It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (2 page)

M
Y DEAREST DREAM
,” Alfred Hitchcock said to me, “would be to walk into an ordinary men’s store on the street and buy a suit, off the rack.

“There are, I suppose, many men who would envy me having the finest tailors to make my bespoke suits of the best material, but my own dream would be to buy a suit—on sale.

“Now, I have pretty much given up my hope of losing enough weight, which I don’t think will ever happen, but that is not the problem. The real problem is not my size, but my shape.

“Even sex is embarrassing for a person who looks the way I do. There weren’t enough light bulbs to turn off.

“If I had been given the choice in life, I would have looked like Cary Grant on whom everything looked good, and I would have indulged some fashion fantasies, a
39 Steps
raincoat, tossed on, a beige cashmere cardigan thrown casually around my shoulders, or better yet, tied around my waist—if I had one.

“Some writers say that Cary Grant was my fantasy alter ego. Silliness. When I look into my mirror, I don’t see Cary Grant. I look into my mirror as little as possible, because the person who looks back at me has always seemed something of a stranger who doesn’t look at all the way I feel. But, somehow, he kept getting into my mirror.”

When Alfred Hitchcock showed me his home on Bellagio Road in Bel Air, California, in the mid-1970s, I had the opportunity to see his astounding wardrobe. Most remarkable was not the quantity of suits, nor the quality, all of the finest fabric, but that they seemed to be the same suit, repeated many times.

At second glance, however, it was obvious that there were numerous subtle distinctions. Among the black suits, there were shades of black.

Hitchcock’s suits were famous, and it was widely assumed that he invariably wore the
same
black suit. James Stewart remembered, “Hitch in Marrakech, 110 in the shade, scarcely ever taking off his dark jacket or even loosening his tie.” Director Ronald Neame recalled that even as far back as 1928 when Hitchcock was directing
Blackmail,
he wore a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, black shoes and socks, in spite of the intense heat from the klieg lights, before air-conditioning.

Many of these suits actually were navy blue. “It is called French blue,” Hitchcock told me, a blue so dark that it seems black. Every suit appeared new, in keeping with the reputation of the director for being meticulous.

Another noteworthy aspect of the collection was that there were many different sizes. “Those suits are all in my sizes,” he said.

“If my weight changes, up or down, I’m prepared.”

I asked him how he kept so many suits paired, together with their mates. He explained that they were all keyed, the trousers with their jackets, the sizes with labels sewn in and dated. Inside the waistband of each pair of trousers was a large number in black, and in each coat was a number. “I don’t enjoy any suspense about finding my clothes.”

Continuing in a more serious tone, he said, “I never achieved the body I wanted, but I am proud of my body of work. It is tall and thin and handsome.”

Henri Langlois, the founder and secretary general of the Cinémathèque Française, introduced me to Alfred Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, at the Plaza Athénée hotel in Paris. Some years before, Langlois’s dismissal by the French government from his post as curator of the Cinémathèque had provoked demonstrations that escalated into the 1968 riots, effectively shutting down Paris. Throughout dinner, Hitchcock and Langlois talked about Hitchcock’s films, those that existed, and a few that existed only in Hitchcock’s mind.

“I once had an idea,” Hitchcock told us, “that I would like to use to open a film. We are at Covent Garden or La Scala. Maria Callas is onstage. She is singing an aria, and her head is tilted upwards. She sees, in a box high up, a man approach another man who is seated there. He stabs him. She is just reaching a high note, and the high note turns into a scream. It is the highest note she has ever sung, and she receives a tremendous ovation.”

Hitchcock seemed to have finished the story.

“And then? What happens next?” Langlois would have leaned forward on the edge of his chair, except that because of his substantial girth, he already
was
on the edge of his chair.

Hitchcock turned and indicated his wife, Alma, who had worked with him officially and unofficially for more than fifty years. He said to Langlois, “Ask the Madame. She does continuity.”

“I’ve retired,” Alma said.

“The closest I ever came to doing this opera vignette,” Hitchcock continued, “was in
The Man Who Knew Too Much.

“I’ve always wanted to do a murder among the tulips, too. When I saw the vast fields of tulips in Holland, I knew right away it was a setting I wanted to use, especially in color with blood on the tulips.

“There’s another scene waiting for a story that I’ve thought about, involving an automobile assembly line in Detroit. The cars are moving along, and the workers are talking about their lives, an argument with the wife, lunch, and other mundane matters. A car rolls off the assembly line, and when the door is opened, a body falls out. That’s as far as I got.

“Some years ago, I was in New York for
Rope,
and the publicist took me to my first baseball game. We watched from the broadcast booth, and I made a few drawings. I asked him how many people were watching the game, and he said sixty thousand. I thought, what a perfect spot for a murder! A murder on a baseball field. One of the players is shot, and there are sixty thousand suspects.

“Then, it actually happened a few years later.”

“Sometimes your films seem like nightmares that are really happening,” Langlois said.

“I consider them frightmares,” Hitchcock explained. “Frightmares are my specialty. I have never been interested in nightmares per se. Frightmares have a great deal of reality. A far-fetched story must be plausibly told, so your nonsense isn’t showing.

“Fear of the dark is natural, we all have it, but fear in the sunlight, perhaps fear in this very restaurant, where it is so unexpected, mind you,
that
is interesting.

“Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It’s just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.

