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

as pointed out by the historian Charles Barr, it does not appear in the extant film. Perhaps Hitchcock’s active imagination had blended fact with fiction for the sake of a good yarn to tell Bogdanovich, or maybe he’d misremembered because the characters had always seemed like a version of himself and Alma. Possibly, the initial idea had been for Hitchcock to play the role, in what would have been a witty way of referencing how close the married couple in the film were to their creators, but it proved too unwieldy or unconventional an ending. In any case, the Hills are sober people with hidden passions, fantasies, and yearnings, who ultimately learn the joy of settling. Rather than chase unattainable objects of desire, they embrace domestic stability. The comforts of home and faithful interdependence trump any desire for passionate release. For Alfred and Alma, this was a cherished precept, the cornerstone of their partnership—and a source of frustration that quietly rumbled through their married life.

When Hitchcock left for New York in March 1939, he faced the photographers with Alma and Pat, now aged ten, beaming broadly by his side in a pose of familial happiness they would repeat countless times over the next forty years. Once in America, Alma and Alfred made it their mission to re-create a slice of southern England in southern California. For Life magazine, Hitchcock set out his requirements. “What I want is a home . . . a snug little house, with a good kitchen, and the devil with a swimming pool. Only try to find one here.” Californian houses, he felt, lacked homeliness; the article featured a photograph of him looking forlornly into a small fireplace, not a patch on the great hearths he was used to back in England. A “snug little house” doesn’t really describe the eighty-five-acre ranch the Hitchcocks bought up among the redwood forests and orange groves of Scotts Valley, beneath the Santa Cruz Mountains. Alma’s green thumb cultivated an impressive garden. One friend said she was reminded of Alma’s flowers on a visit to Nottingham, Alma’s birthplace, the city center decorated with colorful hanging baskets.

“The Ranch,” though, was just a country getaway. For Monday-to-Friday living, the family at first made a comfortable makeshift home in a house rented from Carole Lombard, whom Hitchcock directed in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), a screwball comedy about a married couple whose tempestuous relationship is equal parts hugs, kisses, and smashed dishes. Lombard’s sudden death in a plane crash in January 1942 necessitated a permanent relocation for the Hitchcocks. Ultimately, they found what they were looking for at 10957 Bellagio Road in Bel Air, a newly built house that is often described as being modest by Hollywood standards, which Pat remembers as being calm, cozy, but always immaculate.

Just as the London flat and the Surrey cottage had been before the move, these tranquil family homes became the epicenter of the Hitchcock endeavor where so much of the important work happened: scriptwriting, story conferences, thinking, debating, planning—and auditioning for Hitchcock’s favor. Those who were asked to visit the ranch knew they had been given special access and were rewarded by seeing Hitchcock in his natural habitat. When Frederick Knott adapted his play Dial M for Murder into a script for Hitchcock, he was invited to stay, along with Grace Kelly, the star of the movie. The blurry snapshots that Knott took of the trip are beautiful in their incongruity, revealing a wide-eyed Kelly shoving an enormous hamburger into her mouth, and, even more unusually, Alfred Hitchcock in his garden tending to the roses, wearing a pair of slacks and a white polo shirt. “When Hitchcock liked you . . . you became part of his extended family,” said Arthur Laurents, who felt like an adopted child during the time he worked with Hitchcock, eighteen years his senior. He adored the Hitchcock home—“it was lovely being with people who loved each other”—but being subject to Hitchcock’s domineering charm sometimes felt a little like “Oh God, I have to go to Daddy’s.” He learned that paternal favor was not unconditional. When Laurents told Hitchcock he didn’t want to work on Under Capricorn, he realized he had done more than turn down an offer of work; he had erased himself from the inner circle. Being accepted into the Hitchcock team as a close creative collaborator was also an acceptance into Hitchcock’s private world. A rejection of the former was frequently taken by Hitchcock as a snub to the latter. “It wasn’t like a big studio,” Peggy Robertson recalled, “it was more like a family.” If a member of the family decided to move on, as happened when Herbert Coleman pulled away to take up his first directing job, the patriarch felt wounded. By 1955 Coleman had become such a trusted part of Hitchcock’s life that when the director left town while renovations were done to his house, Coleman was named as the person to field any questions from the contractors. Hitchcock “was very sad about it,” explained Robertson of Coleman’s decision to leave, “feeling Herbie was deserting him. But that’s what he wanted to do.” It took a lot for Hitchcock to let people in; coming and going as one pleased was rarely allowed.

Social events at the Hitchcocks’ could be riotous fun; food and drink were always plentiful and sumptuous, and the guest lists sometimes glittering. When Pat graduated high school, her parents threw a party at Bellagio Road, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman among the attendees. Notwithstanding Alma’s total command of the kitchen, Hitchcock directed life at home much as he directed the work of a movie, to the extent that he arranged Pat’s wardrobe as though she were one of his leading ladies. When Pat reached adolescence, the very age when most fathers step back from such things, Hitchcock took her shopping for clothes, usually without Alma. “He had very definite ideas for me,” says Pat, “of what was appropriate to my personality.”

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