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

spill over the top of his socks, a tiny detail that conjures an arresting image. However, the issue of his size had become much more than aesthetic: he was experiencing chronic back pain and struggled to get insurance because of his obesity, he had an abdominal hernia (a problem he refused to have corrected until 1956) and, most alarmingly, a heart that was sixteen percent enlarged. His physical health surely contributed to his supposed impotence, too. Pressures to slim began to accumulate. In late 1942, his mother passed away, and in the first week of 1943, he received the news that his brother had also died. Suicide was ultimately found to be the cause of William’s demise, but initially Hitchcock was told that he had succumbed to a heart attack. The shock of those two bereavements—even though he and William were never especially close—could only have sharpened his sense of mortality, especially now that he was forty-three, no longer anyone’s idea of “the boy director.”

The year 1943 proved a turning point for Hitchcock, personally and professionally. A week after William’s death, Shadow of a Doubt was released, a film that Hitchcock had shaped as producer as much as director. Lifeboat followed, and was in many ways the most ambitious project he had undertaken. In between, he lost an enormous amount of weight and would never be so big again. In shedding something of his old self, he birthed another new life of Hitchcock: The Dieter.

Hitchcock remarked that when audiences saw the mocked-up ads for Reduco in Lifeboat, he received numerous inquiries about where this miracle weight-loss treatment could be obtained. The truth, of course, was that Reduco, rather like Lifeboat itself, was a fictional product based on the general flow of real-world events. To lose the pounds, Hitchcock had not turned to a miracle cure but to a course of abnegation, skipping meals and denying himself the treats that gave him such pleasure. His was something of a crash diet, in which he essentially missed breakfast, save for a cup of black coffee, and restricted himself to the same at lunch or, at most, a minute steak (just the one) and a green salad, with something similar for dinner. No space was made in his schedule for exercise of any sort, but he cut out various things he blamed for his rotundity, especially potatoes and his beloved ice cream. His Achilles’ heel was alcohol, as it had been for his father and his brother. Joel McCrea, the star of Foreign Correspondent, said that he saw Hitchcock down a pint of champagne at lunch breaks in 1940. Around the same time, Samson Raphaelson was taken aback by the great quantities of gin and orange Hitchcock got through as they worked on the script of Suspicion. When he wanted to lose weight, Hitchcock was able to cut back on the booze, but he admitted that his taste for it made controlling his weight an uphill struggle. His wife knew it, too, and guests saw him sneaking drinks when he thought Alma wasn’t looking.

The daytime sustenance of coffee and steak remained his default menu for long periods of the rest of his life, though dinner was a different story. Those who lunched with him often felt it was expected of them to follow the ritual. Anthony Shaffer, the screenwriter of Frenzy, grew sluggish after several days of midday steak and suggested that they might try something different the next day. Twenty-four hours later, Shaffer was presented with an extensive array of dishes. Hitchcock was joshing, but perhaps the joke was also meant as a rebuke for what Hitchcock inferred as criticism of his eating habits. Shaffer went back to the daily steak and never mentioned it again.

Hitchcock wasn’t the first or last Hollywood star to deliberately change their body shape, but nobody had publicized it in quite the way he did. Not only did he crowbar the subject of his weight loss into a film about wartime calamity on the high seas (in which the survivors risk dying through thirst and starvation), he also put it into living rooms across the United States in the form of a spread in Life magazine, which comprised a series of photographs before, during, and after his reduction from two hundred and ninety-five pounds to two hundred and thirty-eight pounds over an eight-week period. And, as the text in the article makes clear, the story was to be continued: by time of publication, Hitchcock was down to around two hundred pounds, and his ultimate goal was one hundred and sixty-eight. The photos are very Hitchcockian in their execution. In each shot he poses with his trademark blank expression—one that manages to convey dourness and flamboyance simultaneously—next to a potted plant; as the plant grows in each snap, so Hitchcock shrinks. Aside from being terrifically clever and funny, there’s also a feel of great contemporaneity in these photos; they could be ripped from the pages of a modern supermarket tabloid, or an Instagram story published by a social media influencer. This piece, which was ultimately incorporated into his Lifeboat cameo, was planned months in advance of the film’s release, suggesting that from the time he decided to lose weight, Hitchcock had mulled the publicity opportunities, thinking of how he might use his body to deepen his relationship with the American public.

From then on, Hitchcock incorporated his weight struggle into his public reputation. Nearly five years later, he penned an article about his latest movie, Rope, in which he announced that for his next cameo the “Hitchcock countenance will appear in a neon ‘Reduco’ sign on the side of a miniature building,” seemingly sure that his readers would instantly understand the reference. Until the end of his days, Hitchcock’s weight would hit peaks and troughs; a period of gain would be followed by a spell of self-denial. The fluctuations were spotted by the press, and Hitchcock was available for comment.

As Jan Olsson notes, Hitchcock’s was “one of the most