Authors: Patrick McGilligan
He dodged the witty veteran writer Hal Kanter, assigned by the AFI to ghost his acceptance remarks. “He kept canceling dates with Kanter,” recalled Freeman, “and denying any knowledge of the need to make a speech.”
The day before the event his doctors forbade him to go, throwing AFI officials into a “panic,” according to Joseph McBride. “As a precautionary measure,” McBride reported, “his acceptance speech was taped in advance, on the afternoon of the event.” Although Hitchcock mustered the courage to defy his doctors, the taped version was later intercut with the live version, to give television viewers “the illusion of an error-free delivery”—even though a close viewing shows him standing in the former and seated in the latter.
On the very day of the tribute, a telegram arrived from Frank Capra in Palm Springs, sending his regrets. “It was a message from one old lion to another,” wrote Freeman. “Hitch held it in his hands, read it, reread it and cried. Not for the sentiment, I don’t think, which was certainly genuine, but because he saw it as attesting to his own demise.”
At the Beverly Hilton, where the event took place, Universal had reserved a suite for Hitchcock and then frantically contrived to keep liquor out of his hands until the dinner began.
The cohosts of the evening were Ingrid Bergman and François Truffaut. The glittering assemblage included many veterans of Hitchcock films: Dame Judith Anderson, Teresa Wright, Jane Wyman, John Forsythe, Vera Miles, Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Rod Taylor, Sean Connery, Karen Black, and Tippi Hedren. There was also a sprinkling of younger Hollywood, including Barbra Streisand, Robin Williams, and Steve Martin.
All stood to cheer when the director entered the room, walking to his table—as he had insisted—without help. (“He might have as easily pole-vaulted his way,” recalled Freeman.) Spotlights covered his “step by agonizing step, his face red and wheezing, his eyes straight ahead,” said Freeman.
The honoree paused “gallantly” to kiss the hand of his daughter, Pat Hitchcock O’Connell, according to the
Los Angeles Times
, before arriving at his table, where he was ringed by Bergman, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Lew Wasserman, Lord and Lady Bernstein, and—“in her own show of gallantry”—Mrs. Hitchcock, even though it had been previously announced that she would be absent because of illness. (Like her husband, Alma hated the idea of appearing publicly in such condition, but at the last moment she decided to come.)
Each of the AFI tributes had its own “flavor,” Charles Champlin wrote in the
Los Angeles Times.
“James Cagney’s was a family picnic, a welcome home for a beloved and rascally uncle who had been away too long. Orson Welles’ was a mixture of reverential awe and sadness, that the astonishing triumph of
Citizen Kane
was a peak he has not equaled since. The tributes to Henry Fonda and Bette Davis were warm with admiration for achievements and for lives lived to the full. William Wyler’s night was touched with austere respect for a meticulous and demanding craftsman who was not a man you slapped on the back.”
Yet Hitchcock’s was undoubtedly “the most filmic of all,” wrote Champlin, and also “one of the most melancholy.” For it was obvious to everyone present—and then, when the tribute was broadcast one week later, to a national TV audience—that the unsmiling Master of Suspense was deeply mired in a private hell. No matter how merciful, the later crosscutting between clips and rehearsed speeches strained to find any expression in Hitchcock’s blank, defeated face. He briefly rose to the occasion with a
subversive speech, which Kanter had cobbled together out of his own resourcefulness. He spoke almost with aplomb, although he couldn’t stand and had trouble with the “idiot” cards. The audience “couldn’t be sure whether he accidentally or intentionally alluded to the Life Amusement Award instead of the Life Achievement Award,” according to the
Los Angeles Times.
“He said all a man required was affection, approval, encouragement and a hearty meal, and he was grateful for having received three out of the four this night.”
*
Then Hollywood, a den of iniquity for mistresses and divorce, heard something rare, as Hitchcock proceeded to rhapsodize about “the woman at my side” as the ultimate wife, mother, writer, editor, and cook. On the occasion of his last public appearance, he paid moving tribute to the lifelong partner who was still there with him.
When AFI director George Stevens Jr. came to his table to hand him the award, Hitchcock tried to stand up, but fell back into his chair—a moment briefly captured in the televised version. And then there was an especially heartbreaking moment at the end of the evening, when Ingrid Bergman came over to him and made a declaration of her gratitude, presenting Hitchcock with the prop key to the wine cellar, which had been tucked in her hand in a famous shot from
Notorious.
