Standing behind the camera was the corpulent figure of Alfred Hitchcock, recognized as cinema’s master of murder, mayhem, and suspense, his pendulous lips exhaling bad breath while delivering extraordinarily obscene jokes in a lugubrious Cockney accent.
Reclining in front of the camera was his latest star, the exquisitely beautiful Tippi Hedren, poised, elegant, remote, and seemingly unattainable; she was the last in a long line of ice-cool blonde screen goddesses who had captivated Hitchcock during his 40-year career.
At 34, Hedren was more than 30 years younger than him, a former model with a six-year-old daughter—now-movie star Melanie Griffith—who was on the verge of marrying her agent, Noel Marshall.
Although Hitchcock was aware of this, he became dangerously obsessed with Hedren, acting as the ultimate Svengali. He began bombarding her with crude sexual advances and ruthlessly attempted to control every facet of her life, on-screen and off.
The confrontation that day had been building for a long time. Following their collaboration on the psychological thriller Marnie, where she acted alongside Sean Connery, Hedren earned a nomination for the Photoplay Award as the most promising new actress of the year.
Seeking Hitchcock’s approval to travel to New York for the award presentation on The Tonight Show, she was met with unexpected refusal. Unable to fathom her absence, even for two days, he called the network himself to reject the award and cancel her appearance.
For two years, Hedren had maintained iron-clad self-control in her interactions with the famed director, never succumbing to his sexual proposals.
However, that day, her pent-up emotions erupted, resulting in a furious outburst where she screamed at Hitchcock, allegedly labeling him ‘a fat pig’ in the presence of the crew on set. Hitchcock was taken aback. “She did what no one is permitted to do,” he bitterly lamented, adding, “She referred to my weight.”
In her fury, Hedren insisted on being released from her exclusive contract with Hitchcock.
From that point on, he brutally cut her from his life, issuing threats to destroy her career and refusing to communicate with her directly, only through intermediaries. He never spoke her name again, referring to her only as ‘that girl.’
This incredible saga is depicted in a 90-minute BBC2 television drama, The Girl, featuring Sienna Miller as Hedren and Toby Jones as Hitchcock, with Imelda Staunton portraying Hitchcock’s wife, Alma, and Penelope Wilton as his loyal assistant, Peggy Robertson. Although this is a few years old (about four), it remains worth a watch.
Now 82, Miss Hedren serves as the artistic adviser for the film. She expresses her ‘one reservation’ by saying, “I worry they will not portray me as strong a character as I was—and still am. I had to be extremely strong to resist Mr. Hitchcock.”
“He was incredibly insistent and obsessive, but I was an exceedingly strong young woman, and there was no way he would get the better of me.”
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, born in 1899 in the East End suburb of Leytonstone, was the son of a Catholic greengrocer. His father, William, a strict disciplinarian, would send Hitchcock to the local police station with a note declaring that he had been ‘naughty.’
Upon arrival, a custody sergeant known to the family would lock the boy in a cell for five or ten minutes before letting him go. The sound of the door clanging, Hitchcock maintained, instilled him with ‘dread’ and left him with a lifelong fear.of jails, arrest, and the police. It was clear that this resonated with his dramatic sensibilities.
Emma, his mother, was sharp-tongued and demanding. She required her son to stand at the foot of her bed and recount his daily activities — an ordeal he would later describe as his ‘evening confession.’
For many years, he harbored a deep resentment towards his mother’s oppression, and close friends speculated that when he depicted the murder or violation of his heroines onscreen, it was a mental assault on his mother.
In 1926, he married Alma Reville, a film editor and screenwriter, but their union turned out to be devoid of sexual intimacy. Apart from a single incident when they managed to conceive their daughter, Patricia — which he would confess to finding ‘mechanically unpleasant’ — Hitchcock remained celibate for the rest of his life.
To explain this to friends, he would claim he was ‘sexually impotent.’
Subsequently, his romantic life and more intense sexual fantasies were executed through his on-screen heroines rather than in real life. With the passage of time, the boundary between reality and his darker fantasies, influenced by his own profound frustrations, often became indistinguishable.
From his teenage years onward, Hitchcock developed a significant obsession with blonde women. Interestingly, his wife, who had reddish hair, did not fit this particular type.
His inaugural screen blonde was a West End musical comedy star known simply as June.
Although her natural hair color was light brown, Hitchcock demanded that she appear blonde when casting her as the endangered heroine in his silent thriller The Lodger in 1927, which revolved around a Jack-the-Ripper-like serial killer who took pleasure in slashing golden girls on foggy nights near London Bridge.
To June’s dismay, she found herself forced to don a blonde wig, the curls of which Hitchcock meticulously styled himself. “By the end of the first week,” she lamented, “I looked like Harpo Marx.”
The second British blonde he pursued was the bisexual Joan Barry, mother of Henrietta Tiarks, Duchess of Bedford. In Rich And Strange, Barry portrayed a young wife filmed by Hitchcock in a water tank alongside her husband, Henry Kendall.
Straddling him, Barry dared him to swim between her legs. Upon doing so, she unexpectedly captured his head between her thighs until bubbles floated to the surface. When he emerged, he gasped, “You almost killed me that time.”
To which Barry quipped, “Wouldn’t that have been a beautiful death?”
Hitchcock infinitely regretted that the scene, which perfectly encapsulated his desire for and dread of the captivating blonde, was cut by the censors.
