It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (6 page)

“I learned from Poe that you could experience all of the emotions and physical sensations of being afraid without yourself being in any physical danger, though after reading him, I didn’t like to go immediately into the dark.

“I don’t know if a night in my early childhood when I woke up alone in the blackness was the start of my childhood fear of the dark, or if I already had it.

“I called out, but no one came. The entire house was dark and I couldn’t find my parents.

“Then they returned. It seemed that on a warm summer evening, my parents had gone for a short walk. There was a maid somewhere about, but I didn’t know that. I suppose I was about four. My dislike of the dark has stayed with me. It represented the unknown, while my preference has always been for the familiar. One never knows what could be lurking in the darkness. One does not wish to know.”

Not all of Hitchcock’s fears were physical. “One of my greatest fears has always been that of making a fool of myself in public. An embarrassing moment. I think of it as open-fly phobia. What I consider to be my greatest fear of all is—to know the future.”

Joining with his three brothers, who were fishmongers, William Hitchcock was able to expand his business. The Hitchcocks were comfortable, but there was always lingering tension about money, about future security, which the young Hitchcock couldn’t understand. “Only later, I realized what great pressure there was on my father. He worked those very long hours and didn’t show the strain, until one day he died.”

On December 14, 1914, William Hitchcock died of a heart attack at age fifty-two. “My father was always away,” Hitchcock said, “except for his Sunday morning attendance at church and our visits to the theater. It was only after he died that I realized he was never home, because he was out there working hard for us, his family.

“My father never seemed carefree, except at the theater. I think he worried a lot. Selling produce that can spoil in a day must be nerve-wracking.”

The death of his father forced Hitchcock to find a career. His older brother took over the family business, and Alfred was asked what he would like to be. “I said maybe I would like to be an engineer, so I was sent to a school of engineering and navigation. I took courses in mechanical drawing, electricity, and other aspects of engineering, and I gained a great deal of practical knowledge in the shop courses that helped me later in film work. It was quite a program they had. I could have become a blacksmith, but I think I made a better choice for myself. It was the draftsman training that eventually got me a job as an art director.

“I’d always liked to draw, and I took evening art classes at the University of London. It was suggested that we students visit museums, and I found the museums wonderful.”

Hitchcock went to work at the W. T. Henley Telegraph and Cable Company where he was at first employed in a clerical position. He got the job because he knew something about electricity, and also because during World War I, there was a labor shortage. He quickly tired of ohms and volts, and began visiting the advertising department where the supervisor let him do some layouts for ads. They liked what he did, so he began designing ads and brochures. He helped design Henley’s employee magazine, and even wrote for it.

Hitchcock’s short story, “Gas,” appeared in the first issue of the
Henley Social Club Magazine.
Hitchcock described it as being “about an unfortunate young Englishwoman who goes to Paris and is kidnapped by a gang of cutthroats, robbed, and then tossed into the Seine. At the end of the story, we learn that she dreamed it all under anesthetic at the dentist’s office.”

Hitchcock already had some idea of who he was, who he wanted to be, and how he wanted to live. While a few of his thriftier co-workers carried lunch pails or bagged lunches, most preferred a communal break at the local pub. Standing up while eating never appealed to Hitchcock, who selected a restaurant which not only served good food but, as he recalled, “had very clean fine linen napkins.” He had a lifelong appreciation of table linen, china, crystal, and silver. After lunch, he would smoke one cigar, the best he could afford, considering the straitened circumstances at home after his father’s death and the need for him to contribute part of his salary.

He did not remember feeling lonely at that time, and he never minded eating alone. “Besides, I didn’t earn enough money to pay for two.”

Hitchcock wanted to fit in with his co-workers while not really sharing their interests. “I had too much to do, my solitary pursuits, which were of much greater interest to me.”

He chose to protect himself from rejection. “I have always been uncommonly unattractive. Worse yet, I have always known it. The feeling has been with me so long, I cannot imagine what it would be like not to feel that way.”

