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

as a self-evident function of his work. It led to a great many pieces by or about Hitchcock in women’s magazines, and various invitations to support an array of causes linked, in one way or another, to women. In the sixties and seventies, there were multiple overtures from the organizers of beauty pageants, such as Miss World, Miss California, and Miss Zodiac, entreating Hitchcock to preside over the judging. He was also sounded out about becoming the owner of a franchise in the first iteration of women’s professional basketball in 1978. Hitchcock swerved all such offers, but the notion that he had a powerful, sympathetic connection with women was a key part of his mythology. “It’s easy for him to make a woman say ‘yes,’ ” wrote the interviewer June Morfield in 1962. “You see, he has a way with them . . . once a woman gets involved with Hitchcock, she’s rarely ever the same again.”

Accompanying the image of Hitchcock as an expert on femininity was his reputation as a creator and controller of women. On May 10, 1958, a piece titled “Hitchcock Gives Free Rein to the Gentle Sex” appeared in TV Guide, with a nod to that week’s episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. A mocked-up photograph displayed seven actresses from the series as puppets, each having their strings pulled by Hitchcock, their puppeteer. The day before that piece was published, Hitchcock attended the premiere of his latest movie: Vertigo, about male obsession and female objectification, in which James Stewart’s retired police officer John “Scottie” Ferguson attempts to remold his lover, Judy, into a replica of Madeleine, the deceased object of his desire. Only in the final tragic minutes of the film does Scottie come to realize that Judy and Madeleine are the same woman (both played by Kim Novak), and that he has been unwittingly embroiled in a murder plot. Each generation of the last century has had its own “Pygmalion” movies about men trying to create their perfect woman: My Fair Lady; Weird Science; Pretty Woman; Ex Machina. The distinction between those films and Vertigo is that the director of the latter had for many years proudly boasted that transforming women was one of his great achievements. In this role, he likened himself not to Henry Higgins but, with tongue in cheek, to Svengali, the malevolent character from George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, who not only turns a young woman into a star but exploits and abuses her in the process, possessing and controlling her in a way that robs Trilby of the person she once was.

A critical and commercial disappointment at the time of its release, Vertigo is now widely regarded as one of Hitchcock’s crowning triumphs, and the definitive statement of his interest in women. In Scottie, some see a stand-in for Hitchcock himself, a wry, witty, self-contained man whose life is governed by phobias and anxiety, and who becomes fixated with turning a girl-next-door into a ghostlike vision of feminine mystery and cool sexuality. In the years immediately preceding Vertigo, Hitchcock had been in search of a new blonde heroine. He’d been stung by the departure of Ingrid Bergman, who moved to Italy with the director Roberto Rossellini, and then by Grace Kelly’s decision to ditch her film career in order to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956. In 1957, after directing her in The Wrong Man (1956) and “Revenge,” the first episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitchcock signed Vera Miles to a five-year deal. The contract forbade any commercial engagements requiring her to dress in swimwear, lingerie, or anything Hitchcock considered beneath the dignity of a lady. Hitchcock had her lined up to star in Vertigo, but his ill-health forced the production to be pushed many months back. By the time the wheels were ready to roll again, Miles was pregnant and no longer able to participate. Ultimately, he gave the female lead to Kim Novak, whose excellent performance is integral to Vertigo’s peculiar charm, but Hitchcock complained both during production and for many years after that “it was very difficult to obtain what I wanted from her because Kim’s head was full of her own ideas.”

Hitchcock next turned his attentions to Eva Marie Saint, an Oscar winner for her role in On the Waterfront, and seen at the time as the antithesis of the demure Hitchcockian blonde. Hitchcock reveled in the task of refashioning her for his purposes, inhabiting the role of a “rich man who keeps a woman: I supervised the choice of her wardrobe in every detail.” The success was tinged with sadness. “I took a lot of trouble with Eva Marie Saint,” he vented to Hedda Hopper, “grooming her and making her sleek and sophisticated. Next thing she’s in a picture called EXODUS and looking dissipated.” He was referring to Saint’s performance in Otto Preminger’s epic about the founding of Israel, after which she appeared in an equally earthy role as the downtrodden Echo in John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down. Saint’s decision to take these parts seemed to cause Hitchcock genuine distress. In a passage of their interviews that did not make its way into François Truffaut’s book, Hitchcock explained the effort required to transform an actress—even a highly accomplished Oscar winner—into a Hitchcock blonde: “you go to work on these girls and teach them how to use their face to convey thought, to convey sex, everything.” All too often, however, his creation was sullied by some other director, unworthy of the siren he had made: “all the heartaches I’ve had, and the pain, and the emotion I’ve poured into the thing, ends up nothing . . . the effort: completely wasted.”

This was the measure of Hitchcock’s possessiveness, as well as the belief he had in his ability to realize female perfection. In this way, he sounds less like a dirty old man angling for the fulfillment of a sexual fantasy, and more like certain male fashion designers who come to see their muses as flesh-and-blood