The factual basis for many of these childhood yarns is impossible to verify. One might hazard that they are a little too perfectly Hitchcockian to be true, or at least to be taken as the starting pistol for Hitchcock’s career in shadows and suspense. As his parents had taught him, Hitchcock valued neatness in all things. He stated to others that his idea of pure happiness was “a clear horizon. Nothing to worry about on your plate”; maintaining “a tidy mind” was a goal for which he labored daily. The empirical accuracy of these memories, however, is less important than their emotional tone. Hitchcock was telling us that he associated childhood with fear, uncertainty, confusion, and brief moments that change everything.
In a profound sense, Hitchcock thought there was an irreducible part of himself that remained a child all his life. Not only was it, by his reckoning, the basis of his unusual personality, it was also his source of abundant creativity. His inner child, he believed, provided the dominant themes of his work, as well as the rare talent that allowed him to explore those themes on screen with such fluidity and originality. “I believe it’s intuitive to visualize,” he explained, “but as we grow up, we lose that intuition,” though he fancied himself something of an exception: “My mind works more like a baby’s mind does, thinking in pictures.” It’s an inversion of the traditional romantic myth of the child genius. Rather than exhibiting an uncanny adultness as a boy, Hitchcock’s contention was that he maintained childhood qualities that bloomed in adulthood. That he had held on to a childlike nature was evident to many of those who knew him. Russell Maloney of The New Yorker observed that Hitchcock worked with the “mind of an intelligent child who gets angry when his adventure story bogs down midway with talk of love, duty, and other abstractions.” Others noted his juvenile sense of humor that stayed with him even as he entered his eighties. “I was very close to Hitchcock,” said Arthur Laurents, screenwriter of Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). “He was a child, you know, a very black-comedy child.”
In Hitchcock’s remembering, there was no meandering path between his childhood and adulthood, only a straight superhighway. “My wife says my design for living is work,” he said, “which could be true because I planned my life’s work as a child.” The novelists, playwrights, and artists he claimed to have adored as a schoolboy remained crucial influences all through his career; he never divulged an old guilty pleasure, some youthful obsession that he later looked back on with embarrassment. Along with Barrie, Hitchcock named the spy novelist John Buchan and a gamut of middlebrow English authors as the great cultural influences of his youth, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, whom Hitchcock discovered as a sixteen-year-old when he read his biography. It was “the sadness of his life,” one marked by childhood abandonment, that drew him to Poe’s writing. His adolescent reading of Poe’s stories revealed to him a truth on which his whole career was based: that people love—need, perhaps—to be scared in safety. “And, very probably,” he reflected, “it’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films.” Poe’s work also inspired The Avenging Conscience (1914), a film by D. W. Griffith that had a huge impact on Hitchcock when he saw it as a teenager.
Possibly, this was an honest reflection of the person he had always been, someone of unwavering tastes and sensibilities. Aged twenty, he founded and edited Henley’s in-house magazine, the Henley Telegraph, in which he published a series of his own short stories, mainly melodramatic tales with a comical twist that are reminiscent of his later work, including occasional pieces published under his name in popular fiction magazines. His childhood fascination with timetables, maps, and machines stayed with him, too. In scripting sessions in the 1970s, the final decade of his life, he induced exasperation and amusement in his writers when he would obsess over some seemingly trivial detail to do with the San Francisco Bay Area Transit system, the distance between London landmarks, or at which remote Finnish train station a scene should be filmed.
Hitchcock as a jailbird baby, in Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Ironically, though he attributed his facility as a filmmaker to the little boy within, in his years of greatest fame he presented himself as the type of person one couldn’t imagine ever being young. When, as an adult, he encountered children, he often failed to make allowance for their age, as though he had no conception of the ways in which they might have differed from grown-ups. Some of those who visited Hitchcock and his wife at their home noted that their little girl, Pat, was treated as an adult rather than a child, and there are several stories of him doing the same with children who appeared in his films. One day during the making of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring Doris Day and James Stewart, a colleague gave it to him straight: “Your problem, Hitch, is you don’t know how to direct children. You use the same language with Chris [Olsen, a child actor] you use when you’re talking to Jimmy, Doris, or any adult.” In conference on the script for The Birds—Hitchcock’s famous film about a sedate Californian community suddenly besieged by flocks of vicious birds—Hitchcock questioned whether it was realistic for Cathy, the daughter of the Brenner family, to hug Tippi Hedren’s character when thanking her for a birthday gift. “I really don’t know much about their behavior. Do they really fling themselves into people’s arms?” he asked, sounding as though he were talking about some exotic species he’d only ever witnessed from afar, despite at this point being a proud grandfather of three young girls.
If he did feel distant from children, and experienced some discomfort when looking
