It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (42 page)

“I said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock, I simply want you to know the company is proceeding with the picture with you without any question.’ He said, ‘That’s okay.’ Period. But I thought it was an amazingly generous and unnecessary give on his part.”

For Hitchcock, however, it was an admission that the end was near. It was important to him to believe that he was physically able to make another film, and although he was beginning to doubt he could, he still had his pride.

“I was in my office in the Black Tower when my phone rang,” Hilton Green remembered. “It was Mr. H.’s secretary calling, frantic. She asked me to come to Mr. H.’s office as fast as I could. I had my tie in my pocket because I’d always worn a tie with him, as everyone did. She said, ‘Don’t bother about your tie.’

“I raced to his office and found him lying on the floor behind his desk. He’d fallen and couldn’t get up. His secretary couldn’t lift him. He was there waiting for me to help him up, because he didn’t want anyone to know. He didn’t want anyone to see him like that.

“I picked him up and put him in his chair. It just broke my heart.”

Hitchcock faced the absence of Alma’s advice and approval, on which he had depended for more than half a century. She was at home, but ill. “If Mr. H. said Alma liked it very much,” Green said, “it was the greatest compliment Hitchcock could ever pay a writer.” The only greater compliment was, “Alma loved it.”

Mount recalled that when Alma was briefly feeling better, Hitchcock brought her the script of
The Short Night.
“She said she liked it, which really pleased Mr. Hitchcock, but that wasn’t as important to him as that she had
read
it. After that, he was elated because he thought it could be like the good old days, at least for a while, having Alma’s opinion and, even more important, to be able to show his work to her.”

“My parents loved a beautifully set table,” Pat recalled. “Even when only the two of them were having dinner together, my mother used a beautiful linen tablecloth, fine crystal glasses, lovely china, and good silver, and my father appreciated that.”

When Alma became too ill to cook for her husband, he cooked for her. With the shift of nurses Alma needed, the Hitchcocks’ small house couldn’t afford to be crowded by the presence of another person, a cook.

One day, while Hitchcock was preparing the meal, he burned his arm badly with hot grease. In his words, “That made my short-order cooking short-lived.”

H
E CONTINUED TO
appear at his Universal office. Green described the day that Hitchcock knew he couldn’t go on:

“After Bob Boyle and I had scouted locations in England and Finland, and I shot some footage on a Polaroid camera to show what the locations looked like, I came back to Universal and laid it out for Mr. H. He said, ‘Great.’ I thought we were going ahead.

“Then, his secretary called me one day in my office, and she said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock has to see you right away.’

“I went to his office. She said, ‘You’d better go in.’

“He was sitting there behind his desk, and he said, ‘I want you to do a favor for me. I want you to go see Lew Wasserman. And I want you to tell him that I’m all through, that I can’t go on.’

“That was the saddest day of my life. I couldn’t understand. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’

“He said, ‘I can’t make movies anymore the way I want to. I’m just not physically able.’

“I said, ‘Of course you are. We can do this picture together. You know, you just tell us what you want, and we’ll do it.’

“He said, ‘No, I don’t want to make movies that way.’

“I don’t know if you know much about Lew Wasserman. Really a strong man. He cried. ‘I knew this day was coming,’ he said, and it was very sad.

“After that day, Mr. H. came in a couple of times. There was a tribute to him, the AFI. He got very weak.” The American Film Institute lifetime achievement gala honoring Hitchcock was held in March 1979.

O
N
M
AY
8, 1979, Hitchcock closed his office at Universal.

“Hitchcock’s bungalow, which was the size of three railroad cars, was kept fully staffed, and nothing was changed,” Mount said. “Mr. Hitchcock was sick, at home, and I let him and Alma know that the bungalow was standing. He sent word through Alma that we could close it. He wouldn’t need it anymore.

“His was the last bungalow on what is called the front lot. It was put there deliberately, so that Mr. Hitchcock could walk about three hundred feet from his bungalow to the Black Tower should he want to see anyone.

“Afterwards, Lew had that little caricature from the television show painted on the side of the building, about twelve inches high, which was the only thing that identified it as Mr. Hitchcock’s building. That building stayed there at least a year after Mr. Hitchcock’s demise, untouched.

“The building has been moved from that location, and chopped up and turned into other bungalows. So, the building actually still exists, although it’s in sections now, on different parts of the lot.”

Hitchcock had told me, “As long as I have my health and energy, I would never retire,” but even as he spoke, his health was rapidly declining. He had to bear considerable pain, but still, he did not want to retire. “I can’t retire. I have no hobbies,” he said. “What would I do?”

When the moment finally came, when Hitchcock decided not to keep his office at Universal, it meant he was admitting to Lew Wasserman, to everyone he knew, to all who knew him, to Alma, and especially to himself, that the Hitchcock body of work was complete. He had told King Vidor and me that the body of Alfred Hitchcock’s work would be complete when the body of Alfred Hitchcock gave out.

The prospect of going to Helsinki for the filming of
The Short Night,
and leaving Alma, who was too ill to travel, had been difficult for him to contemplate, though he would have liked to have had another success in those last years, not so much for himself, as for the Madame. “If our health had held up,” he said, “we would have done it again.

“I couldn’t imagine being alive without Alma. I wouldn’t want to be. I always thought I would go first. It never occurred to me that I would survive Alma. I’m older, you know. One day older.”

