Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock

By John Russell Taylor

This biography of Alfred Hitchcock is as intriguing, revealing, perverse, and entertaining as any of his classic films.

'The best book yet about the movies' most famous director' Publisher's Weekly
'No one will ever top Hitch' Jimmy Stewart

One of cinema's greatest directors, a virtuoso visual artist, and a genius of the suspense genre, Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) is universally known for such masterpieces as Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds.

But he was also a famously difficult and complex man, prone to arguing with studios and stars alike. In writing this biography, John Russell Taylor, a distinguished film critic and friend of Hitchcock's, enjoyed his full cooperation. Based on numerous interviews, with photos from the private family albums, and an in-depth study of the making of his last film, this biography of the director is as intriguing, revealing, perverse, and entertaining as any Hitchcock classic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781448211616

Book preview

Part One

England

Chapter One

In 1899 the London borough of Leytonstone was not a borough, and was not even in London. Somewhere out there in the indeterminate east, near the Wanstead marshes, it was just shaking itself out of its traditional condition as a sleepy Essex village and receiving the dubious benefits of strip development along the main road from London to the North Sea packet-boats which docked at Harwich. Fifteen years earlier, at about the time when William Hitchcock, master greengrocer, was setting up his wholesale and retail fruiterers business in a modest London stock-brick shop with living quarters above at 517 the High Road, the area seems to have been noted mainly as the most convenient point to alight from the train for East Londoners on pleasure bent in the woody wilderness of Epping Forest. The maps show open spaces all round—Epping Forest, Wanstead Park, Leyton Flats, the Great Shrubbage—and, slightly less alluring, Bethnal Green Workhouse Schools, a large infant orphan asylum, and the new City of London Cemetery, placed there no doubt because land was still readily available before the tide of lower-income housing covered it all in brick and mortar, and the area still offered fresh country air to the orphans and workhouse children from London’s teeming East End.

In any case, it was a good place for an enterprising young tradesman to be in the 1880s. The population was soaring, and covered a whole social spectrum, from the old Essex gentry and the prosperous middle-class inhabitants of Walthamstow and Epping to the newly arrived workers spreading out from neighbouring East Ham and Leyton. The wholesale side of William Hitchcock’s business covered a considerable area, supplying small local shops and general stores with fruit and vegetables; the retail side also flourished, to such an extent that he rapidly took over another shop on the other side of Leytonstone High Road. His three brothers were all fishmongers, and as he continued to expand, persuaded him to join them in the fish shops as well, building up finally a chain which extended all over South London, to become one of the major elements of the giant 1930s combine Mac Fisheries. In the 1890s, though, most of this was still in the future. In 1890 William started a family with a son, William, followed in 1892 by a daughter, Nellie, and then, seven years later, his third and last child, Alfred Joseph, born on 13 August 1899.

It was, as things turned out, rather a good year for English show business. Two other notables in particular sprang from the same sort of solid, respectable lower-middle-class background: Charles Laughton, born six weeks earlier in Scarborough, Yorkshire, and Nöel Coward, born four months later about as far west of London, in Teddington, as Alfred Hitchcock was born east of it, in Leytonstone. Both offer, in their careers and personalities, a number of curious parallels and contrasts. Coward seems at first glance remote from Hitchcock, but their unpredictable mixtures of sentimentality and cynicism, their fierce English patriotism combined with easy cosmopolitanism, their extreme social mobility and command in many areas of society other than that in which they originated, their ability to create their own fantasy worlds and impose them without question on the public, all indicate an improbable similarity. Laughton, great if unpredictable actor, rotund like an overgrown baby, cynic and sensualist, actually crossed paths with Hitchcock professionally on a couple of occasions, and had one even more important attribute in common with him than had Coward: he was born and brought up a Roman Catholic.

