If anyone else were telling it, I’d be looking for the door. We shake hands and he immediately begins a monologue about prison breaks and South America. He’s short, five feet five inches or less, with unwrinkled skin. It’s a studio bungalow the way Newport summer houses are “cottages.” This bungalow has two levels, a screening room, a dining room, many offices, an art department, and cutting rooms. The office is standard Universal issue, sort of a pseudo English manor house. After much frantic buzzing about the lot, he’s located and changes his plans at the last minute. is expecting not only me, he’s expecting Thom Mount, the head of production at the studio. I arrive at twelve-twenty-five and the secretaries are in a tizzy. I settle for a sweater and jacket and throw a tie in my briefcase just in case it turns out to be the prom. Should I wear a tie? Oh, stop it, I’ve been to script meetings beyond count, so just put on regulation screenwriter’s drag and go to lunch with the man. Are we going somewhere else? Do we eat in his office? I don’t recall ever seeing him in the commissary, and who would forget? I remember that he’s a food-and-wine maven and rather formal. I’m to be at his Universal bungalow at twelve-thirty for lunch, to meet him for the first time, going to see a man about a job. When, in succession, he made Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963), Hitchcock was our mountains and our rivers, curled permanently into our brainpans. There was nothing polite about them and nobody’s parents approved. And even though an older generation had grown up on Hitchcock’s films, those pictures-the English movies and the early Hollywood ones-were scary but decorous. After all, he was on television every week, telling macabre stories, frightening us. That they had a creator was not a surprise. They seemed like a permanent part of the mindscape, the way mountains or rivers are part of the physical world. Those of us who grew up during the late Fifties and early Sixties, and who now peer down the long corridor toward middle age, cannot remember a time when these films didn’t exist. He always claimed that “in England everyone looks as I do, and no one would remark on it.” Maybe-but he exploited his profile as effectively as any pinup. He wasn’t crazy about being fat, but he saw his body as a tool to use in the making of his career. He exploited a physique that most would try desperately to diminish. Television did that for him-but long before his television show he was popping up in all his own movies, those tiny cameo appearances that audiences loved. But unlike any other director, he was an identifiable public figure, as recognizable as any president or movie star. At his best, he was an inventor of part of the modem cinema’s grammar. Hitchcock had the historical good fortune to have worked from silent films through television. He was obsessed with detail and had a slow, meandering style. Sometimes the talk was without apparent purpose, but at other times some shred of casual chatter would turn out useful to our work. One minute the script, the next a story about Ivor Novello’s tailor or the Tahiti steamer schedule in the Thirties. There was always time in our work sessions for stories and anecdotes. He moved in and out of senility and yet, for all that, he seemed in no hurry to finish his work, even though his life was clearly limited. When I was working with him, he was seventy-nine years old and was sometimes lost in the solitude of great physical pain, arthritis mostly. With his high-waisted black suits-with trousers that rested above his enormous belly, leaving just a few inches of white shirt exposed and with a black tie tucked into his pants-he looked positively fictional, out of Dickens, perhaps, or a banker by Evelyn Waugh. I was aware of this and, as I came to see, so was he. Sometimes he was at the top of his form and told them well other times less so. There were times when he seemed to feel obliged to tell Alfred Hitchcock stories. He was a well-known raconteur, and some of his stories were widely known and repeated-often by him. I think he sometimes got it confused, particularly in his storytelling. Hitchcock’s public self was so distinct that it was often impossible to know if I was dealing with the corporeal man or the invented persona. You hear about it all your life, and when you finally see the damn thing, it looks so much like the postcards, it’s difficult to see it fresh. While I will try to tell you a bit about him as I saw him, I warn you that, to me at least, he was ultimately unknowable. The time we spent together was always decorous, frequently pleasant, occasionally tense. I was the last screenwriter to work with him before his death. From December 1978 to May 1979, Alfred Hitchcock and I collaborated on a script.
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