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Summary
Summary
Winner of the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Biography
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A fresh, innovative biography of the twentieth century's most iconic filmmaker.
In The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock , Edward White explores the Hitchcock phenomenon--what defines it, how it was invented, what it reveals about the man at its core, and how its legacy continues to shape our cultural world.
The book's twelve chapters illuminate different aspects of Hitchcock's life and work: "The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up"; "The Murderer"; "The Auteur"; "The Womanizer"; "The Fat Man"; "The Dandy"; "The Family Man"; "The Voyeur"; "The Entertainer"; "The Pioneer"; "The Londoner"; "The Man of God." Each of these angles reveals something fundamental about the man he was and the mythological creature he has become, presenting not just the life Hitchcock lived but also the various versions of himself that he projected, and those projected on his behalf.
From Hitchcock's early work in England to his most celebrated films, White astutely analyzes Hitchcock's oeuvre and provides new interpretations. He also delves into Hitchcock's ideas about gender; his complicated relationships with "his women"--not only Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren but also his female audiences--as well as leading men such as Cary Grant, and writes movingly of Hitchcock's devotion to his wife and lifelong companion, Alma, who made vital contributions to numerous classic Hitchcock films, and burnished his mythology. And White is trenchant in his assessment of the Hitchcock persona, so carefully created that Hitchcock became not only a figurehead for his own industry but nothing less than a cultural icon.
Ultimately, White's portrayal illuminates a vital truth: Hitchcock was more than a Hollywood titan; he was the definitive modern artist, and his significance reaches far beyond the confines of cinema.
Author Notes
Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America and has written for publications including the Paris Review. He lives in England.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
White (The Tastemaker) suggests legendary director Alfred Hitchcock had more lives than a cat in this sweeping biography. In his coverage of Hitchcock's 60-plus-year career, White examines 12 "lives" that shaped what he terms the "Hitchcock brand" (as opposed to the familiar "Hitchcock touch"). "The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up" recalls Hitchcock's childhood traumas of abandonment and punishment (from his experience at school) as the basis for the distress and fear he portrayed in his films. "The Murderer" discusses "voyeurism, guilt, enchanting blondes" and covers Hitchcock's desire to reframe the slasher genre. The core of "The Auteur" follows Hitchcock's films from "conception to projection," detailing conflicts with collaborators, while "The Womanizer" tackles what critics have called "full-on misogyny" on-screen. Inside stories behind the director's classic films abound, as with an anecdote about Evan Hunter, who wrote the screenplay for The Birds to little credit; after telling a child he wrote it, the child responded, "No, you didn't... Alfred Hitchcock did." Hitchcock fans will be enamored of this canny, full portrait of an artist with a singular vision. (Apr.)
Guardian Review
Dickens never recovered from the spooky stories his nurse told him at bedtime, and few of us ever outgrow Hitchcock. He holds us captive by tweaking our anxieties and using cinematic techniques - warped angles of vision, painfully elongated time, nerve-shredding sonic shocks - to delectably torment us. Martin Scorsese has admitted that he screens Hitchcock's films "repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly". Such repetitions always deliver revelations: watching the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much again the other day, I noticed that the anonymous London bobbies caught in a shootout are granted a line or two of jaunty dialogue just before they're killed. Their banter is enough to make them pitiably tragic, and it earns the aloof, unmerciful director some credit for compassion. "I dictate the picture," Hitchcock once said. To consolidate his power, he created a personal myth that became a lucrative commercial brand. When asked for an autograph, he often scribbled a silhouette: a blobby head with wispy hair, its plump curves interrupted by a concave nose and two puckered lips. Hitchcock made an icon of himself using nine economical pencil strokes; Edward White's study of his "variegated legacies" disassembles him into 12 separate facets, each exposing an aspect of "the public entity he crafted". The dozen selves anatomised by White do tend to overlap or to contradict one another. Aren't Hitchcock