Hitch (48 page)

Family Plot
was scheduled for an Easter 1976 release. But when in December the possibility came up of its being the opening attraction at the benefit première of Filmex, the Los Angeles International Film Festival, on 21 March 1976, Universal liked the idea and moved forward the date for delivery of the final print accordingly. On 18 March there was the first preview before an audience at the University of Southern California: Hitch himself was present, spoke before the film and was very pleased with the student audience's reaction—‘They didn't miss a trick.' The reception at the opening of Filmex was also enthusiastic, if in a less detailed fashion. The showing was part of a show business junket—fireworks, performing elephants and such, plus a charity benefit dinner afterwards, in the course of which Hitch was presented by James Stewart with a newly set-up Filmex Award, and made some whimsical comments about the squareness of the award's shape, hoping it was no reflection on him and his work, and seeing it also possibly as a die with just one spot on it, himself.

After this very successful première the national openings of the film were scheduled for Easter. So the publicity machine at Universal went into operation, with Hitch himself deeply involved. Since he did not plan to travel very much with this film, the kick-off of the campaign was a unique press conference coast-to-coast on
closed-circuit television. The proceedings began at 9 a.m. Los Angeles time, on Stage 5 of the NBC studios at Burbank. Hitch was bright and fresh, very much on form, and if many of the questions were routine, some of the answers were not. He reiterated his mistrust of symbolic interpretation in his films, politely side-stepped an invitation to go through the actors-are-cattle routine one more time, and said some familiar things in an unfamiliar fashion, bearing out his own instruction to avoid the cliché. What was the mandatory age of retirement for a director in Hollywood, someone asked. ‘I would say, around reel twelve.' Was he planning on retirement? ‘What's retirement?' No, he did not have any property in mind for his next picture. But yes, there definitely would be a fifty-fourth. He replied to a congratulation on his and Alma's impending golden wedding anniversary that they were both in excellent health ‘and clear conscience' (strange association of ideas, murmured someone). The last question of all seemed to take him by surprise: given the context of
Family Plot
, a lady asked, had he any idea what he would like to see inscribed on his own tombstone? He considered. ‘Well, I suppose something like “You see what can happen to you if you aren't a good boy”.' A gag, of course, but also still the same old anxieties, still the same old guilts, even seventy years on.

‘How one feels about Hitch depends on how one feels about film,' one of his writers said to me. And it is remarkable how many accounts of Hitch and occurrences in his life seem to be based on the unspoken assumption that he himself is a film. Not so much that he is, in Isherwood's phrase, a camera, recording what he sees, but that he has actually made himself into a film, at once subject, object and medium. His reactions are described frame by frame; his memories have the sharpness and shape of something seen through the view-finder—by someone else, naturally, because he never looks through a viewfinder. Why should he?—by the time he comes to shoot any specific film he has already absorbed it completely, he has only to think it, and draw a line round his thinks. His films are his fantasies—for a very private man (which he is) he is also an amazingly public man, exposing the innermost workings of his mind for all to see. But naked is, as we know, the best disguise. By virtue of the creative process the films, though they are him, are also something else—autonomously existent works of art, obeying the rules of art rather than those of life, and any naïve assumption that the films are an easy key to Hitch's character should be deeply mistrusted.

For the films, if they are in some senses a confession, are also a weapon—the weapon a timid man uses to bring a hostile environment under control. The relationship between a film-maker and his public—and particularly between Hitch and his public—is to some extent a battle of wills, dependent for its outcome on how far the film-maker can direct the audience through the film. The film is a machine for influencing people: it is much more importantly what is projected on the screen of their minds than on the screen of their cinema. It is not for nothing that Hitch has speculated on the possibility of an age when it will not even be necessary to make the films any more: audiences will simply be wired with electrodes and then be played like a giant console organ—press this key and they
laugh, press that and they gasp. But however it is done, the filmmaker has other people where he wants them, he can control and predict their reactions. How different from everyday life.

