Hitch Goes To Hollywood - Text aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Notes a Home

Bill Dorris

© 2009

The movies that we associate with Hitchcock have his hands all over them – Notorious, Vertigo, Rear Window, Psycho. In Donald Spoto's words, they are "astonishingly personal documents".(1) Or as Albert LaValley puts it, "his themes and interests are indeed almost too obsessively recurrent not to be his own". If we look at these recurrent themes and interests, and the "montage methods" Hitch used to "produce effects he has obviously experienced", we should have a good idea re what key characteristics he needed to create the films that are his legacy – the key characteristics which were driving, organizing, motivating his work as a film director, creating the films for which Alfred Hitchcock became famous.

Perhaps the most obvious place to start is with sexuality, the "murkier side" of sexuality, the kind of sexuality "where feelings of other kinds abound", feelings of "anxiety, fear, murder"; the kind of sexuality that shows up in Strangers on a Train with it's "undercurrents of sex and murder, of homosexual threats and attractions, blendings of wives and mothers”. Think of the "perverse experimentation with Tippi Hedren by Sean Connery" in Marnie; the "final images of (Anthony) Perkins against a white wall (in Psycho), mother's voice and skull, Janet Leigh's car rising from the murk…". Think of the sort of sexuality that shows up in Vertigo, where Scottie's "preoccupation with female clothing borders on the perverse"; where Jimmy Stewart spends the first half of the film tracking Kim Novak, and the second half "undressing her".

Hitch's sexuality is the sort of sexuality that is driven by fear, "fear of a devouring, voracious mother"; a fear that goes right to the core of the male identity, fear of a "continual threat of annihilation, of being swallowed up", a fear of "being 'swamped'". It's a fear of "psychic obliteration", a fear that drives Norman Bates to "his own ritual of defilement", to the slashing then "meticulous cleansing" of that bloody bathroom. It's the fear that Uncle Charlie knew in Shadow of a Doubt – the fear of a man who "murders wealthy widows", those women "smelling of money", the money their dead husbands slaved for, "… eating the money, drinking the money…" those "faded, fat, greedy women".

Hitch's sexuality is the kind of sexuality that easily slips into strangulation, the kind of sexuality where "love scenes are filmed as if they were murder scenes, and murder scenes as if they were…". It's the kind of sexuality that was essential to Hitchcock’s films – indicative of Hitch’s first key characteristic, what we'll call his massively conflicted and repressed sexuality.

Closely associated with this first key characteristic is a second which pervades every Hitchcock film, films which inevitably "portray a world dissolving into arbitrary chaos" (2).

Think of the chaos associated with every one of Hitch's chase films – North by Northwest, The 39 Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much -- chases in which the innocent man is ever pursued by both the villains and the cops, pursued in a "double-chase" where the "tempo and complexity shift and change as the murder, the madness, the rescue become emblematic of the character's variations in passion".

Think of Hitch's famous domestic scenes, scenes where that which should be the safest and most secure source of comfort turns out to the drugged drinks of Notorious, of Spellbound, the poisoned milk of Suspicion, the protective husband of Dial M For Murder.

Think of the core of Shadow of A Doubt -- a core which in fact pervades every film we associate with Hitchcock -- that sense that "almost anything can be anything else, so all appearances are deceptive and threatening". Think of Psycho where "everyone has a disguise or something to hide – the hidden treasure, the furtive plans of lunchtime lovers at the opening, wedding-day tranquillizers secretly taken by Janet Leigh's co-worker, the cash undeclared for taxes by the possessive father, the bottle of whiskey hidden in an employer's desk; the secret of illicit affairs, stolen cash, concealed identities, and undiscovered murders."

Think of The Birds where nature itself turns on us – the perfect metaphor for Hitch's second key characteristic, his fear of an overwhelming and chaotic world.

A third preoccupation of Hitchcock's which pervades his films, even in the face of a happy romantic ending, is the question of guilt, or more particularly, the experience of "what it feels like to be guilty", to “have the handcuffs on". (3)

As early as Blackmail and Sabotage we have the wife confessing to murder then going off, unpunished, with the detective, leaving a pervasive sense of guilt, a guilt which "seems to diffuse itself into both characters, the whole film – and us".

In our identification with Bruno in Strangers we participate in his “attraction for murder… for sexual perversion”. In “his sickness we can distinguish – corrupted, perverted, but given a kind of esthetic dignity – the very archetype of our desires.” “We are as much on his side as we are on Guy’s, and the screen itself, this chasm that separates reality from fiction, is not enough of a barrier to prevent our participation… we find ourselves more involved than we would care to admit”.

In Psycho “nothing that isn’t disturbing or tainted ever happens, and to enjoy it (as most people do) is to stand convicted, and consciously convicted, of a lurking nostalgia for evil", to stand convicted "of Original Sin”.

And in Rear Window when the murderer “suddenly appears” in Jimmy Stewart’s apartment, asking “What do you want of me?”, we are all guilty – along with Jimmy and his binoculars - not of blackmail, but of a motive far more “despicable” -- “idle curiosity". The entire film “illustrates the cardinal virtue of Hitchcock’s morality: we can never be hard enough on ourselves”.