Hitchcock was too young to fight in the Great War until it was nearly over, but as soon as he was eighteen, he immediately went to take his physical. He was rejected, which he said was a blow.

“It shouldn’t have been such a shock. They didn’t say what was wrong with me, but I think they just didn’t like the way I looked. I’m an upside-down cake. I was very healthy, but I believe they thought I would have been a disgrace to the uniform.

“They would have had to make my uniform to order because they didn’t have any that came in my shape. My legs are too small for my body. I suppose they thought I wouldn’t have been able to charge into battle, or even out of it.”

He joined the volunteer corps of the Royal Engineers, which didn’t require a uniform, and which met to practice home defense.

“I was deeply interested in movies from childhood, well before I became involved with them. Deeply interested. They were a passion of mine. I didn’t read fan magazines. Stars were of no interest to me. Later, I understood better why. I read the trade papers and technical journals.

“I saw films that looked like someone had set up a camera in front of a stage, especially the British films. I’d be over the moon with the Frenchman Georges Méliès. I was thrilled by the movies of D. W. Griffith and the early French director Alice Guy.”

In 1919, Hitchcock read in the trade papers about a Hollywood company—Famous Players-Lasky, which eventually became Paramount—setting up a branch in London at the Islington Studios. “It was important in my life,” Hitchcock said, “both as Famous Players-Lasky and later as Paramount.”

He applied for a position at the studio with an elaborate portfolio he had put together while at Henley. “Someone I knew, knew someone who knew what their first film was going to be. Actually, at the time, the plan was only tentative, but fortunately, I didn’t have that excess of information to hinder me. It was an occasion where what I
didn’t
know was as important as what I
did
know. I rushed out and bought
The Sorrows of Satan,
a Victorian novel, and stayed up much of the night for several nights, not something I ever liked to do.

“It was rather unfair to Henley because I was pretty tired on the job, but I did all of my work. I was utterly conscientious. When I completed all the main titles, I called Famous Players-Lasky for an appointment. Another thing I didn’t think about, due to my youth, lack of experience, and perhaps stupidity, was that I didn’t know the script or the scenes, and what I was offering would only be useful if they let it shape their film. It was presumptuous of me, but I didn’t even know it.

“‘You can have these free,’ I said. My enthusiasm was taken in the best spirit. My drawings, which I knew were good, were praised, and the confirmation of what they said was they offered me a part-time job. So, my first job in the film world was as a writer and designer of titles for silent films.”

The movies, then being silent, required full-screen titles, called intertitles, whenever there was dialogue, and Hitchcock’s job was to adorn the titles with artwork as well as to select the type. Hitchcock was so fascinated by the film studio, he volunteered to do other jobs as well, becoming what he described as “a kind of third assistant at a time when they didn’t have third assistants.”

He was spending so much time there, they thought he was a full-time employee. When they realized he wasn’t, they asked him if he would consider leaving his job and coming to work for them full-time. It didn’t take much persuasion. He quit his job at Henley and went to work at Famous Players-Lasky. Later, Hitchcock always said proudly, “I was American-trained in film, you know,” because he had worked first for an American company in England. “I got a pittance, but I didn’t know it, so I was very happy.”

From 1920 until 1922, he designed intertitles for films, as well as doing other tasks. “I was the first to pick up a piece of paper from the floor and deposit it in a wastebasket, even though officially I was employed in the editorial department. I did whatever odd job had to be done around the office, while spending as much time as I could in the studio watching the films being shot, sometimes even doing the work of an assistant director without benefit of title. I was very happy in my work.

“At that time, the American scriptwriters were all women, and I learned screenplay writing from them. There were many opportunities at that time for women to work in films. This kind of sedentary work was considered appropriate for women, like sewing. When films became more important, these positions were no longer readily available to women.”

By 1922, the American company had become discouraged with their British venture, and decided to phase it out, renting the Islington Studios to independent producers. One of them, Seymour Hicks, a well-known actor-playwright, rented the studio to film his own successful stage play,
Always Tell Your Wife.
In the middle of shooting, Hicks had an argument with his director, Hugh Croise, and fired him, intending to direct the rest of the picture himself. As his assistant, he hired Hitchcock.