But not too different, not if Hitch can help it. The perfect calm and control of the working conditions he creates for himself have constantly been remarked on since his earliest days in the cinema, and by now the politeness, the quiet, the absolute external formality of dress and demeanour have become a fetish. What would he do, someone once asked him, if in the middle of a long and difficult take a member of the crew sneezed or dropped a hammer? ‘I'd say “cut”, look in the direction of the man who sneezed, and expect him not to be there.' Once, in the middle of
Psycho
, the film ran out in the middle of a take. Nothing was said, absolutely nothing, but the set was enveloped in an atmosphere of dread for the rest of the day. Hitch believes he cannot get angry—to be angry, he might say with Alexander Pope, is to revenge the faults of others on yourself—but the truth is that he does not have to any more. And even in his home environment, his social life, Hitch has done everything through the years to achieve total control, to remove as far as possible any chance of the unpredictable and probably unpleasant from happening. His circle of personal friends is small, and they all know their place. He does not seem dictatorial because he does not have to be—he is not going to talk about anything he does not want to, he is not going to do anything before he is absolutely ready to do it, and that is that. He does it with the utmost courtesy, but you become aware that if you are going to play the game of life with him, you are going to play it by his rules. And since they are very fair and gentlemanly rules, it is difficult to object.

All this is evidently an elaborate defence, a stratagem for dealing with the terrors of life, which Hitch has slowly, painstakingly built up over the years. He has achieved a progressive insulation from the outside world, to become director of his own little private world, safe and predictable. But not entirely lacking in challenges, not dead. For there are always the challenges he sets himself to work out in his films—his mind is never still, he is never content to do things the easy way, the way they do them in the movies. And then there is Alma, his perfect counterpart, the one big quirky, unpredictable element in his life. To be frightened of everybody, after all, comes to much the same thing as being frightened of nobody, and there are those who claim that Alma is the only person he is really frightened
of in this world. Hardly frightened of, one would say, but deeply regardful of, deeply concerned about and respectful of her reactions. For she is certainly the one person in the world who is totally un-intimidated by him, will tell him exactly what she thinks of his work (with the authority of having been even longer in the profession than he) and firmly maintain her own attitudes and opinions in the face of his palpable disapproval. Though it would be a sentimental oversimplification to say that during the past fifty years or so he has ‘done it all for Alma', it is a sort of sentimentality not so foreign to the supposedly ruthless, cynical Hitch as one might think.

But in many respects the Hitch who is found intimidating by nearly all his friends and associates is actually extremely vulnerable. It is not for nothing that the pervasive theme of his work is anxiety—fear has been too well instilled by his strict father and his formidable mother, by his Jesuit teachers, by his early experiences of life. He likes to quote Sardou's recipe for drama, ‘Torture the heroine,' but despite this classic authority, the attitudes to the sex in his films seem inspired by a fearful fascination and extreme nervousness of the unknown—his typical cinematic ill-treatment of his heroines has nothing to do with personal misogyny but a lot to do with devising a ritual to control the uncontrollable, a way of working out otherwise unmanageable impulses and emotions; not dislike of women but fear of himself, the good Catholic boy, in relation to women. The fear of authority may be ‘explained', inadequately, by the story of his brief childhood incarceration, but it is all of a piece with the rest of his attitudes surviving through, from earliest childhood right up to the present.

Anxiety is even at the bottom of his sense of humour. His practical jokes are a means of communicating, and of fixing things in such a way that the deviser has the whip hand, is in control. And in his films the humour is always inextricably mixed with terror. After a preview of
Shadow of a Doubt
the composer, Dmitri Tiomkin, was disturbed because the audience giggled in one or two unexpected places. Not Hitch: he was delighted, because it showed they were really tense and uncomfortable. And often a giggle and a gasp are not too far apart—shock and discomfort can give rise to either reaction. Hitch's humour is a weapon, like any other. And this perhaps explains his willingness to lend himself, careful of his dignity as he generally is, to the most ridiculous stunts in the cause of publicity. Hitch crouched next to a St. Bernard with a brandy keg strapped
round his neck; Hitch among the swans, ‘apologizing' for
The Birds;
Hitch in the rain, under a transparent umbrella, miming a sneeze in Milan; Hitch in drag as Queen Victoria; Hitch in a little Lord Fauntleroy suit, as a giant, evil child … How could he? Well, obviously, because he is in command: his dignity is something he can relinquish quite off-handedly—his doing so could be one sign that he really despises his public—but would never let anyone take from him. And the stunts serve their purpose. The pictures hit the papers, they keep Hitchcock a physical presence in the minds of the public, they are all part of his extraordinary talent for selling himself and his work.

