An old colleague, Hume Cronyn, recalled that in these latter years Hitchcock had become “a sad and rather isolated figure. I visited him often and found him weeping. He said not only that the work was not proceeding well, but that he never went out, never saw anyone, was never invited anywhere.” But he had in truth wished this fate for himself; he had never been gregarious and had never cultivated any lasting friendship except that with his wife. With Alma now only a sad presence in his life, he was fundamentally alone. It was, at his age, hard to bear.
. . .
In the autumn of 1976 he wrote to Truffaut that “at the moment I am completely desperate for a subject.” He had no intention of retiring. A new pacemaker had been fitted, and for a while it seemed to have rejuvenated him. In an interview with Sight and Sound he remarked that “my health is pretty good, despite a few arthritic aches and pains. I have a heart-pacer but that works more reliably than nature. And my films are sufficiently successful for other people to want me to go on working.”
Then he found one more project. He had been reading Ronald Kirkbride’s novel, The Short Night, a romantic espionage thriller about a double agent who is spirited out of Wormwood Scrubs prison. Hitchcock also took the precaution of buying the rights to Sean Bourke’s The Springing of George Blake, concerning the escape from the Scrubs of a real double agent, George Blake, who then fled to the Soviet Union. The narrative of Blake on the run interested him, but he was also intrigued by the story of Blake’s wife and three children. This was to be the core of the film which was to be only loosely based on the facts of the matter. He enlisted an American writer, James Costigan, and through the spring and summer of 1977 they worked together; but nothing came of it. Hitchcock then turned once more to Ernest Lehman, but they parted company when the director began to insist upon introducing a brutal rape scene that Lehman resisted. It had been the same situation with Evan Hunter and Marnie. Lehman recalled that “sometimes I think we both knew, on this one, that we were going through the motions. Were we, or weren’t we? I’ll never know. He wanted to make it, didn’t he? I wanted him to make it—isn’t that why I wrote it? But did either of us believe that he could?”
In the summer of 1978, after Lehman’s departure, Hitchcock called on another old friend, Norman Lloyd, to help with the script. “He couldn’t lick the story,” Lloyd said later. “Nobody could lick the story. Nobody knew better than Hitch that it was old hat. He’d had it on his shelf for eleven years and, interestingly enough, while we’re talking about it we kept looking for something else.” The doubts multiplied as Hitchcock’s health continued to deteriorate. One day he turned to Lloyd. “You know, Norm, we’re not ever going to make this picture.” When asked the reason he replied, “Because it’s not necessary.”
His moods of enthusiasm and dismay now fluctuated with his health. Hitchcock suddenly informed Lloyd that they should break off the treatment and start work at once on the actual script. “Not me,” Lloyd replied. “I don’t think we’re ready.” The writer saw the pained look of betrayal on Hitchcock’s face. “He just cut me off,” Lloyd said, “like I’d never known him. He had a right to.”
On the following day Lloyd returned to Hitchcock’s bungalow, where Hitchcock was sitting with the treatment in his hands. “I really would like to work on it with you,” Lloyd said.
“Never mind, I can do it myself.”
This may have been at the time Hitchcock telephoned Anthony Shaffer, the writer of Frenzy, in London. He first apologised for not employing him in Family Plot. Then according to Shaffer his voice changed. “Tony! They’re all betraying me! Everyone’s leaving me! You’ve got to come and rescue me! I’m all alone!”
In the autumn of 1978 he suffered a bad fall. He slipped on a carpet laid upon the marble floor of his bathroom, crashed against the shower door and fell against the wall. He was taken to hospital and no permanent damage was found. But rails were put up within the house, and he began to use a cane.
In December, another scriptwriter was brought in to work on The Short Night. David Freeman, in The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock, noted when they met that “he’s short, five feet five inches or less, with almost unwrinkled skin. He’s very fat.” Their first interview did not seem to go well, and “the truth is that I’m starting to get uncomfortable. I begin to think he doesn’t know why I am here.” But this was Hitchcock’s old technique, of talking about anything other than the film in hand. Freeman believed that the director had so donned the mantle of his public self that he was ultimately “unknowable.” He was as fixed as the faces of Mount Rushmore.