She and Cary Grant had shared custody of it, as a good luck charm, for thirty years. Now she was returning the key—and its luck—to him.
Totally out of character, Hitchcock embraced the actress, trembling. “Suddenly it was not a public show of affection,” reported the
Los Angeles Times
, “it was a parting at the platform of two old and dear friends who could not be sure they would meet again.” Grant, who typically had balked at rehearsing and saying anything lengthy at the podium, spontaneously jumped up and joined the embrace, ending the night on “a moment of high and genuine emotion whose honesty transcended the circumstances of a fundraising event,” according to the
Los Angeles Times
, which added that there were moist eyes throughout the room.
His flirtations with the pretty young secretary worsened, and “soon enough she was spending time with him in his office, à deux,” according to David Freeman. “No one but the two of them can say what went on, though I imagine it was something along the lines of Hitch posing her and gazing at her while she unbuttoned herself. Looking was a particular
specialty of his. It’s unlikely that Hitchcock was capable of much more than that.”
The office rumor was that Hitchcock—on the pretext of considering the young secretary for a part in his fifty-fourth film—gave her a little money for posing. “To set this down makes it sound sleazier than it was,” said Freeman. “The whole thing had a pathetic innocence about it.” Then one day the secretary disappeared; the new rumor was that Lew Wasserman had found out about it and put an end to the matter. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Lew Wasserman had paid her to go away,” said Freeman, “if he thought Hitch’s good name was at risk. He was Hitch’s friend, but equally important, Hitch’s name was an important studio asset.”
The director and writer continued their work up until May 1979; as they left it, “The Short Night” would be polished enough to be published, after Hitchcock’s death, along with Freeman’s memoir. A short time after the draft was delivered, however, Hitchcock called in Hilton Green and asked him to notify Wasserman that his fifty-fourth film would never be made. Wasserman, a friend to the last, pretended it was a temporary decision. Hitchcock’s office stayed open, and he still came in to work when he felt like it, sitting at his desk and dictating correspondence, or jotting fresh notes on “The Short Night.” Whenever he was there in the afternoon, he watched a film in his private projection room—often alone.
Although he considered himself a Catholic, he had long since stopped going to church, and now the Jesuit father Thomas Sullivan, friendly with Hitchcock since 1947, insisted on coming to Bellagio Road once a week to say Mass for him and Alma.
He had also long since stopped going to Dr. Walter Flieg’s office, asking apologetically if he might have his checkups at home, where the doctor was now his most regular visitor. Hitchcock enjoyed Dr. Flieg’s company, among other reasons because they tended to talk about movies, not his health. Dr. Flieg loved Hitchcock’s anecdotes and reminiscences. The checkups were brief and routine; the conversation and cocktails took longer.
Most of the time, in his last months, Hitchcock preserved his good humor, Dr. Flieg recalled. But the stretches of misery and depression also lengthened and worsened.
According to Donald Spoto’s book, Ingrid Bergman paid Hitchcock a final visit, very close to his eightieth birthday, in August 1979. “He took both my hands,” the actress informed Spoto, “and tears streamed down his face and he said, ‘Ingrid, I’m going to die,’ and I said, ‘But of course you are going to die sometime, Hitch—we are all going to die.’ And then I told him that I, too, had recently been very ill, and that I had thought about it, too. And for a moment the logic of that seemed to make him more peaceful.”
Death surrounded him. It came in the newspapers; it came by mail and by phone. Michael Balcon: October 17, 1977. His sister, Nellie: January 30, 1979. Victor Saville, only a month after making an appearance at Hitchcock’s American Film Institute tribute: May 8, 1979. Peggy Robertson had the sad task of bringing him the news each time. Besides Alma, these were the relatives and friends he had known the longest, back in his youth and the boy wonder days. Each death brought new outbursts of tears.
Hume Cronyn came to visit, trying be cheerful. Hitchcock held his hands, weeping, knowing that whichever one of them outlived the other, it would be the last time they met.