Psycho, Strangers, Rear Window – the lot of them are inconceivable without Hitchcock’s third key characteristic, that conscience he couldda hung off of Mt. Rushmore .

And what of the mind that conceived of all this -- this mix of sexual repression, chaos, guilt, and murder? (4) The mind that was the creative driving force behind Hitch's films, that selected, conceived, brought to life the likes of Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers, and Psycho?

The kind of mind that could fill an afternoon of cocktails with friends wintering in Saint Moritz, first by demonstrating how it is "possible to strangle a woman with only one hand, and then by "warming to the subject" of necrophilia "for an hour".

The kind of mind that had an "obsession" with "blonde, subtle, Nordic" women -- those Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Vera Miles, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint "women of mystery" – those women who triggered a "simultaneous attraction and repulsion" in him. A mind that could spot an unknown model in a TV commercial, order up her portfolio, sort through the pile of photos, and then sign her to an "exclusive seven-year contract". The kind of mind that would hire Edith Head to design "not only a lavish wardrobe for her screen tests, but a complete wardrobe for her personal life" as well. A mind that would assign two crew members to keep track of her off the set, to "keep careful watch on where she went, whom she visited, how she spent her free time"; that would "take her aside for long story conferences about the film", then direct her "down to the movement of an eye", to "every turn of her head". A mind that "was always staring at her on and off the set". A mind that was "doing a Vertigo with Tippi Hedren".

This was the kind of mind that was "relentless" in searching for new material; that had a staff of "well tuned" insiders who "scoured everything - plays, novella, short stories, newspaper clippings" looking for that "little spark", that "springboard or trigger" -- that headline in a Santa Cruz newspaper: "Sea Bird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes" -- that "would turn him on", to "come up with a whole new situation and characters". Like that novel Peggy Robinson handed him in the spring of '59, that novel Hitchcock "holed-up with for a weekend in his home in Bel-Air", that novel with "two shocking murders, a twist finale peppered with transvestism, incest, and necrophilia", that novel that was "catnip" to Hitch, that novel with the perfect shower scene.

That mind behind the overall picture, behind Notorious, Vertigo, Strangers, Frenzy, Psycho…that mind was Hitch's fourth key characteristic -- a mind with the kind of active inner life Edgar Allen Poe would have been proud to be bricked up in.

What would it take to turn this into film, into cinema? (5) Into those North by Northwest chase scenes -- the biplane turning, Cary Grant diving into that cornfield; that finale across the face of Mt. Rushmore?

It would take the kind of mind that created that strangulation scene in Strangers, that had Robert Walker "pursue Laura Elliott to the amusement park island, flick open her cigarette lighter... her face filling the frame as she looks directly into the camera, suddenly blocked as Walker steps into the frame… his hands gripping her throat, her eyeglasses falling to the ground"; the kind of mind that has us see the “strangling and final collapse of the woman as a huge reflection in one of the eyeglass lenses, the shadowy distortion marking at once something gruesome and infernal, a moment wrenched from a terrible nightmare”.

Think of that trick shot Hitch devised for Vertigo, “that combination of a forward zoom and a reverse tracking shot" that created the "effect of the dizzying elasticity of dimensions – itself the visual equivalent for the admixture of desire and distance, the longing to fall and the fear of falling, the impulse toward and the revulsion from, that define the somatic and spiritual condition of vertigo”.

Think way back to Sabotage, how Hitchcock “gradually built up the psychological situation, to “draw the audience right inside it”, to let the audience experience, “how the thought of killing arises in Sylvia Sidney’s mind and connects itself with the carving knife she uses when they sit down to dinner”. The scene is “made up entirely of short pieces of film” edited together so as to “emphasize first one detail, then another”, so the “camera immerses us closely in the scene”. So as Sylvia “serves at the table you see her unconsciously serving vegetables with the carving knife, as though her hand were keeping hold of the knife of its own accord. The camera cuts from her hand to her eyes and back to her hand; then back to her eyes as she suddenly becomes aware of the knife, then to a normal shot (of her husband) unconcernedly eating; then back to the hand holding the knife…“now the camera moves to Verloc – back to the knife – back again to his face. You see him seeing the knife, realizing its implication.”

To create this cinema, this film montage, which forces the viewer into the psychological tension of every scene, it took a mind with a compelling sense of visual drama; a mind that couldn’t “read fiction without visualizing every scene”, so that a book became “a series of pictures rather than a book”; a mind that was “interested in the narrative line, not in a message, not even in the significance of plot or character, but in the development of emotional resonances in narrative through cinematic method”.

It took the kind of mind that “carried this little pad with two frames and a pencil, so as he explained something, say to the cameraman, he’d draw an image of what he wanted from the shot”, so “the cameraman would put a lens on and that’s exactly what he’d get”.

