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

But the dandy is an identity born to the English leisure class, populated by soft-handed playboys. Beau Brummell’s family were stinking rich with “new money,” and to compensate for his lack of aristocratic genes, Brummell made a fetish of idleness. In the democratic age, this poses a problem for dandies whose identity has been constructed through industriousness and aspiration. Hitchcock got around the problem by building inactivity into the fabric of his hard-working life. He affected a pose of boredom in his director’s chair, and teased interviewers with flippant answers to serious questions. “Let’s play” was the attitude he communicated to his screenwriters, despite the fact that he demanded unstinting professionalism and dedication from anyone working for him. Herbert Coleman, his assistant director and associate producer in the 1950s, wrote in his memoirs that his marriage was put under great strain by Hitchcock’s expectation of total commitment to the project of “Hitchcock.” Coleman was aggrieved when Hitchcock told a colleague that Coleman “knows more about producing a movie than anyone I’ve ever known. . . . But he has one fault. He thinks more of his family than he does his job.” Ernest Lehman was of the opinion that the dandyish loafing was a strategy of self-deception designed to take Hitchcock’s mind off the carousel of demands that his filmmaking entailed. Hitchcock made films, so Lehman reckoned, “to keep the franchise of his reputation, his fortune and his lifestyle. But his greatest pleasure, his true raison d’être may have been just to feel comfortable, to sit and spin tales and play with ideas, to be at ease, eating, drinking, sans anxiety—and let’s face it, making movies was hard work and produced considerable anxiety in him.”

The leading men in Hitchcock’s films often have a relaxed attitude to work, or find themselves in a situation of enforced inactivity. In the four movies he appeared in, Cary Grant plays a grifter sponging from his wealthy wife; a secret service operative who spends his time eating, drinking, and riding horses; a retired jewel thief luxuriating in his ill-gotten wealth; and a louche advertising executive. In the latter of those roles, the ad executive Roger Thornhill, he exhibits an industrious streak, but that’s glimpsed only in the opening scene in which he steals a cab while off-loading work to his secretary. In these roles, Grant replicates the ideal of the high achiever who never breaks a sweat that Hitchcock aspired to be. His characters could be described by Thomas Elsaesser’s feeling that Hitchcock lived his life as a “protest, the triumph of artifice over accident, a kind of daily victory over chance, in the name of a spirituality dedicating itself to making life imitate art.”

Sauntering hand in hand with the dandy’s disregard of effort is his denial of emotion. An “unshakable resolve not to allow himself to be moved” is how Baudelaire phrased it. In his perfect state, the dandy succumbs to neither sadness nor anger nor joy; he is dispassionate and aloof in all circumstances. It is the most distinctively English part of the dandy’s take on masculinity, one that Hitchcock embodied in the expressionlessness of his public persona. Home-movie footage used in a 1999 BBC documentary shows Hitchcock at home in the 1930s, fooling around in front of the camera, pulling faces and pantomiming, at one point pretending to be a baby in a playpen, his fist wedged in his mouth. On first viewing, it’s a peculiar sight; despite being one of the most photographed people of his lifetime, the images that have come to define him are those in which he stares into the camera unsmiling, devoid of emotion. For a similar reason, the ending of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” about a man tormented by his doppelgänger, is strangely gripping viewing. As the camera cuts from the final scene of the drama, and back to Hitchcock in the studio, we see him writhing in the grip of two identical-looking medical orderlies. “I’m Alfred Hitchcock! I am, I can prove it . . . I insist!” he shouts, his face twisted in fear and anger. It’s an eerie sight, the world’s most imperturbable man suddenly all at sea. As this hysterical Hitchcock is led off, another Hitchcock, the blank canvas we all know, walks into the frame, reassuringly deadpan. He apologizes for this unseemly eruption of emotion and explains that the gentleman being removed was an obvious fraudster. Off camera, there is a gunshot. Hitchcock remains unmoved. “Poor chap. If you’ll excuse me, I need a moment to pull myself together.”

For practically the entire length of his career, Hitchcock extolled the virtue of what he called “negative acting, the ability to express words by doing nothing.” Naturally, this had much to do with the technique of filmmaking. “The screen actor,” he said in 1937, “has got to be much more plastic” than the theater performer. “Mostly he is wanted to behave quietly and naturally . . . the best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well.” Consequently, Hitchcock considered one of his most important duties as a director to cleanse an actor’s face of all but the most essential display of emotion. Working with Kim Novak had been a challenge, he told Peter Bogdanovich, because she communicated an array of extraneous emotion through her face. “You have got a lot of expression in your face,” he told Novak. “Don’t want any of it . . . it’s like taking a sheet of paper and scribbling all over it.” Speaking shortly before his relationship with Tippi Hedren broke down, he said that controlling her every facial gesture was one of his key achievements on The Birds. The evidence of that is plainly apparent in Hedren’s close-up reaction shots in the early scenes of the movie, in which the blankness of her expression communicates her character’s inscrutability. Some critics have suggested that, despite their gender,