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

Once Stage Fright was complete, Alma never took a credit on another Hitchcock production. She remained his champion and continued to exert an influence, but crossing the streams of personal and professional may have become too much. As her husband’s worldwide fame increased in the fifties and sixties, Alma inched further away from the spotlight, but the significance of her advice never lessened in Hitchcock’s eyes. Into the 1960s, Hitchcock still sought Alma’s opinion on how he might adapt source material into a new film. With John Buchan’s The Three Hostages, she pitched a list of highly Hitchcockian scenes, including one of a man being drowned by having his head held under the water of the Ganges River, sparking memories of Hitchcock’s first murder in The Pleasure Garden and anticipating the slow suffocation of Gromek in his next movie, Torn Curtain. She also gave her husband a document outlining the exciting scenes in the book that should be carried over into the film. The page was blank—a lovely example of this aging couple’s shared sense of humor and Alma’s instinctive understanding of what made Hitchcock and “Hitchcock” tick.

Alma’s words could be used to convey praise—Hitchcock offered no higher compliment than saying Alma approved of one’s work—as well as condemnation. When Hitchcock wanted to detach himself from a television project with Richard Condon in 1964, he used Alma’s opinion as justification. “I had Mrs Hitchcock read the script,” he said, as though Condon would naturally accept Alma as the ultimate arbiter on scriptwriting, “and her only comment to me was that she has just read Infinity of Mirrors [Condon’s most recent novel] and thought it was so beautifully written and asked me why the script could not have the same quality.” Should Hitchcock himself ever be on the receiving end of Alma’s critique, he felt crushed. After viewing a cut of Vertigo, she had just one criticism: “that shot of Kim running. Her legs are so fat. It looks awful.” Hitchcock despaired. “Alma hates the film,” he told those around him, and returned to the edit to excise the offending shot. About three weeks before the release of that movie, Alma was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Ultimately, she made a full recovery after surgery, but Hitchcock was petrified at the prospect of losing her. When Alma was in the hospital, he traveled there “weeping and shaking convulsively,” pushing his fear down into the pit of his stomach and pretending to be perfectly calm as he sat with her. Away from the hospital, he broke down in front of colleagues and wondered aloud whether there was any point in carrying on should the worst happen.

Alma was vital to Hitchcock and “Hitchcock,” yet she remains enigmatic. Like Doris Day’s Jo in The Man Who Knew Too Much, did she itch with unfulfilled ambition, having sacrificed her career in order to better support her egotistical husband? As with Gay in The Paradine Case, and Midge in Vertigo, did she soldier through the upsetting thought that she, the dutiful, homely companion, couldn’t compete with the glamorous object of her beloved’s wild fantasies? One suspects both these might be true, but she maintained a deliberate strategy of leaving little record of herself that wasn’t mediated through the entity of Hitchcock. In 1966, a branch of the British government wrote to ask whether Alma would share her memories of working in the film industry in the twenties, but she demurred. She was also approached to be interviewed for a book titled Women Who Made the Movies; Hitchcock had recently been involved in a similar book and television project, Men Who Made the Movies. Hitchcock responded on her behalf, saying, “Mrs Hitchcock and I have given a great deal of thought to your letter,” but Alma would not be participating, as she had only ever been “a technical writer of scripts which was definitely not part of the creative process . . . she would assemble a script in its purely technical sense.” This wasn’t so, but the letter had seemingly been written with Alma’s assent. It’s possible she didn’t feel well enough for an interview at this time, or perhaps she was carrying out her self-assigned duty to create the circumstances in which Alfred was always the star. As Hitchcock once said, the only drawback for a man married to a woman of such discretion is the risk that he “will never be talked about in public,” creating in him an “egoistic need to write about himself. I’m sure I prefer it that way. I suspect Alma knows that too.”

This was as true in 1925 as it was in 1979, when Hitchcock was working at home on the script of The Short Night. Things were progressing sufficiently well for the script to be stress-tested under the weight of a Reville critique. David Freeman, with whom Hitchcock was writing, was amazed to see the old man suddenly animated. He gesticulated and switched voices, performing each of the characters. The doleful, immobile Hitchcock whom Freeman had come to know over the preceding weeks had vanished. Alma, herself ailing from old age and ill health, was rapt. “It was like watching two people on a first date that was going really well, and at that point they’d been married fifty years,” recalls Freeman. “I think he wanted to show her how clever he was, and more importantly that there was hope, a future. And he desperately wanted her approval.” The old Hitchcock—or, to be more exact, the younger one—was back, and Alma couldn’t have been happier.

* The article was written by Roger Burford and delightfully illustrated by his wife, Stella, another talented young husband-and-wife team who had found a distinctive way to collaborate.

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THE VOYEUR

In 1953, Hitchcock was treading water. Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train were followed by a third black-and-white film for Warner Bros., I Confess, an unusually sober movie about the trials of duty and