Hitchcock biography uncovers persona

Alfred Hitchcock.

A new biography of the master of suspense uncovers the life behind the persona, says Duncan White.

The trailer for Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film, begins with a life-size dummy of the director floating down the Thames in front of the Houses of Parliament.

The camera cuts to a close-up and Hitch, reclining in the water, tells us that the reason he is "floating around London like this" is that he is investigating "a very horrible murder". "Rivers," he warns us, "can be very sinister places." It is so knowing, it is practically pastiche. There is no doubt about who the star of this film is going to be.

By this late stage of his career, Hitchcock had become rather accomplished at playing himself. It was an instantly recognisable performance, honed in the vignettes that opened the hugely popular Alfred Hitchcock Presents: the jowls, the pendulous lower lip, the suits, the unflustered demeanour and the black humour. It is telling that he managed to create a brand out of his own silhouette.

The problem for the biographer is getting beyond this persona Hitchcock inhabited so thoroughly. He told the same self-mythologising anecdotes in interview after interview and kept his distance from all but a very select few. There is something ultimately unknowable about Hitchcock.

Biographers abhor a vacuum. Most controversial among the extant biographies are Donald Spoto's The Dark Side Of Genius (1983) and Spellbound By Beauty (2008), in which Hitch is depicted sexually harassing his leading ladies and using his films to project the creepy desires he could not act on in his own life. It's a portrait of Hitch as pervy Pygmalion. Patrick McGilligan's A Life In Darkness And Light (2003), while generally more nuanced than Spoto's, argued that Hitch was impotent.

So without any fresh revelatory material, Peter Ackroyd's new biography has to work with what is already known. This can tempt novelist-biographers like Ackroyd to trespass where they are not wanted. In his Dickens biography, Ackroyd took a critical kicking for depicting himself having chats with Charlie on the Tube. There is none of that kind of ostentation here. Alfred Hitchcock starts with the birth, ends with the death and works its way briskly through the films in between.

Yet, funnily enough, there is a lot of Ackroyd in this biography, but unobtrusively so, like a Hitchcock cameo. And a good thing it is, too, for the success of the enterprise depends on it. Why? Well, if there is any writer capable of imaginative sympathy with Hitchcock, it is Ackroyd. Both were brought up in strict Catholic households in lower-middle-class London and both were boys in whom there was a contradictory mix of shyness and ambition. Both developed an insatiable appetite for work. Both publicly declared themselves celibate. Hitchcock made some of his finest films late in his life; Ackroyd, at 65, seems to be gaining momentum.

Hitchcock made a great show of not taking his films too seriously - "it's only a movie" - but was anxious that they were not taken seriously enough. He sought out highbrow collaborators, including Sean O'Casey, Thornton Wilder, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Vladimir Nabokov. The only interviewer to get him to talk earnestly at any length was fellow director Francois Truffaut - and even then it took three days for him to open up. In this, Ackroyd argues, Hitchcock was like Dickens: both were "poets and visionaries who posed as practical men of the world".

Ackroyd's book is strong on the impact of London on Hitchcock. The opening pages draw on Henry James and Thomas De Quincey to evoke Limehouse at the turn of the century.

It was in this environment, Ackroyd argues, that Hitchcock developed his "Cockney vision of the world" in which terror and comedy were intertwined, a vision "adumbrated by Dickens and Chaplin". While he stopped making explicitly London films when he moved to Hollywood (at least until Frenzy), the city shaped him.

As the great films mount up and Hitchcock refines his Hitchcock act, Ackroyd exploits small insights to extrapolate a tangible personality. When his mother died in 1942, followed soon after by his brother, he lost 45kg.

He clearly suffered intensely behind his mask. He found himself "uncommonly unattractive" so set himself up for a life of "anger, sorrow, dismay, despair, anxiety and loneliness".

Ackroyd clearly made the decision not to let the psychosexual stuff determine his portrait. That does not mean he ignores Hitch's famously obsessive and sadistic treatment of some of his leading ladies, especially Tippi Hedren on the sets of The Birds and Marnie, just that he is careful to contextualise it.

The closest to outright speculation he comes is in the story of Hitchcock's claim that, had he not met Alma Reville, his wife and collaborator, he might have become a "poof" (his word). Ackroyd, who is gay, points out that homosexuality is "almost a leitmotif" in Hitchcock's films.

Ackroyd says the "secret" to Hitchcock's film-making was not the expression of repressed desires but his ability to project his anxiety on to the screen. He was, Ackroyd writes, "a man filled with constant dread" that he could translate into moving images. He sought to exert absolute control over the creation of a cinematic world in which people lost control in terrifying ways. If he was generating the fear, he could not be subject to it.

Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd
(Chatto & Windus $36.99)

- Canvas