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

to hear, and spread, about colleagues; or, simply the reverie of a frustrated, inexperienced man, with an immensely vivid interior existence. Without explaining how he came to formulate the theory, he repeatedly avowed that Latin women, though famed for their supposed hot-blooded passion, had little interest in sex, while the “typical American woman” is “frigid” and “a tease, who dresses for sex and doesn’t give it—a man puts his hand on her and she runs screaming for mother.” The most sexual women of all, he opined, were those of northwestern Europe, the Germans and Scandinavians, and especially the straitlaced English: aloof, decorous, and passionless on the surface, but quivering with hidden passions—Hitchcock could’ve been talking about himself.

The quintessential incarnation of this type of woman was Grace Kelly, who starred in three of his films, Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955). Interpretations of Hitchcock’s behavior around actresses and his motivations in casting them differ, but his infatuation with Kelly is beyond dispute, as it had been with Ingrid Bergman the previous decade. The appreciation was mutual: Kelly and Bergman both declared themselves smitten with Hitchcock, his gracious manners, his humor, and his talent. In all three of her films with him, Kelly encapsulates the notion of femininity that exhilarated her director: the ice maiden concealing a volcanic sexuality. In To Catch a Thief, she is even given her own “back-of-a-taxi” moment when her ladylike character, Frances Stevens, abruptly steals a kiss from an astonished John Robie (Cary Grant) before shutting her bedroom door in his face. Hitchcock was thrilled to learn that in real life “the snow princess,” as he called Kelly, appeared to embody his fantasy. “She fucked everyone,” he is reported to have said on the set of Dial M for Murder, including “little Freddie the writer,” referring to a dalliance between Kelly and the screenwriter Frederick Knott, which, as the author Steven DeRosa notes, might tell us as much about Hitchcock’s view of writers as it did his views on sexually active women.

In each of her three films there is something extraterrestrial about Kelly’s characters. She doesn’t enter Rear Window so much as she manifests, from nowhere in the pitch black, as though beamed in from another dimension. Having roused her crochety boyfriend (Jeff, played by James Stewart) from his sleep with a soft, slow kiss, she switches on threeshe switches on three lights, with a ritual recitation of each one of her three names—“Lisa. Carol. Fremont.” Now she is illuminated: an angelic visitation in evening gown and high heels. And, lo, she delivers a miracle of a gourmet meal, transported fresh from one of Hitchcock’s favorite Manhattan restaurants, turning a fusty bachelor pad into an oasis of midtown opulence.

In Hitchcock films, men and women are separated not only by biology but also by plains of experience: men—excluding the insane ones—inhabit a world governed by fact and rationality, while women, as Richard Allen argues, have access to mysterious reserves of instinct and intuition. In Spellbound and Notorious, Bergman’s characters have an abundance of this quality, as do Daisy in The Lodger and Blanche in Family Plot, the director’s third and fifty-third films, respectively. Throughout Rear Window, Lisa performs small miracles. Even Stella (Thelma Ritter), the nurse attending to Jeff’s broken leg, showcases the mysterious powers of female perception when she tells Jeff how she predicted the Wall Street crash when she was nursing a director at General Motors. “When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go.” “Well, Stella,” replies Jeff, “in economics a kidney ailment has no relation to the stock market.” “Crashed, didn’t it? I can smell trouble right here in this apartment. . . . I should have been a Gypsy fortune teller instead of an insurance company nurse.” Like Midge, Barbara Bel Geddes’s character in Vertigo, and Jane Wyman’s Eve in Stage Fright (1950), part of Thelma’s role is to embody “ordinary” womanhood. Arguably, these women reflect the women Hitchcock knew best, Alma in particular, those on whom he relied but who did not represent his ideal of feminine sexuality. Yet even these “ordinary” women have something unfathomable about them.

Hitchcock was one of a vast roll call of twentieth-century male artists who wondered aloud about who women are and what they want. What’s unusual in Hitchcock’s case is the eagerness with which our culture adopted him as an authority on the subject. During his most high-profile years, from Notorious to The Birds, his opinion was sought by interviewers—male and female—on various aspects of women’s lives. How should they dress? How should they speak? Do they possess the necessary qualities to be good film directors? Do their fears differ from men’s? On one occasion, asked to distill the essence of femininity, he submitted that as he wasn’t a woman, he probably wasn’t best placed to answer. Usually, however, he was only too happy to give his two cents. He once claimed, without any apparent mischief, that it was a “very well known fact” that if “a woman is surprised in the nude, what does she do? She covers her breasts. Why not shield the area between her legs first? Never. Always the breasts.” On another occasion, he offered tips on how women should dress in order to bag themselves a husband. “A woman who wants to subdue a man would do well to subdue herself first,” he offered before getting into specifics: “Never dither about a color. Try it against the face and contemplate the effect. . . . The new lilacs and mauves are very becoming, but do make certain that you get the shade right for you.”

Hitchcock with Ingrid Bergman, during the filming of Notorious.

Hitchcock at work on Rear Window with Grace Kelly and script supervisor Irene Ives.

Only rarely did an interviewer ask where the maestro got his information. More commonly, his attunement with the feminine disposition was accepted