For the Hitchcock family were that relative rarity in their class and with their background, long-standing English Catholics. In the East End of London, a melting-pot of nationalities, there was at that time and since a considerable Catholic population of, mostly, recent Irish extraction. And there were still pockets of the old Catholic gentry surviving not too far away, in East Anglia. Also there were in more intellectual circles a number of converts swept in by the great Catholic revival of the mid-nineteenth century, the period of Newman and Manning. But the Hitchcocks did not belong to any of these groups. No record seems to have survived of how and why they were Catholic—all members of the family now know is that they always seem to have been, and so stood slightly apart from their neighbours and peers, who tended to be Church of England or, if they began as Nonconformists, shifted allegiance to the Established Church as they moved up in the world. And religion was important in the family; the parents were devout, regular churchgoers and very strict with the children, who had to go every week some miles down the road to Sunday school at St. Francis, Stratford, had to make regular confession and received an almost entirely Catholic schooling. Latterly, the parents seem to have drifted from such strict devotion, but this was the rather severe, restrictive and self-consciously special atmosphere, of a family apart, keeping itself very much to itself, into which Alfred Hitchcock was born.

He seems to have been a rather solitary child. The baby of the family, seven years younger than his sister, he did not have much to do with his brother and sister at that time, since in childhood seven years seems like an unbridgeable abyss. Occasionally a childlike resentment at being left out made itself felt. On one occasion they were going off for a bicycle ride to the near-by Green Man public house and explained to him firmly that he could not come because he was too young to ride a bicycle and would fall off. He countered with the notion that this merely demonstrated the silliness of bicycles—if they had three wheels nobody would fall off. It was only later he discovered that such a thing as a tricycle did exist, and congratulated himself on having worked out the idea entirely on his own through the functioning of natural logic.

If he was left out of some of the pleasures, he was also fortunately excused some of the less comfortable duties. On Sundays after mass William and Nellie had to lend a hand minding the second shop over the road, but Alfred was never allowed to work in the shop. Despite which his very earliest memories are connected with the business. Right behind the house were the ripening sheds, and a vivid early impression is the scene inside them: with the great bunches of bananas ripening by the warmth of gas flares, the sight and the smell and the distinctive hiss. When he was a little older he was allowed to go out with the deliveries of fruit and vegetables to grocers all over the Epping area, often a whole day round by horse-drawn van. Another process which fascinated him was the husking of walnuts, which used to come into the shop still in their fleshy green outer coats and be husked ready for sale by the shop workers.

But not all memories are so happy. One that sounds like a perfect ‘Rosebud’ story—could this be the key to so much wariness, so much silent watchfulness in later life?—is that when he was about five he woke up late one Christmas Eve to see his mother taking a couple of toys out of his stocking to put in his brother’s or his sister’s, and replacing them with two oranges. Another, which made an unaccountably profound impression on him, was waking up around eight o’clock one Sunday evening to find that his parents were out and there was only the maid watching over him in his room. This produced such a feeling of desolation and abandonment that he still remembered it when he got married, and insisted that there should always be a hot meal at home on Sunday evening and that he and his wife should be as far as possible always within call of their daughter at this vulnerable period of her childhood. Then there is the famous story of his brief sojourn in a police cell. According to the classic version, when Hitchcock was five or six, in punishment for some minor transgression (and it must have been very minor, since by all accounts the young Alfred, called by his father a ‘little lamb without a spot’, was almost unnaturally quiet and well-behaved), he was sent down to the police station with a note. The officer in charge read it and then locked him in a cell for five minutes, saying, ‘This is what we do to naughty boys.’ The story is so convenient, accounting as it does for Hitchcock’s renowned fear of the police, the angst connected with arrest and confinement in his films, that one might suspect it of being in the ben trovato category. And probably Hitchcock has told the story so often he is not sure himself any more if it is true. But his sister insists that it actually did happen.

The incident suggests that William Hitchcock was a stern father. People who knew him say that he seemed to be fundamentally a kindly, rather emotional man who felt some mysterious necessity to keep his emotions under constant restraint, with the result that he suffered from various naggingly painful conditions of apparently nervous origin, like boils and carbuncles. He kept a careful eye on his children’s moral well-being, to the extent even of ordering them home at what they felt to be an unreasonably early hour from perfectly respectable evening entertainments, and sitting up to make sure that Nellie kept the hours he prescribed even when she had only been to a staid dance at the Town Hall in the sober company of her brother Alfred. At the same time, he would shield his children very indulgently from the effects of the outside world. Alfred attended briefly a convent school run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus ‘for the daughters of gentlemen and little boys’, as the black-and-gold sign outside proudly stated, and even more briefly the primary school which had been built in 1893 immediately behind the Hitchcocks’ house. Here he was protected by the presence of the ‘paper boy’ from the shop, who was paid a shilling a week for services which included taking on himself any punishment Alfred became liable for at school. But Father Flanagan came and gave his parents hell for sending him to a secular school at all, and instead he was sent off at the age of nine or so as a boarder at the Salesian College in Battersea.