During this period, Hitchcock directed part of his first film, which was never finished.

“Paramount’s head of publicity liked me and asked if I would want to direct a two-reel comedy called
Number 13,
which she had written and for which she had some backing. She had worked with Chaplin, so everybody took her quite seriously. We started, but the film was never finished.

“The money ran out, and it may have been just as well. We were saved from disgrace and from having that piece of film floating around forever.”

In 1922, the Islington Studios were leased and eventually sold to a new British company, Gainsborough Pictures, which had been created by Michael Balcon, with Victor Saville. Balcon had been a salesman and Saville a film distributor. They were soon joined by Graham Cutts, an exhibitor who wanted to direct.

Hitchcock applied for a job on their first picture,
Woman to Woman,
and was hired.

“On my own time,” Hitchcock said, “I practiced my hand at writing a script from a novel. When the job at Gainsborough came up, they hired me as the assistant director. Then, they said in a panic, ‘Who’s going to write our script?’ I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ They read it, and liked it. I was twenty-three.

“I had a friend who was going to be the art director on the picture, and he found he couldn’t work on it.
Woman to Woman
was a big, important picture. It featured a Hollywood star, Betty Compson. I said, ‘I’ll do the art direction, I’ll design the sets,’ and so forth. They believed me, and I did some drawings to show them. So, I became art director as well.”

Hitchcock chose as his assistant on
Woman to Woman
an attractive young film editor who had begun working at Islington in 1916. Her name was Alma Reville.

H
ELLO
, M
ISS
R
EVILLE
. My name is Alfred Hitchcock and I have just been appointed assistant director on a new film. I wonder if you would consider the position of cutter on this film?”

Thus Hitch and Alma began their relationship. Hitchcock had noticed the petite young redhead from the moment he started work at Famous Players-Lasky, but had been too shy and too conscious of his own lower professional status to make an approach until he at least felt equal in rank.

“I was surprised to hear from him,” Alma told me, “and very grateful. I’d been out of a job ever since Paramount left Islington.”

She became Hitchcock’s assistant. The job involved editing film and being the script girl, which was an important position on the silents. “I began by admiring her from afar,” Hitchcock told me. “I much preferred admiring her from a-near.”

Fifty-seven years later, nobody expressed better the relationship between Hitch and Alma than Hitchcock himself in his acceptance speech at the American Film Institute’s 1979 Lifetime Achievement Award Tribute to him:

“Among those many people who have contributed to my life, I ask permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration.

“The first of the four is a film editor.

“The second is a scriptwriter.

“The third is the mother of my daughter, Pat.

“And the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen.

“And their names are Alma Reville.

“Had the beautiful young Miss Reville not accepted a lifetime contract without options as Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock some fifty-three years ago, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock might be in this room tonight, not at this table, but as one of the slower waiters on the floor. I share my award, as I have my life, with her.”

There has been much discussion of the glamorous, mysterious blondes who were predominantly the heroines of Hitchcock’s films, though there were brunettes, too. The most important woman for Hitchcock, however, was the heroine of his private life, a mysterious redhead. She was Alma Reville, who became Alma Hitchcock.

Hitchcock had always acknowledged privately Alma’s contribution to his films, and for some of them she had been credited onscreen, but her full contribution to the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock was never declared so publicly until the American Film Institute dinner, during the last year of their life together. That was the way Alma had wanted it. As Hitchcock was the public person, his wife was a totally private person. While Hitchcock was nourished by recognition and praise, it made Alma blush.

“Alma, you know,” he told me, “was the only person I could lose my dignity with, and dignity was a heavy burden to always carry.”

A satisfied Alma told me, “He gave me a life I never imagined.”

Norman Lloyd, actor, producer, and long-time friend of the Hitchcocks, said, “He was the eye, she was the ear.”

