Alfred Hitchcock (2 page)

Uncle John, the tricky, flamboyant Hitchcock, inspired flamboyance in his nephew. Hitchcock’s father, William, existed in the shadow of his younger brother’s success and legend. There is a lasting impression that William
Hitchcock was a habitual drinker, and not always an efficient shop owner. On occasion, it is likely, he would have had to be bailed out by Uncle John.

Yet William married well, and his wife complemented his weaknesses with her strengths; their example of friendship and partnership reinforced Hitchcock’s own feelings about marriage. Hitchcock’s mother, Emma Jane Whelan, was second-generation Irish, Catholic, literate, the daughter of a policeman and one year her husband’s junior. Hitchcock once described his mother as having “a cottage-loaf figure,”
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which grew plumper as she grew older. When William was twenty-four and Emma was twenty-three, they were married and took over a greengrocery in Stratford.

Emma Jane Whelan Hitchcock has been described in her later years as “a smartly dressed, sedate person, very quietly spoken with an aristocratic manner.” She had a black-Irish sense of humor, and could be sharp-tongued on occasion. She was very sensible, and likely kept the books for her husband, organizing the schedule and routine for a business that depended on timing and freshness.

In 1890, the third year of their marriage, Emma gave birth to a boy christened William Jr.; in 1892 she bore a girl the parents named Ellen, or Nellie. In 1896 the burgeoning family moved to Leytonstone, less than two miles north along the river Lea, where the Hitchcocks ran a greengrocery at 517 The High Road. On August 13, 1899, in the private rooms above the shop, Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born.

That was the year “W Hitchcock” took out an advertisement in the
Express and Independent Almanack
asserting the “NOTED QUALITY” of his “ENGLISH AND FOREIGN FRUIT,” various kinds of potatoes, and other products. Customers were assured “ALL ORDERS PUNCTUALLY ATTENDED TO”—“FRESH EVERY DAY.”

The more remote the years, the more difficult it is to be precise in reconstructing a life story—and speculation differs as to what sort of life Hitchcock led as a young child at 517 The High Road.

According to some published accounts, Hitchcock’s father was a strict disciplinarian who could be stern and forbidding. Perhaps Hitchcock’s most famous childhood story is this: William Hitchcock reportedly taught his son a lesson at a tender age, sending Alfred off to the local police station with a note that said the boy had been naughty. The policeman locked him in a cell, telling him, “This is what we do to naughty boys.” Hitchcock said he always remembered “the clang of the door which was the potent
thing—the sound and the solidity of that closing cell door and the bolt.”

After a few minutes—maybe five, maybe more—he was released.

Although his sister confirmed this incident to Hitchcock’s official biographer, John Russell Taylor, she wasn’t an eyewitness. And when Hitchcock told the story to interviewers, as he did relentlessly over the years, the story grew and mutated. The infraction changed. His age changed: sometimes he was as young as four, other times as old as eleven. “Hitch told it so often, and it was convenient for the press,” said Robert Boyle, his production designer later in America; “he probably came to believe it himself.”

Certainly his films believe it, and many times, in many ways, replay the scene.

It’s worth remembering, however, that Hitchcock’s maternal grandfather was a constable—and that in at least one version the policeman in the boyhood’s story was a family friend, in on the joke. Police, like priests, were hardly strangers to the Hitchcock household. Still, Hitchcock always insisted the incident gave him a lifelong fear of arrest, jails, and policemen—a fear confirmed by many adult anecdotes.

Though policemen may have been thornily lodged in his subconscious, a stern, forbidding father is at odds with Hitchcock family lore. A kinder, gentler William Hitchcock is conjured by another Hitchcock anecdote, that Alfred was so well behaved as a boy, his father dubbed him “my little lamb without a spot.”

William Hitchcock helped instill in the spotless lamb the boy’s early passion for show business. He led the family to the nearby Borough Theatre in The High Road Stratford, one of Greater London’s largest, a three-thousand-seat palace with playbills starring the likes of Beerbohm Tree, Henry Irving, and Ellen Terry. The Empire Theatre on Broadway also presented touring shows. The Theatre Royal on Salways Road, built by actor-manager Charles Dillon, began to project “animated pictures” between acts as early as 1897.