He did not stay long there either. At the beginning of term his mother packed him a tuck-box containing among other things some long-back bacon and pre-fried fillet of Dover sole. When he had been there a week or so his father came to visit him on Sunday after mass, and enquired what he had had for lunch. Oh, answered the child lugubriously, cold fillet of sole from his tuck-box. His father was so incensed at this that he vanished, white-faced, to see the headmaster and by three that afternoon Alfred was out of the school, collected by his brother and sister, never to return. Probably just as well, since the only other thing he can remember about it is that the good fathers believed so fervently in purging as the cure for all ills, physical and moral, that all the boys in the school were simultaneously given a strong dose of laxative with their evening tea, with the inevitable rather messy results.

The discipline at Alfred’s next school, St. Ignatius College, Stamford Hill, where he remained until the age of fourteen, was no less strict, but rather more sensibly applied. The Jesuits were noted at that time for their fierceness in corporal punishment, which was carried out with ritual formality, generally with a cane made of hard rubber. The refinement of the punishment, however, was psychological. Once the errant child was sentenced to corporal punishment, he could choose for himself when it should be administered—first morning break, lunchtime, mid-afternoon or the end of the day. Naturally the child put off the fateful moment as long as possible, sweating all day. And when it did arrive there was again a ritual to be gone through: the strokes on the hand were given three at a time, because the hand became too numb to feel a fourth, and the most that could be given in one day were six, three on each hand, so that if the offence was so grave as to merit twelve strokes the whole process had to be repeated the following day. Hitchcock, who still seems to have been a very quiet boy, can hardly have come in very often, if at all, for this ultimate deterrent, but recalls that the horror of it, ‘like going to the gallows’, marked his life, creating an almost morbid revulsion from any sort of behaviour which was or might be construed as evil: if you were a good boy, you not only kept out of danger of hellfire, but also stood a better chance of not being subjected to high-handed and ferocious physical discipline, as unpredictable as the wrath of God itself (’Unpredictability’, says Enid Bagnold; ‘it’s the essence of authority’). Hitchcock also, in this connection, learned one lasting lesson in understatement: one day his favourite priest summoned him in for punishment, looked at him sadly and said, ‘This isn’t nice, is it?’ Alfred said dutifully, ‘No, Father,’ and the priest just allowed the strap to fall gently on his hand. A symbol, but a telling symbol, all the more effective for avoiding the obvious, direct gesture—much as Hitchcock has chosen to do in his own mature movies.

St. Ignatius was, this time a day school, and Hitchcock seems to have led an unobtrusive, not in any way very remarkable life there. He had his moments of obtrusiveness, however. He had been a regular altar boy for some time, but prompted by ‘a childish desire to be a ceremonial figure’, he envied the two principal acolytes who carried the big candlesticks. One day he begged the head acolyte to let him do this. ‘What will you give me?’ asked the boy. ‘Got any Sexton Blakes?’ He had never come into direct contact with Sexton Blake—even in detection his tastes were a cut above that. But he went out and bought ten or a dozen Sexton Blake stories to bribe the master of ceremonies and get his way. The trouble was, he did not realize until the moment came that he did not know the necessary responses to the priest. There was an awful silence, then he saw the priest irritably motion the head acolyte to get him off the scene, like a music-hall turn that had outstayed its welcome, and that was the end of his moment in the limelight.

Understandably, he preferred in general to keep a low profile, to watch rather than actually join in games whenever they could be avoided. Nor was he very noticeable academically, remaining safely neither top nor bottom of his class—his best subject being geography. Here too he tended to be solitary, more given to observation than participation, and pursuing his own slightly eccentric private interests whenever he could. He became fascinated, for example, by the London omnibus system, collected maps and timetables, and eventually realized his ambition of travelling every yard of the London General Omnibus Company’s routes. By the age of sixteen he knew the geography of New York by heart from maps; his favourite reading was railway timetables and Cooks’ travel folders, and he prided himself on being able to recite from memory all the stops on the Orient Express.