A
LMA
L
UCY
R
EVILLE
was born on August 14, 1899, in Nottingham, a lace-making center 120 miles north of London. Alma’s father, Matthew Reville, was the London representative of a Nottingham lace firm. Shortly afterward, her family moved to Twickenham, west of London.

She was educated at a private girls school where she was a good student until forced to drop out for two years when she contracted chorea, commonly called Saint Vitus’ dance. Being a semi-invalid for so long changed her aspirations and the direction of her life. An advanced education had become even less a possibility, and Alma began looking for a vocation.

Since her mother loved to attend the cinema, she took her young daughter with her over the objections of an aunt who, according to Hitchcock, warned Alma’s mother, “‘You mustn’t take young Alma to the cinema, because she will only pick up fleas.’ Well, she did get involved in the cinema, and after a while, she picked me up. But I’m certainly no flea.”

With lace going out of style, especially during the economic and social changes of the Great War, Alma’s father had gone to work at the London Film Company in the costume department. It was housed in a converted power station in Islington, only a few blocks from the Reville home, and Alma often rode her bicycle there to see her father and to watch the actors. Noticing his daughter’s interest, and preferring that she work close to home, he arranged for her to be employed there, making Alma a second-generation film person. “I was hired as a tea girl, the only job possible for an untrained sixteen-year-old,” Alma remembered.

She made the tea for the morning break and then again for afternoon tea, as well as all during the day for anyone who wanted it. Even in that task, Alma immediately wanted to excel. She not only learned all of the refinements of tea making, rinsing the cups with scalding water so they would retain the heat longer, allowing the leaves to steep the right amount of time, but she learned all of the preferences of each of the tea drinkers, such as pouring the cold milk in first before the bath of hot tea. Such enterprise and good spirit did not go unnoticed. Despite her extreme youth, even for that time, she was quickly in line for rapid promotion.

Her employers noticed how bright and energetic she was, and being in need of a cutter at the lowest possible salary, they promoted her. She was thrilled. She wanted to learn everything about the business she already loved. At that time, a cutter assisted the director, who was expected to edit his own movies. She was also a script girl and secretarial assistant to the director. On occasion, she appeared in a film, briefly inspiring in her some ambition to become an actress. Director Maurice Elvey asked her to step in to play young Megan Lloyd George in the 1918 film,
The Life Story of David Lloyd George.
This film, considered lost for eighty years, was recently found by Kevin Brownlow, noted British filmmaker and historian.

Alma understood the filmmaking process from the development of the screenplay to the development of the film stock. There wasn’t anything she hadn’t done except star in a film. She had all but one of the qualifications to be a director at a time when women had some opportunity in this field. “I’m too small,” Alma told me. “Not just short, but small. I could never project the image of authority a director has to project. A director has to be able to play the role of a director.”

“Would you have liked to have become a director if you hadn’t met Alfred Hitchcock?” I asked.

“I don’t know. The people I worked for said I might become an assistant director at the time. I never really thought about it. I loved my work, and I would have just wanted to go on with it. I liked writing, and I liked best working with a small group of people, like a stock company. As everything got so big, you were no longer part of a team, but part of an organization. Later, sometimes I thought I might like to write a novel because you can do that alone.”

In 1919, when the London Film Company closed down, and the studio at Islington was sold to Famous Players-Lasky, Alma was invited to stay on as a continuity girl.

“It sounded very nice,” she told me. “In truth, I hadn’t the faintest idea what a continuity girl did. I think it’s
because
I hadn’t a clue to what it involved and didn’t know any better that I said yes. I didn’t hesitate. I figured I always had time later to say no, and then I never wanted to.”

At that time, Alma was rare because she worked both as a cutter
and
a script girl. For her first job in both capacities, she was assigned a costume film. “When I saw the picture I had put together, I was horrified. I had made
so
many mistakes! All these years later, it makes me blush to remember it. A girl comes into a hallway with mittens on and goes into another room where she doesn’t have them on, and then she leaves with the mittens back on. It’s a wonder I wasn’t made redundant immediately. Everybody laughed. Well, it was better than losing my job, but I didn’t enjoy being laughed at, either.”