It took a mind that “staged scenes like blueprints”, a mind for which going “through the script and creating the picture on paper“ was “the real making of the film”, for whom the shooting, the editing, “the rest was just a bore”. It took the kind of mind that could tell Vera Miles on the set in Psycho to “be sure to stand on her mark”, not to “move one inch either way”, and then dose off in his chair while the scene was shot, already knowing “how it was going to look”.

Creating the likes of Notorious, Vertigo, Strangers, Psycho . . . took the mind of a Hitchcock, a mind with his fifth key characteristic -- that incredible ability to visualize drama.

That's it -- the five key characteristics behind Hitch's work as a film director. The five key characteristics driving, organizing, visualizing his creations – those films we know as Hitchcock's, all the way from Sabotage and Blackmail through his final cameo in The Family Plot almost fifty years later. Now starting with our best guess as to his genetic biases, let's follow Hitch over the first 20+ years of his life to see where these five key characteristics came from, to see how he happened to get the right kind of problems over and over and over again – the kind of problems that accelerated the development of his five key characteristics, the kind of problems that gave us this "international institution".

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No doubt Alfred Hitchcock was born “anxious”, or at least “inhibited”.(6) Still that doesn’t exactly book you straight into Norman Bates’ motel. What Hitch needed was a little something extra, something right at the outset to give him a definite jump on the competition, to pump his little “needs and insecurities” up into a fullblown fear -- an awful, endless, abiding fear of a chaotic, unpredictable and overwhelming world, the kind of world that’d smother little Fred with love, and then forget to feed him, that’d keep him so scrubbed up and tidy he probably figured his dipes were starched - the kind of world that only a mother could provide. (7)

And not just any mother. What Hitch needed was a special kind of mother; in his case an Irish Catholic mother from a “stern” cockney, working class background; a “meticulous”, “neat” mother who “wouldn’t venture out of her room” unless she was “perfectly dressed”; a mother unexpectedly blessed with one last little baby boy, a baby who obviously “needed” her.

And Hitch got that little something extra, that early jump on the competition. He got himself “surrounded” with momma’s “doting affection”, with a “devotion” that was somehow “too intimate”, too “overwhelming”, too “intrusive”; a devotion that “imprisons rather than frees”, a devotion that must have driven Emma’s little bundle of joy ever further into retreat; into sitting “quietly in a corner”, ever vigilant -a “loner and a watcher” - “saying nothing”, just “looking and observing a great deal”; a devotion that no doubt drove him even further yet - into that secret world of dreams and fantasies - of escape, and safety, and, yes, revenge; into that inner world where little Freddy finally got his hands on the joy stick, where he could keep the milk trains running right on time, and watch the mud pies come flip-flopping, flying, splashing down, and SPLAT -- all drippy, black and brown, and gooey down the wicked witch’s back. (8)

OK, not exactly Psycho, but still, not a bad start for five. You could say Hitch got his first big break just when he needed it, and her name was momma. (9)

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By the time Hitch was old enough to start letting the old man know who really oughtta be taking care of momma - old enough to be playing doctor, pumping the trike, and generally lashing Geronimo - the whole family was helping out - doing their best to keep their boy on the fast track to Hollywood, or more to the point, to Norman’s Motel. (10)

Emma continued as before, “surrounding” little Fred with her “doting affection”; with her “sedate”, “quiet”, “close and constant companionship”; with an “interest” that “investigates rather than encourages”, a “psychological intimacy” that “inculcates guilt of a scrupulous and neurotic type”. Dad was mostly unavailable but no matter, he did what he could. A stickler for “discipline” and “order”, for keeping “emotions under constant restraint”, William Hitchcock had no uncertainties about a father’s “uppermost duty” out in London’s East End - “protecting his children from bad influences”. This worked out to “keeping a careful eye” on them, to “ordering them home” almost before they left, to carting them all off to St.Francis - miles down the road in Stratford - for weekly confessions, mass, and Sunday school. It also included Hitch getting clapped in a cell up at the local slammer. Having caught his “little lamb” in some “minor transgression”, dad apparently gave the wee lad a note and sent him off to the nearest police station - where he soon found out exactly what they “do to naughty boys”. Of course Hitch was released a few minutes later, but you get the idea. Little Fred mightta been halfway through the phallic stage, but he wasn’t about to start “constantly asserting” himself, or “bursting into and through” half of Leytonstone, much less showing any “interest in the genital equipment of adults”. Least not in 1905. Those bits were gonna have to wait for the movies. For now all the action was in the Hitch’s head. Mom and dad had him up there, ever busy building a conscience - a conscience he couldda hung off of Mt. Rushmore ; a conscience crucial to his film career. (11)

And that was no small matter, but Hitch needed more than guilt. For one thing he needed fear. Those “enormous insecurities” that momma had already worked up to a fever pitch, the sense that the world was chaotic, overwhelming, erratic, definitely not to be trusted -all this had to be sustained, extended, stretched to fill his ever expanding horizons. Just at the time his body and mind were gearing up to leap tall buildings, Hitch had to be kept to a single bound. Or better yet, yoked with kryptonite. He had to learn where danger lurked - in the garden, the house, the streets; in mother’s smile as she sliced the meat. He had to be kept on his toes, and more importantly, in his head, ever observing, “constantly alert”, ever planning against ever present dangers - his career depended on it. And happily this was not much of a problem along The High Road in Leytonstone. In fact it was pretty well guaranteed. You see, the Hitchcocks were a “family apart”, cockney Catholics amid a sea of Protestants, and, apparently - at least as mom would have it - a good cut above their local brethren as well - information that must have given little Fred a pretty fair hint re the sort of welcome he could expect out on the street; not to mention a clear choice of playmates - about four, to be exact.

