few—mostly writers on his films—that Bergman had once attempted to seduce him, an unlikely sounding story he related with such conviction that it was hard to know whether it was true or not. Either way, it’s easy to imagine how Alma would have felt sidelined, humiliated even, whenever one of Hitchcock’s obsessions with a young actress took hold. Tippi Hedren claims that Alma once apologized to her for Hitchcock’s smothering possessiveness, though it’s not evident whether she had any knowledge of the assault that Hedren alleges. Charles Bennett’s memoirs claimed that the Hitchcocks’ “married life was a happy one—until a second woman became a part of it,” yet Bennett names no names, and no corroboration seems to exist. There have been similar suggestions that Hitchcock had an affair with Joan Harrison, but, again, there’s no concrete evidence. The following summer, 1949, when Hitchcock was away once more, Alma wrote Cook to tell him she was feeling “very lonely this week, and recovered my equilibrium—or I thought I had until the day’s mail arrived,” perhaps because she had received a letter from her husband that knocked her off course. A few weeks later, she again reached out to Cook for emotional support when terrible reviews came in for Under Capricorn. The press, particularly in the United States, was savage, taking aim at the script for which, despite her name being absent from the credits, Alma felt partly responsible. The Washington Post called the dialogue “unintentionally hilarious.”
It might be that Alma’s relationship with Cook resulted from a collision of feelings she had for Hitchcock her husband and those for “Hitchcock” the entity for which she had worked so hard over the years. Or, perhaps she found herself yearning for a more intense, physical connection than she had come to experience in her marriage. Cook, ten years her junior, described Alma as “extremely attractive” because of “her intelligence and her warmth,” and it’s understandable why she might have turned to this vivacious younger man at a moment of unease. The record is frustratingly silent, though one clue might be found in another of Cook’s short stories. In “Her First Island,” Clara Henderson, “a very conventional woman,” begins an affair with a man named Ted during a two-week period in which her husband, Norman, is overseas on business. Though she adores Norman—“a truly warm and fine thing she had with Norman. No one could ask for a better marriage”—she is drawn to Ted because he represents excitement and abandon, and he has no associations with her usual roles and routines. When Norman and Ted meet, they get on terrifically, despite being polar opposites. Ultimately, Clara is pleased to draw a close to her fling, because “Norman symbolized solidity and roots and strong anchors and all those firm attributes one is supposed to have in one’s life. Norman was comfort; Norman was protection.” It’s unclear quite when Cook wrote this and if he intended it as a comment on his relationship with Alma. Even if not, it’s an interesting articulation of the dynamics of a triangular relationship and the way Alma may have been feeling about her marriage as she approached her fiftieth birthday. It also nudges one into asking what Alma got out of her relationship with her husband. As Hitchcock outlined in his acceptance speech for the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award in 1979, Alma swaddled him in “affection, appreciation, encouragement, and constant collaboration.” In return, Alma found an outlet for her considerable talents, but also stability and uxorious comfort. When they were apart, Alma wrote letters to Hitchcock—and his secretaries—asking whether he was looking after himself, eating properly, sleeping well, and going for his checkups. In return, Hitchcock had a habit of making small but frequent romantic gestures, calling ahead to hotels where Alma was staying to make sure that a fresh bouquet of her favorite flowers would greet her on arrival. On the whole, theirs was a profoundly strong partnership. But at times it was difficult for Alma not to feel overlooked by Hitchcock and “Hitchcock.”
It’s possible Hitchcock thought Cook was gay: Cook’s diaries reveal he had relationships with men and women, and in the months before his apparent fling with Alma, he seems to have become involved with Douglas Dick, an actor who played a role in Rope, adding further depth to Hitchcock’s interest in the film’s theme of coded homosexuality. It’s also possible that Hitchcock knew about Alma and Cook, and that she knew he knew, but nothing was ever said about it. Unflinching self-examination was not highly valued in the Hitchcock household. Alfred was a master of dissimulation when it came to his emotions; Alma had an extreme aversion to talking about herself and her past. “There was a primary motivation in our small family to never look back but only ahead,” remarked Pat. It was an attitude that allowed Hitchcock to bounce back from failure and disappointment with astounding success—but it also allowed resentments to fester, and damage to remain unrepaired.
The Hitchcocks and Cook remained good friends for years. In 1950, Cook was a witness at Alma’s American citizenship ceremony, and a few years later they were witnesses at his wedding. Cook also worked happily on Stage Fright as well as on the next Hitchcock picture, Strangers on a Train, which featured Pat again, this time in a larger role that made excellent use of her comedic talents. Soon after, Cook made a small but important contribution to Rear Window. Pat dialed down her acting career when she married in 1952, and she had the first of her three children a year later. Subsequently, she took on a few roles in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, though her only other appearance in a Hitchcock movie was her turn as the cattily amusing Caroline in Psycho. Hitchcock said he and Alma were relieved when their daughter decided to favor motherhood over her career. Yet Pat remained part of the broader Hitchcock enterprise, and was on the payroll of the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine for several years, as associate editor, though her formal duties seem to have been minimal.