the auteur and Hitchcock the pioneer the same, not a duo? And how can the gluttonous fat man also be a foppish dandy who "curated his body image" like the murderous gay aesthetes in Rope? One section labels him a womaniser, even though he claimed to be impotent, said he dreamed that he possessed a frail, transparent penis made of crystal, and claimed to have impregnated his wife with the aid of a fountain pen. Then, with odd illogic, White follows these kinky whimsies by celebrating Hitchcock's contentment as a family man who liked to do the washing-up after dinner. Characterising the Catholic Hitchcock as a man of God, White rather desperately argues that the colour of Grace Kelly's red dress in Dial M for Murder is "liturgical"; he's right, however, that Judith Anderson in Rebecca treats the drawer containing her dead mistress's lacy underwear as a fetishistic shrine. The problem of Hitchcock's cruelty - truly malevolent or merely jocular? - recurs in many of these parallel lives. White deflects complaints about his harassment of successive blonde actresses by pointing to his record as an ecumenical abuser. He once terrorised a seven-year-old boy cast in an episode of his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents by telling him in a whisper that if he didn't stop fidgeting "I'm going to nail your feet to your mark, and the blood will pour out like milk". In a similar mood, he crassly remarked that the tapes of screaming children recorded by the Moors murderers were "jolly good stuff". White regards Hitchcock as "the emblematic artist of the 20th century", who began as a "modernist whiz-kid" and ended as "a wily old cynic on the path of postmodernism"; occasionally he over-reaches in trying to prove his ambitious case. Do the scampering legs of the chorus girls in Hitchcock's The Pleasure Garden justify a comparison with the cubistically fractured physique of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase? Psycho allowed us to peep behind a shower curtain and gave us a whiff of decomposition in the fruit cellar, but as a "cultural happening" it doesn't quite rank with the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. I'm uneasy too when White describes the shower head that spurts cleansing water on to Janet Leigh as an allusion to the ceiling vents for Zyklon B at Auschwitz. He is better on the avant-gardism of The Birds, a precursor of cinema's current surrender to technology: a sodium vapour process merged separate shots to amass those squadrons of attacking crows, and an early electronic synthesiser called the Mixtur-Trautonium supplied their squawks of triumph. Tracking Hitchcock's contemporary influence, White is an enterprising tour guide. I was happy to be reminded of Cornelia Parker's PsychoBarn, constructed in 2016 on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Parker considers the gloomy gabled Bates house to be "the most corrupt building you could find", yet she made it look invitingly homey and healthy by splicing it on to an innocent agricultural barn and setting it to chasten the arrogant Manhattan skyscrapers that poked up in the distance. And thanks to White, I went on an excursion to Leytonstone, Hitchcock's birthplace in east London: here, in a gallery of mosaics on the walls of a sooty tunnel in the tube station, the monochrome nightmares from his films glow and glisten like Byzantine jewels. Not to be outdone by panels that show the sapphire sky from To Catch a Thief or the flaming carousel from Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock himself turns iridescent. At the age of six, dressed in a banana-yellow military uniform, he chubbily straddles a pony outside his father's grocery shop; changing to a lime-green suit on the set of Stage Fright, he chortles as he tells Marlene Dietrich a no doubt salacious joke. I was also pleased to learn from White about the lewd Hitchcock tribute in Eminem's Music to Be Murdered By. After sampling the host's unctuous "Good evening" from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Eminem raps to Gounod's unmournful Funeral March of a Marionette, the theme tune of the series. He first informs us that we're hitched to his cock, after which he adjusts his jockstrap, scratches his balls, takes an audibly splashy pee and deploys a Lysol wipe. The words trip along at near-unintelligible speed, matching those quick editorial cuts in Psycho that make you think you've seen a knife ripping Janet Leigh's flesh; decelerated, you can hear Eminem delight in the "dirtiest rhymes" of an "obscene, pervertedest mind". Cornelia Parker exorcised Psycho's house of horrors by lifting it into the fresh air above Central Park, but Eminem lingers in the dank basement where Mrs Bates creaks in her rocking chair. As White's book confirms, Hitchcock entices us down into that underworld, knowing we won't resist. Then he frightens the life out of us and leaves us to die laughing.
