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

Hitchcock felt the pressure of that same critical gaze when he first set foot in the United States in 1937. At this point, he had yet to sign a deal with an American studio, and he treated his visit as part fact-finding tour, part publicity campaign to raise his profile. As had been his habit in London, he arranged to conduct a couple of interviews over food and drink. He looked on mealtimes as opportunities to get important work done with journalists, actors, writers, and executives. They were also occasions when he was at his most accessible. Over several years, Peter Bogdanovich built a relationship with Hitchcock through lunchtime conversations, as did John Russell Taylor, the man Hitchcock entrusted to be his biographer. “Working with Hitch meant eating with him,” explains Shirley MacLaine, star of The Trouble with Harry. “I wasn’t blonde, thin, ethereal, so he didn’t want to jump on me”; instead, he lavished her with food and drink: “breakfast was pancakes, fried eggs, fruit, toast, and jam. My lunch was worse because the desserts were heaven, and dinner was something I had to learn how to eat with him: meat, potatoes, appetizers, seven-course meals and Grand Marnier soufflés.” The dining table was a place where Hitchcock felt comfortable and powerful, a fixed setting that encouraged familiarity, sharing, and conviviality while still having the barriers of table and chairs to prevent genuine intimacy, a safe space and a venue for performance.

When he arrived at the 21 Club in midtown Manhattan for his interview with H. Allen Smith, one of New York’s best-known celebrity interviewers, Hitchcock had surely approached it as an opportunity to charm, and to display himself as a bon vivant of an irrefutably English variety, in line with his idiosyncratic films. Instead, America viewed him as a glutton. If Smith’s account can be believed, Hitchcock devoured a lunch of three steaks and three helpings of ice-cream parfait, supplemented by three pots of tea and some post-blowout brandy. Perhaps the gorging had been an act. Hitchcock loved to stage elaborate practical jokes at dinner parties, designed to baffle and disgust his companions. It’s not completely unthinkable that the 21 Club lunch had been intended as something of this ilk. If so, the joke got lost in translation. He was reported to have been unhappy that his capacity for consumption, not his filmmaking brilliance, dominated the coverage of his American debut. Eight days after Smith’s article was published, the New York Times ran a piece that likened Hitchcock to Falstaff, describing his hail-fellow-well-met personality at the dining table, which probably got closer to the Rabelaisian side of his character that he had been hoping to transmit. But it was accompanied by a mocking description of his body: “His free-floating, unconfined waistline is a triumph in embonpoint. . . . When he smiles, his chins all smile with him, one after another.” It set the tone for the next forty-three years in which American journalists used Hitchcock’s body as a creative-writing homework task, each endeavoring to sketch with words the most gratuitous depiction of his physical form. Writers compared him to Disney characters, clouds, four-legged animals, and various inanimate objects. One declared that “Alfred Hitchcock has a posterior like those London busses on which his characters so often flee,” while another went for an extended nautical metaphor, likening Hitchcock’s profile to the “forepart of a sailboat with a balloon jib set. His mast, or backbone, is tilted slightly to the rear to balance the weight of his flying belly and he moves forward in a unique waddle. . . . His red face floats like a pennant at the forepeak, cushioned on three ample chins.”

In her 1943 article, “300-Pound Prophet Comes to Hollywood,” for the Saturday Evening Post, Alva Johnston split her wonderment for Hitchcock’s moviemaking skills with the memory of how his peculiar body had transfixed the public on his arrival. “The newcomer was a sensation with his cycloramic torso, setting-sun complexions, round, wonder-struck eyes, and cheeks inflated as if blowing an invisible bugle. People reacted to him like children at sight of balloon giants in Macy’s Parade. . . . He drove about a tiny Austin which fitted him like a bathing suit.” Nearly twenty years later, at the apex of Hitchcock’s commercial and critical standing, another writer for that same publication claimed that the director “holds two distinctions on the movie-TV industry—one centered on his odd physiognomy, the other on his impudent vocal cords.” Apparently, Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, and all his other outstanding achievements over the preceding decades were overshadowed by the sight and sound of a man who was written about as though not an entirely real person, halfway between a forbidding mythical creature and a children’s cartoon character.

Even his employers joined in. The critic Casey McKittrick has mapped how David O. Selznick and his employees actively encouraged promotional materials that emphasized Hitchcock’s size in his early years in Hollywood. McKittrick’s study of Selznick International Pictures official records—dominated by Selznick’s long-winded memos that exasperated Hitchcock—lead him to believe that the company’s top brass used Hitchcock’s sensitivity about his weight to force him to “comply with their wishes and to shame and disarm him when contract disputes arose.”

Rather than trying to ignore or fight against these things, Hitchcock took possession of his body and guided America’s interest in it, starting in 1943 when he went on a lengthy and very public weight-loss regimen. In various conversations, Hitchcock cited different triggers for this, including a story that he had caught sight of his reflection in the window of a shop in Santa Rosa during the filming of Shadow of a Doubt in 1942. For a second, he wondered how this fellow could have allowed himself to grow so big—and then realized that he was looking at himself. He voiced disgust at his own body in a very Hitchcockian way, noticing how the flesh around his ankles had started to