We’ve already seen dad’s idea of a good time. Of course there were reasons - well up and over the eyeballs in his green grocery business - husking walnuts, lugging potatoes, barley, bananas; counting cash, stacking shelves, sorting, sweeping, managing two, sometimes three, assistants; carting deliveries all over the East End - 6, 7 days a week; watching his family grow and his health decline - William Hitchcock probably had enough trouble staying on his own two feet without worrying about staying off his son’s. Luckily for Hitch his “rather nervous” and “emotional” father also had a “kindly” streak in there somewhere. Otherwise that quick trip up to the slammer mightta been the least of little Fred’s worries. Still the old boy obviously did what he could. You’d think Hitch would have credited him for at least a couple dozen films.

And Hitch’s siblings? They could have been a serious problem - it’s hard to work up a good worry, much less expand it, when you’re playing with the brother and sister all day. Happily this never happened. By the time Hitch was getting into crayons, his sister was getting into bras.

In fact about the closest they ever got to doing anything together was on dance nights - when dad sent his 8 year old son up to the Town Hall to “chaperone” his 15 year old sister. No doubt Nellie gave the “little lamb” a good few things to worry about on those nights - week after week after week. And as for William, Jr., the “well built” older brother, who might have eased Hitch into the world of “cricket and lacrosse and football”, into the Leytonstone streets that were “thick with young athletes”; who might have pulled him out of his fear - his “physical fear” - and into the action; who might have been the playmate Alfred “never had”? Well, by the time little Fred started leaving home for his treks up to the Town Hall, William was 18 and ready to start “a life of his own”. He was leaving home for good, leaving his brother safely on the sidelines - “watching”, “content with his books and his games”, with getting all his exercise “from the neck up”. (12)

And so we’re back to momma, back to her “inevitable centrality” in that little house on The High Road, that “severe, restrictive”, shaky, little house where something was definitely wrong. Maybe it was his father’s “declining health”, maybe it was his mother’s rising fears of an empty nest, maybe it was their social isolation, maybe Hitch’s folks weren’t all that well matched in the first place. Maybe it was the whole lot. Whatever it was, Hitch never told; but his permanent retreat into momma’s lap meant that he felt it all - every quiver, every creak, every tiny tremor; every hint of a glance, of a distant bark in the dark of night. One of his few glimpses into the “forest of privacy” that “darkens the grounds” of those early years probably says it all:

“I was five or six. It was a Sunday evening, the only time my parents did not have to work. They had put me to bed and went to Hyde Park for a stroll. They were sure I would be asleep until their return. But I woke up, called out, and no one answered. Nothing but night all around me. Shaking, I got up, wandered around the empty, dark house and, finally, arriving in the kitchen, found a piece of cold meat which I ate while drying my tears.”

And you can be sure that wasn’t the only Sunday evening; the only tiny tremor; the only empty hint of a glance, of a cold bark in the dark of night. And with his finger ever on momma’s pulse, Hitch must have felt them all, every little one. And that can add up to a fair few “tears”, not to mention plates of “potatoes, ice cream”, “fries”, and “meat”. (13)

A conscience the size of Everest, and a fear that never quits. And all by the age of 7 or 8. What more could a child hope for? In Hitch’s case a lot more, and he didn’t even have to ask. It all came as part of the package. Part of growing up in London , rather than Weedpatch or Akron , or even LA. Part of his time with dad, the best of those times, up there on the van, moving along to the “rhythmic jingle of the harness”, to the clip clop “beat of the horse’s hoofs”, “delivering fruit and vegetables to grocers all over the Epping area”, out through the “great complicated junction at the foot of The High Road”, even as far as “piers and quays of London”; and a bit later, pursuing his own “favorite pastime” - riding the buses and tramlines as far as they would take him, from “one end of the city to the other”, riding up top, “trying to touch the passing lilac-trees”, turning slowly around on “the revolving table at Westminster Bridge”, watching the flower-girls weaving “tinsel and ferns into boutonnieres ”, the “rowdy youths” and “street-criers selling oysters, and balloons, and candy whistles that wouldn’t blow”; “wandering through Lambeth Walk and the Cut, their cookshop windows steaming with roast joints of beef and pork, and golden-brown potatoes soaked in gravy”; even taking the “river steamers to the very mouth of the Thames”, past the tugs and “squareriggers”, with their sails “lashed snug on the yardarms”, bobbing high up in the “white shroud of fog” that rolled in off the Channel - a string of images, of colors and scents and sounds, ever unfolding before him; richer, more varied even than his little family outings to the theatre with its “green-lighted villains and ghosts”, its “rose-colored heroines”, and crucially for Hitch - just as safe.

