“My father belongs to that hardy group that plays practical jokes as a rough and spirited game,” said Pat Hitchcock in 1963. Some were ingenious and genuinely funny, such as the time he hired an elderly actress—who was in on the joke—to attend one of his dinner parties where she sat silently throughout the meal as Hitchcock pretended not to know who she was or why she had arrived, leaving the other guests bemused. At another dinner party, he arranged for all the food to be colored blue, fish, soup, and all. These are Dadaist jokes; they have no individual target, and no agenda other than to puzzle and confound. When his jokes did pick on a particular person, they were often people he liked or whose approval he sought—very often women—and they could be decidedly cruel. On the set of Rich and Strange, for example, he pranked his friend the actress Elsie Randolph by having her shoot a scene in a phone booth that he slowly filled with steam, knowing that Randolph would panic because of her allergy to smoke. “He was a darling, but a darling with a sadistic sense of humour,” was Randolph’s gracious verdict.
Of course, it’s possible to see this sadism, especially where women are involved, as a further sign of his desire to control and demean. But perhaps it was the outgrowth of a sclerotic masculinity that rendered him emotionally inarticulate to such a degree that pranks and gags were another substitute for intimacy—like a little boy in the playground pulling on a girl’s ponytail. At work, Hitchcock had his films into which he could pour the strong emotions he felt keenly but had no other means of processing. In his day-to-day life, especially in his twenties and thirties, he used humor as a release for these feelings: lust, fear, insecurity, disgust, even anger, that emotion he swore he hardly ever experienced.
As a successful young director, the boy who had grown up as an unusual loner also found himself in the novel position of being a dominant figure in social situations. At times he misused the power this gave him, leading to some awkward and unpleasant encounters. In his memoirs, Charles Bennett related a remarkable story about a time he and Hitchcock went out for the evening with two young ladies, one of whom was a Florence Foster Jenkins type of character who gained notoriety in London for her dreadful singing. Bennett claims that Hitchcock was giddy with the anticipation of slyly mocking her throughout the evening, only to discover that the woman was as sharp as a tack and was more than capable of keeping Hitchcock in his box. “I had never seen Hitch more unhappy,” said Bennett. “The biter was bit.”
Similarly, several contemporaries recall Hitchcock making young, inexperienced, or naive members of his production teams the target of his teasing, sometimes in nasty, unfunny ways. Once he offered to give the unit manager on The 39 Steps, Dickie Beville, a lift to the theater in London where he was due to meet his wife. A little while into the journey, Beville realized that Hitchcock was driving them out of the city altogether, heading to the Hitchcocks’ cottage in Surrey. Beville’s wife was to be stood up. Another, more infamous, story has a few variations, but always involves Hitchcock spiking a crew member’s drink with a laxative and then conspiring to leave him on his own overnight, in handcuffs, in some public place, where the inevitable consequences of the laxative would kick in, leading to the kind of humiliation that Hitchcock himself would have found soul-destroying. Alma, who herself liked a practical joke—she once spiked Hitchcock’s drink with Benzedrine—thought very dimly of her husband’s extreme pranks. “Would any of Hitch’s friends dare to play such jokes on him?” she once asked aloud. “Not if they wanted to remain his friends, they wouldn’t.” As Hitchcock said of himself, “I’m very sensitive; a sharp word . . . hurts me for days.”
Hitchcock relished the power he had to effect discomfort in others, while keeping himself safe from ridicule. Having grown up with a strong sense of vulnerability because of his sense of differentness from those around him—his size and shape, his profile, his solitary nature—and anxious that he would be laughed at because of it, the ability to be the one who made others squirm and feel like outsiders had an intoxicating effect on him. Whether his behavior was sadism or simple teasing, it was ultimately about his desire for control—of his body, his emotions, his reputation—and his fear of losing it.
This unpleasant strand of his joking never entirely left him, but it diminished greatly once he moved to America. The bantering, informal sets over which he presided in London were different from those more professional environments in Hollywood, where he was unable—certainly in the first few years of his American career—to be quite the dominant figure he had been in England. More prosaically, he simply grew out of the rougher, more juvenile stuff as he aged.
Since the details of his nastier jokes have come to light following his death, a lot of those close to Hitchcock have reacted with incredulity that the man’s humor could be construed as anything other than the mischievousness of a cheeky, overgrown schoolboy. His daughter has claimed that sensationalist gossip has bred a false impression that her father was a sadist. She takes particular exception to a story that during the filming of the fairground scenes in Strangers on