Kirkus Review
A fresh assessment of the legendary director. Following The Tastemaker, his outstanding biography of Carl Van Vechten, White takes on another titanic figure in the arts. The author plumbs Hitchcock's films and TV shows to reinforce his view that he was a man of many contradictions, "usually complex, often troubling, but always vital." White breaks down his subject's psyche into 12 "lives," beginning with "The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up," which delves into his childhood trauma, "dread of authority," and the "lifelong fascination with cruelty and violence that fueled his creativity." In "The Murderer," White posits that to "crack the Hitchcock code there's no better place to start than at the grisly end," as he leads us down a bloody path that runs from The Lodger to Psycho. The author reveals Hitchcock's ability to promote his brand and create a "personal mythology." In "The Womanizer," White explores Hitchcock's complex, contradictory relationships with women as a "creator and controller," best seen in Vertigo, and his dependence on his wife, Alma. Discussing Shadow of a Doubt, "a point of continuity between the two halves of his career" gives White the opportunity to point out that the "most insistent theme of his work is a seemingly happy home cruelly torn asunder." Examining Rear Window, which the director considered his "most cinematic" film, the author notes now "Hitchcock knew the power one could command by looking--and by denying others the opportunity to look." It was the success of his two TV shows that helped create the "Entertainer," and "The Pioneer" neatly shows how "each of his works is in deep conversation with the rest." Hitchcock "The Londoner"--White is especially good on the director's early English films--and the Catholic "Man of God" complete the 12 lives. Although the author doesn't uncover much groundbreaking information, he presents the man and his films in a readable, entertaining package. An incisive literary autopsy of the Master of Suspense. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Proving the truth of the well-known axiom, this biocritical study of Hitchcock confirms that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In 12 chapters, White explores 12 versions of film director Alfred Hitchcock: "the murderer," "the auteur," and "the family man," among them. Hitchcock, of course, was none of these people and all of them: a famously idiosyncratic man who concealed enough mysteries to keep biographers writing for decades. There probably will never be a definitive book about Hitchcock (like his movies, he is open to infinite interpretations), but this one adds much to our understanding of the man and his movies. The approach is certainly intriguing, the writing is engaging, and the author provides us with a wealth of new insights into Hitchcock. White engages in some fine detective work, too, trying to get to the truth behind some of the most intriguing Hitchcock legends, including an oft-told origin story that might be more fiction than fact. A solid entry in the voluminous literature of Alfred Hitchcock.
Library Journal Review
Alfred Hitchcock (1899--1980)has been the subject of dozens of books in the last 20 years, but White (The Tastemaker) distinguishes his work with an inspired approach. Bypassing a traditional narrative, this necessary and perceptive study of the filmmaker and his cinematic impact is framed in 12 separate portraits, each focusing on a particular aspect of Hitchcock's character. Crafting detailed but highly readable studies of, for example, the innovator, the frightened youth, and the dark-edged jester, White offers a kind of anatomical overlay, where each trait infuses the next with even more subtext. This is especially true of an early chapter presenting recently resurfaced stories about Hitchcock's alleged harassment and abuse of women in his professional life such as Tippi Hedren. This section, which gives readers a sense of the director's need for creative control, provides a fascinating contrast to later chapters that deal with his weight troubles, his lack of concern over analysis of his films, and the posthumous, living mythology associated with the name Hitchcock. VERDICT An absorbing, thoughtful, and balanced look at a master of his medium.--Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. xi |
1 The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up | p. 1 |
2 The Murderer | p. 27 |
3 The Auteur | p. 52 |
4 The Womanizer | p. 81 |
5 The Fat Man | p. 110 |
6 The Dandy | p. 133 |
7 The Family Man | p. 159 |
8 The Voyeur | p. 181 |
9 The Entertainer | p. 202 |
10 The Pioneer | p. 226 |
11 The Londoner | p. 250 |
12 The Man Of God | p. 276 |
Acknowledgments | p. 297 |
Alfred Hitchcock Filmography | p. 299 |
Abbreviations | p. 301 |
Notes | p. 303 |
Selected Bibliography | p. 341 |
Credits | p. 357 |
Index | p. 361 |