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

And that’s something you don’t understand and never will, because you’re neither a philosopher nor a gentleman.

Hitchcock wouldn’t have shared the social elitism of that speech. But the idea that life finds its apogee in “whatever is perfect of its own kind” encapsulates very neatly his idea of style, in objects and in manners.

Barely into adulthood, Hitchcock resolved to dress the part of the man he felt was waiting within, obscured by that “armor of fat” and “cottage-loaf” shape. While still working his entry-level jobs in his teens and early twenties, he acquired the sharpest suit he could afford, cultivated a thin mustache, wore a natty homburg, and, whenever finances allowed, forwent homemade sandwiches for a proper lunch at an upscale restaurant on the Strand. His friend and collaborator Samuel Taylor saw this as evidence that Hitchcock had always known “the kind of human being and the kind of character he was going to be.” With an unerring sense of occasion, he relished any event for which he had to dress up, whether a work function, an opening night of a new play, or a boxing match. Reminiscing about some of the fights he witnessed at the Albert Hall in London in the interwar years, he marveled at the aesthetic incongruity between the brutality in the ring, soaked in bodily fluids, and the sophistication of the watching crowd dressed in evening gowns and black tie. What a contrast, he remarked in 1962, to “the Hollywood people” of the present day: men who go out at night in “a shirt . . . without a tie . . . and a light suit, and a woman goes in an evening dress—that awful combination.” When his income leaped during the second half of the 1920s, Hitchcock took himself to Savile Row and Jermyn Street, where Brummell had been a century earlier, to set in place what would constitute his “look” for the rest of his days: dark business suit with white shirt, dark tie, and highly polished black shoes.

The young dandy at work. Hitchcock c. 1926.

A true dandy believes that good taste is timeless; Brummell and Wilde both disregarded fashion, which Wilde described as “a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months.” With the exception of silly getups he wore for a few of his television shows and the odd publicity shoot, these bespoke suits were the only clothes the public ever saw Hitchcock in. Even those closest to him could be caught off guard at the sight of a dressed-down Hitchcock. While on a family vacation in Hawaii at some point in the 1970s, he emerged from his hotel room in what seemed to the rest of his clan like a new skin: a mint-green shirt. Seeing the stunned reaction from his daughter and granddaughters, Hitchcock explained that Alma had bought it for him. He didn’t seem thrilled to be venturing into uncharted territory at this stage of life, and Pat wondered whether her mother hadn’t bought it as a practical joke. One Hitchcock biographer observed that Hitchcock’s commitment to his suits, even when sweltering under a blazing sun or studio lighting, made his clothing a kind of “disguise,” a fancy-dress costume similar to the eccentric clothing favored by other imposing directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and Josef von Sternberg. True, dark suits became a trademark for Hitchcock in the way other modern artists developed sartorial identifiers—Picasso with his Breton shirt, Dalí and his waxed mustache. Yet Hitchcock’s clothes were the opposite of a disguise. They were a visual statement on how he approached living and filmmaking: with precision, rigor, and efficiency, and with as much understated elegance as he could muster. In the words of Philip Mann, a biographer of some of the great dandies of the last hundred years, “The dandy does not wear his clothing as fancy dress. . . . It is a uniform for living.”

The academic Thomas Elsaesser believes the essence of Hitchcock’s dandyism isn’t in the design of his suits, which were entirely prosaic, drab even. Rather, it’s the fact that Hitchcock “always wore them, in every climate, in his office, on the set, in the Californian summer, in the Swiss Alps or in Marrakesh.” Certainly, Hitchcock’s commitment to correctitude over utilitarianism is vital to his sense of style, but if one thing makes him a dandy, it’s his unswerving attention to tiny details that nobody but he would ever notice. One friend, permitted to peek inside the Hitchcock wardrobe in the 1970s, discovered a row of what seemed to be identical suits. On closer inspection, however, there were slight differences between them; some were black, others a shade of blue so dark as to make the difference negligible, and there were slight differences in measurements and cut, too, to mitigate his yo-yoing weight. Hitchcock sometimes said he dreamed of buying an off-the-rack suit but that he was prevented from doing so by his irregular proportions. It’s unlikely he really meant it; the last thing Hitchcock wanted to be was a middle-of-the-road everyman. As Roland Barthes put it, the true dandy thinks of his suit as a “uniform in its essence, yet adaptable in its details,” enabling him to stand out from the crowd while appearing to remain predictably unchanged. It’s a notion that could apply to many of Hitchcock’s films as well as to his sense of dress.

Appointment books kept by his secretaries from the mid-1950s on give an insight into Hitchcock’s daily routine that we don’t have for earlier periods. Listed among the meetings, viewings, and scripting sessions are regular and frequent haircuts and shoeshines in the office, and multiple measuring and fitting sessions with a tailor. For a while, the tailor was Frank Acuna, who had made clothes for Cary Grant, too, though at the time Hitchcock used his services he was best known for designing Liberace’s outfits, which, naturally, were at the other end of the dandy spectrum