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

Despite anything he may have said to the contrary, his size and shape very obviously marked him out from the crowd in England. The birdlike Alma was always worried about his weight, and periodically went on his diets with him, a sign of the love and dedication she invested in all things Hitchcock. “He is much too heavy,” she said in 1972. “He tries to diet now and again, but it is awfully hard for him. He does so love ice-cream.” In 1917, his exemption from military service was possibly on the grounds of his obesity, which must have been a source of simultaneous relief and embarrassment in an environment of nationalist fervor when all young men were expected to prove their masculine worth. Any sense of estrangement would have been even more marked in the 1920s, when slimness for both men and women became the ideal as never before. In the artistic world of Weimar Germany, where Hitchcock began his directing career, the slim line was revered. Even the monsters in German cinema were tall and slender. The shadow cast on the wall by the creeping figure of Nosferatu, an image to which Hitchcock referred so often in his own work, stretches up, not out; his limbs are as long and spindly as Hitchcock’s were short and stubby. If Hitchcock felt he was a thin man trapped inside a fat man’s body, he may also have felt like a twentieth-century man trapped in a nineteenth-century shell.

In day-to-day life, rather than a modern machine that powered him forward, Hitchcock experienced his body as an anchor. In 1938, a short report appeared in London’s Daily Herald about a cricket match he played in, presumably for a team representing Shamley Green, the Surrey village where the Hitchcocks had a cottage. The journalist was struck by Hitchcock’s imperious demeanor on the pitch, noting that he bowled the ball with a languorous underarm action, “feet planted firmly on the ground, from which position he did not move. The ball was brought back to him by hand.” Aside from the incongruous image of Hitchcock decked out in white flannel on a sports field, this is instantly recognizable as the Alfred Hitchcock of Hollywood fame, rooted to the spot, haughty and immobile as others buzz around him. It sounds remarkably similar to descriptions of him in other situations requiring some degree of physical exertion. He and Alma spent many Christmases in St. Moritz, where Hitchcock contented himself with watching others having fun in the snow. “Hitch insists on getting into ski pants,” explained Alma, “which takes him about an hour, and then he sits on the porch smoking the whole time!” The writer Whitfield Cook recalled going to a nightclub in Los Angeles with the Hitchcocks and Grace Kelly. “I danced with Grace and Alma . . . Hitch just sat and watched.” Others remembered Hitchcock’s tendency to arrive at a party, plant himself in one spot, and wait for others to approach him. In all those settings Hitchcock developed a particular social style to accommodate his weight, one of nonchalant mastery in which ordinary folk flitted this way and that while he stood—or sat—like a lone molecule of calm.

In the first few years as a director, before he became heavily obese, he had been keen to present himself as a rather dynamic figure, braving exotic locations, being loud and busy in the studio. From the mid-1930s, when his weight rose as high as three hundred pounds, his style changed to the point where he was routinely observed to be looking inert, or downright bored by the whole business of filming, even falling asleep during takes, a habit he eventually developed at dinner, too. “He does not deliver a mass of instructions in a loud voice and he does not rush from one part of the set to another,” reported one journalist who had been granted access to the set of The 39 Steps. “It is hard to tell whether he is annoyed or not. . . . He is a mystery to most.” A decade later, a journalist for Good Housekeeping encountered a relatively slim Hitchcock, yet still made note of his size, shape, and mobility as he contrasted the physicality of the director and Ben Hecht during the story conferences for Notorious. While Hecht would pace about or “sprawl artistically on the floor,” Hitchcock, “a 192 pound Buddha (reduced from 295) would sit primly on a straight-back chair, his hands clasped across his midriff, his round button eyes gleaming.”

The turn against Victorian plumpness was arguably even more dramatic in America than it was in western Europe. In the late 1890s, Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations of the so-called Gibson Girl captured a picture of willowy beauty that would influence representations of female perfection for the next hundred years or more. Male bodies were also reshaped—metaphorically and literally—by the example of the heavyweight world champion James Corbett, and by Bernarr Macfadden, the father of bodybuilding. By 1920, the eradication of fatness had become a lucrative industry and something of a moral crusade. If people know one thing about William Howard Taft, president between 1909 and 1913, it’s probably the humiliating story of the time his three-hundred-pound naked body got wedged in the White House bathtub. The tale is almost certainly untrue, but it has persisted because it allows us to mock the man for his weight. In the entertainment world, the public censure of fat was obvious. In 1909, Lillian Russell, once celebrated for her voluptuousness, gave interviews on how she fought the flab, revealing the details of her calorie-burning morning workout. When the German soprano Olive Fremstad made her feted debut in New York, critics praised her voice but ridiculed her size and shape. A few years later, another soprano, the Italian Luisa Tetrazzini, spoke of her surprise at how much attention American journalists paid to the weight and appearance