Alfred Hitchcock (5 page)

Surely Hitchcock, who throughout life publicly poked fun at himself but privately was hurt by people’s gibes, sensed the scuttlebutt and withdrew into himself.

For lunch at St. Ignatius, students could pick up snack food at a tuckshop, or bring lunches from home and take them down to the river Lea or out on the playground. Very often two friends huddled together, outside on the playground, munching their sandwiches as they watched the other boys form teams for games. They were “Alfie” and “Hughie”—Hitchcock and Hugh Gray, another unathletic, bookish, budding aesthete.

Gray told François Truffaut that he would always remember Hitchcock standing up against a wall, watching the other boys contemptuously. But that appears to have been mythmaking on Gray’s part. He told his wife that the two usually sat together on a stone bench, somewhat forlornly.

Asked once by television interviewer Dick Cavett what he was like as a boy, Hitchcock replied, “Nice, very quiet, very dignified, kept to myself. I never fought other boys. I was very diligent.”

To appreciate that nice, quiet boy, chubby, with soft brown eyes and a rooster’s tuft of hair, sitting on a stone bench and watching others play as he chewed his lunch, we must “avoid the cliché.” “Avoiding the cliché”—recognizing the familiar and using it to spring surprises—was Hitchcock’s succinct mantra, oft-stated in interviews. It was his artistic credo.

Alfred Hitchcock the man in many ways belied his image. The origins
of Hitchcock’s “wrong man” theme are there in that chubby boy on the stone bench, who allegedly stank of fish. He might have appeared thick to classmates, but he wasn’t what he appeared. Appearances deceived, as he was fortunate to learn early in life. Self-knowledge was a crucial component of his character, and his films are insistent about discovering hidden depths, or eccentricities, in people.

Early on Hitchcock felt like an outsider, apart from other kids on Salmon Lane, or at St. Ignatius; later in America, even after his reputation was firmly established, he still felt apart from the Hollywood crowd.

The boy who sat on the stone bench, calmly observing and absorbing, found ways to enjoy himself. Hitchcock was more of a doer than people give him credit for, but he was also, from very early in life, a consummate watcher. He enjoyed himself immensely, watching.

He was at least two people: the watcher and the doer, the insider and the outsider, the image and the reality. He was the short, chubby cliché, but inside the “armor of fat,” as he sometimes called it, he was sweet, sensitive, dashing, and wise. And tough. It was a hard, hard world, and he could be exceedingly tough in finding his way through life.

Inside the armor was a knight on a quest, whose sword would be a long silver ribbon of film.

Pressed by interviewers, Hitchcock said that at St. Ignatius he learned important things: “a strong sense of fear,” how “to be realistic,” and “Jesuit reasoning power.” The fear, the realism mixed with fancy, the reasoning power and discipline of ordered thinking—these were the cornerstones of his art. No director was more disciplined, more ordered in his thinking. His unusually meticulous methods were key to his films and success, and also to his character.

There was a built-in paradox to Jesuit reasoning power—so powerful, Hitchcock knew, that it could prove the unprovable (the existence of God, for example). Hitchcock despised the “implausibles,” those critics who faulted the holes in his films, for they had touched on one of his deeply embedded character traits. When forced to choose between reason or belief in his search for a cinematic effect, he wouldn’t hesitate to suspend reason. “Film should be stronger than reason,” he insisted in interviews. Or, as he told Oriana Fallaci, when a bomb or murderer is in the room “Descartes can go boil his head.”

The implausibles just didn’t get it: Hitchcock films reveled in their implausibility. Mr. Memory prompted to recite a supersecret formula onstage in front of hundreds of people in
The 39 Steps.
A man slaying his wife and
then chopping her up and burying her head in a communal garden, with windows open all around, in
Rear Window.
The entire story of
Vertigo
—desperately hard to believe, except for people who love Hitchcock films.

