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

his private life into his public image as the patriarch of a bourgeois family of unique distinction; just like the next-door neighbors, but simultaneously very different. In August 1930, Hitchcock wrote several hundred words for a popular magazine to publicize Murder!, a movie he describes as “the product of the Hitchcock combination—Mr. and Mrs.,” and which demonstrates that Alma knows “more about scenario writing than I am ever likely to.” The piece reveals Hitchcock’s working methods at the same time as showing us the Hitchcock family, including the cute toddler Patricia—“who is two and regards me as a joke”—their maid, their secretary, their “little cottage hidden in five acres of coppice,” their swish London flat on Cromwell Road, and even their car, nicknamed Blackmail.

The Hitchcocks on their wedding day, December 2, 1926.

The “little cottage” was in fact a rather large Tudor dwelling, fitted out with luxurious modern bathrooms and kitchen, in the Surrey village of Shamley Green. Ostensibly, this was the Hitchcocks’ domestic sanctuary from London, the film industry, and the pressures of work. Yet, as with their flat on Cromwell Road, it was also a venue in which Hitchcock performed for journalists. According to one reporter who wrote a feature on it, the cottage was “imbued with the atmosphere of the Middle Ages, together with all the comforts of these Modern days,” a reflection of the Hitchcocks themselves: a wholesome, traditional English family at the cutting edge of twentieth-century urban culture. Another journalist was greeted by a smiling Alma—“delightfully vivacious and a charming hostess”—while young Pat introduced her to the pony and the Old English sheepdog. Hitchcock could be seen “parading the garden” in his pajamas, dressing gown, and slippers, a homely, if odd, man of the house.

At the time, this display of contented domesticity—especially his fulsome praise of Alma’s talents—made Hitchcock seem a bourgeois eccentric; now it gives him the look of a far-sighted critic of traditional masculinity. For a male artist of the interwar era, Hitchcock’s warm public embrace of hearth and home made him an atypical figure. One of his contemporaries, the critic Cyril Connolly, famously wrote that “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” Female artists still searching for a room of one’s own might have advised Connolly to count himself lucky if parenthood had encroached only as far as the hall, but Connolly’s epigram articulates a widely held belief among male modernists. The poet Wyndham Lewis married his wife, Gladys Anne Hoskins, in 1930 but kept her existence a secret, even from close friends, so certain was he that a feminized domestic environment was anathema to artistic productivity. “I have a wife downstairs,” he remarked to one visitor, having never mentioned her during the previous two years of their friendship. “A simple woman. But a good cook.” Hitchcock’s affectionate public take on family life is closer to that of Arnold Bennett’s, the exceptionally popular, middlebrow English novelist who was the bête noire of Connolly, Lewis, and other English highbrows. However, Hitchcock’s involvement in the modern medium of cinema, his interest in the avant-garde, and his determination to introduce elements of it into his work places him in a unique spot, as does the disconnect between the image of the blissfully calm family life he presented to the public and the families he put on screen—disordered, dysfunctional, or embattled. To Hitchcock, “the pram in the hall” was not a blockage, but a portal to what some have described as his “chaos world,” that nightmarish place into which his characters descend.

Right up until the end of his life, Hitchcock publicly asserted that his happy marriage was the girder of his career. Yet it’s uncertain how much of the Hitchcocks’ marriage made it on-screen. Hitchcock was notoriously evasive on what of himself he put into his films, and Alma left scant public record of her thoughts on anything. As Donald Spoto has noted, perhaps the closest we have to a depiction of Alfred and Alma are Emily and Fred Hill, the lead characters in Rich and Strange (1931). Adapted from a novel of the same name by Dale Collins, the film both mocks and celebrates young adults of the Hitchcocks’ generation who are encouraged by movies, magazines, and advertising to believe that happiness is only a spending spree away. Bored stiff with their humdrum domestic routine, the Hills splurge a financial inheritance on adventure abroad. After travels through exotic foreign lands, studded with temptations that almost end their marriage, and dangers that almost get them killed, they discover that excitement and glamour are not for them, and they are relieved to slide back into their sedate lives.

As a pair of thoroughly modern young fogies, Fred and Emily read like a riff on Alfred and Alma, despite the fact that the film is largely faithful to its source novel. In Paris, the Hills find themselves in the Folies Bergère, aghast at the gyrating flesh, a scene apparently modeled on the Hitchcocks’ own experience of the venue, which they visited while working on the script. At some point in the evening, Hitchcock asked a fellow audience member where he and Alma might see some belly dancing. To their astonishment, they were led to a brothel. “In front of my wife, the madam asked me whether I would like one of the young ladies. Well, I’ve never had anything to do with that sort of woman. . . . So we had been behaving exactly like the couple in the book—two innocents abroad!” When he discussed Rich and Strange with Peter Bogdanovich, Hitchcock described the end of the film: “After it’s all over, they [the Hills] meet me in the lounge. This is my most devastating appearance in a picture. They tell me their story and I say, ‘No, I don’t think it’ll make a movie.’ ” The original script, cowritten by the Hitchcocks with Val Valentine, does feature a scene with the character of an unnamed filmmaker, but,