The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Edward White (best way to read e books .TXT) 📖

is not the person your eyes tell you he is; that fat man is an impostor. In a characteristically deadpan riff, he said the confusion initially arose when he’d asked for a stunt double to perform his first cameo. “The casting department, with an unusual lack of perception, hired this fat man! The rest is history. He became the public image of Hitchcock.” The misconception lingered until some years later he gave “an accurate and detailed description of my true self,” and the casting department hired Cary Grant, although the public still considered him to be the short, tubby man with a bald head and dour, emotionless face.

As sensitive as he was about his appearance, Hitchcock had a deep-seated desire to be seen; he invested creative effort in publicizing his face and body, and appreciated that his distinctive looks could be made to work to his advantage. On one level, the jigsaw of his silhouette that he dispatched as Christmas gifts in 1927 (the year in which he first became a celebrated public entity) might be read as a self-deprecating joke; in nine strokes of a pen, he rendered himself—the round-shouldered blob that he saw, and despised, every time he looked in the mirror—worthy of artistic reproduction. Yet it was also a revealing display of self-promotion. From that moment, Hitchcock commandeered his body to help curate his public image, creating for himself a new, semi-fictional persona, a character more layered and complex than most of those that appeared in his films. At the peak of his celebrity, he dashed off the silhouette when approached by autograph hunters—including Andy Warhol, who had him draw his profile on a batch of Polaroid photos when the two met for lunch in April 1974. Warhol, like Hitchcock a former ad man, would have appreciated the savviness with which Hitchcock reproduced and exploited his silhouette, which was also used to publicize many of his Hollywood films and was seen at the start of every episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

He was pained not only by his size but also by his shape, the “cottage loaf” body that he said he inherited from his mother. A photograph of one of the Hitchcock boys shows in all likelihood his brother, William, on a horse next to his father outside the family shop; it displays the same physique Hitchcock lamented: stocky, large head, round torso, and limbs just a little less than proportionately long. The boy in the photo is perhaps eight or nine, roughly the same age at which Hitchcock would relish the aroma of the local bakery, where he’d be given free biscuits, a treasured memory he retrieved as an old man. It was also around this time that a schoolmate told him he was “funny-looking.” Whether or not the child meant to cause harm, it lanced right to the bone. Hitchcock never developed the emotional robustness that would allow him to brush negative comments aside. Iffy reviews, rejections, and sleights—real or imagined—burrowed their way inside and stayed there, even at the height of his success. On this occasion, young Alfred went home and stared into the mirror, turning his head to one side to inspect the contours of his face. When his mother came up to him, he asked her whether she agreed that he looked odd. “You’ll grow out of it,” was her simple, devastating response.

The sense of existing within a body that was not truly his might have emanated from this exchange, as did his fixation with his profile. The habitual drawing and redrawing of the silhouette was an attempt to bring this disruptive impostor under control, and an inversion of the Hollywood cliché of being photographed only on one’s “good side.” He publicized his “funny-looking” profile relentlessly, even though he could be cutting when those around him expressed a similar fixation with their appearance. One of the anecdotes he enjoyed sharing with journalists was of the time a young actress, knowingly beautiful, asked which he thought was her best side. “You’re sitting on it,” Hitchcock replied.

Sometimes, he tried to convince Americans—and perhaps himself—that it was only Hollywood’s unattainable standards of beauty that made him seem physically unusual. There had never been a time in his life when he could have been described as slim, but “in England, everyone looks as I do, and no one would remark on it,” he said in 1979. That was a characteristic exaggeration, provably false but resting on an important kernel of truth. The England of Hitchcock’s infancy was a place and time that cast larger bodies as models of good health. “Plumpness” was the word; in the East End of 1899, razor-sharp cheekbones and catwalk builds were generally associated with poverty and tuberculosis. Both Queen Victoria and her son Edward VII were renowned for their heft and their gargantuan appetites. Like Hitchcock, who “was not one to toy with his food,” Victoria chomped her way through meals at an astounding clip, and she and Edward both gorged on rich multicourse meals. The era also experienced a transformation in British dining, especially in London, led by chefs such as Auguste Escoffier, who introduced what is now considered classical French cooking, service à la Russe, and the model of the modern restaurant. There wasn’t much haute cuisine served up chez Hitchcock, which was a household of potatoes, roast meat, and fish and chips that they sold from one of their outlets on Salmon Lane. Yet Hitchcock would always regard this pre–World War I moment as a culinary high point, not because it was gluttonous but because it seemed to him the ultimate in simple sophistication, an ideal he cherished in all aspects of life. As one colleague put it, “his pleasure was in artistic efficiency.” He collected menus from the period and enjoyed reading them, a practice that seemed like some refined form of torture when he was on one of his periodic spells of dieting. When he threw a dinner party for Joan Harrison and her husband, novelist