At this time he did not appear to have any strong artistic interests, though in tune with his particular interest in geography he enjoyed drawing maps, real and imaginary. He invented for himself games with ship routes on maps of the world, marking them out with coloured pins and planning imaginary journeys—always by himself, for he recalls no playmate to share his childish enthusiasms. Indeed, there is no escaping a feeling that there was something curiously desolate about Hitchcock’s childhood. It does not seem to have been particularly unhappy, but all his memories are of being alone (though by choice, it seems), separated by age from his brother and sister, curiously distant from his parents because they, for all their evident concern over their youngest child, obviously had difficulty in expressing their emotions, frightened of his teachers, the police, authority figures of all sorts. It is not for nothing that the characteristic subject of his art, often taken to be suspense, is more accurately anxiety. He himself admits, even as an adult, to endless irrational anxieties, such as a terror of getting into trouble with the police so intense that he has scarcely driven a car since his arrival in America and on one occasion had a prolonged anxiety spasm as a result of merely throwing a cigar butt that might not have been totally extinguished out of a car during a drive to northern California. The story of his token incarceration by the police seems to be no joke, and it is difficult not to see the origin of much in the mature man’s character—deviousness, shyness, impassivity, insistence on total control of his environment and all possible circumstances of his existence, personal and professional—as lying somewhere in the plump, secretive, watchful child, convinced that if he stepped out of line in any way, if he revealed anything of what he thought and felt, betrayed his emotions to anyone else, THEY (the harsh, rationalistic, disapproving ‘they’ of Edward Lear’s nonsense poems) would somehow come and get him. As Norman Bates says at the end of Psycho, ‘I want just to sit here and be quiet just in case they suspect me. They are probably watching me—well, let them. Let them see what kind of person I am—not even going to swat that fly.’

And as Hitchcock moved into his teens things hardly seem to have changed very much. There are no records of friends at school. Cardinal Heenan says he was in the same class at St. Ignatius, but Hitchcock cannot recall him; Hugh Gray, eventual translator of André Bazin’s cinema essays, was also in the same class. Hitchcock seems to have been abnormally sensitive and retiring, and describes himself as a ‘particularly unattractive youth’. Girls too figured not at all in his life: when he met his wife-to-be in his early twenties he had never been out with a girl other than his sister, and it is probably not stretching fantasy too far to guess at the first hint of how he latterly delighted to treat the cool, remote-seeming blond heroines of his films in the resentful dreams of a plain, pudgy fourteen-year-old watching some evidently unattainable blond girl near home or school and thinking, ‘If only I had her in my power, just for a few moments …’

Whether this is true or not, being away from home at a very strict boarding school, he did not see so much of his parents or have much chance to spread himself on his own interests out of school hours. Two maiden cousins, Mary and Teresa, seem to have taken a particular interest in the boy, and encouraged him to strike out on his own: at least there never seems to have been any idea of his going into the family business. In 1914 his father died. He was called from school and told the news by his brother, who took over the business; he then went over to his sister’s and remembers her greeting him by saying almost aggressively to him, ‘Your father’s dead, you know,’ giving him a surreal sense of dissociation. Shortly afterwards, at the age of fourteen, he left school; he was asked what he wanted to do and answered, for want of anything better to say, that he was interested in engineering. On the strength of this he was put to study at the School of Engineering and Navigation, where engineering drawing, drafting, and making working drawings of machines like the globe valve were an important part of the curriculum: draughtsmanship certainly, but nothing in the slightest artistic.

After a short period of specialized training there, Alfred took his first job, as a technical clerk at the W. T. Henley Telegraph Company, a firm which manufactured electric cable. The 1914-18 War did not impinge much on him. One air raid left him with a vivid memory of going into his mother’s room at home in Leytonstone to see if she was all right: ‘The whole house was in an uproar, but there was my poor Elsa-Maxwell-plump little mother struggling to get into her bloomers, always putting both her legs through the same opening, and saying her prayers, while outside the window shrapnel was bursting around a search-lit Zeppelin—extraordinary image!’ The detail of the bloomers he recalled years later and slipped into the opening sequence of his sound thriller Murder. In 1917 he had his Army medical, but was classified C3 and excused service. He enlisted instead in a volunteer corps of the Royal Engineers; they used to meet in the evenings at the Inns of Court Hotel in Holborn Viaduct to receive theoretical training in laying charges and the like, and once took part in practical exercises in Hyde Park. He went with another lad from Henleys, feeling a sorry sight because he could never get his puttees wound properly and they kept falling round his ankles, so they buried their sorrows in a lunch at Lyons’ Marble Arch Corner House.

