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

The remaining factor in Hitchcock’s entry into television was his yearning for attention. It was a curious aspect of his personality that while he guarded his privacy and had great belief in the rightness of his decisions, he craved the approval of strangers. Almost overnight, Alfred Hitchcock Presents gained him the kind of public acknowledgment he’d always desired. From being a widely recognized film director in the early fifties, by the end of the decade he was one of the most famous men in America. “People swarmed out of nowhere to see him,” Pat Hitchcock remembered. “It was like being with Elvis Presley.”

The series was almost as big a hit internationally as it was in the US. As he liked to say, he recorded his opening and closing monologues in “French, German, English, and American,” ensuring he was an A-list celebrity across the developed world. He became accustomed to the stardom and relished it. Herbert Coleman and Samuel Taylor accompanied Hitchcock on a reconnaissance of locations in Finland, where he was thrilled to be mobbed by a group of schoolchildren and to receive an impromptu standing ovation from the patrons of a roadside diner. Coleman spent a lot of time traveling with the Hitchcocks in the fifties and sixties and registered how Hitchcock basked in the attention he received. When they flew to Rome in late 1956, Hitchcock was delighted by the number of photographers waiting to greet him at the airport, but he was puzzled as to why he couldn’t find any of the photos in the newspapers the next day. According to Coleman, the event had been arranged by Paramount Studios, which had been unable to raise any interest in covering Hitchcock’s arrival because his visit to the city a short time earlier had been extensively reported. Mindful of not upsetting their cherished asset, Paramount had paid some photographers to work their flashbulbs without any intention of selling the pictures.

Inseparable from Hitchcock’s desire for celebrity was his impulse to entertain, in his unique way and on as large a scale as possible. The tension between wanting to be an artist and being an entertainer who gives the people what they want lingered from his first film to his last. “Hitchcock admits to catering for the low-brow,” averred one critic who wrote one of the first published reviews of a Hitchcock film, in the spring of 1926, though that same year his work was branded the “last word in screen art” by another reviewer. Eleven months later, Hitchcock pasted into one of his many scrapbooks a review of The Lodger that calls the movie “only for entertainment,” a phrase underlined and put in quotation marks. If made by Hitchcock, these markings might be the exasperation of a young filmmaker whose artistic efforts did not get their due; more likely, Hitchcock was satisfied that a film that was initially derided by the moneymen as art-house drivel had defied its doubters. Ivor Montagu remembered that Hitchcock had once told him that canny filmmakers “make pictures for the press,” because pleasing them is the only way to safeguard one’s reputation—and to gain power and influence within the industry. It was for the reviewers that he stuffed his films with “the Hitchcock touches,” to satisfy their desire to see cleverness on screen. Michael Balcon had different recollections of Hitchcock’s attitude during his British period, saying that he and Hitchcock “were in the business of giving the public what it seemed to want in entertainment. We did not talk about art or social significance.” Though Hitchcock went through phases in his career of trying to recalibrate his style and redesign the parameters in which he worked, he never swerved from the notion that his priority was to keep the public on the edge of their seats, and to find ways of lending one’s artistic impulses to that end. This, he avowed, was the mark of real talent. To Truffaut he put it plainly: “You have to design your film just as Shakespeare did his plays—for an audience.”

Audiences, of course, were available not only in movie theaters; Hitchcock could sniff them out anywhere. To entertain those around him, and establish himself as a mercurial personality on set, early in his career he developed a series of routines and habits—an off-camera Hitchcock touch—such as ending breaks in filming by smashing a teacup on the floor. Antic eccentricity was gradually replaced by something more sedate, though no less performed: the Zen-like master who professed to be bored by the business of shooting a film, and took more pleasure in gathering cast and crew to listen to him recite a lewd joke or an anecdote about the movie business of yore. The dinner table was another space for performance, as were the countless interviews during which he repeated so many of the same quips and anecdotes, the lines of a part only he could play.

Had he possessed more confidence in his appearance, it’s possible he would have pursued a more conventional type of performing; one could imagine him in the “character” parts he gave to those such as Peter Lorre, Hume Cronyn, Edmund Gwenn, and, in his silent films, Gordon Harker, actors who were never romantic leads in a Hitchcock movie, yet whose differentness he admired and relied on to add oddness and humor. In essence, this is what happened from the late fifties, when he starred in numerous trailers for his latest big-screen releases in the guise of the comedic persona from the television shows. Inhabiting a character was a process he clearly enjoyed; on at least two occasions, he posed in character for pieces in American publications, including one in which he took on all the roles in an Agatha Christie–style murder mystery.* Ingrid Bergman explained that although Hitchcock didn’t like to talk about acting, he was given to performing dialogue from scripts, or giving practical demonstrations of how he thought an emotion should be projected. For the magazine