Hitch was white as a sheet, and visibly shaking. For a moment I couldn’t make
out whether this was because he was in the grip of barely suppressed fury —
he prided himself on not being able to lose his temper, but that sort of
superficial equanimity always comes at a price — or whether he was merely
anguished. Enlightenment came soon enough.
“What am I going to do? What am I going to do?” he wailed, or as near wailed
as his habitual stentorian enunciation would permit.
“What’s the problem?” I asked innocently. “You know the part of the dodgy
medium (in his last film, Family Plot, which he was then casting)?
Well, they want me to use this girl Li-za Minn-ell-i. And she would be
completely wrong. What am I going to do?” I was so shocked at his attitude
that, without thinking, I blurted out, “You say no. You’re Alfred Hitchcock.
What can they do to you?”
“Oh, you don’t know. Terrible things; they can do terrible things.”
I have often thought about this little scene. After all, what could they have
done to him? Even at 75, he was Alfred Hitchcock, and any company in
Hollywood would have jumped at the chance of having a new Hitchcock film on
their books. But not in his mind: that is the point. For him, at least in
his more paranoid moments, they could have done the most terrible thing of
all: they could have stopped him making films.
One day, after he had finished shooting Family Plot — yes, of course,
with the casting he wanted — I thought of doing back-to-back interviews with
the two senior Hollywood film-makers I knew best, Hitchcock and George
Cukor, on the subject of surviving.
The two men were almost exact contemporaries, both born in 1899, and
temperamentally could hardly have differed more. But on one thing they were
in total agreement: nix on retirement. When I asked Hitch whether he ever
contemplated the possibility of retiring he gave a (this time totally
histrionic) shudder, and said “I think that is the most horrible idea. What
would I do? Sit in a corner and read a book?” But then, though Hitch was
without doubt the film-maker who most successfully played Hollywood at its
own game, making by and large the films he wanted to and convincing
Hollywood studios that this was what they had wanted all along, he was
always the first to say that he was afraid of everyone and everything.
Indeed, the way that he managed deviously through the years to arrange that
life around him was a game played entirely by his rules suggests the
defensive strategy of a timid but cunning man.
Above all, he hated confrontations. It was one of the worst happenings of his
life when Roy Thinnes, fired early in the shooting of Family Plot
from the role of the master kidnapper, actually turned up at Chasen’s, the
Beverly Hills restaurant where the Hitchcocks were dining at their own
personal table, and begged a face-to-face explanation. Another which
permanently marked him was the parting of the ways which came with Tippi
Hedren about halfway through the shooting of Marnie.
He had refused her permission to fly off to New York over the weekend to take
part in a charity event she was involved with, at which she was to receive
an award.
She took this amiss, and then, according to Hitch, “She said something no one
is permitted to say.”
“What did she say? What did she say?” I quizzed him eagerly. “She, um,
referred to my weight” (if that’s how you define calling him a “fat pig” in
front of the assembled crew). Ever after that, on set, it was “Would you ask
Miss Hedren . . ? ” “Would you tell Mr Hitchcock . . ? ” Mention of Hedren
raises of course the vexed question of what, exactly, were Hitch’s relations
with those cool blondes with a sizzle of sexuality beneath the frosty
exterior. This fascinated me when I was working on my biography. Claims put
forward subsequently that the break between Hitch and Hedren was
precipitated by his violently putting the make on her I just did not
believe. I knew Tippi while I was in Los Angeles, and she never even hinted
at anything of the sort but admitted, retrospectively, that what she most
resented, that he was unreasonably possessive, was entirely unconscious on
his part.
But there other, less clear-cut examples. Joan Harrison, for instance.
You would not call Hitch a ladies’ man in any conventional sense, but he
always loved and felt most comfortable in the company of women, and always
in his professional life liked to be surrounded by capable members of the
sex. Joan Harrison was certainly capable: she became the first female
independent producer in Hollywood. She was also exceptionally glamorous, in
the prescribed cool blonde fashion.
She went over to Hollywood with Hitch (and family, of course) in 1939, and was
known shortly after to have had a flaming affair with Clark Gable. She was
widely assumed to be Hitch’s mistress as well. Peggy Robertson, Hitch’s
personal assistant for his last 30 years, told me that when she first
arrived in Hollywood people kept asking her shamelessly if she was to be
Joan’s successor in every sense (nudge, nudge).
Being the forthright, jolly-hockeysticks English lady she was, Peggy went
straight to Hitch and asked if being his mistress like Joan was one of her
duties. Hitch registered shock-horror. “I can safely tell you that I was
never between the sheets with Joan.”