The bus, the tram, the steamer . . . the stall at the theatre - all much the same, the acts and scenes following each other right on schedule, a steady flow of action and images, from Shakespeare to Shaw, from Shoreditch to Spitalfields to Bishopsgate. . . a scene, a stop, one after another, right before your eyes, all predictably on time. Here was the perfect feed for Hitch’s ever growing, ever “active inner life” - that “life of fantasy”, of “fears and dreams” - which expanded even further across the pages of his travel books and wall charts, charts that followed the entire “British merchant fleet” down the Thames and out the Channel to the 7 seas and back, checked and rechecked against the daily “shipping bulletins”, just to be sure that all “the hands” in their “oilcloths and sea boots” were safe from the towering waves, from the “mountains of water” that came “crashing over the bulwarks”; just to be sure that every tiny flag on his “enormous” bedroom wall chart was perfectly in place, safe and accounted for, day, by day, by day, by day.

And so it was that Hitch, with his little Plotto books in hand, working and reworking his images into storylines - turning his tiny flags, and wall charts, and timetables into “literature” - found himself about four centuries ahead of the rest of Leytonstone’s budding directors. While all the playmates he “never had” were racing down The High Road to the football pitch, or up Vicarage, past St Joe’s, swinging their cricket bats and lacrosse sticks, Hitch was already in a league of his own. ‘Cos for him the roads, and streets, and footpaths weren’t just shortcuts to the pitch, they were the pitch. The lamppost and horse tram and pillar box weren’t just markers on the way home. They were bits of light, and sound and color; parts of the stage, the plot, the action; of the endless stream of images he was forever shooting off the top of the van, the bus, and the Thames steamer. They were chopped, studied, compared; mixed with “rose-colored heroines”, “green villains and ghosts”; pinned and clocked, on maps and charts and timetables - woven into a complex visual universe, into Hitch’s “active inner life”, his “life of fantasy” where images were not just recorded in living, vivid detail, but interlinked in time and space, with color, scent, and emotion, capable of being retrieved, reworked, and manipulated; capable of being played for an eager audience in the little house on The High Road, to a green grocer’s family, somehow “astonished” that their 8 year old could rattle off virtually the entire nation’s train schedule. (14)

I guess Hitch’s family must have just been too busy to notice - too busy with dance nights and leaving home; too busy going to the theatre, and strolling late nights out in Hyde Park; too busy up on the van “delivering fruit and vegetables all over the Epping area”; too busy “doting” over little Fred - too busy to notice where all of Hitch’s “astonishing” feats came from in the first place.

Good thing they never asked about story boards.

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By the time school days rolled around, Hitch definitely had the all the basics - a conscience you could barely lift, a fear that never quit, and the sort of “active inner life” Edgar Allan Poe would have been proud to be bricked up in. What he needed now was the right kind of school, a school that would harness all this potential, a “healthy, English” school with a “relentless moral rigor” - not to mention “whysking rod” - a school that would definitely keep him on that straight and narrow road to Hollywood . (15)

But first he needed a bit more work on the home front, a few more years to cement those ties that bind, to buffer him from all the nasty influences out there on the street - classmates, school chums, friends -the sort of temptations that could easily distract young Fred from the task at hand.

Happily this wasn’t much of a challenge for the folks. At seven, when it “was time to think of school”, that’s about all they did. While the other neighborhood kids were taking that first big step down the road to the Leytonstone local, little Fred just stayed “at home”, safely buried in “his timetables”. From 8 to 11, when the other guys were milling around the playground swapping lunches and hunches, and punches, Hitch was mostly just swapping schools - moving around the East End , following dad’s shop from Leytonstone to Poplar to Stepney. That probably put pay to any danger of him becoming one of the lads. (16) Still just to be on the safe side, Hitch’s folks took whatever extra measures seemed necessary - little touches like hiring on the local ‘paper boy’ as their son’s “protector”, touches that no doubt brought young Fred straight home after school - home to his wall charts and travel books; his steaming potatoes and “fried cod” and “long-back bacon”; home to his “evening confessions”, right there at the foot of momma’s bed, night after night after night. Little touches that kept Hitch “safe, quiet, withdrawn, and friendless”; that had him well prepared for St. Ignatius College by the fall of 1910, for St. Ignatius and its three years of “relentless moral rigor”. (17)