The foremost star Hitchcock worked with during the new talkie era was Jessie Matthews, the reigning sex symbol of the time. However, Matthews, while brimming with sex appeal, was a brunette and bore no sexual allure for Hitchcock.
She also held too much power as a box-office star for Hitchcock to enforce his will upon her; she swiftly dismissed his suggestion that she adopt ‘a mincing operetta style’ in Waltzes From Vienna.
When he persisted, Sir Michael Balcon, the head of the studio, intervened and instructed him to back off, fearing that Matthews would abandon the film and the studio. Hitchcock never forgave her for this affront to his authority, holding onto his hostility for 40 years thereafter.
Far more to his liking was the cool blonde Madeleine Carroll, the star of The 39 Steps. Yet, similar to his previous blondes, Carroll fell prey to Hitchcock’s sexual fantasies. His interest in bondage was immediately indulged on the first day of shooting by handcuffing Carroll to her co-star Robert Donat, whom she had never met before.
He then feigned the loss of the keys, leaving them bound together.together in a state of awkward discomfort and closeness for the majority of the day — a situation they subsequently had to portray in the film.
A pattern of merciless sadism started to define Hitchcock’s interactions with his leading ladies. His initial Hollywood blonde, Joan Fontaine, who played the timid second Mrs. de Winter in the 1940 film *Rebecca*, was intentionally isolated by him.
‘He would incessantly remind me that no one believed in my talent except for him,’ she recalled. He subsequently undermined her by suggesting that her co-star, Laurence Olivier, held disdain for her and that she might be replaced.
The more grounded Swedish blonde, Ingrid Bergman, attempted to awaken Hitchcock’s dormant sexuality but left him completely embarrassed when he proved physically incapable of responding to her advances. He was profoundly infatuated with her, which led to strains in his marriage with Alma.
Bergman, a warm, passionate woman who genuinely cared for him, perceived that he was deprived of affection and sought to remedy this, yet his repressed libido remained unresponsive, even to her.
Hitchcock’s ideal archetype of the screen blonde was certainly Grace Kelly, who would later become Princess Grace of Monaco.
He was not fooled by her composed, elegant, and refined demeanor. He took great pleasure in gossiping about her complicated love life during the filming of *Dial M for Murder*, where her desperate struggle against strangulation had clear sexual implications.
‘That Gryce!’ he would exclaim in his hissing Cockney. ‘She slept with everyone! Why, she even slept with little Freddie (Frederick Knott), the writer!’
American Kim Novak was another blonde whom Hitchcock exerted his influence over.
‘Before shooting began on *Vertigo*,’ one of his biographers notes, ‘he invited her to his home and conversed about everything aside from the film — art, food, travel, wine — all the topics he assumed she wouldn’t be familiar with. He successfully made her feel like an uninformed child, naïve and uneducated, precisely what he wanted — to dismantle her defenses. By the end of the afternoon, he had her right where he desired, compliant and submissive.’
Janet Leigh also became a blonde sex symbol for the director. In the infamous shower scene of *Psycho*, the knife was used to imply the notion of violent rape and sexual violation.
As one of his screenwriters, Arthur Laurents, noted: ‘He resided in a realm of kink. Perverse sex, bizarre sex, that captivated him . . . at his core, he was a voyeur.’ Then one day in 1961, while watching a television commercial for a diet drink, Hitchcock laid eyes on his ultimate blonde obsession: Tippi Hedren.
He placed her under an exclusive contract at $500 a week — low pay by Hollywood norms — selecting her clothing, makeup, jewelry, and hairstyle, advising on her diet, social interactions, and lifestyle choices.
‘She’s already experiencing the peaks and valleys of terror,’ he declared in 1962, and that was perhaps an understatement.
As the anguished protagonist of *The Birds*, she was assured by Hitchcock that only mechanical birds would be used; instead, Hedren endured five days with prop men, protected only by thick leather gloves, hurling dozens of live seagulls, ravens, and crows at her, their beaks restrained with elastic bands.
When one of the birds scratched her cheek, barely missing her eye, Hedren collapsed on set, sobbing uncontrollably. A doctor prescribed a week of rest, during which she was tormented by ‘nightmares filled with flapping wings.’
It’s no surprise that, as she grew increasingly aware of the full degree of Hitchcock’s control over her, panic ultimately drove her to rebel and escape from him.
He kept her on salary, binding her to her contract for two years, during which he declined all other requests for her involvement, including an offer from the esteemed French director, François Truffaut, one Hitchcock never even revealed to her.
In 1967, after finally breaking free…By agreeing to Charlie Chaplin’s invitation to take part in his film, A Countess From Hong Kong, Hedren reluctantly accepted to have tea with the Hitchcocks at Claridge’s.
This meeting was meant as a reconciliation effort by Alma, yet it turned out to be a tense and strained affair where Hitchcock struggled to hide his resentment toward her. Some believe that he never fully recovered from the hit to his pride caused by Hedren’s departure. After Marnie, he directed only four more films — Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, and Family Plot — none of which can be considered classic Hitchcock.
By 1980, when he finally received his knighthood, he had retreated completely into himself, refusing food, remaining in bed, and coldly regarding the few visitors he allowed. He passed away on April 29, 1980, just three months shy of his 81st birthday.
While Tippi Hedren may have lost her opportunity for major stardom due to his egomania, she ultimately regained her freedom and reaffirmed her independence from a distressed and anguished genius.
Sitting nearly alone in a vast cinema feels somewhat unsettling. It’s as if an event has taken place elsewhere, and you are the only one oblivious to it.
by Helena Bryanlith