It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (4 page)

As we spoke, someone approached Hitchcock for an autograph, and he drew his famous sketch of himself. After the person left, Langlois apologized. “I’m sorry they disturb you here in Paris, even while you are eating.”

“They never disturb me,” Hitchcock said. “They are the ones who make it all possible. The public.”

It brought him great pleasure that audiences in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires could look at his pictures and feel the same emotions.

“Emotions are universal, and art is emotion. Therefore, putting film together and making it have an effect on an audience is for me the main function of film. Otherwise, it is just a record of events.

“In the distant future, they will have what I call ‘the Tickles.’ People will go into a big darkened auditorium and they will be mass-hypnotized. Instead of identifying themselves with the characters on the screen, they will
be
that character, and when they buy their ticket, they will be able to choose which character they want to be. They will suffer all of the agonies and enjoy the romance with a beautiful woman or handsome man. I call them ‘the Tickles,’ because when a character is tickled, the audience will feel it. Then, the lights come up, and it’s all over.” Hitchcock paused reflectively.

“And it’s a good way to dispense with real actors. Walt Disney has the right answer. If he doesn’t like his actors, he tears them up!”

“Were there any actors you would like to have worked with?” Langlois asked.

“Of course. Claudette Colbert. Did you know she was French? I would like to have made a Lubitsch-style picture with her. I also would like to have worked with William Holden.
Sunset Boulevard
was a wonderful film, one of the greatest. And I would like to have worked with Miss Hepburn. Audrey, not Katharine. Katharine Hepburn wouldn’t have fit into my films, but I wanted Audrey, and I almost worked with her, but it didn’t happen.”

“Would Miss Hepburn, Audrey not Katharine, have been a blonde?” Langlois asked.

Hitchcock shook his head. “No. Definitely not.”

I mentioned that Claudette Colbert, William Holden, and Audrey Hepburn were all in Billy Wilder films.

“I envy him,” Hitchcock said. “A great director, Wilder. He knew how I felt about those actors in his film. I told him, and he said the actor
he
most wanted to work with was Cary Grant. So there you are.

“I believe directing actors is really only a matter of getting good actors in the first place. Then, you have a chat with them.”

As we finished our meal, Langlois said, “You have a career to be very proud of, Mr. Hitchcock.”

“Not
Mr.
Hitchcock. Hitch. Call me Hitch. I am proud, but I’ve been lucky. Getting the opportunity is the most important part.

“A few times, it looked like I might fail. There is that thin line between success and failure. I managed to survive the tightrope, even though I don’t think I’m built for tightrope walking.”

As we left the restaurant, Alma said to me, “In all the years we’ve been together, my husband has never bored me. There aren’t many wives who can say that.”

I
MET
H
ITCHCOCK
several times while I was writing about Groucho Marx. Groucho’s favorite restaurant in Los Angeles was Chasen’s, which was also the favorite of Hitchcock and his wife.

Groucho’s preferred night at Chasen’s was Thursday, and Thursday night dinner at Chasen’s was a ritual for the Hitchcocks, who frequently came to dinner with Lew and Edie Wasserman, and Gregory and Veronique Peck.

Erin Fleming, Groucho’s friend, was frequently with us. Groucho and Hitchcock would greet each other. Each had one of the few tables in the small front room of the restaurant.

Groucho’s favorite part of the meal was a specialty of Chasen’s, banana shortcake. He would say he ate the dinner “to get to the shortcake.”

One night, as we finished our banana shortcakes, Groucho said he wished that he could have a second portion of the dessert. The captain heard him and rushed back with some. Groucho wouldn’t accept it, because even in his eighties, he had a great deal of discipline. He said if he had one slice, he could enjoy the memory without feeling guilty.

Summoning the captain, Groucho said, “When they get to dessert, send over a round of banana shortcakes to Mr. Hitchcock and his friends, and be sure to put it on my check and not on his. And see what the boys in the back room will have.”

