Hitch (17 page)

Hitch was not after all too unhappy about his plunge into quota quickies, because he was working the while on a subject which really pleased him. He liked the character of Bulldog Drummond, as featured in a series of novels by ‘Sapper' (Hector McNeil)—a gentleman agent involved, in a rather jolly, sporting spirit, in basic detection and international intrigue. Among the writers under contract to British International Pictures was Charles Bennett, author of the original play on which
Blackmail
was based. Hitch got together with him and proposed an original story using the Bulldog Drummond character as the father of a child who is kidnapped. Together they developed
Bulldog Drummond's Baby
, sold the idea to British International, and prepared to start work on the film. But obviously it was not going to be a very cheap film, certainly no quota quickie, and Hitch's personal situation with Maxwell got more and more difficult as he was baulked in one project after another. He wanted to produce a film to be written and directed by John Van Druten, who would have a small crew and two principal actors at his disposal for a whole year to shoot entirely on locations around London; but Van Druten had doubts, and Maxwell was not too happy about financing such an unconventional project. Then Hitch was considering a story by Countess Russell about a runaway princess—very much what eventually became
Roman Holiday
—but that came to nothing also. It became clear that
Bulldog Drummond's Baby
was not going to be made—not at British International anyway—when Maxwell wrote to Hitch saying, ‘It's a
masterpiece of cinematics, old boy, but I'd rather have the
£
10,000' (which, incredibly, was all the film would cost). Hitch suspected that Walter Mycroft, the film critic whom he had brought in as story editor at British International, was plotting against him and poisioning relations between him and Maxwell. But whether or not that was so, poisoned they were, and Hitch felt it was time to get out.

The question, of course, was where to go. For some years—since the end of the silent era, in fact—there had been two major film companies in England: British International, headed by John Maxwell, and Gaumont-British, a combine which took something like definitive shape in 1927 under the control of Maurice and Isidore Ostrer, City financiers. The Ostrers had acquired an important holding in Michael Balcon's Gainsborough production company in 1928, and by 1929 had combined with C. M. Woolf's W. and F. renting company, acquiring in the process Woolf himself (who had crossed Hitch's path before) as managing director. Besides the two major film production/distribution/exhibition combines, the most interesting and exciting of the other possibilities was Alexander Korda's London Films, soon to become the big maker of prestige movies in England. For the moment Korda was building on the modest success of two inexpensive films with a relatively big production,
The Private Life of Henry VIII
, which, when it was completed and shown towards the end of 1932 created a sensation. Finding Hitch at a loose end when he left British International, Korda rapidly put him under contract, but to Hitch's puzzlement no job or property to work on materialized. Eventually one day he went to beard Korda in his Wimpole Street office, to be greeted with the spectacle of Korda pacing the floor saying, ‘Heetch, Heetch, where can I get some
money
?' Since Hitch was under the impression that it was the producer's job to get the money, and the director's to be paid it, he bowed out of this arrangement also, and never did get to work for Korda. Nor, for that matter, was he ever to work directly with the other major figure to emerge on the British film scene in 1933, J. Arthur Rank, eventually the great tycoon but for the moment merely a dabbler in religious movies.

So the only realistic alternative to British International remained Gaumont-British, and that was where Hitch found himself, more or less—working for independent producer Tom Arnold and directing, of all things in the world, a rather cheap version of the stage musical based on the music of the Strausses,
The Great Waltz
. Called in
Britain
Waltzes from Vienna
and in America
Strauss' Great Waltz
, the production had been reworked as a vehicle for Jessie Matthews, since Victor Saville's
The Good Companions
one of the most popular of British stars. Hitch seems to have had no grudge against her, but he certainly had a grudge against the production: ‘My lowest ebb,' he has called it, and made no secret to the cast and crew of how much he despised the whole thing. The film itself is actually rather charming, with what seem to be a few characteristic Hitchcock touches—the anti-romantic idea of ‘The Blue Danube' being conceived in terms of the various foods in a bakery; the shot indicating a servant's humbling by showing just the count's two feet at the top of the stairs which occupy most of the shot and the top of the servant's head at the foot—but Hitch will have none of it. He claims now not to have been consciously aware that he was in severe difficulties, even though his commercial and critical standing were low following
Rich and Strange
and
Number Seventeen
and he had never been forced to make a film he disliked more than
Waltzes from Vienna
. Probably he was more desperate then than he will admit, even to himself; certainly he felt immense relief when one day his old friend Michael Balcon came to visit him on set. Balcon came with an American cinematographer who was fascinated by the way Hitch drew out the whole film frame by frame, and said he had never seen anything like it. ‘Show him,' said Hitch, pointing to Balcon. And sure enough, after a few minutes Balcon came over and asked him casually what he had on his schedule next. ‘Nothing,
yet
,' replied Hitch significantly.

