The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

a Train she took a ride on a Ferris wheel that Hitchcock ordered to have stopped at the moment her carriage was at the very top, leaving her hanging in midair for several minutes. She insists the gag lasted for a few fleeting seconds, and she was never screaming with fear, as the misreporting has it. There is no evidence to counter her recollection of the incident, nor any reason to doubt it. Yet the story to which she objects appears to have first surfaced in publicity material written by Warner Bros. and sanctioned by her father. The same is true with several tales of Hitchcock’s humor; a good deal of his reputation as the dark, sadistic joker was directed by himself. Talking about a lifetime of pranking, embarrassing, and compromising people, Hitchcock told an interviewer that “the moment any opportunity occurs, I’m in there. . . . I love hearing or seeing . . . the nice discomfort of the recipient of the joke.” As is the case with his complex relationship with women, his teasing, cruel humor wasn’t an aspect of his personality that was obscured from the public, but was taken in hand and marketed as part of the Hitchcock legend. He knew how it would make him look; he enjoyed the notoriety.

When he came to write his biography of Hitchcock, Patrick McGilligan discovered that one infamous anecdote about Hitchcock’s brutal sadism couldn’t possibly be true. Hitherto, Robert Goold, an old boy of St Ignatius College, had maintained that during his schooldays Hitchcock had been one of two boys who had restrained him, pulled down his trousers, and attached firecrackers to his underwear, terrifying him and very nearly causing him serious and painful injury. But McGilligan’s research showed that the dates didn’t tally; Hitchcock had left St Ignatius before Goold had enrolled. Goold conceded that it must have been a false childhood memory; ironically Hitchcockian, in its way.

Rather than a malicious lie, Goold’s story was likely the fusing of distant recollections with Hitchcock’s predilection for undermining dignity in the name of entertainment. He loved to scare, disturb, and discomfort, and he based his entire career on knowing that, deep down, we yearn for these things, too. As a born entertainer, his mantra was to give the audience what they want—whether they like it or not.

^* The other appeared in Life magazine, July 1942, in which Hitchcock played the part of a bartender in a six-page photo-essay, “Have You Heard?” about the potential deadly cost of wartime gossip.

^† He tried to get a similar sequence into Blackmail, in which two bobbing heads seen in the back windows of a police van would look like a pair of giant eyeballs, shifting from side to side.

10

THE PIONEER

Prominent among Alfred Hitchcock’s enviable talents was his ability to reinvent himself while remaining exactly the same. It was a running joke on his television series, in which he appeared in multiple, unconvincing guises. He was Hitchcock the Pilgrim, Hitchcock the Baby, Hitchcock the Scarecrow—even Hitchcock the Beatle, wearing a mop-top wig for an episode in 1964. No matter how elaborate the costume, there was never any disguising the wearer.

As the fifties drew to a close, he used his education—and the expertise of those around him—in the swiftness and economy of television production to induce the most memorable reinvention of his career, as the maker of horrifying black-and-white slasher flicks. Psycho was a game changer in Hollywood, especially its sparse, expressionist score by Bernard Herr­mann, and George Tomasini’s quick-cut editing, both of which exerted a huge influence on other filmmakers’ work. Having self-financed the production, Hitchcock had also challenged the business model of the old studio system, and made himself a phenomenal profit in the process. In the wider culture, Psycho was not so much a landmark as a lightning bolt. Upon its release, it was derided by establishment critics, who dismissed it as grubby melodrama. Andrew Sarris was one of a younger breed who thought very differently. “Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America,” he wrote in the Village Voice. “Besides making previous horror films look like variations of ‘Pollyanna,’ ‘Psycho’ is overlaid with a richly symbolic commentary on the modern world as a public swamp in which human feelings and passions are flushed down the drain.” At sixty, Hitchcock had made a film that kept pace with the fast-changing expectations of young audiences, those for whom violent dislocation was an increasingly familiar cultural experience.

It would be pleasingly neat if Hitchcock had always intended to follow Psycho with The Birds, a bestial nightmare that evoked the Cold War–era terror of destruction from the skies. In fact, Hitchcock came to The Birds rather belatedly. For a long while, he harbored hopes of getting Audrey Hepburn to play a lawyer-turned-undercover-hooker in No Bail for the Judge, or tempting Grace Kelly, now the Princess consort of Monaco, to take the title role in Marnie, turning Her Serene Highness into a kleptomaniac with a psychosexual disorder—a Hitchcockian act of reinvention if ever there was one. When neither of those worked out, he switched horses and pushed ahead with an adaptation of “The Birds,” a short story by Daphne du Maurier first published in 1952. The action was transposed from du Maurier’s native Cornwall to California, and the story became one of Hitchcock’s trademark tales of a beautiful, independent woman stripped of her poise and dignity, beaten down by terrifying forces she can’t control or comprehend. Around that familiar conceit, Hitchcock arranged a carapace of cutting-edge filmmaking that makes The Birds one of the most influential movies ever made.

As much as Psycho, The Birds is a prime example of Hitchcock as modernist showman, working in the tradition of impresarios and publicists such as Sergei Diaghilev and Edward Bernays, as well as groundbreaking filmmakers. With his use of advanced special effects and sound design, a marketing campaign built around his celebrity, and an attempt to create a movie star out of somebody