When the two men did eventually turn to the film, Hitchcock was full of technical questions. He needed to know the precise topography of the area around Wormwood Scrubs prison, from which George Blake escaped. What time did the street lights go on? Was there a roundabout near the main road? When he disliked one of Freeman’s ideas he gave his standard reply. “No, that’s the way they do it in the movies.” He seemed to be most interested in the possible sex scenes. “Yes, yes. That will work. Very exciting.” There are unconfirmed reports that it was at this stage in his life that he made sexual propositions to female members of his staff, and that one or two secretaries were paid for their silence. It is all too probable that he lost his inhibitions as he fell slowly into senility.
He was often in pain from arthritis and still relied upon injections of cortisone to relieve it, but Freeman noticed on one of his visits to Bellagio Road that “on the bureau opposite his bed there are about fifty bottles of pills.” Freeman also observed that Hitchcock began to drink brandy which he kept “in a brown paper bag stashed in the bathroom of his office”; Hitchcock “wrapped his lips around his glass with urgent bite, bent his head back until his throat and several chins seemed flat, and poured the brandy down into his throat in one continuous gulp.”
Pain was not the only stimulus for drink. There was also fear. His personal assistant, Peggy Robertson, told Freeman that before one story meeting he had told her “that he couldn’t continue.” He asked her repeatedly, “When do you think I’ll go? When?” The occasional visits of old friends seemed to increase his distress, and Ingrid Bergman recalled that “he took both my hands and tears streamed down his face, and he said ‘Ingrid, I’m going to die.’ ” The news of the death of contemporaries also reduced him to tears, but perhaps from hysteria as much as grief. When Hume Cronyn came, they just held hands and cried.
A version of Freeman’s script was completed by the spring of 1979, but it was stillborn. Some tentative preparations had been made for production of The Short Night. A location scout had been sent to Helsinki, where much of the action was to be filmed, and the narrative was turned into a sequence of storyboards. The game of casting was played. Clint Eastwood? Sean Connery? He tinkered with the script.
But the play-acting could not go on indefinitely. He called his old associate Hilton Green into the office and asked him “to go to Lew Wasserman and tell Lew that I’m all through.”
“What do you mean you’re all through?”
“I’ll never direct again.”
In another version he is supposed to have said, “I can’t make this picture. I’m never going to make a movie again.” Whatever the exact words, he knew that he was pronouncing his own death sentence. No one could argue him out of it.
. . .
In March 1979 he was celebrated as the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Film Institute. He did not relish the occasion that had all the hallmarks of an expensive funeral; he refused to cooperate with the staff of the institute until the last minute, and sat through the proceedings with a blank stare. His face was puffy, he was obese, and he walked to his table with great difficulty. He hardly seemed aware of what was going on around him. Yet he had strength enough for a short and elegant speech. “I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film e
ditor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen, and their names are Alma Reville.” At the last moment, Alma had been able to attend. For the final time he was surrounded by old friends, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant among them. They had all come essentially to deliver their farewells.
Two months later Hitchcock cancelled The Short Night and announced to his staff that he was closing down the office and the company. He had given them no advance warning, although most of them must have anticipated his decision, and he had made no provision for their futures. Some were slow to forgive him for this final act of thoughtlessness or selfishness. He came back for a while as if nothing had happened.
Freeman recalled that “he’d found a new secretary and resumed his rituals, unencumbered by the fiction of being a film-maker, or the trappings of power and authority.” But the pantomime did not last for long. He did return at the beginning of 1980 when, in a private ceremony on a sound stage, he received the knighthood bestowed on him by the Queen in the New Year’s Honours List. When asked about the long wait for the honour, he replied that “I guess she forgot.” There was very little else to say.
He slowly faded away. He lost interest in the world. He refused food and drink. He was cold, and even hostile, to visitors. He screamed at his doctor. He had turned his face to the wall. He seemed to have forgotten that Alma was still in the same house. Once more he was lying alone in the darkness, with the scythe of death descending ever closer to him. He died of renal failure on the morning of 29 April, 1980. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean. Alma was bewildered for a while but then retreated into a world where he still lived. She died in 1982.
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A Note About the Author
Peter Ackroyd is the author of London: The Biography, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, Shakespeare: The Biography, and Thames: The Biography. He has written acclaimed biographies of T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Sir Thomas More, as well as several successful novels. He has won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award, and the South Bank Award for Literature. His last book was a biography of Wilkie Collins.
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