St. I. wasn’t around during the Inquisition, but you could have fooled Hitch. The place was perfect. The “rubber strap” hanging in the prefect’s office, like votive candles in that damp, dark church - ever flickering in your mind, a constant reminder of Father Vaughn, of Father Newdigate, their names etched hard and narrow over the confessionals, their knuckles tight. The sermons and lectures and essays, the injunctions and warnings, on sin and sin, and sin and sin, and “sex and crime, and sin and death”; on “fornication, lust and lying, and vice, and murder”; and “theft” and “table manners”; on “frivolity”, and “ice rinks”, and “picture palaces” - the picture palaces that were springing up all over London, that would soon replace the darkened ice rinks where Hitch was already sitting - sitting and watching the screen and worrying, about sex and crime, and sin and vice and death; about the “mortal terror” of “being summoned” down the hall “to the gallows” - to the prefect and his “rubber strap”, the strap that left you “numb” after “three strokes”. The strap, and the Jesuits, and sin and vice and death - no wonder Hitch was more than “terrified of physical punishment”. Thanks to those three years of “relentless moral rigor”, Hitch had worked himself up into a fullblown “moral fear” - a “fear of being involved in anything evil”. Or more to the point, of being seen to be involved in anything evil. (18)

Already Hitch was “affecting an innocent look”, letting “nothing appear on the surface” with the result that it “was difficult to know what might be going on underneath” And just as well, because what was “going on underneath” was much more of a tidal wave than a ripple. In fact it was more like three years of tidal waves - three years of Scott and Shakespeare, of Dickens, and Dante, and Defoe; of treading the boards with the likes of Hamlet and Macbeth, and Exton and bloody Richard; of Paris and London, and Miss Havisham’s mouldy wedding cake; of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and Krook and Swills, and the Court of Chancery where “nothing ever ends”; of Mrs. Jellyby and Tulkinghorn and Sir Thomas Doodle; of Esther Summerson, ever in the grip of her “flaming necklace”, and Lady Dedlock, “cold and dead” in the melting snow. It was three years of reciting and memorizing and paying “particular attention” to those endless “moral dramas”; three years of studying and performing, and, yes, three years of living them - and not for class, or exams, or “Prize Day”; not to escape that long walk “to the gallows”. Hitch was living them - living in them, and through them - like his wall charts and timetables, like his “travel folders” and “maps of New York ”, his films and theatre, like his trips to “every stop on the Orient Express”. Hitch was living by proxy, by fantasy, by “colored pins” on the maps he drew, by “imaginary journeys” and trips he was constantly “planning”, by trips he was constantly taking - with Dickens and Defoe, with Shakespeare and momma and Newdigate.

So while his classmates were still busy sorting out what the bits and pieces of Bleak House or Richard II might have to do with the likes of “truth and justice”, “power”, “love” and “corruption”, Hitch was downing the big picture like a plate of yams. He didn’t have to work his way through the concretes to find the abstractions. He had already been through enough concrete to be an abstraction - the justice of the slammer, of the strap; the love of a mother, of a family; the power of a prefect, of a cold, dark, empty house. . . Shakespeare and Dante and Dickens weren’t giving Hitch his first trip to Hell, they were just showing him a few more rooms. After a 1000 pages of Bleak House, Hitch wasn’t working out the “similarities between Tulkinghorn, Kenge and Vholes”; or recognizing the “emblematic qualities” of Mrs. Jellyby, or Jo or Jarndyce or Krook, or anyone else. He didn’t have to - Hitch had already met the whole crew. Dickens was just introducing him to some more people he already knew - from his own bleak house. So while the other kids were working their way up to the big picture, Hitch was practically previewing some old clips of his own - clips we’d all be seeing over and over in the years to come - the “grim distrust of public institutions”, of “statesmen and judges and lawyers and policemen” - each more “venal, and small-minded” than the other - “driven by the most intense lust and greed” - none of them “much better than the villains” themselves.

And while his classmates were working out the nuances of the written narrative - the questions of theme and plot and conflict, of “focus” and “shifting viewpoints”, of dialogue and characterization, of motivation and “psychological metaphors”, Hitch - ever watchful, “observant”; ever attentive, “down to the last glance and gesture and detail” - was working out narratives of his own, visual narratives - dramas driven by his own “fears and dreams”, by his own themes and conflicts; visual dramas, suddenly set loose in Shakespeare’s tales of “theft, imprisonment, murder, and penance”, in Dickens’ endless kaleidoscope, those etchings through the “heart of English society” - visual dramas, with sets and lights and plots and metaphors; with chance after chance after chance for Hitch to take those crucial early steps into the real thing - to work and rework that fear we’d all know in time, that “moral fear”; that fear “of the police, of the Jesuits, of physical punishment”; that fear of fleeing fast the swords of Richard and Exton, and Newdigate; of fleeing out past the main altar and down the Thames with “all the sail that we could make”, only to find stationed about the foredeck -“gnawing like the rats” at Crusoe’s feet Mrs. Jellyby and Krook and Tulkinghorn, and there behind them - awaiting like some “horrible desolate island, void of all hope of recovery” - the office of the Prefect of Studies. . . that fear MGM must have commissioned St. Ignatius to develop - in 3D and Technicolor - that fear of Hitchcock’s. (19)

