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

paid vastly more attention to female clothing than male. Even so, he understood the power that clothes had to frame a man’s identity—as one might expect of someone who had Liberace’s costumier make his suits. One of those playing alongside Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest was Martin Landau in his first screen role, as Leonard, the dandyish sidekick of James Mason’s villain, Phillip Vandamm. Hitchcock thought it important that Leonard be dressed almost identically to Cary Grant’s character, so he arranged for Grant’s tailor, Quintino, to make Landau’s wardrobe. In Chicago, Landau was summoned by Hitchcock to LaSalle Street Station, where he was filming a scene with Cary Grant. “Martin, put on one of the suits you are going to use in the movie—I’d like to see it being worn in the surroundings.” That he requested to see Landau wearing the suit on location before filming is a sign of Hitchcock’s dedication to clothing, but also of his teasing sense of humor. He guessed that Grant would not be impressed to see a supporting cast member—one who had never even been in a movie—wearing suits made by his tailor, cut identically to his own. On location, somebody approached Landau: “Excuse me, Mr. Landau, but Mr. Grant wants to know where you got that suit.” When Landau replied that it came from the Universal costume department, he was told, “Mr. Grant says that’s impossible.” Apparently, Grant could tell just by looking exactly who had tailored Landau’s suit, and he was not pleased about it.

Grant needn’t have worried. The suit he wore for virtually the entire movie has passed into dandy folklore. In 2006, GQ magazine voted it the best man’s suit in Hollywood history. “North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant,” writes Todd McEwen, “it’s about what happens to his suit.” Dragged thousands of miles across the country, it takes a beating but never needs more than a light sponging to restore it to its crisp, elegant best. McEwen wonders whether making Grant look scruffy was the only atrocity Hitchcock would refuse to commit on film: “it would be too traumatic to see this suit getting totaled, that would be way beyond Hitchcock’s level of sadism.” A decade after North by Northwest, Grant gave GQ his thoughts on how to dress well, while protesting, with blatant false modesty, that he wasn’t at all well dressed and barely had any interest in clothes. He insisted he had never “gone to any special trouble to acquire clothes that could be regarded as noticeably fashionable or up-to-date . . . simplicity, to me, has always been the essence of good taste.” An entirely Hitchcockian sentiment. Edith Head noted a similarity between Grant and Hitchcock’s instinctive feel for color, too. In preproduction for To Catch a Thief, Grant planned a color scheme for his own costumes around the plans Head and Hitchcock had made for Grace Kelly. “She’s wearing a pale blue bathing suit for the beach scene? Good, I’ll wear plaid shorts. She’s wearing a gray dress? How would it be if I wear a dark jacket and gray slacks?” Hitchcock was happy to allow Grant to dress as he chose; some believe that his leading man embodied Hitchcock’s fantasy version of himself. He once described Grant as “the only actor I ever loved.” Grant agreed that something special existed between his director and him, “a rapport and understanding deeper than words,” which manifested itself in their shared tastes, manners, and sensibilities.

“Perfection of its own kind.” Hitchcock with Cary Grant during the filming of North by Northwest.

One might say that Grant became an avatar for an inner Hitchcock that could not be outwardly expressed. He had a body shape that fit the dandy ideal—slim, long-limbed, with a broad chest and shoulders—and also expressed a confidence in his looks that was entirely alien to Hitchcock. In both To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest a fifty-something Grant was happy to film scenes in various states of undress. Baring his mahogany-tanned body in the beach scenes of To Catch a Thief, Grant displayed more naked flesh than any star in any Hitchcock film.‡ Hitchcock expressed a career-long aversion to making films that starred middle-aged men. He cited this as the reason why he never made a film of the Dr. Crippen story, and why he stopped casting James Stewart after Vertigo. But the rule didn’t apply to Cary Grant, whom Hitchcock seemed to look on as entirely unique, ageless, and timeless. Enviably handsome and youthful though he was, Grant clearly looks older than the thirty-odd years he’s meant to be in North by Northwest, and on first viewing it can be confusing to see him referring to Jessie Royce Landis as “Mother,” when they look more like brother and sister. Hitchcock never lost faith in Grant’s ability to defy the aging process, and hoped to cast him as the leading man of future films, too. As late as 1979, long after Grant’s retirement, Hitchcock wrote to him asking whether he might “have the privilege of photographing you again one day, because you can be, you know.”

The importance of clothes on a Hitchcock production strayed beyond the gaze of the camera. Male technicians who arrived on set wearing short-sleeved shirts, or—heaven forbid—lacking a tie, would receive a message that such slovenliness was not permitted. The same applied to writers, though Hitchcock would rarely brave the subject himself, it being a little too close to confrontation for his liking. At the end of Evan Hunter’s first day on The Birds, Peggy Robertson appeared at his side in the parking lot. “Hitch thinks it might be better if you didn’t dress for work quite so casually.” Either an urgent conversation had been had the moment Hunter exited the boss’s office, or Robertson, expert Hitchcock whisperer that she was, had intuited the situation. Either way, the next morning Hitchcock was pleased to see Hunter had left his sports jacket at home