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

were meant to be. Hitchcock was forever stimulated by the sight of men and women slipping out of their conventional roles of sex and gender. There is a frisson between Annie and Melanie in The Birds, as there is between Patsy and Jill in The Pleasure Garden—“sapphic overtones,” to quote Patrick McGilligan—which Hitchcock said was inspired by a lesbian couple whom he, as a wide-eyed virgin, encountered in Berlin in 1924. “In the hotel room they made several propositions, to which I stolidly replied, ‘Nein, nein.’ Then we had several cognacs, and finally the two German girls got into bed. And the young girl in our party, who was a student, put on her glasses to make sure she wouldn’t miss anything.” That incident might have been an influence on a multilayered gag in The Lady Vanishes when Caldicott and Charters—two inseparable old public schoolboys—are panic-stricken to find themselves in a tiny room with a young woman who cheerily undresses in front of them.

Hitchcock as Lady Agatha, the Countess of Windblown, 1957.

Men in drag have a long history at the heart of British popular culture. In the 1920s, Hitchcock entertained friends by prancing around as “Mabel,” a flapper in a slinky dress, high heels, and a string of pearls. Around the same time, Alma had trouser suits made for her by the same tailor who fashioned Hitchcock’s clothes. Walking through the lobby of a grand hotel one day, a trouser-clad Alma caused necks to crane in disapproval. “They are all talking about your trousers,” Hitchcock said in a booming voice, unable to hide his delight at his wife’s taboo-breaking. Norman Bates’s cross-dressing mirrored Hitchcock’s own enjoyment of posing, often for the camera, in a dress. Once he did a turn as Queen Victoria, and dressed up as the lady of the manor, one of numerous roles he played in a mock murder mystery story printed in This Week magazine in 1957.

All this sophistication, this knowledge of the parts of life that happen only in the shadows, jars with the other face that Hitchcock showed the world, that embarrassing twin brother, a fearful and superstitious square who knew nothing about the world beyond the movies. Perhaps the doubles, decoys, and lookalikes that litter his films were a recognition that within himself there were competing identities in constant, noisy conversation. He was simultaneously the artist and the crowd-pleaser, the timorous virgin and the man women couldn’t resist—and the fat misfit and the dandy, elegant and precise, for whom obtaining “whatever is perfect of its own kind” was the closest he got to a philosophy of life.

* This chapter owes a particular debt to Thomas Elsaesser’s essay “The Dandy in Hitchcock,” which was itself written in response to Raymond Durgnat’s thoughts about Hitchcock’s aestheticism and dandyism.

† Janet Leigh in Psycho and Barbara Leigh-Hunt in Frenzy both had body doubles.

7

THE FAMILY MAN

The gang of three were all together, the talented Hitchcocks on tour. In the spring of 1951, Alfred, Alma, and Pat, now twenty-two, took a trip across Europe. In hired cars—neat and nimble European models, not the lumbering limousines that Hitchcock relied on to ferry him around Los Angeles—Alma and Pat took turns behind the wheel. Averse to driving, Hitchcock indulged his love of maps and assumed the role of navigator.

Europe held a host of associations for all three Hitchcocks. Transatlantic Pictures, the company Hitchcock had founded with Sidney Bernstein after ending his relationship with Selznick, had closed following the relative commercial failures of Rope and Under Capricorn. Hitchcock dusted himself off, signed a new deal with Warner Bros., and returned to familiar territory, making Stage Fright, starring Marlene Dietrich, and Strangers on a Train. Pat had played small roles in both films, the former cowritten by her mother and partly inspired by Pat’s time at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. This vacation was her chance to see the wider continent, particularly the great cities in which her parents had learned the craft of filmmaking and the art of coupledom more than twenty years earlier. For Alfred and Alma, the trip offered an unusually long stretch of relaxation, warm with sunshine and old memories, but clouded by melancholy reminders of the war. “Florence we just loved,” Alma wrote to Hitchcock’s secretary Carol Shourds, despite the damage wrought by bombing, but Munich “was really very sad. As you know, we lived there some time. It has been smashed up badly.”

Alfred’s letters to Shourds gave fewer details of the experience of continental travel and more about the brass tacks of business, namely his latest search to find new source material. He sent a report back to Los Angeles titled “Journal of Mr. Hitchcock After His Explorations Through the Jungle of Story Agents and Tellers of Tales,” detailing his responses to a mound of plays, novels, and short stories sent his way by eager writers and their representatives. One that had been highly recommended to him he dismissed because Alma read it and said she “couldn’t make head nor tail of it,” the swiftest possible route to Hitchcock’s wastepaper basket.

Blending the personal with the professional was standard practice in the Hitchcock household. Hitchcock didn’t simply take work home with him; the work was emotionally and creatively grounded in his family’s domestic existence. People have often compared his approach to work with that of Shakespeare and Dickens, but both those men used their careers as a means of putting distance between themselves and their families, leading double lives of pen and hearth. The opposite was true of Hitchcock, for whom the boundary between domesticity and creativity was not just permeable but invisible. He once said it was his ambition to put murder back in the home where it belonged. At his address, it had never left. In every sense, “Hitchcock” was a family enterprise.

The movie Hitchcock most frequently cited as his favorite was Shadow of a Doubt, his definitive effort at wreaking havoc among