Once Stage Fright was complete, Alma never took
a credit on another Hitchcock production. She remained his champion and continued to exert an influence, but crossing the streams of personal and professional may have become too much. As her husband’s worldwide fame increased in the fifties and sixties, Alma inched further away from the spotlight, but the significance of her advice never lessened in Hitchcock’s eyes. Into the 1960s, Hitchcock still sought Alma’s opinion on how he might adapt source material into a new film. With John Buchan’s The Three Hostages, she pitched a list of highly Hitchcockian scenes, including one of a man being drowned by having his head held under the water of the Ganges River, sparking memories of Hitchcock’s first murder in The Pleasure Garden and anticipating the slow suffocation of Gromek in his next movie, Torn Curtain. She also gave her husband a document outlining the exciting scenes in the book that should be carried over into the film. The page was blank—a lovely example of this aging couple’s shared sense of humor and Alma’s instinctive understanding of what made Hitchcock and “Hitchcock” tick.
Alma’s words could be used to convey praise—Hitchcock offered no higher compliment than saying Alma approved of one’s work—as well as condemnation. When Hitchcock wanted to detach himself from a television project with Richard Condon in 1964, he used Alma’s opinion as justification. “I had Mrs Hitchcock read the script,” he said, as though Condon would naturally accept Alma as the ultimate arbiter on scriptwriting, “and her only comment to me was that she has just read Infinity of Mirrors [Condon’s most recent novel] and thought it was so beautifully written and asked me why the script could not have the same quality.” Should Hitchcock himself ever be on the receiving end of Alma’s critique, he felt crushed. After viewing a cut of Vertigo, she had just one criticism: “that shot of Kim running. Her legs are so fat. It looks awful.” Hitchcock despaired. “Alma hates the film,” he told those around him, and returned to the edit to excise the offending shot. About three weeks before the release of that movie, Alma was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Ultimately, she made a full recovery after surgery, but Hitchcock was petrified at the prospect of losing her. When Alma was in the hospital, he traveled there “weeping and shaking convulsively,” pushing his fear down into the pit of his stomach and pretending to be perfectly calm as he sat with her. Away from the hospital, he broke down in front of colleagues and wondered aloud whether there was any point in carrying on should the worst happen.
Alma was vital to Hitchcock and “Hitchcock,” yet she remains enigmatic. Like Doris Day’s Jo in The Man Who Knew Too Much, did she itch with unfulfilled ambition, having sacrificed her career in order to better support her egotistical husband? As with Gay in The Paradine Case, and Midge in Vertigo, did she soldier through the upsetting thought that she, the dutiful, homely companion, couldn’t compete with the glamorous object of her beloved’s wild fantasies? One suspects both these might be true, but she maintained a deliberate strategy of leaving little record of herself that wasn’t mediated through the entity of Hitchcock. In 1966, a branch of the British government wrote to ask whether Alma would share her memories of working in the film industry in the twenties, but she demurred. She was also approached to be interviewed for a book titled Women Who Made the Movies; Hitchcock had recently been involved in a similar book and television project, Men Who Made the Movies. Hitchcock responded on her behalf, saying, “Mrs Hitchcock and I have given a great deal of thought to your letter,” but Alma would not be participating, as she had only ever been “a technical writer of scripts which was definitely not part of the creative process . . . she would assemble a script in its purely technical sense.” This wasn’t so, but the letter had seemingly been written with Alma’s assent. It’s possible she didn’t feel well enough for an interview at this time, or perhaps she was carrying out her self-assigned duty to create the circumstances in which Alfred was always the star. As Hitchcock once said, the only drawback for a man married to a woman of such discretion is the risk that he “will never be talked about in public,” creating in him an “egoistic need to write about himself. I’m sure I prefer it that way. I suspect Alma knows that too.”
This was as true in 1925 as it was in 1979, when Hitchcock was working at home on the script of The Short Night. Things were progressing sufficiently well for the script to be stress-tested under the weight of a Reville critique. David Freeman, with whom Hitchcock was writing, was amazed to see the old man suddenly animated. He gesticulated and switched voices, performing each of the characters. The doleful, immobile Hitchcock whom Freeman had come to know over the preceding weeks had vanished. Alma, herself ailing from old age and ill health, was rapt. “It was like watching two people on a first date that was going really well, and at that point they’d been married fifty years,” recalls Freeman. “I think he wanted to show her how clever he was, and more importantly that there was hope, a future. And he desperately wanted her approval.” The old Hitchcock—or, to be more exact, the younger one—was back, and Alma couldn’t have been happier.
* The article was written by Roger Burford and delightfully illustrated by his wife, Stella, another talented young husband-and-wife team who had found a distinctive way to collaborate.
