The world knew him as a silhouette: a round, dark shape against a pale background, bowing slightly as the music played, introducing the evening’s tale of murder with a dry, deadpan joke. For twenty years, on television screens across America, Alfred Hitchcock was the Master of Suspense, a public figure as carefully designed as any of his films: the heavy man in the black suit, the droll Englishman who found murder amusing. It was a marvellous performance, and like all of his performances, it was only partly true.
The real Hitchcock was a quieter, stranger, more frightened man than the silhouette suggested: scared of policemen, loathing eggs, never having learned to drive, planning every shot in advance because he could not bear disorder or surprise. And behind him, for more than fifty years, stood a woman almost no one in the audience had ever heard of, whose judgement he trusted more than anyone else’s in the world.
The Boy from Leytonstone
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899, in the flat above his parents’ leased greengrocer’s shop at 517 High Road, Leytonstone, then in Essex and now part of east London. He was the youngest of three children, the son of William Hitchcock, a greengrocer and poultry salesman, and his wife Emma Jane. The family was devoutly Catholic, and young Alfred was sent to Catholic schools, where the priests kept discipline with a flat, hard tool made of gutta-percha. He later said that was where he developed his sense of fear.
He described himself as a lonely, sheltered child, and the loneliness stayed with him. He was a large boy, shy and watchful, happiest observing the world rather than joining in. His parents called him their “little lamb without a spot”. But he carried from childhood a dread of authority and punishment that never left him, and which became the engine of his art: the wrong man accused of a crime he did not commit, the innocent person trapped by forces he cannot understand. Those subjects were born in a small flat above a greengrocer’s shop in Leytonstone.
He left school and went to work, first in a cable company, then, in 1920, into the British film industry, designing title cards for silent films at the Famous Players-Lasky studio in London. It was there, in the early 1920s, that he met the young woman who would change everything. Her name was Alma Reville, and she was already a film editor, a cutter, an assistant director, and a writer. She was, in every way that mattered, his equal.
Alma: The Woman He Married
Alma Lucy Reville was born on 14 August 1899, one day after Alfred Hitchcock. Born in Nottingham, she had come into films as a teenager, working her way up from the cutting room to become one of the most respected editors and writers in British cinema. When Hitchcock met her, she already knew more about making films than he did.
They married on 2 December 1926, at the Brompton Oratory in London, and spent their honeymoon in St. Moritz and at Lake Como. Their only child, a daughter named Patricia, was born on 7 July 1928. The marriage lasted until Hitchcock’s death in 1980, more than fifty-three years, and it was, by every account, one of the great creative partnerships in the history of cinema. Alma worked on his scripts, watched his rushes, argued with him, and told him the truth when no one else would.
Her contributions were enormous and, for the most part, uncredited. She co-wrote The Ring in 1927, the first screenwriting credit she shared with her husband, and collaborated on Suspicion, The Lady Vanishes and Shadow of a Doubt, for which she received a rare screenwriting credit alongside Thornton Wilder and Sally Benson. She shaped his stories and watched every cut with the eye of a professional who had been editing film since she was a girl. Those who worked with Hitchcock understood the arrangement. The highest praise he could give an actor or a crew member was a simple sentence: “Alma liked it.”
A Marriage of Two Minds
The Hitchcocks worked at home. In Hollywood, they lived in Bel Air, and Hitchcock preferred to write in the comfort of his own house rather than in a studio office. Alma and the writer Joan Harrison worked on the script of Suspicion there, finishing it in November 1940, and the same pattern repeated itself film after film. The house in Bel Air was not just a home. It was the studio where Hitchcock’s films were really made, in conversation, over pages, with Alma reading every draft.
She was his first audience and his severest critic. When a scene did not work, she said so. When a detail was wrong, she caught it. Years later, when Psycho was finished, it was Alma who noticed that at one point in the shower scene, as the camera pulled back from Janet Leigh’s lifeless face, you could see the actress take a breath. Leigh had left the production and there was no money for reshooting, so Hitchcock cut away to a shot of the showerhead to cover the error. It was a small thing, invisible to almost everyone, and exactly the kind of thing Alma existed to see.
Their daughter Patricia grew up inside this world. She appeared in two of her father’s films, as Barbara Morton in Strangers on a Train in 1951 and as Caroline, Marion Crane’s office colleague, in Psycho in 1960. She married Joseph O’Connell in 1952, and later wrote, with Laurent Bouzereau, a biography of her mother called Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man. The title says everything. Alma was not the wife of a great director. She was the other half of one.
