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

well-cut clothing and fresh-cut flowers; antique furniture and crystal glassware; rare books, piano recitals, and dinner parties. Even the stunning view from their living room window, the New York skyline of sunsets, skyscrapers, and electric lights, would lose its power if painted in black and white. It was a material existence that Hitchcock understood, for it mirrored his own. It was he who guided the selection of the artworks to be hung on the apartment walls; he who stipulated the color of Phillip and Brandon’s suits. Despite looking like a staid British bank manager, Hitchcock apportioned great depth to the surface of things. He wasn’t showy or decorative in his dress, but he was committed to the perfection of appearance as a way of exerting control over himself and the world around him. In his work and through the living of his life, he reconciled the two strands of the nineteenth-century figure of the dandy, and in so doing asked questions about what it means to be a man in the modern world.

Perhaps the reason it seems so peculiar to discuss “Hitchcock the dandy” is that the common conception of dandyism has drifted quite some way from its roots. Type “dandy” into a search engine, and one is given the definition “a man unduly concerned with looking stylish and fashionable,” augmented by a use of the word in a sentence: “his floppy handkerchiefs and antique cufflinks gave him the look of a dandy.” The dandy evoked here is a descendant of the fin de siècle variety typified by Oscar Wilde, flamboyant young men let loose in the dress-up box. No sartorial flourish was too extravagant for these aesthetes: hats, capes, and scarves, all in bright colors and fancy fabrics, decorated by jewels, trinkets, and feathers. Wilde, the unignorable poster boy for 1890s dandyism, first made a name for himself in America by proselytizing a new dawn in male clothing. He urged men to cast aside somber formality and dress themselves with verve and imagination.

Foppish Wilde set in train an eye-catching lineage of extrovert dandies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly among the English—Quentin Crisp, Brian Jones, and Russell Brand all qualify. But Wilde’s image was an unconventional elaboration of the original dandy, Beau Brummell, a social-climbing celebrity of Georgian Britain who, ironically, had helped to establish the masculine uniform against which Wilde rebelled.

In Brummell’s philosophy, sobriety and austerity were key; there was no place for flashy adornment or garish color. Exquisiteness, not extravagance, was the watchword. Brummell used his body not as a playground for his imagination, but as a mannequin on which to perfect the male ideal by obsessing on tiny details. He was known to spend hours in front of the mirror fussing over the knot in his cravat and the tilted angle of his hat. His look was predictable but flawless.

Like Wilde, Brummell looked to the example of the ancient Greeks for his idea of the perfect man, embodied by the long-limbed, muscular silhouette that proliferated in their art. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English country dress had emphasized the belly, narrowed the shoulders, and shortened the legs, favoring those—such as Hitchcock, as it happens—with John Bull–like frames. Brummell tossed tradition aside and redesigned gentlemen’s clothing to make the chest, shoulders, and legs the key male attributes. Under his influence, the template of the modern men’s suit was created, and, by extension, something of the modern man: a machine for civilized existence.

Brummell and Wilde represent two distinct traditions of dandyism; Wilde was Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust to Brummell’s Thin White Duke. However, beneath the differences in attire they were united by the belief that the perfection of outward appearance reflects an inner spiritual mastery, and that manners and style are vital to the living of an elevated, hygienic existence in the modern city, a place in which you’re only ever a misstep away from the sewer. Hitchcock displayed kinship with both traditions, including in his physical appearance: not just the clothes he wore, but how he wore them. Whether consciously or not, his daily routine was remarkably in step with Brummell’s precepts for the well-lived masculine life.

The two schools of dandyism rear their heads in Jamaica Inn, the last film Hitchcock made before signing with Selznick. Falling between two Hitchcock classics, The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca, the film gets little critical attention and is generally regarded as noteworthy only because of Charles Laughton’s performance as the deranged villain, Sir Humphrey Pengallan. “We can’t recall when we’ve ever held a monster in such complete affection,” stated the New York Times reviewer back in 1939, although one of the leading experts on Hitchcock’s English period is not alone in believing Laughton’s face-pulling histrionics to be “virtually unwatchable.” Peter Ackroyd might be correct when he says that Jamaica Inn is “Laughton’s picture, not Hitchcock’s.” Even so, it articulates something about style and masculinity highly germane to its director.

The film features a character called Dandy, a member of Pengallan’s criminal gang. On the page, Dandy could be read as a flamboyant Wildean—proudly showing off his new lace cuffs in his first appearance—though there’s no hint of lavender in Edwin Greenwood’s performance. Pengallan is closer to a Brummellian dandy, an aging Georgian rake who, echoing the real Brummell’s biography, ridicules his erstwhile friend, the newly crowned King George IV, as “a painted bag of maraschino and plum pudding.” Outwardly respectable, Pengallan lives by a moral code that rejects mainstream concepts of law and order in favor of a dandyish sense of his own superior being, foretelling the attitudes of Brandon and Phillip in Rope. On surveying booty spirited from a recent shipwreck, he outlines his worldview to his oafish henchman:

Look at this exquisite stuff. Worth the miserable lives of a hundred rum-rotten sailors. It’s perfection of its own kind. That’s all that matters, Merlyn—whatever is perfect of its own kind. I’d rather transport all the riff-raff in Bristol to Botany Bay just to save one beautiful woman from a headache.