At the end of 1979, the last year of his life, came the second award: his listing on Queen Elizabeth’s annual New Year’s Honors as an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
“The possibility of a knighthood, I suspect, played a larger part in Hitchcock’s inner life than he acknowledged,” wrote David Freeman. Officially an American citizen since 1955, Hitchcock was still British to the core, and knighthood allowed him to be known, in the last months of his life, as Sir Alfred. With a flash of the old Hitchcock, he irreverently dubbed himself “the short knight,” and there was a brief flurry of attendant studio publicity and office activity resurrecting Hitchcock’s fifty-fourth, “The Short Night.” But that likelihood was as illusory as the fleeting notion that the director might somehow be able to travel to England for a formal ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
Instead, Lew Wasserman and Universal—which had cocooned Hitchcock for the last twenty years; which had made the studio a safe haven as well as gilded cage for him; which had kept up the pretense of pre-production on the fifty-fourth Hitchcock film in spite of internal certainty that the director was finished—performed one last act of corporate noblesse oblige by hastily rounding up old friends and associates for a knighthood luncheon.
Cary Grant and Janet Leigh, along with a phalanx of studio officials, came to honor Hitchcock, and photographs were taken of him looking all but gone. British consul general Thomas W. Aston bestowed the knighthood. Asked by a reporter why it had taken the queen so long, Hitchcock managed a winking reply. “I guess she forgot,” he said.
Around this time, stopping by the office to say hello to the director, David Freeman found the staff in tears, and furniture movers streaming in and out, carrying boxes, files, books, old films—“the detritus of his business,” in Freeman’s words. Hitchcock had once and for all informed the front office that he couldn’t—and wouldn’t—make another film, and “the
studio jumped at the chance to close down, or at least reduce, his costly operation,” according to Freeman.
“The staff was furious at him for not making an announcement to them himself,” wrote Freeman, “and more importantly, not helping them look to their futures. His own sense of himself was so wrapped up in being a film maker that when he wasn’t one anymore, he just closed up his shop and released his staff. The people around him had trouble seeing past his recent cruelties and drunken behavior; they saw venality where there was only human frailty. They left angry and hurt, and when they were gone, he came back.”
Hitchcock then sat in the middle of his office, having the studio barber trim his sideburns as the workmen gradually emptied out the place. Even after that day, though, Hitchcock couldn’t stay away. The director began showing up at the barren office, briefly aided by a temporary assistant. According to Freeman, Hitchcock “resumed his rituals, unencumbered by the fiction of being a film maker, or the trappings of power and authority. There was only one phone line left, and when it would ring, the bell would echo, oddly, off the walls.”
In the afternoons he still ordered up screenings, although the logbook was no longer maintained, and there is no record of the last films he watched. A dog lover since boyhood, the director loved
Benji
, and watched the dog-thwarts-kidnappers film repeatedly. The New Wave had waned, and he no longer tried to keep up with youthful trends. He probably watched the latest Walt Disney and James Bond pictures, which always amused him. He would have forced himself to see Universal films because he was loyal, and a major stockholder. In the past his own films had always been on the schedule, whenever he had a writer to indoctrinate—and perhaps that was still true even now. Perhaps Hitchcock watched his own favorites—although he never much dwelled on favorites—reminding himself once and for all of the power and immortality of his life’s work.
By late winter, however, he had stopped showing up at Universal. After one last act of duty and friendship (a taped introduction to the forthcoming American Film Institute Life Achievement Award tribute for James Stewart), he left Bellagio Road only once more, checking into Cedars Sinai for diagnostic tests in March. In his final weeks, he took to bed. Alma was incapacitated. His wife was adrift from reality, and he had watched and directed his last film. For Hitchcock, film had been friendship and society, as well as the work that consumed him. Film had been his entire world for all his adult life. Now, uncharacteristically, he even lost interest in the newspaper, in television, in industry or Hollywood gossip.
According to Dr. Flieg, Hitchcock suffered aches and pains, mild hypertension, a heart condition, kidney problems, and a general physical deterioration, but his constitution was strong and he was not dying. He could have lived out months, even years, with care and comfort, said Dr. Flieg. Yet always a man of tremendous willpower, now the director willed himself to die. A man who loved food and drink, now he refused either, taking only sips of water. He stopped getting out of bed; he refused to see or talk to friends; he stared coldly at the few who braved a visit, and more than once confronted them with irrational anger and epithets.