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By the time the testosterone started pumping - and his “frame started filling out quickly” into a “solid dumpling of a boy” - Hitch was pretty well set. (20) Guilt, fear, fantasy. . . a few more bits and he was on his way to the big screen - a few more bits, and one of these was practically guaranteed. A “particularly unattractive, fat boy” with “no friends”, Hitch wasn’t exactly hanging out in the back room of the local barber shop, listening to the men “playing bagatelle”, and soaking up all the essentials of that “long underground tradition” of “male Enlightenment”. And he definitely wasn’t standing in the evening shadows with the likes of Mahony and Leo Dillon, watching Mangan’s sister calling him into tea - her “figure defined by the light from the half-opened door”, her “dress swinging as she moved her body, the soft rope of her hair tossing from side to side” - standing in the shadows, with his “heart leaping”, wondering if, when, how to speak to her, how to tell her of his “confused adoration”. Not Hitch.(21) Whatever “watching” this “lonely fat boy” was doing was on his own, and at a safe distance - in places like Madame Tussaud’s and the Black Museum, that “chamber of horrors” in Scotland Yard, where they had “all the shoes of prostitutes from the Gaslight Era”, shoes whose heels contained “fascinating bits of information” - information coded in red, in blue, in green. . . in colors a man could see from a distance - as he watched her “walking along the Waterloo Bridge at night” - in colors that told him exactly “what her speciality was”.

And a few years later, by his late teens, nothing much had changed. Hitch was out of school, and caught in a “monotonous round” of work and home, home and work; and he wasn’t meeting the lads inbetween to compare notes on “going with girls off the South Circular.” Aside from his movies and the odd evening class, Hitch was just going to work and going home - home to momma and her warm meals, to momma and her “evening confessions” - home to night after night, “at the foot of her bed”, answering “her detailed questions about the business of the day”, after day, after day, after day. (22) And mostly, home to his room, and his books, and his other Emma - his “favorite character” in all of fiction - his Emma Bovary, standing “motionless, with her forehead against the window, looking into the garden”; thinking back to “the ball”, to the “Viscount” in his “low-cut waistcoat”, “sweeping her” across the cotillion floor, her “skirt swirling out against his trousers”, their “legs intertwined”; dreaming of “long embraces” and “sighs in the moonlight”, of “all the fevers of the flesh”; “wanting” to be free of her tiny village, of her “narrow house”, of her husband ever “sucking” his “puffy cheeks”; “yearning to travel”, to “live in Paris”, to become her “exhalted dreams”. . .

Home to his room, and his Emmas - home to his cocoon and his trap, to his books and his escape - home to his Poe - to Roderick and Lady Madeline, bound as one behind “vacant eye-like windows” in the “bleak, grey walls and turrets”, in the “insufferable gloom” of the House of Usher. . . to Egaeus and his Berenice - once “agile, graceful” and “gorgeous”, and now suddenly in the morbidity of his own mind, the “Berenice of a dream” - and through her smile, her teeth - “long, narrow, and excessively white” - objects of his “phrenzied desire”. Roderick and Egaeus - and Hitch - trapped in those “gloomy, grey, hereditary halls”, in the “most intense and painful meditation”, grieving the slow and final consumption of Berenice and Lady Madeline, taken by “the destroyer”, trance-like, to the grave. And then those “first feeble movements in the hollow coffin”; that “distinct, metallic, clangorous, muffled reverberation”; that “wild cry disturbing the silence of the night”; and suddenly Usher crashing to the floor, “a corpse” under the “bloody white robes” of Lady Madeline. And Egaeus, his garments “muddy and clotted with gore”, “shrieking” at the “violated grave”, at the “disfigured body” - “still breathing, still palpitating” - shrieking at the spade, at the plyers. . . at the “thirty-two small, white bits”. . . at the thirty-two teeth “scattered to and fro about the floor”.

Into his 20s and still nothing had changed - the “lonely fat boy”, who had “never been out with a girl in his life”, was still going to work with “his face a perfect deadpan”, and a “ludicrous, draggy gray topcoat covering his girth like an oriental gown”. 21, 22, 23. . . home and work, work and home. Hitch and momma - momma with her hot meals, her nightly confessions. Hitch with his movies and his plays. Up in his room with his books and his magazines, and his News of the World - ever busy building his “massive library of criminal cases”; sating his “obsession with the detail of suffering”, his obsession with the likes of Peace, and Pearcey and Jack the Ripper… the likes of Dr. Crippen and John Reginald Halliday Christie - that “mild little man” with all those bodies stuffed in his cupboards, that “mild little man” who “could only reach his climax” by “strangling the woman he was having sex with”. (23)

But Miss Reville needn’t have worried. The Alfred Hitchcock who phoned her in the summer of 1923 - the Alfred Hitchcock who had been “watching her almost constantly when she wasn’t looking” - didn’t need a victim. He wasn’t setting Alma up for an early version of Frenzy. He didn’t need to. Hitch already had an outlet for “whatever dark impulses may have lurked in his mind” - He had just been made an assistant director. Hitch wasn’t looking for a victim. He was just looking for a “cutter” on his “new film” - for a cutter, and a co-worker, and a wife; and mostly for someone just like momma - someone to replace her for the next 50 years - the next 50 years of marriage to a “devoted”, “protective”, “motherly”, and “bossy” wife; the next 50 years of fantasizing about “cool blondes” and “identifying” with stranglers, of filming “murder scenes as if they were love scenes”; for the next 50 years of being “obsessed” with “the desire to open a film with a murderous rape”. (24)

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Of course in the fall of 1913 Hitch’s obsessions weren’t exactly the problem. (25) For that matter, neither was Hollywood . In fact it wasn’t even a fantasy. Out of school, out of work, and still out in East Epping , it was gonna take a bit more than mom and dad, or the Jesuits, to get Hitch to Hollywood . It was gonna take The Allies and the Central Powers, and the British War Effort. It was gonna take World War I.