“Well, that’s not saying much,” said Peggy; “What about in the hay, on the
hearthrug, on the kitchen table?” More shock-horror. “Do people really do
things like that?” said Hitch.
A footnote: the subject once came up in conversation with the actor John
Houseman. He was categorical: “I would put my hand in the fire to swear she
was never his mistress. I ought to know, because for some time she was
mine.”
Continued on page 2 ()
People often ask me what Hitch was like as a friend, man-to-man and all that.
I don’t really know: it is not really a concept that springs readily to mind
in relation to Hitch. I can answer only from my own experience.
I do know that he was never deeply friendly with any of his famous stars, even
if, as with Cary Grant and James Stewart, he liked them and worked with them
as often as possible. I should say that he decided immediately whether he
liked you or not, but it was a long process of auditioning, either literally
or metaphorically before he would decide whether he could trust you. This
mattered, because if he gave you his trust, it had to be complete and
unquestioning.
One thing I am sure of: he emphatically did not identify with the heroes of
his own films: Cary Grant was never to him a wishful version of himself.
Indeed, after he told me all about the bad dreams and creative uncertainties
he had while tormenting Tippi Hedren in The Birds, it occurred to me
that it was actually his heroines that he identified with. Which makes him a
masochist rather than the sadist of legend, doesn’t it?
The playwright Rodney Ackland, who worked with Hitch in the 1930s, was at the
time one of the few openly gay men in British cinema, and found that Hitch
was immensely curious about all that. Once, Ackland told me, Hitch confided
coyly: “You know, if I hadn’t met Alma at the right time, I might have been
a poof.”
Chance would be a fine thing, thought Rodney.
From the first, once I had arrived to teach in Los Angeles, I found Hitch a
generous, confiding and very amusing friend, who seemed to want to know as
much about me as I wanted to know about him. Cary Grant told me that he
thought he got on well with Hitch from the first because “at least I knew
what liquorice allsorts were”, and no doubt that applied in my case also.
David O. Selznick, the producer who first brought Hitch to Hollywood under
contract, gradually got to know him personally and wrote to Irene Selznick
in 1939, after spending a social evening with Hitch, that he was “not a bad
guy, shorn of affectation, though not exactly a man to go camping with”.
Well, there’s no arguing with that!
But what of all the tales of his cruelty, and the assumption that anyone
famous, as Hitchcock was, for his practical jokes must be somehow
coarse-grained and brutal? (Even though Hitch’s practical jokes, like
sneaking a horse into Gerald du Maurier’s dressing room to greet him
inexplicably at the interval, are more surreal than anything else.) At least
one thing in my experience of him goes right against the popular judgment.
When I had completed my biography I had to twist his arm even to read the
typescript. When he did, he came up with just one request for omission. It
was the story about his being taught to dance by the father of Edith
Thompson, his favourite English murderess. Whatever for, I asked; it’s such
a wonderfully bizarre idea. He explained that when he had his first job, for
an electric-wire company, there was a company social club at which the young
gentlemen were taught to dance by senior gentlemen, and the young ladies by
senior ladies. (It would have been improper for them to learn with each
other.) The man who taught Hitch, a Mr Graydon, had two daughters, one of
whom worked in the same office, so Hitch knew her well, the other just
around the corner, so Hitch saw quite a lot of her, too. A few years later
the second daughter, now married, became famous as Edith Thompson, the last
woman for many years to be hanged. Years later still Hitch’s sister, like
him a devout Roman Catholic, met the other sister, still Miss Graydon, at
some kind of church function. They became friendly, and the next time Hitch
was in London he was reintroduced to Miss Graydon over the teacups. It
became a little ritual of his sister’s, and the lady started sending him
birthday and Christmas cards.
Now whenever he saw her, said Hitch, he found himself considering. The
connection with a famous murderess never came up, and he presumed this must
be the great secret of her life. “I look into her eyes, and I am sure I can
see her asking: does he or doesn’t he know? Now obviously she is going to
read your book, and if that story is in it she will know for sure that I do.
John, would you want to break an old lady’s heart?”
Who would have expected him to be so solicitous over the wellbeing of someone
he hardly even knew? So, of course, I took it out. But there is a coda.
During the proof stage of the book I got a call from Hitch. “You know that
story? Well, you can put it back in. I just heard that she died.”
Sky Cinema is playing a selection of Hitchcock films throughout April.