“It’s what you don’t see that frightens you, what your mind fills in, the implicit usually being more terrifying than the explicit. The unexpected is so important. I’ve never liked heavy-handed creaking-door suspense and other clichés. I like to do a ‘cozy.’ Something menacing happens in a serene setting. The cozy setting is a wonderful opportunity for danger and suspense.

“I, personally, have always been interested in rounding up the
un
usual suspects.

“Eventually everything becomes avoiding the cliché. Your own cliché as well as everyone else’s. It’s not just what
you’ve
done. It’s what everyone else has done and done and done. I pity the poor people in the future.”

Hitchcock was interested in Langlois’s activities on behalf of film preservation during the World War II German occupation of Paris. The French film lover had broken the law of the occupation, risking his life to personally save hundreds of films that might have been destroyed or lost.

Hitchcock asked, “How did you choose which ones to save?”

Langlois answered, “Those which came to me and said, ‘Save me!’ I didn’t have the possibility to see them—only to save them.”

“It was very brave of you,” Hitchcock commented. “You could have been put into a concentration camp.”

“I didn’t do anything brave,” Langlois continued. “I just hid the films in my bathtub and the bathtubs of my friends. We didn’t take so many baths.”

“Not taking those baths was a great service to the world,” Hitchcock said. “At the end of the war, I made a film to show the reality of the concentration camps, you know. Horrible. It was more horrible than any fantasy horror. Then, nobody wanted to see it. It was too unbearable. But it has stayed in my mind all of these years.

“I don’t think many people actually
want
reality, whether it’s in the theater or in films. It must only
look
real, because reality’s something none of us can stand for too long. Reality can be more terrible than anything you can imagine.

“I, myself, was not old enough for World War I until near the end, when I was rejected. I was too old for World War II, but I like to believe I would have been brave.”

“Trying to make films you
want
to make requires some bravery, too,” Alma said.

“I have heard of a film,” Langlois said, “that you have wanted to make for years, but…”

“Mary Rose,”
Alma said. “It would be a wonderful picture, but they have typecast him as a director who doesn’t make that kind of picture. But we’re not giving up.

“My husband is very sensitive to criticism,” Alma added. “But when people don’t like what he does or won’t let him do something he believes in, I’m twice as hurt. I’m hurt for myself, and I’m hurt for him.”

“
Mary Rose,”
Hitchcock explained, “was a play by James M. Barrie which I saw in London in the early 1920s. It impressed me very much. In brief, it is the story of a twelve-year-old girl who is taken on an excursion to an island by her parents. She disappears and, weeks later, reappears, with no explanation. As a young woman, she returns to the island with her husband, and disappears again. She is gone many years. Then, when she reappears, her son is a grown man, her husband is middle-aged, but she hasn’t changed at all. In the end, she has to go back, but to where?

“I have never forgotten it. I’m trying to attack it now from a science fiction angle, because the public will want to know where Mary Rose went when she disappeared for twenty-five years and then came back as young as she was when she disappeared.

“There was another story I always wanted to do. It was a true story, on which
So Long at the Fair
was based. A woman searches for her mother who has disappeared without a trace at the Paris Exposition of 1889. The missing person has contracted the plague, and the facts have been covered over to protect the city from panic. It is a story like
Death in Venice,
also a very good film. I would like to have made both of those.

“And
Diabolique;
I’d like to have made that one, too, but [Henri-Georges] Clouzot beat me to it. For many years, I thought I would do a John Buchan book,
Three Hostages.
It’s not as good as his
39 Steps,
but it’s a good story. And, oh, something of Wilkie Collins. What a writer that man was! I admired Dickens, and I’d like to have done something of Poe.

“I was always an avid reader of the newspaper from the time I was a boy. As I became interested in the world of film, I became more alert to stories, especially crime stories that could be the basis for a film. There was one I read somewhere, I don’t know where, which has never left my mind. It’s not one I could ever use because it’s too horrible to show, except in a horror film, and even in a horror film, it would be too shocking and probably would provoke a release of tension resulting in a few gasps, some giggles, and then laughter.

“There was a report of a Chinese executioner who did heads. He was so good at his job that people requested him when they were sentenced to have their heads chopped off. You can imagine how painful botched and sloppy work could be, especially if the whole procedure were dragged out.

“One poor fellow who had resigned himself to his fate, stepped up, and this super-executioner deftly dealt the death blow with the greatest precision, but nothing happened.

“The man said, ‘Please don’t keep me waiting.’

“The executioner said, ‘Please nod.’

“The man did, and his head fell off. What imagery!

“I don’t know if the story was true or not,” Hitchcock said, “but it’s so far-fetched, that maybe it was.”

Our conversation was a mix of movies and food, the two passionate interests of which neither Hitchcock nor Langlois ever tired. Langlois was even stouter than Hitchcock.

“I believe that there is a perfect relationship between love of food and a healthy libido,” Hitchcock said. “People who like to eat have a stronger libido, a greater interest in sex.

“I was very innocent and sexually repressed in my youth. I was a virgin when I married, you know.”

He hesitated momentarily, having noted the disapproving frown on his wife’s face, and then continued. “I think that too much sex while you are working goes against the work and that repressed sex is more constructive for the creative person. It must get out, and so it goes into the work. I think it helped create a sense of sex in my work.

“The experiencing of passion, as with fear, makes you feel alive. In the film, you can experience these very extreme feelings without paying the bill.”