It was while Alma was working on Donald Crisp’s
Appearances
that she met the young man who had come to work for Famous Players-Lasky in 1919 as an intertitles artist, Alfred Hitchcock. At that moment in time, Alma was far ahead of him in her knowledge of filmmaking.

She noticed him immediately, but as she remembered, he didn’t seem to be aware of her, being completely absorbed by his work. This surprised her, since she was accustomed to being noticed by young men, who liked her perky style.

“I regarded myself as a very attractive girl, prettier perhaps than I really was, but I was outgoing and social. You might say I had good self-esteem. I enjoyed pretty clothes. I loved movies and I loved what I was doing. I was an optimistic type, and I saw a rosy future.”

Like her future husband, Alma always believed in the importance of first impressions.

“I remember a young man coming in with a large package under his arm, wearing a dingy gray topcoat.” She giggled at the memory, seeming to relive it in her mind. Hitchcock told me that Alma’s giggle was the first thing he had noticed about her.

Although immediately attracted to her, Hitchcock didn’t feel he could properly court her yet because he and Alma inhabited a world not far into the twentieth century, and each lived within a nineteenth-century family. The prevalent values were still those of a Victorian world. Only when Hitchcock graduated to assistant director did he feel he could pursue his courtship. Being shy, he approached Alma by telephone, offering her a job. “It wasn’t very romantic,” Hitchcock remembered.

Alma was different from any girl he had ever met. “Until then,” he told me, “I never understood what women wanted. I only knew it wasn’t me.”

When Famous Players-Lasky gave up on the English market and leased the Islington Studios to independent producers, Alma went to work for one of those independents, Gainsborough. Hitchcock, who had been kept on as the property master by the American company, soon joined Gainsborough, too.

Working together for Gainsborough provided the opportunity for them to know each other better. They spent most of their courtship talking about movies, according to Alma. “Still do,” she added. “We wrote letters to each other, but they weren’t love letters. They were letters about filmmaking.” They enjoyed meetings of the London Film Society. A young actor named John Gielgud was also a member and film enthusiast. Many years later, he told me, “It was where we went to see the highbrow movies.” One of the founders was Sidney Bernstein, a distributor who immediately noticed and liked Alfred Hitchcock. This was the best opportunity to see what was going on throughout the world in film. The Russian cinema was important to Hitchcock, who particularly noted its use of montage.

Hitchcock was an enthusiastic, committed theatergoer. Many of the actors he saw on the stage at that time would later appear, sometimes more than once, in his films. Among them were Tallulah Bankhead, Edmund Gwenn, Leo G. Carroll, Gladys Cooper, Sara Allgood, Isabel Jeans, Ian Hunter, Miles Mander, John Williams, and Ivor Novello.

Woman to Woman
was the first of five films on which Hitchcock and Alma worked together. It was a joyful time for them, although, as Alma added, “It was somewhat marred because director Graham Cutts was not our cup of tea. He didn’t appreciate Hitch, he knew very little, and actually we carried him. Then, he resented it. He was jealous of Hitch, who was intuitive and perfectly understood everything technical. Cutts was ready to depend on others, but not to share credit.”

The film was a great success, encouraging Gainsborough to follow it with
The Passionate Adventure
and
The White Shadow,
again with Hitchcock as assistant director, though uncredited, and art director of
The White Shadow.
Hitchcock also adapted the stage play and, with Alma, wrote the screenplay, again uncredited. The film was unsuccessful, and Cutts complained to producer Michael Balcon that Hitchcock was undermining his authority on the set. Balcon, however, was impressed by the young man, who seemed to be saving him money by doing so many jobs so well.

After the success of
Woman to Woman,
Balcon made a low offer in a bid to purchase the Islington facilities, not expecting Paramount to accept, but they did. Balcon had the idea that the only way to run a successful film company in England was to own the studio facilities.