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

and had a tie around his collar. Neckties were important to Hitchcock; without one, a man seemed as good as naked. When one fledgling director asked him for some advice, Hitchcock looked the kid up and down and said, “Real directors wear ties.”

The imposition of his tastes and standards in clothing was a way of infusing the atmosphere with a sense of himself, making everybody work toward the goal of realizing the same Hitchcockian end. “Look Hitchcock, think Hitchcock” was the ostensible goal, but it was also evidence of his strong manipulative streak, reshaping those around him by pushing them through the filter of his personality. Peggy Robertson felt the force of Hitchcock’s cosmetic expectations, and she admitted to basing at least some of her wardrobe choices on what she thought he would or would not like to see her in, much like Eva Marie Saint had done on the day of their first meeting. Speaking many years after Hitchcock’s death, Robertson recalled one occasion on which she bought a sober navy-blue dress, thinking it would please him, but was crestfallen when he paid her a compliment in a tone of voice that she inferred to be a criticism. Another time, she bought a pair of sensible brown shoes that Hitchcock seemed to genuinely like when she wore them to work for the first time. “I was so thrilled by this,” Robertson remembered, “that I went out the next weekend and bought about three pairs of these terribly expensive shoes, just glowing with happiness that I was getting some approval.” But, ever wary of dispensing praise to those he thought were searching for it, the compliments dried up immediately. “He never said another word about my shoes in my life. Not one. He knew, he could tell.” It’s testament to the power of the myths that Hitchcock spun around himself as being a man of unmatchable taste and talent that important members of the Hitchcock enterprise would go to such lengths to gain his approval—especially when they knew it to be a virtually impossible task.

The dandy attitude of perfecting life through devotion to small details seeped into every part of Hitchcock’s existence. The Californian homes he kept with Alma were decorated and furnished without typical Hollywood ostentation, but with an immense attention to particulars. When Hitchcock remodeled one of his bathrooms in the 1950s, he gave workmen the most precise instructions and was insistent about the use of a particular type of green-and-white marble he had sourced in Vermont. The artwork that studded his walls was deliberately chosen to reflect the Hitchcocks’ public and private selves, a mixture of their premodern English heritage and their very modern present; the grittily figurative balanced with the exuberantly abstract, works by Utrillo, Epstein, Klee, and a Picasso that, to Hitchcock’s irritation, turned out to be counterfeit. A look in the Hitchcocks’ cutlery drawers and china cupboards would reveal not only beautiful implements of the finest Sheffield steel, Waterford crystal, and Delftware, but something antique and silver to cater for any conceivable dining need. There were asparagus servers, grape scissors, cream ladles, and butter spreaders; teaspoons and demitasse spoons; spoons for sugar, berries, ice cream, after-dinner coffee, and salt; nut picks, berry knives, butter knives, and fish knives; forks for salad, fruit, luncheon, and dinner; pie slicers, cheese planes, and cake breakers; carvers for roast meat, and separate ones for game and poultry. These are just a few entries from an eleven-page inventory of silverware drawn up in 1962 for one of the Hitchcocks’ two homes.

That there was a right way of doing things, and a thousand wrong ways, seemed axiomatic to Hitchcock. On the set of North by Northwest, he appeared genuinely affronted when he saw Eva Marie Saint pour herself coffee into a Styrofoam cup. In all seriousness, he pointed out that such conduct was incompatible with being a movie star. “Someone should bring it to you in a china cup and saucer.” More indecorous behavior occurred the night Paul Newman came to dinner in the early 1960s. Not only did Newman take off his jacket and hang it on the back of his chair the moment he reached the table, he declined the offer of the wines Hitchcock had paired with the food and asked instead for a beer—which he drank straight from the can. This was not leading-man behavior; Cary Grant would have rather been seen dead than swigging beer from a can. Hitchcock’s opinion of Newman never entirely recovered.

Ritual, performed with easy, understated style was crucial to his public image. His tendency, which he followed most insistently after his break from Selznick, of starting and finishing filming at civilized hours kicks against our culture’s dominant notion that to be successful in any given field one must be gripped by “drive,” “passion,” and “inspiration,” all of which eat up the clock. Hitchcock’s timekeeping was a dandyish display of effortless mastery; he was in charge of his production, not the other way round. “It’s only a movie” became something of a catchphrase of his, an expression intended to convince us that at the core of Hitchcock was an unruffled insouciance. “I’ve come to believe that a hidden future is one of God’s most merciful and exciting gifts,” he once wrote, expounding his theory of never taking anything too seriously. “We can live in a state of chronic despair, or we can live with faith in the future, even though it is hidden from us.” Of course, this is completely at odds with the other things that he spent half a century telling us about himself, that he was a bag of nerves, terrified of everyone and everything. It also runs counter to his obvious obsession with his work, one that he took home with him and chewed over every night. In describing his routine during filming, he said he would rise early to think through the challenges of the day ahead. His family recalled that this tended to occur about