In 1933, at his ‘lowest ebb', Hitch seemed a strange figure to be a candidate for artistic greatness. Even to people who knew him well there was little real evidence that if he had not chanced to drift into movies he might not have been equally happy and fulfilled helping to run Mac Fisheries. He was, if not deliberately secretive (though he could be that too), at least rather shy about boring people or seeming pretentious about his artistic interests. Even where films were concerned, a lot of his friends and colleagues were left free to suppose that his interests were entirely business and technical—one old friend has told me that he doubted whether Hitch ever saw a film for other than a severely practical reason (to check on the work of an actor or technician in it, for example), and ever saw a film by anyone but himself right through. That is certainly far from the truth, particularly in these early days, but it was an impression he gave. And others, confronted with evidence of his collecting activities in art or his interest in and knowledge of music (which is in certain areas encyclopedic), or his omnivorous reading habits, have been frankly incredulous. He just never seemed to be that kind of a person.

The reason for this comes down, surely, to a species of shyness which afflicts many Englishmen brought up and functioning largely in a philistine environment. Hitch had never had much encouragement at home for his artistic interests (though, to be fair, he had no active discouragement either) and the film business he entered was for the most part in the hands of small businessmen who regarded the films they dealt in much as they would so much soap or used cars. (Hitch remembers the days when the senior Woolfs would stand outside their offices on the corner of Wardour and Old Compton Streets touting their wares—‘'Ere, 'ere, I want to talk to you'—and doing business on their doorstep like a Whitechapel tailor's shop.) Fear of being laughed at for his eccentric artistic
interests, fear of seeming pretentious or boring, fear of being mistrusted in his line of business if he ran the risk of being taken for one of those unreliable arty impractical types—all of this must have contributed to a raising of defences that it was hard to drop even when among people, like the early members of the Film Society, who he could be fairly sure shared his interests and would not scoff or draw back. All really shy, timid people have to choose at some time in their lives between total withdrawal and constructing a façade for themselves behind which they can live and function. Obviously Hitch chose the second possibility, and did it very successfully—so much so that many took the façade for the man.

And all this, of course, was just as Hitch would wish it to be. Behind the barrier might lurk the sensitive plant, his father's ‘little lamb without a spot', who was painfully physically shy, with an absolute horror from childhood of undressing in front of anyone, a puritan discomfort with his own body, and a compulsive need to clean up after himself, to the point of always mopping up and drying a wash-basin and polishing the taps after washing his hands. That was not perhaps
the
real Alfred Hitchcock; it was certainly
a
real Alfred Hitchcock. But he was also, quite genuinely, the good fellow, the cheery extrovert he seemed to be. And this was certainly where the practical jokes came in. Practical jokes have been defined by psychologists as the desperate attempts of the intensely introverted to establish communication. Certainly, there seems to be something to that in Hitch's case, though the corollary, that they are the means whereby those who feel the world has them permanently at a disadvantage throw others off balance and so establish their own domination of their environment, seems, in so far as it implies an element of real nastiness or cruelty, to be further from the point. Even those who cared least for practical joking all admit that hardly any of Hitch's essays were actually cruel or demeaning to their victims. Rather, they showed the workings of an active fantasy and an almost surrealistic sense of the incongruous and bizarre.

