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

he couldn’t stand to watch it.” However, she now suggests that the episode was part of Hitchcock’s effort to dominate her.

In the publicity for the film, Hitchcock boasted about the way he had invented ‘Tippi,’ insisting—without explanation—that her name from now on be held between inverted commas. Hedren was introduced to journalists with a brief biography and details of the exacting tutelage that Hitchcock had provided, including the twenty-five thousand dollars that had been spent on her screen tests, conducted with the exactitude of a real Hitchcock shoot. Even when Hedren spoke to America’s teenage girls through the pages of Seventeen magazine, Hitchcock was with her to explain to the interviewer Edwin Miller how seriously he took building a character and, in this case, the actress cast to play her.

The minute attentions paid to her acting and the creation of her public persona elicited no complaints from Hedren: “He was not only my director, he was my drama coach, which was fabulous.” The problem was that the ‘Tippi’ project strayed beyond the film set; Hitchcock inserted himself into Hedren’s life in ways she could not accept. He left food he wanted her to eat outside her front door, sent her a peculiar Valentine’s message, and peppered her with requests for her to join him for dinners, lunches, and drinks. When alone, he told her dirty stories and jokes, likely the same ones he told Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman, though Hedren wasn’t anywhere near as amused as those two women appeared to have been. Worst of all, she alleges that one afternoon Hitchcock “threw himself on top of me and tried to kiss me” in the back of a limo directly outside their hotel. “It was an awful, awful moment I’ll always wish I could erase from my memory.” Hedren says the incident was never mentioned by either of them for the rest of the production.

The situation worsened during the filming of Hitchcock’s next movie, Marnie, in which Hedren took the title role, originally intended for Grace Kelly. Hitchcock’s unwelcome attentions continued, though some cast and crew members felt he had an old man’s hopeless crush on an ingenue, nothing more. Things came to a head when Hitchcock forbade Hedren from traveling to New York to receive a Photoplay award from Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, which infuriated Hedren, and which she interpreted as part of his broader strategy of controlling and possessing her. In the aftermath of this, an ugly encounter occurred between the two that abruptly ended their professional and personal relationship. Hitchcock spoke very rarely about what went on, and when he did his comments were elliptical and evasive. The most he revealed was that Hedren had crossed a red line and “referred to my weight.”

Hedren’s version of events alleges that Hitchcock sexually assaulted her. The first inklings of this story landed in the public consciousness in the early 1980s, in Donald Spoto’s biography of Hitchcock, a book derided by some of Hitchcock’s most faithful collaborators as fanciful and malicious. A further account was published by Spoto in 2009, on which the movie The Girl (2012) was based, enlarging the image of Hitchcock as a sadistic misogynist who deliberately humiliated Hedren to satisfy his lust and assuage his feelings of inadequacy. Then, in 2016, Hedren published her story in her own words. “I’ve never gone into detail about this and I never will,” she writes of what occurred in Hitchcock’s office. “I’ll simply say that he suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly, and I couldn’t have been more shocked and more repulsed.”

Hedren’s book was met with fierce criticism from those who maintain that Hitchcock adored women and prided himself on behaving like a gentleman in their presence. Doubts and questions—of a type very familiar to us from recent controversies—were raised. Why had her story shifted over the years? If Hitchcock had been guilty of sexual assaults, why hadn’t she reported them to the police? How could she have previously spoken glowingly of a man she now claimed had abused her? Factual inaccuracies in Hedren’s account were also highlighted. Hedren contends that Hitchcock was intent on ruining her career as punishment for rejecting him, and she alleges that François Truffaut had wanted to cast her in Fahrenheit 451 but was dissuaded from doing so by Hitchcock. Truffaut’s daughter, Laura, has said this is untrue. John Russell Taylor spoke for many skeptics when he accused Hedren of desperate attention-seeking: “How else is she going to stay in the eye of the public than by coming up with increasingly sensational stories about Hitchcock?”

Hedren’s memoir was published a year before the torrent of allegations against Harvey Weinstein and numerous other powerful media figures catalyzed #MeToo. The sharpened focus provided by that phenomenon impels even those unconvinced by Hedren’s allegations to take heed of the ways in which Hitchcock was known to have behaved around at least some women during his years in the film industry. Brigitte Auber, who played Danielle in To Catch a Thief, valued the friendship she struck up with Hitchcock, somebody she looked to as a kindly mentor. One evening in Paris, after the two had met for dinner, they sat in a car outside the apartment where Auber lived with her boyfriend. Hitchcock lunged at her, kissing her on the lips, though she immediately pulled back, stunned, much as Hedren claims to have done during the filming of The Birds. He was instantly contrite and embarrassed, and attempted to revive their friendship in the coming years, though Auber was unable to see him in the same light ever again. “It was an enormous disappointment for me,” she told biographer Patrick McGilligan. “I had never imagined such a thing. The quality of our relationship was entirely different.” McGilligan rejects the darker characterizations of Hitchcock, yet he acknowledges that the director was “capable of questionable behavior” and claims that Hitchcock “had at least two friendships