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

was a regular at fashionable Hollywood restaurants, such as Chasen’s, Perino’s, and Romanoff’s, but usually sat beside his wife. With the exception of his mother, he doesn’t appear to have been particularly close to any woman until he and Alma began to work together in London and Germany, though he openly declared that he preferred the company of women, and particularly disliked being part of a big group of men. Being “one of the boys” sat uncomfortably with him; since childhood he had felt unnerved or diminished by competitive masculinity, something that imbued—in his mind, at least—a kinship with women. Donald Spoto has described Hitchcock as a loner who “never had the gift of friendship,” yet a sincere and deep friendship is precisely what Hitchcock formed with Alma, in whom he found somebody who shared his sense of humor as well as his artistic and commercial ambitions, understood his fears and insecurities, knew how to buoy him up, but was also prepared to speak her mind when she thought he was in error. One writer who interviewed the Hitchcocks in their old age was impressed by a “fruitful kind of friction passing between them, as Alma interrupts one of Hitchcock’s professorial monologues to interject her own peppery opinions.”

Early and sustained success as a filmmaker gave Hitchcock extensive control over his working environment. Women therefore played a more prominent part in his life, professional and private, than might have been the case had he stayed in advertising, or pursued some other career. Hitchcock’s films repeatedly latched on to what he thought were women’s giddiest hopes and deepest fears: the fantasy of romance and adventure; the terror of rape and murder. In the process, he turned to Alma and the women around him for advice and insight. Yet the experience of watching some Hitchcock movies is that of observing a man trying to divine what he thinks are the endless mysteries of womankind, especially in matters of sexuality. “Although I think Hitchcock’s camera was sympathetic to women,” said Jay Presson Allen, one of the women who wrote for him, “I don’t believe he necessarily understood them.”

In relation to women, Hitchcock can sometimes appear like a curious brew of J. Alfred Prufrock and Benny Hill: English repression meeting English bawdiness, which may be two sides of the same coin. Shyness and insecurity in his physical appearance prevented Hitchcock from having romantic or intimate relationships with the women whose company he so enjoyed. At various times, he said he was very sexually inexperienced, and that he had lived much of his life in a state of impotent celibacy. Of the many things that he and Alma gained from their relationship, sexual fulfillment was not among them. Hitchcock told some that he’d had sex just once in his life, and joked that he’d had to use a fountain pen on the night Alma conceived. His occasional outbursts of “outrageousness” on set with his leading ladies—slapping Fontaine during Rebecca, for instance, and apparently exposing himself to Madeleine Carroll on Secret Agent—were done with the justification of getting an emotional response to aid their performance. One wonders whether, along with his stream of dirty jokes and innuendo, they were also his substitute for physical intimacy.

Alma and Hitchcock aboard the SS Mary, on a trip to America, June 1938.

According to his own testimony, he was unusually cosseted at the time he took the reins on The Pleasure Garden, aged twenty-five, having never been out with a woman, not even Alma. During the filming of the drowning scene, he was baffled when the woman playing the victim refused to go into the water. It was left to the cameraman “to tell me all about menstruation. I’ve never heard of it in my life!” It might strike one as an unlikely story; Hitchcock was a movie director during the Roaring Twenties, “not a backward, pre-adolescent country boy from an earlier century,” in the words of one skeptic. Yet such ignorance is not entirely inconceivable. After all, E. M. Forster confessed to the pages of his diary that only at the age of thirty—a year after the publication of A Room with a View—did he learn “exactly how male and female joined.” Forster’s powers of observation were at least as formidable as Hitchcock’s, and his learning was immense; if he could have gone through his twenties in such a state of obliviousness, then why not the equally shy, socially awkward Hitchcock?

Regardless of its truthfulness, the tale speaks to his feeling that women were an exotic and unknowable species. It seems that even with Alma, there was some part of her being—her sexual self—that existed frustratingly beyond his ken. The bewilderment, fascination, and longing women caused in him were all diverted into his films. The ultimate manifestation of this is the fabled Hitchcock “blonde.” His interest in blonde women is first hinted at in The Pleasure Garden, then confirmed by The Lodger, in which all the Avenger’s victims are fair-haired, while Madeleine Carroll, star of The 39 Steps and Secret Agent, was the woman Hitchcock pointed to as the first true Hitchcock “blonde.” Though taxonomized by their coloring, the definitive characteristic of these women is ineffable mystery. Like a scratched record, Hitchcock recurrently expressed a dislike of “women with sex hanging all over them like baubles,” favoring instead “a woman who does not display all of her sex at once—one whose attractions are not falling out in front of her . . . she ought to maintain a slightly mysterious air.” “Anything could happen to you with a woman like that in a taxi.” He evoked this image of a reserved woman turning into an insatiable nymphomaniac on the back seat of a taxi so often that it’s possible it stemmed from a real-life experience that, as Hitchcock told friends and colleagues, happened to him after a Christmas party in the twenties or thirties. Equally, it could have been a morsel of risqué gossip of the sort he loved