8
THE VOYEUR
In 1953, Hitchcock was treading water. Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train were followed by a third black-and-white film for Warner Bros., I Confess, an unusually sober movie about the trials of duty and conscience starring Montgomery Clift. Then came Dial M for Murder. It was a hit, but, as Hitchcock admitted, he coasted through the production; it was only his third color movie, but was otherwise Hitchcock-by-the-numbers and took just thirty-six days to film—five of which were dedicated to the scene in which Grace Kelly is violently attacked in her nightgown, which left the actress bruised and sore. During production, two things kept Hitchcock buoyed: his ardor for Kelly, who he was directing for the first time, and the prospect of his next movie, for which he had the highest hopes.
This forthcoming picture was to be made for Paramount, with whom Hitchcock had recently signed a highly lucrative deal. Under the terms of the contract, he was obliged to make nine films, the rights to five of which would become his after eight years. The first of these films was Rear Window, for which he was having a marvelous set constructed: a block of thirty-one apartments, eight of them furnished and fitted with everything but running water. Not that the audience would ever enter any of them; all they’d get was a voyeuristic glimpse through the windows at the good and evil that thrives behind closed doors.
Though its plot is pure fiction, Rear Window could count as sensory memoir. A film about the nature of films, a festival of watching and projecting, it is the closest we will ever get to experiencing the world as Hitchcock saw it. Hitchcock was aware of the ethical murkiness of watching, but he never let that diminish the joy it gave him. He spent eighty years never being able to look away, his vision unobscured even when his eyes were closed.
From its inception, cinema has been bound to the act of looking at women’s bodies. In 1915, Audrey Munson became the first woman to appear fully nude in a mainstream American movie. The film was Inspiration, in which Munson played an impoverished New Yorker, rescued from her drudgery by a sculptor who makes her his muse. When she leaves him, he is crestfallen, and in a plotline that coincidentally foreshadows Scottie’s hunt for Madeleine in Vertigo more than forty years later, the artist wanders the streets in search of her perfect form among the city’s statuary. Despite its shots of nudity, Inspiration was unchallenged by the authorities because of its artistic theme, and because in real life Munson’s body had provided the template for dozens of statues around Manhattan, many of which survive to this day. She made three further films, but the public soon lost interest in looking at her. The work dried up, debts accumulated, followed by serious mental health problems. On her fortieth birthday she was committed to an insane asylum where she stayed, with hardly a visitor, until her death sixty-five years later.
Hitchcock was acutely aware of the centrality of the watch
ed woman in the history of his medium. The very first shot in the Hitchcock canon is of the bare legs of a group of dancers running down a spiral staircase, evoking Duchamp’s seminal painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, which itself trailed a pioneering time-lapse photographic study of a naked woman walking down a flight of stairs that Eadweard Muybridge published in 1885. Of course, all these images fit into a far lengthier artistic tradition, stretching back centuries, in which Hitchcock was well versed. When Norman Bates has his “what the butler saw” moment, spying on Marion undressing in her motel room, his peephole is concealed beneath a framed print of Willem van Mieris’s painting Susannah and the Elders, an image of two men preying on a naked woman while she bathes. The pointed significance of the painting is underlined in the movie’s trailer when Hitchcock stops in front of it and says it is of “great significance,” before feigning discomfort and changing the subject. Is the painting significant purely because it reflects what Norman does to Marion? Or, do the dirty old men on the canvas signify the one behind the camera? Or, are we, in our enjoyment of looking, either at Psycho or at a Renaissance masterpiece, as guilty of voyeurism as any artist?
In conversation with Andy Warhol, another artist who spent a great deal of his career silently staring at bodies in intimate situations, Hitchcock claimed he had glimpsed pornographic films only once in his life, and that was after the age of sixty, and by way of happenstance. It occurred after a steak dinner during a publicity trip to Tokyo, he said, when he was led blithely “into this upper room and there they had a screen that showed these awful films,” the specifics of which he didn’t divulge. However, he daydreamed about including acts of sexual voyeurism in his films. The story of Adelaide and Edwin Bartlett, which Hitchcock frequently cited as his favorite true-crime tale, entailed the willing cuckoldry of Edwin by Adelaide and a young clergyman named George Dyson. In 1953, Hitchcock published a magazine piece about the case in which he explained—with, as the scholar Sidney Gottlieb has also identified, an intriguing but perhaps unintentional, parallel to his situation with Alma and Whitfield Cook—that the Bartletts’ marriage “had been entirely platonic. Except for one occasion which resulted in a stillborn child, they lived together as friends and nothing more. . . . He had encouraged her friendship with George Dyson, and he urged them to become affectionate. In effect, he had ‘given’ her to Mr. Dyson.” Later, Hitchcock imagined making a film about the case, and explained how he would shoot the scene of the parson “making violent love to the young woman while the husband, sitting in his rocking chair and smoking his pipe, looked on.” In the first drafts of The Trouble with Harry, Jennifer—Harry’s widow, played by Shirley MacLaine—confesses that her late husband insisted on hanging a photograph of his brother over their marital bed, to create the impression that he was watching them make love. That risqué element was ultimately dropped, but approaching eighty and working on his final script, Hitchcock imagined a strange act of voyeurism that nobody had ever put in a Hollywood movie: a man and a woman exposing themselves to each other, a prelude to him combing her pubic hair.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 20
