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

woodcock from Scotland, beef from Japan, limestone lettuce from Kentucky, and, of course, several bottles of the finest champagne. “It was a meticulously timed event,” recalled Rabwin, remembering how staff at the restaurant shuttled back and forth to collect food from the airport, at tremendous expense. His expenditure on food and drink was vast. In his first year in America, he spent $2,459.30 in restaurants, more than $40,000 in today’s money, and a further thousand dollars each on groceries and liquor.

Knowing how Hitchcock bloomed during the course of a dinner party, Grace Kelly threw one in his honor on their return from filming To Catch a Thief, at which she served the dishes from France that he had most enjoyed. Edith Head, the acclaimed costume designer, thought the gesture revealed a profound similarity between Kelly and her director, both of whose lives were guided by the pursuit of sensory stimulation. “Grace was never THE ACTRESS; she liked acting, and did it well, but it was just another experience; she was a girl who believed in life. She loved beauty, loved prettiness, and wasn’t afraid to tell you so.” Food was also a point of bonding between Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman. “I loved to visit the Hitchcocks,” Bergman said. “Alma was one of the best cooks in the world. I always had second helpings of everything, especially dessert.”

The center of Hitchcock’s gastronomic universe was his home, where he and Alma teamed up to make elegant consumption an immovable part of their daily routine. When Alma unofficially retired from her work on Hitchcock’s movies in the 1950s, she invested her time and creative energies in cooking, something she’d always loved and at which she excelled. She experimented with new recipes, preparing meals for guests or, more commonly, making dinner for Hitchcock and her to share after he came home from the studio. Pat remembers that her father would frequently phone home after lunch to discuss what he could look forward to later that evening; it was over these dinners that Hitchcock would work through script or production problems with his wife. Invariably, the table was beautifully laid, the wine thoughtfully selected. “They took their time,” Pat recalls, “and at the end of the dinner, after a cup of coffee, Hitch stood up, put on an apron, filled the sink with water, sprinkled the soap, and did the dishes.”

In the early 1960s, the Hitchcocks overhauled the kitchen at their Bel Air home to allow Alma a bigger canvas on which to create. The renovations—which apparently cost sixty-five thousand dollars, more than the original cost of the entire house—included the latest and best in terms of kitchen hardware, utensils and gadgets, as well as an enormous walk-in refrigerator-freezer, and a wine cellar that held as many as sixteen hundred bottles, fitting for a man who had recently been awarded the prestigious title of Grand Officer of the Burgundian Order of Tastevin. In his excellent writing about the shifting significance of food to Hitchcock’s public profile, Jan Olsson explains how members of the press were invited to capture this shrine to fine dining in a number of photo-heavy pieces—usually timed to promote a new Hitchcock film—the first being in Look magazine, August 1963. Twenty years earlier, an article like this might have opened with a comment on Hitchcock’s hind quarters, the girth of his belly, or the ruddiness of his cheeks. Instead, the first words quote Hitchcock on the similarities between cooking and filmmaking. “Food, like pure cinema, is putting pieces together to create an emotion. . . . Independently meaningless, together they mean something.” Look presents Hitchcock as front of house, the haughty but humorous maître d’; back of house was Alma, a homely force of creativity who shared with readers two of her recipes, including a dish she called “Terrine à la Hitchcock.” Olsson points out that the Hitchcocks’ rebrand as the neighborhood Francophile sophisticates was well timed, and not only because it mirrored Hitchcock’s emerging reputation as Hollywood’s artiste sans pareil. Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking had been published two years earlier, in 1961, and the first season of her television show The French Chef ran between February and July of 1963, concluding only a month before the publication of the Hitchcock piece in Look. Child’s influence helped demystify “fancy” French food, finding a spot for soufflés and consommés in ordinary American kitchens. This is precisely the way in which the Hitchcocks’ interest in food was covered in the last two decades of their married life. When Pat Hitchcock published a short book about her mother in 2003, she devoted fifty-one pages to Alma’s recipes and menus. It reads like one of Child’s books, albeit with the occasional English treat among the French classics—Yorkshire pudding, pheasant with bread sauce, roast lamb with mint sauce, all Hitchcock favorites.

From the mid-sixties on, the references to Hitchcock’s weight dramatically reduced in the pages of the American news media, or at least they were sublimated into the image of Hitchcock as serious connoisseur, an image he was careful to maintain. In 1966, he sent a disgruntled telegram to a press officer in London, complaining about a letter that had appeared in London Life, a new and very fashionable publication. The offending missive had referred to Hitchcock ordering steak and kidney pudding when it should have been steak and kidney pie. Unhappy that he might appear to be ignorant of the difference, Hitchcock pressed to have a correction issued.

By the seventies, the decade in which America’s “obesity epidemic” began, Hitchcock’s body no longer seemed as unusual as it had at the end of the Great Depression. Surely, his advanced years and stellar reputation had earned him a break from the gossip, innuendo, and ridicule. Nevertheless, the long struggle with his weight had taken its toll. Hitchcock’s final ten years were a slog. He suffered from excruciating pain in his arthritic joints, likely exacerbated by years of supporting so much weight and his fanatical opposition