We left and didn’t see what happened afterward.

At his home, months later, Hitchcock finished the banana shortcake story.

“Everyone at our table that night was on a diet except the Madame and Peck. The Madame doesn’t eat much when I’m on a diet, and I’m always on a diet. So Peck got all six of the shortcakes.”

Hitchcock indicated the green, grassy view from the window of his Bel Air home. “I own all of that,” he said in a mock serious tone.

The huge expanse of property was actually a golf course.

Hitchcock began our meeting by telling me, “To interview me, you would have to interview my films.”

“I already have,” I said, “and they told me many of their secrets—but not all.”

No visit to the Hitchcock home would have been complete without seeing the kitchen, the most important room in the house for Hitchcock and his wife. It had taken him many years to remake the kitchen and create the wine cellar, all exactly to their specifications.

He showed me the giant refrigerator, of which he was justifiably proud. As I looked in, he stood behind me and put his hand on my shoulder, as if to push me in.

“Just joking,” he said.

No matter. It was so full of food, there wouldn’t have been room for me.

“This food is our luxury,” he said. “We don’t have a swimming pool or a tennis court. We don’t live to impress anyone else.

“We fly in fish and meat weekly from England,” he said. “Dover sole, beef, and lamb.”

The lamb reminded him of one of his favorite stories, “Lamb to the Slaughter,” by Roald Dahl, done on
Alfred Hitchcock Presents,
an episode he directed in 1958.

“A woman, played by Barbara Bel Geddes,” he said, “learns from her unsympathetic husband of many years that he is leaving her. She kills him with a frozen leg of lamb, the most perfect murder weapon of my entire career. Then she cooks that leg of lamb while policemen are searching for the murder weapon, and she serves them the delicious leg of lamb. That’s one murder weapon they will never find. I call that my ‘ticking lamb’ story, which is a variation on my ‘ticking bomb’ theory.

“The idea is that you want to let the audience in on everything so they know that a ticking bomb is there while the characters don’t know it. That is the suspense, waiting for the bomb to explode, only they are waiting for the leg of lamb to be discovered as the murder weapon.”

He said that he never ate leg of lamb without thinking of that story.

“Are you able to distinguish between English Dover sole and French Dover sole?” he asked me.

I’d never given it any thought. I considered that the question might be what Hitchcock referred to as “a leg pull.”

I answered, “Only if I saw the fish’s passport.”

“I only eat Dover sole caught by a net, not by a hook,” he said. “Have you ever seen a fish with a hook in its mouth?” He squeezed his lips together and twisted his face like a fish with a hook in its mouth. I assumed he was referring to the pain inflicted on the fish, but I wondered, how did he know if the fish was
really
caught in a net?

Hitchcock was extremely proud of his wine cellar. He enjoyed the acquisition of great wine and brandy, some of it bought to drink, and some of it to have and hold with the instinct of the passionate collector.

He told me that he had “authentic Napoleonic brandy, bottles of wine from the nineteenth century, and dazzling vintages from the 1920s.”

“Do you drink these?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said, “I could never do that. Those bottles are really irreplaceable. The responsibility for drinking one is too great. It might be the last bottle in the world of its kind. Then, there is the possibility that the actual taste would not live up to the taste buds in my mind. And then, too, perhaps I don’t feel I deserve it.”

I was shown around the rest of the house, a lovely home, but considered modest by Bel Air standards. I recognized Liberty of London fabrics. “We don’t have to move to a bigger house,” Hitchcock said. “I do not enjoy the process of moving. I find it like enduring a sickness.

“It’s the work that’s important. I’ve made films people enjoyed, and I didn’t wish to prove myself with a bigger house. I like to use words such as cozy and snug when I describe my home.”

Hitchcock’s art collection was impressive, including paintings by artists who hung not only in the Hitchcock home, but also in the great museums of the world. His favorite artist was Klee, and Alma’s, Utrillo. His favorite sculptor was Rodin, and he was proud to own a work of his. Hitchcock’s own drawings bore a certain resemblance to those of Klee.