The Fears He Carried
For a man who made his living frightening other people, Hitchcock was remarkably frightened himself, and honest about it. In 1963, when The Birds was shown at Cannes, he told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci: “I’m frightened of everything: burglars, policemen, crowds, darkness, Sundays.” But one fear topped the list.
“I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes… have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it.” The contradiction hardly matters. The fear, whether literal or embellished, was part of how he understood himself: a man who found the ordinary world faintly horrifying, and who turned that horror into art.
His fear of the police went back to childhood, to his favourite story, the one he told interviewers again and again. When he was five, his father sent him to the local police station carrying a note. The policeman read it and locked the little boy in a cell for a few minutes, saying, “This is what we do to naughty boys.” Whether it happened exactly as he told it hardly matters; Hitchcock was a great fabulist, and he told the story so often that it became true in the only way that counted. He said in 1973 that he was scared stiff of anything to do with the law, and refused even to learn to drive, in case he were stopped and given a parking ticket. That fear runs through his films like a thread: the police who arrive too late, the authorities who get it wrong, the innocent man who cannot prove his innocence.
And yet he understood the value of his fear. “I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear,” he once said, “because a hero couldn’t make a good suspense film.” He knew that suspense is not about the bang. As he told Francois Truffaut, there is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
The Routines of a Craftsman
Hitchcock’s private life was built on routine, and his routine was built on control. He was famous for planning his films in exhaustive detail before a single frame was shot. He worked out every camera angle, every cut, every movement in storyboards and drawings, so that by the time he arrived on the set, the film already existed in his head. He rarely looked through the camera. He did not need to.
This was not laziness. It was self-protection. The set was a place of noise and disorder and people, and Hitchcock fled disorder. He was shy in company, uncomfortable in crowds, and happiest in the quiet of his own home, working things out on paper with Alma. The control he exercised over his films was the control he could not exercise over the world, and it was total.
It was this same instinct for control that made him a television star. Alfred Hitchcock Presents began in 1955, and for ten years Hitchcock introduced each episode himself, standing in silhouette, delivering a few dry lines in that unmistakable voice. The show made him famous in a way no film ever had. He directed only eighteen of its 361 episodes, but he was its soul, and he understood, better than anyone, that the man introducing the story was itself a character he had created.
The Father and the Family Man
For all his fame, Hitchcock guarded his private life fiercely, and his family was the centre of it. He and Alma had built a life together that was, by Hollywood standards, remarkably steady: one marriage, one child, one home, one partnership that never broke. Patricia, who had grown up on her father’s sets, remembered a father who was warm and funny at home, and who kept his family and his work carefully apart.
He was not a man for the Hollywood social whirl. His pleasures were quiet ones: his work, his home, his wife, his daughter, and the long, patient business of making films exactly as he imagined them. The public Hitchcock, the droll master of ceremonies who joked about murder, was a mask he wore for the cameras. At home, the mask came off, and what remained was a shy, watchful, deeply private man who had found, in Alma, the one person in the world he did not need to perform for.
The Last Years
Hitchcock’s final years were quiet ones. He became an American citizen in 1955, but he never lost his Englishness. The honours came late: the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1967, the first BAFTA Academy Fellowship in 1971, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979. At the AFI ceremony, he thanked four people by name: a film editor, a scriptwriter, the mother of his daughter Pat, and as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. Their names, he said, were Alma Reville. In the last months of his life, England honoured him at last. On 3 January 1980, he was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Because he had long since become an American citizen, the honour was an honorary one: he could use the letters KBE after his name, but not be called Sir Alfred.
He died on 29 April 1980, at his home in Bel Air, aged eighty. Alma survived him by a little more than two years, dying on 6 July 1982. She had been his wife, his editor, his writer, his critic, and his first audience for fifty-four years.
Alfred Hitchcock was the most famous director in the world, and he was also a frightened little boy from Leytonstone who never quite stopped being afraid. He was afraid of policemen and eggs and crowds and the dark. But he did not do it alone. Behind the silhouette, behind the jokes, behind the Master of Suspense, there was always Alma, reading the script, watching the rushes, catching the breath no one else could see. The fear was his. The clarity was hers.