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

with actresses” turn sour in the mid-1950s in similar fashion, but only Auber was prepared to speak publicly about her experiences. McGilligan also describes Hitchcock’s penchant for groping women and for “thrusting his tongue inside [a woman’s] mouth.”

Hitchcock instructs Tippi Hedren on the set of Marnie.

Despite the protestations of Hitchcock’s ardent defenders, it’s difficult to see why Hedren would have fabricated the entire story, and taken the trouble to keep it alive more than half a century later. Hitchcock spent decades publicizing the pleasure he took in possessing and molding beautiful young women; the fact that many of those women had nothing but good things to say about him—and several of them continue to talk fondly of him to this day—does nothing to mitigate the experiences of others who felt preyed on. Hitchcock alone bears responsibility for his acts of predation, though his behavior was thoroughly facilitated and normalized by the culture within which he lived and worked, one we are only beginning to fully reckon with. Socially awkward, self-absorbed, and sexually frustrated, Hitchcock made passes at and assaults on young women because he failed to control his urges, but also because in the environment he inhabited, men of his standing were afforded license to behave in that way. In Hitchcock’s case, this latitude enabled his pursuit of a fantasy version of himself—the suave, sexually successful alpha male with women in his thrall—in denial of the obnoxiousness or the absurdity of his conduct. Those who were around him in his dotage at Universal were aware of unusual arrangements he had with at least one of his young secretaries, who would disappear into the boss’s office for lengthy spells. One Hitchcock biographer alleges that the woman was shaken by “ugly, intimate demands” of an unspecified nature and left Hitchcock’s employ in distress. Others offer a different perspective. One former colleague, the screenwriter David Freeman, remembers asking her what she was up to behind the closed door; “I’m being erotic for Mr. Hitchcock,” she replied. Precisely what occurred, and what degree of coercion was involved, is probably impossible to prove at this remove. Money may have changed hands, either as a token of affection or as an inducement for silence. When the woman concerned arrived for work in a flashy new car, colleagues drew their own conclusions about how she had managed to pay for it. At least one of her contemporaries believed that she appeared unfazed by the whole thing, and maybe thought it worth the effort considering the remuneration she received.

Perhaps. But even if this more benign version of events is accurate, that for a time this was a known part of Hitchcock’s office routine evinces the huge allowances that were made for his behavior. In the sixties and seventies, he was a living institution at Universal, its third-largest shareholder, and widely regarded as “a god of cinema.” Indulging a peccadillo in the privacy of his oak-paneled office was considered no more than the old boy deserved. “It was a different era,” said David Freeman, a much younger man who wrote Hitchcock’s final script in 1979. “People would keep their mouths shut about it. Certainly the people on the staff. Peggy Robertson ran that company and she knew what was going on and she knew also that no one would benefit from the world knowing this.”

Robertson was indefatigably loyal to Hitchcock the man and the entity, and would hear no criticism of his treatment of women. But from personal experience she knew that powerful men in the movie business had license to indulge themselves. Decades after the event, she recalled starting her career on a film directed by Gabriel Pascal and being horrendously embarrassed by Pascal’s insistence that she sit next to him in restaurants while he fed her. Though it gave the crew “lots of laughs and sighs of relief that they weren’t the ones who were getting fed,” she hated it. “But there was nothing I could do, you know? Who was I, the lowest person there, lower than the clapper boy.”

A longtime friend of Hitchcock’s, Marcella Rabwin, described him as “absolutely charming. He was so sweet. He was so nice. He did everything right.” Yet she also knew he was indulged in various ways because he was considered brilliant: “He was sarcastic and he was cruel and he was many of those things, and we all overlooked it.” Rabwin had experience of other such brilliant and domineering men, having been assistant to David O. Selznick, the “woman’s film” impresario who launched Hitchcock’s career in Hollywood, and who also thrived on controlling and changing actresses. “Every relationship my father had was a Pygmalion relationship,” said Selznick’s son, Daniel, but none more so than with the actress he eventually married, Jennifer Jones. Daniel thinks the filming of the Selznick movie Duel in the Sun was the “apotheosis of David’s fantasy of Jennifer. At one point during the filming, he had her go to some place outside of Tucson and crawl across sharp pebbles so that her knees got completely bloodied. In a hundred and ten degree heat. And she was prepared to do whatever was required.” As the last few years of revelations and reckonings have taught us, this dynamic is not only part of Hollywood’s distant past but its present, too.

If the events of the filming of Marnie have gained piquancy in recent years, the same is true of the movie itself. At the time of its release in 1964, critics were not kind. A reviewer for the Tatler found fault in the principal characters, Sean Connery’s Mark Rutland embodying “the vanity of men,” while Hedren’s “properly cold Marnie left me properly cold, too.” The New York Times was similarly put off by casting and characterization, as well as by the “glaringly fake cardboard backdrops” and an “inexplicably amateurish script.” In the subsequent half-century, the film has undergone an astounding shift in reputation. Today, many critics consider it Hitchcock’s purest work of art, a