The first play Hitchcock recalled seeing, roughly in 1905, had its villain bathed in a “ghostly” green light accompanied by sinister music. The heroine was colored in rosy light. The boy was struck by such visual effects, and the man, directing films, would also dress and light people in symbolic colors. Think of Judy bathed in Madeleine’s hues in
Vertigo.

The family also made a habit of the symphony—”The Albert Hall on Sundays, and the Queen’s Hall during the week.” Asked once to choose his favorite orchestra pieces, Hitchcock listed Roussel, Elgar, and Wagner, Dohnanyi’s “Variations on a Nursery Suite” (“because it opens like the most grandiose, huge, spectacular movie, probably by De Mille, and then reduces itself to a little twinkling on the piano; it always appealed to my sense of humor”), and Artur Rubinstein’s playing of Schumann’s “Carnaval.”

The hardworking Hitchcocks loved all manner of entertainment and took special delight in carnivals and circuses. They always attended the annual Easter Fair in nearby Wanstead Flats, which had magicians and marksmanship contests and amusement rides.

Sunday mornings, William Hitchcock led the family to Mass, and after Mass sometimes on picnics to Epping Forest, with young Alfred dressed, according to one account, “in knee-length breeches, wide lace collar and straw hat.” Later they might stop at the nearby Green Man, a local inn and pub that dated back to the seventeenth century, and once served as a refuge of such fabled highwaymen as Dick Turpin and Jack Shepherd.

Both parents were kind and loving. Although Hitchcock recalled that his mother used to ask him to stand at the foot of her bed every night and recount his daily activities, it would be rash to consider this purely in a negative light. Even calling this an “evening confession”—wasn’t this, besides the language of Catholicism, the Hitchcock sense of humor? His nightly confession was no less than proof of a mother’s abiding affection. “You know how families always spoil the youngest,” the mother says in
Shadow of a Doubt
, speaking of the fatally spoiled Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten).

The family owned classic books: certainly
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
, a favorite of Victorian illustrators, as well as a well-thumbed Bible. The Bible can’t be bettered for gruesome stories, Hitchcock often said, and he routinely cited Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood among the bedtime tales that made violence fascinating to him at an impressionable age. Imagine William or Emma Hitchcock reading their youngest to sleep. Or consider the possibility that father or mother was an enthralling raconteur who embroidered the familiar stories. Hitchcock, who spent his life in service of his urgent leanings as a storyteller, frequently likened the film director’s job to that of a storyteller with a captive audience of children.

“When you tell that little boy the story on your knee, whether it’s Red Riding Hood,” Hitchcock explained once, “you’ve got to make it sound real.”

“I put myself in the place of a child whose mother is telling him a story,” he told François Truffaut in the course of their book-length interview. When “there’s a pause in the narration, the child always says, ‘What comes next, Mummy?’”

He often likened film to dreams in which reality mingles with imagination, akin to a bedtime story that continues into a nightmare after sleep. “Hitchcock realism,” production designer Robert Boyle once explained, consisted of “his fairy tales played against a realistic environment.”

He teased audiences with sly reminders they were in the grip of a manufactured dream.

Bedtime was on the second floor, in the rooms above the shop. The lights turned low, a boy’s eyes darted to the doorway and the shadowy
banisters. “The night always exaggerates things, doesn’t it?” Robert (Derrick de Marney) reassures Erica (Nova Pilbeam) in
Young and Innocent.
And staircases in Hitchcock films are often “the motor of drama,” as Peter Conrad wrote in
The Hitchcock Murders
, leading “upwards to doom,” or descending to creepy basements.

From the royal family down, almost every English house of the time had a dog, if only to ward off intruders. A faithful hound can be imagined lying on the floor as young Alfred, in bed, listened to the sleepy-time tales. Dogs proliferate in Hitchcock films, and sometimes, like Hogarth, who often put his dogs into paintings and etchings, they are his own pets. Dogs in Hitchcock films are invariably amusing, brave, and intuitive about the distress of their owners, and when a canine is killed, as in
Rear Window
, up is sent an ungodly “hue and cry,” in Truffaut’s words, “as if the death of a child were involved.”

“Write what you know” is an old saw, often ascribed to Ernest Hemingway, although the sentiment must date back to antiquity. Hitchcock liked to say he wrote with the camera, but it was the same difference: he filmed what was familiar to him, what he knew about or researched. What he didn’t know he didn’t trust, and tended to avoid. His imagination “improved” on the familiar—as in the case of the jail anecdote.

