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

mannequins on whom to project aesthetic ideas only tangentially connected to the person beneath the fabric. It’s a type of male relationship with femininity that Paul Thomas Anderson explores in Phantom Thread, his 2017 film about the fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock, who bears some striking parallels with Hitchcock beyond their similar surnames, including a gargantuan appetite, a loyal partner named Alma, and a penchant for stitching messages into his garments as a physical sign of himself in each of his works. To realize his narrow vision of feminine beauty, Woodcock relies on the diligent efforts of a talented and industrious team, mostly the women we see busily walking up and down his spiral staircase, an allusion—intentional or otherwise—to the chorus girls running down a set of stairs in The Pleasure Garden, the opening shot of Hitchcock’s first film.

In Anderson’s movie, Woodcock’s career as a maker of new women is threatened by changing tastes of the wider culture, a shift in ideas about women and female beauty. When Hitchcock gave his confession to Truffaut, he was facing something similar. His work with Grace Kelly coincided with Marilyn Monroe’s rise to stardom in films such as Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and The Seven Year Itch. In her book American Beauty, Lois Banner identifies Monroe as the apogee of two distinct types of femininity that dominated in the 1950s: voluptuousness, which connoted a certain sexual brazenness, and girlish, garrulous naivete. Both of these identities were anathema to Hitchcock’s idea of the perfect woman. In a draft of The Trouble with Harry from 1954, John Michael Hayes details a vapid blonde bombshell character, ultimately excised from the shooting script, that resembles the Marilyn stereotype, that combination of hypersexuality and innocence identified by Banner. In the months and years after Monroe’s death, Hitchcock proffered the opinion that “poor Marilyn had sex written all over her face.” It was, in part, to counteract the rise of the brasher sexual identity projected by Monroe that Hitchcock persisted with his model of the cool, elegant blonde, to the extent that he cast the unknown Tippi Hedren to play Melanie Daniels in The Birds. In clinging to his ideal woman, Hitchcock was asserting himself on the movie industry and the wider culture.

According to Hitchcock, it was Alma who first alerted him to Hedren, whom she had seen in a television ad. In appearance, Hedren was a facsimile of a Hitchcock heroine: slim, with a pale complexion, a bone structure of Palladian exactness, and, of course, a head of shimmering blonde hair. Equally important, she had the “high-style, lady-like quality which was once well-represented in films by actresses like Irene Dunne, Grace Kelly, Claudette Colbert.” Hedren was thirty-one and had never acted before. To most directors, this would have been a serious concern, but to Hitchcock, Hedren’s inexperience had its advantages; she would certainly be more pliant in his hands, and he would not have to undo bad habits inherited from previous directors. Without meeting her or even seeing her act in anything other than her commercials, Hitchcock offered her a five-year deal, on the relatively modest sum of $500 per week. Hedren accepted, assuming it was television work that Hitchcock had in mind. A few weeks later, the director had her perform an expensive three-day screen test in full costume, acting out scenes from Rebecca, Notorious, and To Catch a Thief. Hitchcock then invited her to join him, Alma, and his agent Lew Wasserman for dinner at Chasen’s, the Hitchcocks’ favorite restaurant, where he told her that she was about to become a movie star. “Shortly after our drinks arrived, Hitch turned to me and without a word, handed me a small gift box,” recalled Hedren many years later. “I opened it and found myself staring at an exquisite, delicate pin—gold and seed pearls, crafted to depict three birds in flight,” Hitchcock’s way of saying that the lead role in The Birds was hers. “I was stunned. I’m sure I gasped.” Telling a story that she had heard many times before, Pat Hitchcock says, “Tippi started to cry. Alma cried. Even Hitch and Lew had tears in their eyes.” Hedren’s account is virtually identical, with one difference. According to her, Hitchcock’s “eyes were dry. He just stared back at me—very, very pleased with himself.”

For different reasons, The Birds was a difficult shoot for Svengali and his Trilby. Hitchcock fretted about the pressures of making the film through his own production company, as he had done with his previous movie, Psycho. Unlike that film, The Birds was a vast logistical undertaking, the most formidable of his career, exacerbated by the fact that he had cast an acting novice in the lead role. Having been led by Hitchcock step by painstaking step through the entire script, Hedren navigated the filming well, and produced a remarkably accomplished debut performance in a film that migrates from romantic comedy to shrieking horror. But in the infamous scene in which Melanie Daniels is savaged by birds in an attic, Hedren experienced genuine trauma. Before filming had begun, she had been assured that no live birds would be involved in the action; the most terrifying thing she’d have to contend with were a few mechanical ravens. But as the day approached, it became obvious to Hitchcock and his team that it would be impossible to capture the realism and intensity they were after without the use of real animals. As Hedren remembers, she found out about the change of plan on the morning of the shoot. “It was brutal and ugly and relentless,” she says of the five days she spent on the floor of the set while birds were thrown at her head. The crew members who have spoken about it over the years attest that they all, Hitchcock included, felt bad about the situation. In 1980, Hedren said it was “very hard for Hitch at this time, too. He wouldn’t come out of his office until we were absolutely ready to shoot because