Compulsory education lasted only until age twelve in that era, and “Alfie” withdrew from St. Ignatius shortly before turning fourteen. Asked to declare his ambitions, Hitchcock said he thought he might become a navigator. With that half in mind, he enrolled in the autumn of 1913 in the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation on High Street in Poplar. Hitchcock attended lectures in physics and chemistry, took all manner of shop classes, calculated nautical and electrical measurements, and studied the principles of magnetism, force, and motion. (“The worst thing was chemistry,” he subsequently recalled. “I couldn’t get on with that. Melting things in sulfuric acid. Who cares?”)

The lessons and skills enhanced his résumé, and after a year of classwork Hitchcock was hired in November 1914 by WT Henley’s Telegraph Works, a leading manufacturer and installer of electrical cables, on Blomfield Street. Hitchcock’s lowly position involved calculating the sizes and voltages of cables.

He continued with night classes until December 12, when his father passed away at age fifty-two, from chronic emphysema and kidney disease. Of William Hitchcock’s fatal illness not much is known; Hitchcock told Truffaut his father was “a rather nervous man,” and John Russell Taylor said William Hitchcock struggled so hard to keep his emotions in check “that he suffered from various naggingly painful conditions of apparently nervous origin, like boils and carbuncles.” On top of it all, father William was a drinker.

According to Taylor, fifteen-year-old Alfred was tracked down at school “and told the news by his brother” William Jr.; then he went over to his sister’s to commiserate with her. Nellie was then working as a model for a department store and living on her own. Taylor said Hitchcock’s sister greeted him strangely, “by saying almost aggressively to him, ‘Your father’s dead,’ giving him a surreal sense of disassociation.”

William Jr., only twenty-four, assumed management of both fish shops on Salmon Lane, and for the time being, the youngest member of the family continued to live above one shop with his mother.

England had been plunged into war earlier, in the summer of 1914, and London was increasingly choked with fear and rumors. Enemy submarines were spotted in the Irish Sea. Bomb-toting Germans were said to be planning sabotage in London. The newspapers were full of favorably slanted war news, although the lists of the casualties were long.

Hitchcock wasn’t eligible for the draft until he was eighteen, and then it may not have been his weight that excused him from military service with a C3 classification. It may have been the combination of a glandular
condition, his relative youth, and his father’s death. But as he would prove during World War II, what Hitchcock lacked in physical fitness he made up for in patriotism. He signed up for a cadet regiment of the Royal Engineers in 1917. He and a co-worker joined a corps of men receiving theoretical briefings in the evenings, while engaging in weekend drills and exercises. Their actual military stint was limited, however, to marching around Hyde Park in puttees, which, as he told John Russell Taylor, he never could get properly wrapped around his legs.

Afterward, Hitchcock said he and his friend would adjourn to a feast of poached eggs on toast. “Aha!” interrupted Taylor. “You said you never ate eggs.” “Well,” Hitchcock conceded, “I suppose I did eat one or two eggs when I was very young.”

He once told a French interviewer that the first time he experienced genuine fear—as opposed to the enjoyment of fear—came when enemy bombs dropped on London. He was at home with other family members, and they all fell to the floor. His mother took refuge under a table and cowered there, murmuring prayers. But there was a Hitchcockian element of comedy in this terrifying scene, which he recounted, expertly mimicking his mother and other relatives. Despite the imminent danger, tea was still served, and his mother stopped her prayers long enough to say, “Only one sugar for me!”

Another time, Hitchcock remembered, he came home to Salmon Lane amid the shrill blare of sirens warning of a Zeppelin raid. (This must have been in 1915 or early 1916, the period of the most intense Zeppelin attacks.) “The whole house was in an uproar,” he recalled, “but there was my poor Elsa Maxwell-plump little mother struggling to get into her bloomers, always putting both her legs through the same opening, and saying her prayers, while outside the window shrapnel was bursting around a search-lit Zeppelin—extraordinary image!”