The only thing more extraordinary than that is his ability to deliver as well as to promise. In this he is oddly comparable with an otherwise very different figure on the contemporary art scene, Andy Warhol. Both of them are consummate self-publicists who live up to their advertising claims, both prove that artistic sincerity is not incompatible with popularity and a keen sense of timeliness. And both, though claiming vagueness in such matters, are evidently excellent businessmen. Hitch has managed to become very rich with his film-making, his television, his books, his mystery magazine and all the other business activities he has involved himself in through the years—to such an extent that while he pays his agent the normal commission, he pays his business manager a straight $250,000 a year. That must represent security of some kind—especially since the Hitchcocks have always lived modestly in the smallish Bel Air house, which is now their only home since they found the Santa Cruz house too much trouble to get to and use as they would like. But material prosperity does nothing to appease the devils of insecurity. Even on such a harmless occasion as his first talk by invitation to students at the University of Southern California, he was clearly terrified and made elaborate arrangements to be interrupted by an important phone call after half an hour, though once he got talking he was perfectly happy and stayed on for three hours. Hitch in his seventies seems no more at ease with life and people than he was in his twenties.

And what is the real root of this deep unease? Hitch, whose propensity for quoting—if not necessarily believing—his analysts is well known, tends to blame his religious upbringing. But it is not so easy to separate legend and speculation from fact. Just because an explanation is convenient, does not necessarily mean it is true. And
it may be wondered just how much Hitch's religion, considered so important by commentators, actually has been to him, how large it really has bulked in the formation of his mental patterns. The answer to that, disappointingly, seems to be that it has counted for more than he ever lets people suspect. The cynical joker (even at times about the Church and its institutions) has always been a regular churchgoer. It was clearly important to him that Alma should be received into the Church before they married, and Pat was brought up and educated completely within the religion of her parents. In some ways, he seems to resent his background. On one occasion in Switzerland recently he surprised his companion in the car by suddenly saying, ‘That is the most frightening sight I have ever seen,' and pointing to a little boy walking past with a priest who had his hand on his shoulder and was talking very seriously to him. Hitch leaned out of the car and called, ‘Run, little boy, run for your life.' When he was in Rome in the early 1970s, his hosts arranged, thinking it would please him, for Hitch to have an audience with the Pope. But Hitch bowed gracefully out. ‘What would I do,' he said, ‘if the Holy Father said that in this world, with so much sex and violence, I ought to lay off?' Just a gag, possibly—but most likely not. What
would
a dutiful son of the Church do? Best not to run the risk.

It would seem, then, that there is some philosophy Hitch is really committed to. Maybe, as some suggest, in a ‘what if …' sort of way: the Catholic faith is something he was taught as a child (give us the first seven years, say the Jesuits); it may well be true, and it would be silly to ignore the possibility; and anyway, a man needs something to believe in. But on that level of consideration, who can know for sure? Quite probably not even the unconcerned subject of the speculation. There are only two things in Hitch's life which admit of no doubt: his devotion to Alma and his total commitment to the cinema. ‘The real Alfred Hitchcock does not exist outside his work.' That could be. But then the real Johann Sebastian Bach does not seem to exist outside his work. The real William Shakespeare? And does it matter? There is a real Alfred Hitchcock who is perfectly sufficient for the real Alfred Hitchcock. And for the rest of us, the work is what counts. Alfred Hitchcock has devoted more than fifty years of his life to becoming a film, the artist disappearing into his art. To judge by the life in his last film, and the energy he is putting into seeking out his next, the process may continue indefinitely.