The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (an ebook reader txt) 📗

eye for meaningful compositions.” Montagu tried to locate and enhance the essence of Hitchcock, a method that many of Hitchcock’s subsequent collaborators would employ.

Of all those who invested their talents in the Hitchcock legend, the most constant, and perhaps the most important, was his wife, Alma Reville. They were, at first sight, an odd couple. Her small, delicate frame contrasted with his famous bulk. Likewise, her instinct to please and soothe, reflected in the beaming smile with which she greeted the world, differed sharply from Hitchcock’s egotism, his tendency to sulk and show off. To quote their daughter, Hitchcock was “a born celebrity” who craved things—attention, public affirmation, a feeling of specialness—that the more retiring Alma seemingly had little use for.

Alma was born to Lucy and Matthew Reville in Nottingham, on August 14, 1899, just one day after Alfred’s birthday. The family moved to London when Alma was an infant, after Matthew secured a job in the costume department at Twickenham Studios. As a teenager, Alma dreamed of being an actress, though her father thought it best for her to experience the “seamy side of film life,” and helped her land a job as a “cutter.” It proved a turning point. Although Alma later took a couple of small acting roles, it was scriptwriting and editing that absorbed her. While Alfred was still at Henley’s, Alma’s film career cantered ahead. A variety of jobs came her way, but she often doubled up as editor (a more functional job in the tender years of cinema than it is today) and “continuity girl,” a member of the crew responsible for recording the details of a take in order to avoid discrepancies in the edit. While still in her teens, she was even hired to work on Hearts of the World, directed by D. W. Griffith, the titan of silent films, and one of the few directors that Hitchcock readily admitted he was influenced by.

Though it wasn’t love at first sight for Alma, her first experience of Alfred was memorable. It occurred in 1921 at Famous Players-Lasky, where they had both recently begun work. She was amused by his imperious manner, entirely unsuited to his junior standing and baby-faced appearance, and puzzled by the fact that each time their paths crossed, he acted as though she were invisible. Years later Hitchcock revealed that his rudeness was a symptom of his youthful anxiety around women, exacerbated by the fact that Alma was, in career terms, four years his senior and already an editor and second assistant director when he was still sketching intertitles. Alma claimed that as it was “unthinkable for a British male to admit that a woman has a job more important than his, Hitch had waited to speak to me until he had the higher position.” That moment came when he was made assistant to Graham Cutts on a picture called Woman to Woman and, quite out of the blue, he called Alma to offer her the job of editor. They worked together on a further four films with Cutts, and bonded over their conviction that they could do a much better job than their director. When Hitchcock was handed the reins on The Pleasure Garden, his first important decision was to hire Alma as his assistant director.

Both were passionate about cinema, fiercely ambitious, but shy and self-contained people whose social lives as children had been limited. In Alma’s case, she had been stricken by Sydenham’s chorea (St. Vitus dance), causing involuntary tics, jerking of the limbs, and muscle weakness. She lost two years’ schooling because of the disorder which, in the opinion of her daughter, led her to become “extremely self-conscious and sensitive about her lack of formal education,” much as Hitchcock had. Alma even had a strange story of childhood trauma to parallel Hitchcock’s. Amid the crowds in London attending the funeral procession of Edward VII in 1910, Alma was coming down from her father’s shoulders when her hair got caught in the coat buttons of a fellow bystander, and she was dragged to the ground as the man walked past, triggering a lifelong aversion to crowds.

The story of their engagement is one Hitchcock enjoyed revisiting. It happened, he said, on Christmas Eve of 1925, sailing back from Germany, where he and Alma had been working on The Mountain Eagle. Hitchcock entered Alma’s cabin with an engagement ring in his pocket and a rehearsed speech in his head, only to find her prostrate on her bunk, green with seasickness. Undeterred, he popped the question. In response, Alma “groaned, nodded her head, and burped.” For all its unlikeliness, the anecdote has a ring of authenticity. As observed by Patrick McGilligan, Hitchcock had a hugely quixotic view of rail and sea travel, and probably convinced himself that this was the perfect occasion to fulfill a romantic fantasy. That he was unable to gauge the situation and postpone his proposal for a more appropriate moment says a lot about his social clumsiness, and hints at one of the many things the warmer, more empathetic Alma brought to the Hitchcock partnership.

As with The Pleasure Garden, The Mountain Eagle had been full of delays and obstructions, caused by the weather and other unforeseen circumstances—a nightmare for a worrier such as Hitchcock. When he recounted these experiences publicly, Hitchcock told them laughingly, but in the way one might retell a peculiar anxiety dream. Barraged by unexpected, time-sensitive problems, he turned to Alma for constant reassurance, and she, “sweet soul, gave me courage by swearing I was doing marvelously.” She also came to his rescue by handling delicate issues with cast and crew that Hitchcock couldn’t stomach. “Like a man, I left Miss Reville to do all the dirty work,” he admitted. Hitchcock told many tales about those times in Germany, but he always cast Alma in the same role: a sunny-natured dynamo of winning optimism, “standing four-foot-eleven in stockings and a trifle more in high heels,” who never ceased to tell him he was