His World War I memories mingled horror with comedy, much like his films. But living through wartime in his formative years deeply influenced a body of work that is filled with crazed assassins and spy plots, bombs that destroy innocents, and villains with German accents. And it reinforced a psychology that already understood life as fragile and arbitrary.

The war and his father’s premature death, coming as Hitchcock embarked on his first job, formalized his break with the family profession, and put a grim seal on his boyhood.

Founded by William Thomas Henley in 1837, Henley’s was an early manufacturer of electroplating apparatuses and insulated conductors, and later of telegraph and electrical cables, including both shore ends of the Atlantic cable as well as a Persian Gulf cable. Recently the company had shifted its
emphasis from telegraph cables to cables for light and power, and to production of all types of electrical distribution equipment. Besides home orders, Henley’s had contracts and foreign branches around the globe, including in Europe, east India, China, Australia, and South America.

Hitchcock swiftly graduated to the sales section, where he honed his design and draftsmanship skills. There he would cultivate his habit of diligent planning, with notes, drafts, and multiple revisions. There he would also learn various means of publicity and promotion. No one ever had a better procedural grounding for film than Hitchcock did at Henley’s. The job educated him technically, artistically, and commercially.

Henley’s was a vast operation, with several hundred employees at the Blomfield Street office block alone. Like a film studio, the company was not only a business enterprise but a social enclave—a small world unto itself. The calendar of sponsored employee events included sports and dramatics, recreational clubs, company mixers, river trips, picnic parties, and other get-togethers.

Hitchcock liked to say that as a young man he was shy and solitary, but there he is at company outings, beaming in group photos. He liked to say he was a fat young man, but his weight fluctuated, and in some photographs he looks almost debonair, a round, sleek egg of a fellow. He still had hair, he affected a mustache, he sported bow ties on occasion, and in those youthful days he often wore a homburg.

Unlike at St. Ignatius, there is no question as to how Hitchcock fit in at Henley’s: he was decidedly well known and well liked. “The only thing that matters,” Hitchcock once wrote to his friend and producing partner Sidney Bernstein, “is who I work with day-to-day.” He was speaking of the film world, but he might as well have been speaking of Henley’s, where he first learned the importance of camaraderie on the job. Whatever his nature as a young boy, at Henley’s he became the opposite of a loner: an inspired leader and motivator of people.

Throughout the war Hitchcock worked in the sales section, gradually realizing he didn’t want to be an engineer. So, with the self-motivation that defined his character, he enrolled in art courses at Goldsmiths’ College, a well-known, forward-looking branch of London University. The teachers sent him out to railroad stations to sketch people in various attitudes. He studied illustration and composition. Among his classes was a mesmerizing lecture presided over by the illustrator E. J. Sullivan, renowned for the detail and craftsmanship of his line drawings in newspapers, magazines, and books.

It was at Goldsmiths’ that Hitchcock first began to pay attention to the history and principles of art: composition, depth of field, the uses of color, shadow and light. He began to frequent art galleries and museums, especially entranced by the French moderns.

Art courses sharpened his interest in theater and film. Hitchcock now became an inveterate “first-nighter,” and the West End plays he saw during the years before he entered the film industry and in the 1920s made a lasting impression.

He saw
The Lodger
onstage in 1916, and John Galsworthy’s
The Skin Game
a few years later. He always remembered that
Jolly Jack Tar
had a suspenseful bomb in the plot. The people in the theater were nervous about the bomb going off. A woman stood up in the gallery and shouted to the actors: “Watch out for the bomb!” More than one Hitchcock film could have had that as its advertisement: “Watch out for the bomb!”

He was bewitched in 1920 by James M. Barrie’s
Mary Rose
, a sentimental ghost story set in a haunted English manor and on a mysterious island. He never forgot Fay Compton’s stirring lead performance, and for the rest of his life he would dream of filming the play.

He often saw plays alone, and because neither his mother nor his sister had the same fascination with “pictures” (as he stubbornly called them for most of his life), he now went to many films alone too. “I did not miss a single picture,” he later boasted to interviewers.