Gossip columnist
wakes up at 2:30 A.M. in fever-induced delirium,
turns into cineaste for half an hour
by Charles
Yannopoulos
I've read the
biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, the ones that
said he was a ghoul, a prude, or a petulant
childish cur who ingested wormwood with his food
and was as interested in how to make a batter as
in the proper use of reverse track shots.
But I've never
had much use for academic parsing of cinema
technique or the devious ways of anti-hagiography.
Truth to tell, I just admire eccentric Englishmen.
If they paint
their King Charles Spaniels' nails bright red or
plant a sausage in a ripe-smelling seed bed, that's
fine with me. If they read the Times with
their morning coffee and then retire to
their drawing room to extract pebbles from their
car's front tires that's swell. And if they
favor tweed with afternoon tea but leather with
after dinner liquors, well, that's piquant,
and Americans are tickled by impracticality, by
the whiff of mild insanity.
That's why, I
submit, the Royal Family retains its fascination.
It's not due to the way they keep us in suspense
about which organic farms will win their
patronage. Rather, it's in the whys and
wherefores of the royal dogs, how they're taught
to sing anthems on key, while taking care to hide
their canines lest they offend a toff who was
once nipped.
But, back to
Hitchcock. He left England in 1940, so he
was really a hybrid case. Reading between the
lines, Lew Wasserman at Universal suggested
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (the t.v show), made
him rich, and gradually something snapped.
Maybe it was all those prize beef steer he owned,
or the Vlaminck paintings on the wall. Too
muchness can be damaging to the soul.
After 1964,
especially, things went sour. The
conventional narrative says that he had the hots
for Tippi Hedren, made a crude advance, and she
recoiled, calling him a fat pig no less.
It's just a hunch, but I'd suggest an alternative
reading of the facts. It was no libidinous
surge that did him in. More accurately
expressed, it was a surfeit of self-confidence.
In America, he
became accustomed to being recognized, to being
feted for his accent, for his delivery, and even
for his frame, and I suspect that, in the end, he
just thought that he was Cary Grant.
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