At this period he possibly had some scientific leanings—at any rate he must have had some reason for saying he wanted to be an engineer. But artistic interests also began to make themselves felt. His parents had been enthusiastic theatregoers, and he picked up the habit from them, becoming a regular (and usually solitary) attender of first nights up in the gallery, while among his favourite reading were the small paperbound volumes of Dodds’ Penny Plays. The cinema he found for himself, went as often as he could to see anything he could, and from about the age of sixteen began buying all the film magazines he could lay his hands on, though, as befitted a serious lad, only the trade and technical magazines, not the fans. He had also discovered an interest in and a certain talent for drawing, and chose to supplement his training in mechanical draughtsmanship with a course at London University, taught by a distinguished book illustrator of the period, E. J. Sullivan. There students were taught the rudiments of drawing from life, being given projects such as to sit in a London railway station with a sketch pad and draw faces, attitudes, clothing. They were also given an outline course in the history of black-and-white illustration, which nourished Hitch’s lifelong enthusiasm for the great English magazine illustrators and cartoonists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This spare-time interest did not go unappreciated at Henleys, an old-fashioned, rather paternalistic firm very keen on social activities for their employees. The young Alfred, as he made his way up in the world from technical clerk to estimating clerk, also drew caricatures of his colleagues for the firm’s house magazine and contributed articles and short stories. In June 1919 the first number of The Henley, a duplicated magazine put out by Henleys’ Social Club, contained this brief pointer to the shape of things to come, signed ‘Hitch’:

—GAS—

She had never been in this part of Paris before, only reading of it in the novels of Duvain: or seeing it at the Grand Guignol. So this was the Montmartre? That horror where danger lurked under cover of night, where innocent souls perished without warning.—where doom confronted the unwary.—where the Apache revelled.

She moved cautiously in the shadow of the high wall, looking furtively backward for the hidden menace that might be dogging her steps. Suddenly she darted into an alley way, little heeding where it led—groping her way on in the inky blackness, the one thought of eluding the pursuit firmly fixed in her mind—on she went—Oh! when would it end?—Then a doorway from which a light streamed lent itself to her vision—In here anywhere, she thought.

The door stood at the head of a flight of stairs—stairs that creaked with age, as she endeavoured to creep down—then she heard the sound of drunken laughter and shuddered—surely this was—No, not that! Anything but that! she reached the foot of the stairs and saw an evil-smelling wine bar, with wrecks of what were once men and women indulging in a drunken orgy—then they saw her, a vision of affrighted purity. Half a dozen men rushed towards her amid the encouraging shouts of the rest. She was seized. She screamed with terror—better had she been caught by her pursuer, was her one fleeting thought, as they dragged her roughly across the room. The fiends lost no time in settling her fate. They would share her belongings—and she—why! Was not this the heart of Montmartre? She should go—the rats should feast. Then they bound her and carried her down the dark passage. Up a flight of stairs to the riverside. The water rats should feast, they said. And then—then swinging her bound body two and fro, dropped her with a splash into the dark, swirling waters. Down, she went, down, down; Conscious only of a choking sensation, this was death

—————————then——————————

‘It’s out Madam,’ said the dentist. ‘Half a crown please’.

HITCH

The Social Club also brought Hitchcock, quite by chance, another introduction to a lifelong interest. Part of its activities took the form of evening get-togethers in a hall in Leadenhall Street, near the famous Victorian cast-iron market building, during the course of which the young ladies and gentlemen of the firm were brought together in circumstances of the greatest decorum and were taught, if they so wished, some of the social graces such as ballroom dancing. Young Alfred was taught to dance by a spruce, white-moustached senior employee of the firm called Mr. Graydon. It was three or four years later, in 1922, that he realized the freaky significance of this, when Mr. Graydon’s daughter Edith achieved a certain unhappy celebrity as Edith Thompson, of the notorious Thompson/Bywater murder case, one of Hitchcock’s favourite famous British trials, which he claims still to know off almost by heart.