Hitch for his part was probably too busy to notice. Too busy with his books and maps and momma’s home cooking, too busy with the local movie theatres and his evening courses - his courses in “navigation, and mechanics, and electricity”; courses that seemed a logical extension of his maps and charts and timetables; courses that might get him a “respectable position” in the expanding war industries, that might add a few coins to the shrinking family coffers; courses that were suddenly available for a pittance at the local University of London campus, courtesy of the British War Effort; courses that were part of the buildup to 1914, part of the massive Allied campaign, part of the campaign to get Hitch into Hollywood.

A year or so later and not much had changed. Hitch was still hanging out at home, attending a few “workshop courses” and the “occasional play or film”. Who knows, if it hadn’t been for the old man, Hitch might still be there. But by mid-December, 1914, “overwork and worry about his family” had taken “their toll”; and William Hitchcock made his final, crucial contribution to his son’s film career - he died.

Now Hitch had no choice. He had to get a job. Armed with his University of London courses, and buoyed by the ever expanding war economy, he walked into a handy office job - “calibrating electric cables” for Henley ’s Telegraph and Cable Company. Finally, Hitch was on his way to Hollywood .

With the family finances secure once again, and him and momma cosy in their little nest out in East Epping, Hitch was now freed up to get on with the serious work of adolescence - figuring out what sort of a future his past might hold for him. While his days were tied up at Henley’s, his evenings and weekends were free - totally free for him and momma; for him and Madame Bovary, and Edgar Allan, and G. K. Chesterton; for him and Mack Sennett, and Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith; free for Hitch and his fantasies, his films and film journals; free for his university courses.

Thus it happened that while most of his generation was going off “to fight and die ‘for King and for Country’”, Hitch - obesity deferral in hand - was going off to his evening classes, moving as he liked from “blacksmithing” to “screw-cutting” to “economics”; moving from course to course in “sporadic attempts” to find what suited him; in sporadic attempts which eventually led to “art history”, and then, inevitably, to “drawing”, and “painting”. And gradually, as he “took up his sketch pad”, Hitch discovered a “new part of his inner life”, a part that blossomed in the “cordial, paternalistic atmosphere” at Henley’s, that blossomed in the form of little sketches and “caricatures of colleagues”; a part of his inner life that soon caught the attention of Hitch’s supervisors, and - thanks to the ever expanding war economy - opened yet another door along the road to Hollywood - the door to Henley’s advertising department - where suddenly Hitch began to “mystify his colleagues by staying on in the office long after everyone else had gone home”.(26)

Some mystery. Having moved from a job to a career - from calibrating cables to chasing his dreams - Hitch did exactly what anyone one would do. He dove into his work; into his ideas, his sketches, his graphics, his brochures, his advertisements; into the products of his own “active inner life” - a life that was suddenly being affirmed, for the first time, in the eyes of his supervisors, his colleagues; a life that was finally finding a direction, a direction that had gradually been developing over the past few years of drawing and painting and sketching, of devouring films and film journals; over the past few years of reading Poe, and Flaubert, and Chesterton, of finding earlier versions of himself in these men of “great talent”, men who had “never been happy”; in these artists whose “highly charged emotional sensitivities” were “carefully restrained in life” but “furiously explored in fantasy”, whose works “dealt sympathetically with thieves and murderers, with libricity and indecency”, who realized that “it is we” - all of us - “who are the criminal class”. (27) Not that Hitch was telling anyone at work, but by “the end of 1918” at least one member of the “criminal class” was “very fat and very ambitious”, and very ready for Hollywood .

And sure enough, with the armistice came the yanks; the same yanks who would have arrived way back in 1913 - while Hitch was still sticking “pins” in his “wall charts”; the yanks who had just been waiting for the smoke to clear so they could cash in on the booming British film market; the yanks who finally opened up the Famous Players-Lasky studio in 1920, just down the road from Hitch in Islington. With his Henley’s job secure and well over two years of professional graphic design behind him, with his supervisor offering studio space and portfolio advice, Hitch just strolled down to Leicester Square, picked up the latest edition of Bioscope, and sussed out what films that yanks were producing. A few late nights at the office, whipping up the necessary pile of “title-cards”, and he was “hired at once”. A few more months of “moonlighting” and it was official - The Allied War Effort had finally paid off. Hitch was working fulltime in Hollywood , and - happily for Norman - still living at home with momma.

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