During his teens and early twenties, Hitchcock had eagerly visited art museums. At first he went to museums as an art school assignment, but very quickly these visits became one of his favorite pastimes on a Sunday or whenever he had a few hours free. “They also sent us to a railway terminal to sketch people, which I liked even better.”

Hitchcock said that if he had become an artist rather than having gone into films, he would have been an abstract painter only because he didn’t feel he would have been able to master the technique required by representational art. Ideally, he would have liked to have been a sculptor, like Rodin.

Being interested in dream and fantasy in art, he was fascinated by the idea of having Salvador Dali create a fantasy dream sequence in
Spellbound
. As it turned out, most of Dali’s work was not used in the film.

“Very early, I was immensely struck by the Symbolists. For a time, I had Symbolist dreams.”

Hitchcock said he felt privileged to be able to afford the work of Rouault, Dufy, Vlaminck, Rodin, Klee, de Chirico, and other famous twentieth-century artists, but he selected only pictures he enjoyed living with, the kind about which he could make up stories. “Klee could have made good storyboards, you know.

“Mrs. H. and I never acquired a painting unless it was liked by both of us.” For a time, they had a mystery drawing hanging on their wall. “It was much admired. There was no signature. It was the work of our daughter, Pat, when she was a child.”

As a young man standing in long queues to see a painting, he never dreamed that one day he would simply look up in his own home and enjoy a glance at a great painting. “They become a part of you.”

Along with the paintings, there were first editions by George Bernard Shaw and James Barrie, the complete works of William Shakespeare and of Somerset Maugham. He prized an edition of
Juno and the Paycock,
which had been given to him by Sean O’Casey when Hitchcock was making a film version of the play.

He showed me some dishes.

“Do you remember these?”

I did, because I also had admired the dishes at the Plaza Athénée hotel when we had dinner there.

“I asked at the hotel if I could buy some of the dishes from them,” Hitchcock continued. “I had in mind a demitasse or two. A few weeks after we returned home, several cartons arrived from Paris. They had sent a whole set, and no bill. They said it was their gift to us.”

When my taxi arrived, Hitchcock walked with me to the door, where the driver was waiting. Raising his voice so the driver could hear, Hitchcock said, “Don’t worry about the blood. I’ll wash off what’s left, and then I’ll get rid of the knife. Don’t worry about the body. I’ll see that it’s discreetly disposed of. But do check your clothes for bloodstains. Blood spattered on the wall like catsup on a hamburger bun.”

The driver showed no concern. I wondered if he recognized Alfred Hitchcock.

When the taxi dropped me off, I gave the driver the fare and a tip. He returned the tip. I said, “That’s for you!” When there was no response, I realized that Hitchcock’s performance had been wasted. The driver wasn’t really English-speaking.

“E
VERY DAY IS A GIFT
, which is why we call it the present.”

Alfred Hitchcock said this to director King Vidor and me just before the March 7, 1979, American Film Institute gala honoring Hitchcock. We had stopped to speak with him as he waited to enter the Beverly Hilton ballroom for his tribute evening.

Vidor and I sat down next to Hitchcock, who apologized for not rising, because he couldn’t. “Please accept that I have risen in spirit,” he said.

“It’s
your
night, Hitch,” Vidor said. “You ought to be feeling great.”

“Knees. It’s all about knees. My knees aren’t what they used to be—even what they were yesterday.

“The problem is, I had to bring along a friend. Well, not exactly a friend, more of a constant companion. Arthur Ritis.”

Besides the pain, Hitchcock was apprehensive about his entrance, afraid his knees would fail him at the moment he had to walk through the audience to his table, that he would fall and be mortified. “Worse than dying,” he said. “Worse even than forgetting to button your fly. I shouldn’t have accepted. It’s like
Jamaica Inn.
Walking the plank, you know.”