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

written-about bodies in the twentieth century,” as scrutinized as any of the actresses whose appearances he obsessed over. But among his generation he was rare—possibly unique—in being a famous, powerful man whose attempts to maintain a healthy weight and find peace with the way he looked became a topic of public discussion and part of his public image, even while he lived. The cameos and the wry news pieces sometimes gave the appearance of a man with a rhino-thick skin, for whom the subject of his obesity was a bit of fun. That was evidently untrue. He was comfortable with ridicule, but only so long as he was directing it. Whitfield Cook recorded in his diary the sight of Hitchcock performing “the breast ballet,” a dinner-party turn in which—under the influence of much red wine—Hitchcock would whip his top off and gyrate his pectorals for the amusement of his guests. He also did “the whistling sailor,” a ventriloquist’s gag achieved by drawing a face on his naked belly, with the mouth around his navel; then, in the words of one who witnessed it, he “whistled, at the same time wobbling and shaking his stomach, and the big pink visage below his red face seemed not only to whistle but to change its expression.” Those who saw these performances found them hysterically funny; knowing Hitchcock’s talent for performing, they probably were. Yet, knowing also how sensitive he was about his appearance, it’s difficult not to find the idea of Hitchcock presenting himself as a big fat joke more than a little sad.

Hitchcock reveals his weight loss, January 1943.

In other people, he always found fatness a matter of humor and ridicule. Before the filming of Torn Curtain, Hitchcock tinkered with a scene in the script in which the erratic behavior of a member of the public threatens to have the lead characters captured by the East German authorities. As originally written by Brian Aherne, this disruptive member of the public is a small woman, scrawny and disheveled, but Hitchcock found the scene comedically lacking. Under his correcting pencil, the skinny woman became obese, the implication being that fat bodies are inherently funny in a way that thin ones are not. That overweight people struggled to be taken seriously was a lesson he had learned over and again. “I don’t look like an artist,” he pondered aloud when asked why he had never won an Oscar. “I don’t look like I’ve starved in a garret.”

An ironic concomitant of the consumerist boom of the Truman-Eisenhower era was rapid growth in the weight-loss industry. Hitchcock’s apparent switch from prewar feaster to postwar faster gave him a connection with millions of other Americans, especially women. In 1940, he was still telling journalists that he ate “simply but a lot.” By the 1950s, he was speaking of himself as a gourmet who was also an inveterate calorie counter, carefully planning his meals in order to make sure he had space for an evening martini. Discernment, restraint, and matchless self-discipline now became a key part of his public image. In 1955, for example, the Los Angeles Times published his tips for getting rid of “that turkey and eggnog waistline,” and he provided the paper’s West magazine with a list of his favorite Los Angeles eateries, all of which he said were chosen purely on account of their culinary sophistication. For the popular women’s magazine McCall’s, he raved about the brilliance of Escoffier, spoke nostalgically about the dining habits of his Edwardian childhood, and hammed it up for the cameras, sitting glumly before a meager plate of food, which, as Jan Olsson has outlined, became a common pose for Hitchcock during the fifties. The days of ice cream for breakfast and six-course lunches were gone. In fact, he suggested, they had only ever existed within the minds of mischievous or gullible American journalists who had reported his quips about liking steak à la mode as if fact. In moments of self-criticism, he blamed his lack of willpower for not being able to lose weight permanently. Other times, he proffered more forgiving theories. “I don’t get the jitters; that’s why I’m overweight,” he once claimed. “I don’t work or worry it off.” On several counts, that explanation was patently false.

The persona of a gastronome tortured by his passion for food and drink wasn’t simply invented for publicity purposes. Those around him on location in the south of France for To Catch a Thief recall Hitchcock’s tussle between abstention and excess. As Grace Kelly remembered it, “He used to diet all week in anticipation of having a glorious meal on Saturday evening. He’d spend all week just thinking about it.” Her partner of the time, the fashion designer Oleg Cassini, joined them for many of those meals and was struck by how Hitchcock directed the occasions with an energy few recalled seeing in him in any other setting. “We would gather at the restaurant of his choice for the precise meal of his choice. We always ate in restaurants rated three stars or better. Still, Hitchcock would review everything in advance: the wines, the soup, the fish, the meat, the sorbet between courses, the dessert, the fruit and the cheese. He would preside over it all, like an emperor, savoring each morsel. I’ve never seen anyone enjoy a meal more.”

Hitchcock transmitted the idea that, for him, dinner with company at a fine restaurant was a total and immersive creative experience, similar to the making of a film. Though he always stressed his preference for well-cooked, simple food, the serving of a meal gave him an opportunity to express the extravagant and theatrical aspects of his personality, dominating the situation by stage-managing it. Marcella Rabwin observed this when Hitchcock threw a dinner party for her at a Los Angeles restaurant. Hitchcock planned the whole menu, and had ingredients flown in fresh from around the world, at a time when such a thing was a great extravagance. There was