Hitch had already acquired a taste for practical joking early in his twenties—a taste shared by some of his older friends, such as Gerald du Maurier. Du Maurier was the butt of a classic Hitchcock joke, which involved getting a full-grown workhorse into his dressing room at the St. James's Theatre during a performance, leaving the mystery of who and to an even greater extent how. On other occasions Hitch used his maximum ingenuity to get gigantic pieces of furniture
installed in friends' tiny flats while they were away, or would come up with weird birthday gifts like 400 smoked herrings, or on one occasion returned a
£
3 loan in the form of 2,880 farthings. He alarmed the playwright Frederick Lonsdale on their first meeting at Claridges, by complimenting him very extravagantly on his nonsensical book for the musical
The Maid of the Mountains
and ignoring entirely his enormous current successes with sophisticated comedies like
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
and
On Approval
. Lonsdale regarded him suspiciously: ‘I've heard about you from Gerald [du Maurier]. Now if you don't pull any gags on me, I won't pull any on you.' A year or two later they met in an elevator at the Hotel Carlton in Cannes. Hitch observed, ‘Nice day outside.' Lonsdale recoiled. ‘What's the gag?' he wanted to know. (‘No sense of humour, I suppose,' notes Hitch wryly.) One of his other extravaganzas in Gerald du Maurier days was to set up a dinner party at which, without explanation, everything eaten or drunk was blue, ranging from blue soup through blue trout and blue chicken to blue ice cream (‘It seemed such a pretty colour, I couldn't understand why hardly anything we eat is blue'). Then there were the suspense and anticipation jokes: Hitch's elevator habits included a repertoire of cliff-hanging stories which would be cut off at the crucial point by his exit, or lines like the one he once tried in the St. Regis: ‘I didn't think one shot would cause so much blood.…'

Other jokes turned on a more
ad hominem
sense of incongruity. On one occasion he invited an assistant director, Dicky Beville, down to his house in the country, and told him to take such-and-such a bus from Hyde Park Corner. Beville bet him that no such bus existed, but Hitch insisted and told him to catch it at a particular hour. Sure enough, the bus arrived, picked up Beville and conveyed him in solitary splendour to Shamley Green—for the excellent reason that Hitch had hired it specially. He could also retaliate very ingeniously, and would carry on competitions in practical joking with like-minded friends. Once he offered a friend a lift home from work, and took him all the way down to Shamley Green, forcing him to stay the night. In thanks for the hospitality the friend sent him a suitably doctored bottle of fine old brandy. A few days later Hitch thanked him effusively for the gift, which should brighten the last hours of his poor old mother, who had been unaccountably very ill these last few days. The friend was so contrite he sent masses of flowers to the fortunately very hale and hearty Mrs. Hitchcock senior. And if
Hitch felt he had gone a little too far, as on the occasion when he paid a studio prop man a pound to let himself be handcuffed overnight, then immediately before gave him a drink liberally spiked with a strong laxative, he always made generous amends—in this case with a 100 per cent bonus the next morning.

These jokes were very much part of Hitchcock's way of life, professional as well as personal. Among other things, they kept his units cheery and ready for anything. He also had his little cultivated eccentricities. For example, he indulged extravagantly in the English studio habit of constantly drinking tea—something which was unusually hard on crockery, since he always threw the cup over his shoulder after drinking from it, letting it smash wherever it would. He also cultivated a reputation for extravagance and vagueness about money—one which would scarcely seem to be justified by the facts. Of course his circumstances had changed since the 1920s. Even at his ‘lowest ebb' he was financially very successful, and could well afford a week-end house in the country, especially since in London he continued to live in the Cromwell Road flat instead of moving to a smarter and more expensive part of town. Anyway, the air of grandeur suggested by the term ‘country house' does not correspond very closely to the actuality of Shamley Green, a quite unpretentious cottage in a semi-suburban setting where, for all the world like a successful stock-broker, he pottered around the garden and supervised the planting—provided, of course, he himself never had to get his hands dirty. And in other respects he and Alma continued to live in the sober middle-class fashion in which they had been brought up: they entertained a lot at home, with Alma doing the cooking, and brought Pat up as a good Catholic child. Rodney Ackland recalls being taken in to say good night to her while he was working with Hitch on
Number Seventeen
, and Alma proudly asking her to explain the framed print of the Assumption of the Virgin above her bed—at which Pat blandly identified the lady in the clouds as Amy Johnson.