Donald Spoto, in his “dark” biography of Hitchcock, chose to stress how the family “lived behind and over the crates and shelves of produce, and unless they went around through a back alley to a small rear door, they had to pass through the shop to reach the family rooms. In the middle of a small, dark and unsuccessful garden was the family outhouse. Privacy was even rarer than silence or sustained sunshine.”

But when parents owned shops it was very common to enter by the front, and only wealthy people boasted luxurious indoor bathrooms at the turn of the century. Although Spoto harped on Hitchcock’s toilet fixation, it’s a
national
fixation, and one that’s often wielded humorously. “Londoners are fascinated by excrement,” pointed out Peter Ackroyd in
London: The Biography
, noting that Sir Thomas More could boast of knowing five Latin names for “shit.” Especially in the 1930s and 1940s, the “toilet humor” of many British films (including Hitchcock’s) provoked routine censorship when they were imported to America.

This familiar thread of English lives became creative grist. Hitchcock films delight in exploiting the taboo of bathrooms. “For Hitchcock, any task performed in there qualified as suspicious,” wrote Peter Conrad. Traitors and criminals are always darting into toilet stalls; women are spied upon as they undress before mirrors; blood drips on shining fixtures.

Hitchcock certainly had the knack of introducing toilets into films—or
conversation. Even at age seventy-eight, working on the last script of his career, the director liked to recall Derby Day at Epsom Downs, where, as a boy, he noticed the enterprising children who dug holes in the ground and put up little tents, charging people for “the right to relieve” themselves. In Cockney singsong, Hitchcock digressed from scriptwork to imitate the twelve-year-old girls advertising, “Accommodations, one penny, accommodations, one penny,” and the rougher sorts of boys who touted the same service for “A piddle and a poop, one penny.” (“Of course, when the food was bad,” Hitchcock told writer David Freeman, “they did quite well.”)

Authorized biographer John Russell Taylor said that Hitchcock’s childhood entailed mostly cozy memories. Pride of hard work and ownership, family togetherness, stockings at Christmastime that bulged with tangerines and nuts—characteristic of English Christmases.

The authorized view paints a shop less eerie, less of an obstacle course. “Right behind the house were the ripening sheds,” wrote Taylor in
Hitch
, “and a vivid early impression is the scene inside them: with the great bunches of bananas ripening by the warmth of gas flares, the sight and the smell and the distinctive hiss. When he was a little older, he was allowed to go out with the deliveries of fruit and vegetables to grocers all over the Epping area, often a whole day round by horse-drawn cart. Another process which fascinated him was the husking of walnuts, which used to come into the shop still in their fleshy green outer coats and be husked ready for sale by the shop workers.”

That seems closer to the mark. Although maybe it was both: a boyhood not all darkness, nor all sunshine, but like a Hitchcock film, a constant interplay of shadow and light.

Leytonstone was in the midst of thrilling upheaval. The Hitchcock greengrocery was in the middle of the block on The High Road, between May-well and Southwell Grove Roads.

Coming out of the greengrocery, heading in any direction, were family butchers, bakers, shoe menders, tobacconists, clothiers, confectioners, drapers, hosiers, and more grocers and fishmongers. There were other Hitchcock relatives living and working in the neighborhood.

The buses (and later, electric trams) seemed never to stop running, and two train stations were nearby. Railway-mania is a phenomenon among the English, and romance and death ride on trains in many Hitchcock films, as well as on buses, planes, and ships—just about any form of transportation.

On The High Road the boy heard vendors shouting out the afternoon headlines “wet from the press”—as audiences hear them in
The Lodger,
Foreign Correspondent
, and
Frenzy.
Shop visitors arrived with the papers tucked under their arms, gossiping about lurid crime cases. It isn’t too much to say that murder was serialized entertainment in England in that day and age.

Hitchcock liked to quote George Orwell, who, in a famous essay, “The Decline of the English Murder,” concluded that the majority of English murder cases were adultery-related. Killing one’s spouse was a means of divorce. Citing the respected Orwell was Hitchcock’s way of defending himself against critics who were skeptical of his sordid subject matter. But Hitchcock films delved into marital murder, murder for money, political murder—all species of murder.