Genetics or learned behavior might explain the derivation of his worrisome nature, which sounds a lot like what clinicians now speak of as generalized anxiety disorder. His father, William, seemed to relax only at the theater, Hitchcock recalled. “I think he worried a lot. Selling produce that can spoil in a day must be nerve-wracking.” Typical of Hitchcock to find melodramatic edge in the life cycle of a pilchard; even the experience of selling fish, fruit, and vegetables crackled with suspense.
In general, however, Hitchcock preferred an explanation that was simultaneously more pat and more spectacular, attributing his anxieties to the impact of specific moments in his childhood of which he had patchy, but powerful, memories. Principally, these were emotional recollections, strikingly vivid snapshots of unusual moments, which he wheeled out as set pieces over the decades. The best known of these stories is what we might call Hitchcock’s genesis myth, the moment he supposedly acquired his fears of authority, abandonment, and the contradictory horrors of guilt and arbitrary injustice—all the unruly emotions that surge through his most famous work. “I must have been about four or five years old,” he told his fellow film director François Truffaut. “My father sent me to the police station with a note. The chief of police read it and locked me in a cell for five or ten minutes, saying, ‘This is what we do to naughty boys.’ ” John Russell Taylor, Hitchcock’s authorized biographer, stated that Hitchcock’s sister, Nellie, confirmed the story was true, but he never directly quoted her version of events.
Certain discrepancies in the story’s various retellings encourage one to wonder whether the incident was as fresh in Hitchcock’s mind as he claimed. Usually, he said he had been five or six years old at the time, but to Truffaut he suggested that he could have been as young as four, and to the journalist Oriana Fallaci he remembered being eleven. To an Australian newspaper he said, “I’m told I was frightened by a policeman as a small boy, so maybe that’s why I like thrills.” Perhaps, then, this was a memory inherited from relatives who spoke about the incident, and which his imagination had given form to retrospectively—entirely plausible for one with such a vivid and eventful interior life. Sometimes he claimed to have no clue what infraction had triggered his custodial sentence. Other times he speculated it was because he had followed the tram tracks from his home—captivated, as always, by the adventure and romance of travel—but come sunset, he’d been unable to find his way home in the dark. That his father should respond to the return of a missing child by having him put in prison—albeit briefly—seems astonishing, though surely not a sign of uncaring cruelty. Hitchcock once joked that his father had been riled at having to delay his dinner, before adding, “perhaps he was angry because he was worried about me.” If true, it’s redolent of the way a middle-aged Hitchcock responded to a similar situation, more than forty years later, when his wife was late for dinner because of heavy traffic she encountered after a Sunday outing with Anne Baxter, the leading lady in Hitchcock’s film I Confess (1953). “There he was, sitting like Jove, furious at us,” remembered Baxter of the angry, stressed man they discovered on their return. “He didn’t forgive me for that dinner delay for a long time.”
Other, similar stories of childhood trauma became pillars of Hitchcock lore. One time he apparently woke to find his parents out of the house, gone for a walk or to the pub, sending young Alfred into a dread that he had been abandoned. Again, the adult Hitchcock supplied an intense sensory memory: standing alone in the dark of the kitchen, weeping, he pushed slices of cold meat into his mouth in a vain attempt at self-comfort until his mother and father returned. In rehearsing the story in public, he said the episode had instilled in him a fear of the dark (tricky for a man head over heels in love with the cinema) and an unconquerable dislike of cold cuts. In another of his favorite origin stories, he explained that his passion for scaring audiences began before he could walk or talk, when his mother leaned over his cot and said, “Boo!” This one wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. It was a neat way of explaining that enjoyment of fear is hardwired into the human brain, and that none of us ever truly ceases to be the mewling infant in the cradle. These were the operating principles of his life in film.
Talk-show hosts and newspaper journalists never tired of giving Hitchcock an opportunity to tell these anecdotes, and Hollywood publicists made sure they were written into his official biographies when materials were sent to press around the release of a latest film. It was as though each new picture was a reliving of Hitchcock’s childhood, another chance to paint with the camera the fear that first flowered in the belly of the boy he used to be. Paul Cézanne had Mont Sainte-Victoire to return to time and again; Hitchcock had the dark interior of