Hitchcock said that Alma’s vanity had vanished, and he missed it. She had taken great pride in her hair, wore light makeup, preferred high heels, and enjoyed having her clothes made by Edith Head. Herself only slightly taller than Alma, Head had known how to dress the petite woman.

Finally, Alma lost interest in her garden, which had always meant so much to her. “It was a terrible thing,” Hitchcock said, “when she didn’t care about being in the sun with her flowers.”

In the last year, when Alma’s health made it an effort to go out, the Hitchcocks received regular deliveries of dinners from Chasen’s. It was no routine act for that restaurant, but the Hitchcocks were no ordinary patrons. For years, the Hitchcocks had given the restaurant their enduring support and affection, and the restaurant returned their feeling.

H
ITCHCOCK HAD ALWAYS
appreciated and enjoyed honors. Never having received an Oscar as a director had troubled him. He had very much wanted that recognition from his peers.

In 1968, he had received the Irving Thalberg Award for his work as a producer. At the Academy Awards ceremony, he stepped up to the microphone and said, “Thank you.” Just that. The audience was expecting more. So was he.

In the last few years of his life, Hitchcock heard there was talk of a possible knighthood. He would have liked such an honor, he told me, “Mostly so Mrs. Hitchcock might be addressed as Lady Hitchcock when visiting preserves on the ground floor at Fortnum & Mason. ‘One bitter orange, one plum, Lady Hitchcock, and perhaps some digestive biscuits?’ You know, that kind of thing, but too late for Fortnum’s now.”

A few years earlier, Alma had said that her husband’s knighthood was a lingering hope she had for him. It meant much less to her, because she admired and had totally adjusted to “the classless system” of America, “but it would be nice for him,” she said.

On December 31, 1979, Alfred Joseph Hitchcock became Sir Alfred. Not able to travel back to England, he was knighted by proxy a few days later by the British consul general in Los Angeles in the presence of Lew Wasserman, Cary Grant, Janet Leigh, and others.

Hitchcock had hoped that the honor would come to him, but by the time he received it, he had forgotten about hoping for it. He had lost an important element of happiness—being able to look forward—and there was little time remaining for Hitch and Alma to enjoy being Lord and Lady Hitchcock.

When a reporter asked Hitchcock why it had taken Queen Elizabeth so long to knight him, he responded: “It seems she forgot.”

In early 1980, Hitchcock received the Man of the Year Award from the British-American Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles. Ronald Neame presented the award to him. “He was very frail and in a wheelchair when I went up to him before the ceremony. ‘Hitch,’ I said, ‘do you remember me? I’m Ronnie.’ He smiled and placed a hand on my arm. ‘Of course, I do, Ronnie. You’re one of my boys.’”

U
NABLE TO MAKE FILMS
, lonely for Alma’s companionship, Hitchcock lost interest in life. Food and wine no longer brought him pleasure. In almost constant pain, he lost his will to live.

“It’s terribly embarrassing to be sick,” he once told me. “And one’s own death is so undignified.”

On April 29, 1980, in the early morning, at his Bellagio Road home in Bel Air, Alfred Hitchcock died. The funeral service was held at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. In accordance with his wishes, he was cremated, and his ashes scattered off the California coast in the Pacific Ocean.

On May 8, a mass was said for him at Westminster Cathedral in London.

Alma lived on more than two years after her husband. She stayed in their home, frail, with medical help, living in her private world, emotionally supported by the visits of their daughter, Pat, and her family.

Alma Reville Hitchcock died on July 6, 1982. Her funeral was at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood, and her ashes were also scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

P
AT
H
ITCHCOCK
talked with me at New York’s Plaza Hotel just after Christmas in 2003. She and her three daughters had come from their homes in California for the holidays. In August, her granddaughter, Melissa, the only great-grandchild the Hitchcocks had known, had died at the age of twenty-four, and the family found it difficult to spend Christmas at home without her there.

Melissa, the daughter of their first grandchild, Mary, had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis before the age of two.

When Pat told her father, he reacted characteristically. “We’ll do something about it,” he said, but his daughter explained there was nothing they
could
do. It was incurable.

Pat and her daughters, however,
have
tried to do something about it. In his spirit, they have created an Alfred Hitchcock cystic fibrosis charity.

“I
AM AN OBSERVER OF LIFE
,” Hitchcock had told me shortly after I met him. “Personally I have preferred to live an ordinary, uncluttered life, doing my chores, which was making movies. The Chinese have a proverb to the effect that an interesting life is better not lived. I liked to make films
about
the man-on-the-spot, not to
be
him.”

Near the end of his life, Hitchcock said that when he and Alma realized they couldn’t travel anymore, it was then that they really felt old. “We could have traveled,” he said, “but it would have been like trying to make movies when you really can’t.”

Hitchcock was a romantic, as was his wife. They had spoken about just one more trip to the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, perhaps for Christmas, their favorite time to be there to celebrate their wedding anniversary.

“Neither of us wanted to disappoint the other,” he said, “by admitting to not believing the possibility existed. Then, Alma and I stopped talking about our next trip to St. Moritz. Each of us had come to understand that it wasn’t a place we wanted to return to, but rather, a time.

“The worst thing, you know, is when you cannot go back to a place where you have always been happy,” he said, “because you are afraid that if you go back, you won’t be happy—not because the place has changed, but because you have changed.”