The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (best finance books of all time TXT) 📕

Despite garnering Hitchcock his second Oscar nomination, the film did not do well at the box office, and was criticized by those who thought Hitchcock had made the American characters look lazy and chaotic in comparison to the steely, resourceful German U-boat commander played by Walter Slezak. Slezak raved about the experience of working with Hitchcock: “Hitch knows more about the mechanics and the physical technique of acting than any man I know.” He was less complimentary about his fellow cast member Tallulah Bankhead—he thought she was a narcissistic fool; she referred to him as a Nazi—and morale among the actors was rarely high. Filming lasted nearly three months, during which the cast was confined to a small boat floating in a huge water tank. When they weren’t feeling seasick, they were drenched, freezing, and struggling with colds. Hitchcock had limited sympathy. As he told one cast member during the production of a previous film, “there’s no law that says actors have to be comfortable.”

In such circumstances, it was not immediately obvious how Hitchcock would perform his customary cameo. The solution he hit on was pure Hitchcock: clever, funny, and in the service of his personal mythology. Twenty-four minutes into the movie, the character Gus reads aloud from a newspaper; on the page facing the camera is an advertisement for a fictional weight-loss product, the Reduco Obesity Slayer, with photographs of two Alfred Hitchcocks, one his familiar three-hundred-pound self, the other a much slimmer man. This was life intruding on art. Since January 1943, Hitchcock had been on a severe diet, and he used Lifeboat as a way of advertising that fact to the public. The world knew Hitchcock as “a fat man,” and he often played the role for them; he’d been debasing himself by putting fat gags in his publicity articles for years. In an industry filled with the slender and the chiseled, his appearance made him memorable, a way of distinguishing himself from the crowd. It could also act as a masking agent, obscuring the person beneath the flesh. Both had their advantages and disadvantages. Neither gave him what he really craved: control of his own body, materialization of the Alfred Hitchcock who lived inside his head.

Within the shifted reality of the Hitchcock universe, it takes a brave or foolish person to trust the evidence of their own senses. Observable truth is a false friend; there is no steady fact of existence that cannot be undermined. The treachery extends even to food and drink. In Notorious, Ingrid Bergman’s heroine is poisoned to the verge of death by a cup of coffee; homebodies in Rich and Strange (1931) and The Man Who Knew Too Much feel their discomfort in foreign lands because of the exotic food they are fed. In mid-twentieth-century America, nothing could be more wholesome and nourishing than a glass of milk—except when it’s handed to an unwitting guest at the Bates Motel as part of her final meal. In Hitchcock’s initial design for Suspicion, another glass of milk, glowing like lily-white kryptonite, was delivered by Cary Grant to Joan Fontaine not as a restorative tonic but as a poison-laced murder weapon. Maybe the best episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents—his favorite, and one he directed—has a woman serving the leg of lamb with which she killed her husband to the policemen investigating his disappearance. As the cops blithely dispose of the murder weapon, a delicious home-cooked meal doubles as the execution of the perfect crime.*

For most of his eighty years, Hitchcock felt the same unease about comestibles, which were both friend and foe, the source of joy and companionship, disgust and shame. The moral and physical complications of eating and drinking were subjects of daily contemplation for him, and oozed into his work as plot points, potent thematic symbols, and vital insights into character. He resented the impact that consumption had on his body, that unruly mass of flesh that could not be compelled to do his bidding. He could “accidentally swallow a cashew nut and put on thirty pounds right away,” he explained on his struggles to make himself the size and shape he longed to be. When the cameras rolled, lissome bodies were prone to follow his every command; a shift of Tippi Hedren’s eyebrow, or a flick of Eva Marie Saint’s hair, would happen only if he desired it. Even some obstinate method actor like Montgomery Clift could be made to tilt his head in the way his director said it should. No amount of self-denial or wishful thinking ever gave Hitchcock the same control over his own form. As he was reminded incessantly throughout his adult life, he was “fat,” a term that denoted not simply a physical characteristic but a way of being in the world. The distress his weight caused him—or, more important, his inability to control it—can hardly be overstated. “I don’t feel comfortable in my fat,” he admitted to a journalist in 1964. Not one friend or colleague believed he had ever been anything other than profoundly unhappy about his appearance since childhood. He spoke of his relationship with his body in Kafkaesque terms, a hostage within a captor’s grotesque shell. “I have all the feelings of everyone encased in an armor of fat,” he complained, convinced that his weight made others see him as something less than fully human.

Hitchcock at Oktoberfest, Munich, September 1960.

Hitchcock being Hitchcock, he found a way to profit from his grievance, by pouring his appearance into his personal mythology and making it a marketable commodity. And, as people uncomfortable in their own skin often do, he pretended to find the whole subject hilariously funny, making a joke of himself before anybody else had the chance. In a speech he recycled on several occasions in the sixties and seventies, he addressed the question interviewers had asked for decades: “Who is the real Alfred Hitchcock?” First, he told his audience, the “real Hitchcock”