And what sort of a figure did Hitchcock cut in those days, in the offices of Henleys? By all accounts, he seems still to have been quiet and watchful, but quietly self-confident and by no means shy. At the age of eighteen or nineteen whatever interest he ever felt in engineering and electric cable seems to have evaporated. He recalls that his way of working was spasmodic, as it has remained: he was capable of intense concentration over a limited period, but rebelled against, or was too lazy readily to support, a regular daily grind. As an estimator he would constantly have requests for estimates arrive on his desk, would let them pile up, and then deal with them all in a brief frenzy of activity which impressed his superiors with the extraordinary amount of work he had done that particular day. Until, that is, complaints started to come in about the inordinate delays certain customers were experiencing in receiving their estimates.

But relief was at hand. Since he seemed to be a bright young man with ideas of his own, and had some demonstrable gifts as a graphic artist, he was promoted to Henleys’ advertising department. Here he was put in charge of writing or editing the copy for newspaper and magazine advertisements and brochures, and, more importantly, for laying them out and supplying any graphic illustrations required. He loved the job, and mystified his colleagues by staying on in the offices off London Wall long after everyone else had gone home, to see the proofs of the advertisements as soon as they came in. For the first time some call was being made on his imagination and powers of invention; for the first time he was in the business of directing the public’s responses through practical psychology. One example of his inventiveness in this direction was a brochure for a certain kind of lead-covered electric wire designed specially for use in churches and other historic buildings where it would be virtually invisible against old stonework. The brochure was upright, coffin-shaped, and Hitchcock designed it so that at the bottom of the cover was a drawing of an altar frontal, with two big brass candlesticks on top of it, and then above, at the top of the page, the words ‘Church Lighting’ in heavy Gothic type. No mention of electricity, and of course no indication of wiring, since the whole point of the selling line was the discreetness, even to invisibility, of the product. When the advertising manager of Henleys was shown the design he said, ‘Very clever. But don’t tell him I said so.’

And there, with such little triumphs to spur him on, Alfred Hitchcock might quite possibly have stayed. The company, and the job, seemed reasonably safe—Henleys was eventually merged into a conglomerate, AEI Cables, which still exists, and one or two members of the firm who joined around the same time as Hitchcock retired within the last fifteen years. But clearly Hitchcock was already chafing, reading the cinema trade papers, and spending all possible spare time at the theatre or the cinema. He was shy with girls, and did not even know many of the basic facts of life, having been kept, like most young men of his time, in discreet ignorance by his family and his teachers. All his energies as he reached his twenties were directed towards getting on in the world, and he was already determined that it should be in the direction he wanted. In 1919 he read in one of the trade papers that the Hollywood company Famous Players-Lasky (what was eventually to become Paramount) was building a studio in Islington, and was going to set up a whole production schedule of films. This sounded like a chance to get into movies. But the question, of course, was how.

Chapter Two

Exactly why a major American company would want to set up film-making in Britain in 1919 is something of a mystery. The British film industry was already accident-prone: since Lumière first showed his films publicly in London in 1896 films had been made pretty consistently in Britain, and already the industry had undergone at least two major crises, the first in 1909 and the second as recently as 1918. The reason in both cases was much the same—the all too effectual competition of foreign, and particularly American, films. Given the choice, British filmgoers simply preferred the American product. In answer to this, American stars, directors and technicians were already being regularly imported before the 1914-18 War: in 1913 the original London Film Company was set up with largely American staff to make feature films, and the same year Florence Turner, then an important American star, came to London with her own company to produce films, while other American companies scouted for studio sites. The coming of the war to Britain in 1914, however, produced a rapid cooling of interest, and for the duration British film-makers were left to fight on as best they could. But even with the imposition of government taxes on imported film in 1915, American films continued to dominate the market, and it was somewhat ironic that in 1917 the War Office, desirous of making telling films about the war and British national identity, should have brought in big names from Hollywood, D. W. Griffith and Herbert Brenon, to do