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The Guardian (28/Aug/1999) - Pat Hitchcock: The woman who knew too much

(c) The Guardian (28/Aug/1999)

The woman who knew too much

Alfred Hitchcock's centenary year has seen his films subjected to the kind of scrutiny for which the master himself was so renowned. Throughout, his daughter Patricia has remained loyal to the memory of his genius, always tight-lipped about private family matters. But, as a girl, was she also the victim of her father's expert manipulation of fear? Suzie Mackenzie goes in search of the psychological truth.

Pat Hitchcock O'Connell - and it has to be Pat: "I don't know where this calling me Patricia has come from, it has always been Pat. I feel like taking an advertisement out in all the papers." Anyway, Pat Hitchcock O'Connell lives in a beautiful home at the end of a very long drive some miles outside of Santa Barbara - a house that she and her late husband Joseph bought 10 years ago from the tennis player Rod Laver. Five gardeners putter around on car-like contraptions, taming the landscape into a kind of chocolate-box realism.

There is a sleek, bottle-green Jag in the drive with personalised plates - PAT, it reads - so no excuse for getting her name wrong. And when Ms Hitchcock appears at her door she is wearing a formal buttoned suit, an amount of gold, and a look that you would be hard pushed to describe as interested. She proceeds into her drawing room, a concentration of tasteful objets d'art - crystal lamps, silver bowls, porcelain; above the mantelpiece one of her father's Utrillo paintings, on an opposite wall a Klee drawing - deposits herself elegantly on a soft, cushiony sofa, and says nothing.

The impression is instantaneous and effective. I'm looking at an extremely wealthy woman, 71 years old, who has made up her mind that nothing unexpected is going to happen. No mystery here, a certain stiffness around the mouth seems to say. Not even seems. She actually does say it. "I have had a perfectly normal life." Normal is becoming abnormal these days, Hitchcock once observed. "My parents were ordinary people. I know a lot of people insist that my father must have had a dark imagination. Well, he did not. He was a brilliant film-maker and he knew how to tell a story, that's all."

As she speaks, her voice is taut, contracted. "People will think what they want to think, that's what my father always said. They pay their money, they are entitled to. Anyway, I don't care what they think." What you have to imagine is this being said not in anger, not in defiance, but in a tone of utter neutrality. As if to betray any feeling at all is somehow a decadence or, worse, the handing of a weapon to the enemy.

Maybe it's the Hitchcockian setting of it all - the meticulous precision with which she stage-manages the surface of her life - but I begin to think that something else is going on, to hear things not said, or only half said. As when I ask her if she ever felt overshadowed by her father. "Overshadowed? How could a daughter ever feel overshadowed?" Or, more particularly, when, in response to no question at all, she volunteers: "I am writing a book about my mother."

Her mother, Alma Reville, was a respected film editor, first at Twickenham Studios, where she had worked on seven major pictures, including DW Griffiths' Hearts of the World, and then at Islington Studios, where, in 1923, she met Hitchcock, still little more than a script assistant. Alma had been in the film business since she was 16 - she had a six-year start on Hitch. They were, interestingly, born just one day apart, he on August 13, 1899, she on August 14. In some of Hitch's early films, notably The Lodger (1926), Alma gets a credit as assistant director. By the time of The 39 Steps (1935), and for several films after this, the credit is down to "continuity". Once they get to America, in 1939, Alma's credits reduce to a trickle, with shared writing credits on a few films, including Hitchcock's own favourite, Shadow of a Doubt. But by the period of his most sustained creative activity, 1951 to 1960, Alma's name has disappeared altogether.

So, when their daughter says, "My mother had much more to do with the films than she has ever been given credit for - he depended on her for everything, absolutely everything", it must be read as an implicit criticism of Hitchcock - what else? But, when questioned, Pat won't acknowledge this. "What are you trying to get at?" It's best to forget it. Any line of inquiry is fruitless. She will admit to no direct criticism of either of them. "They were wonderful."

Her story, as she tells it, is simple. A blissfully happy childhood with two interesting people who loved each other and her. "We were very close." Well, it wouldn't make a movie. It barely makes a sentence. It is lacking, crucially, in the one element that you need to get a story up and running, the element that her father became the master of. Tension. Hitchcock understood tension in his bones. He knew that tension is not inherent in the story but is created between a story and its audience. You play your audience, he always said, play with their emotions, tease them. "Make the audience work."

Hitchcock used to say that he found Psycho very funny. Of course, it was funny to him; he was looking at the mechanics of the film. How, by breaking one unwritten rule - that the heroine is never killed off in the first half-hour - and subjecting her to a sudden violent death, he was then able to create so much terrified apprehension in his audience that he could eliminate violence almost entirely in the rest of the film. Hitchcock believed that fear, like an adrenaline shot to the heart, woke you up. He thought fear was good for you. Scaring people was a laugh. "I know they go out giggling." He didn't acknowledge, or not outside his films, the inhibiting nature of fear, that fear can send the heart and the mind into hiding.

So it was just fun, his daughter says, when he'd come home from the studio late at night and the first thing he'd do was go to Pat's room and paint a clown's face on her sleeping features so that was what she'd see when she awoke and looked in the mirror - because isn't that what all little girls do, look in the mirror to check their loveliness is intact. "I wasn't frightened. I always knew it was him." Or when, much later, during the filming of Strangers on a Train, he bet her $100 that she wouldn't dare to go up on the Ferris wheel - "Knowing I hated heights" - which she instantly did, and he then stopped the wheel with her chair at its summit, turned out the lights and left her there for an hour. "The only sadism involved was that I never got the $100."

But hang on, surely Hitchcock was transgressing one of his own codes here. He always said that the justification, and indeed the thrill, of fear in his films was that the audience knows it is safe. It's the difference between life and movies - life is not safe. But the young woman at the top of the Ferris wheel is not in a movie and the man who put her there is not a director but her father.

I asked her at one point if she ever cried. "That's the strangest thing I've been asked." Hitch knew she wouldn't cry - she was his daughter, after all, and he had trained her well. From early life, she had learned to repress feeling. "I don't delve into myself over much." But, unlike her father, she never found a repository for those submerged feelings. The oddest thing about Pat Hitchcock is that she evinces no curiosity about life. Is she interested in politics, the outside world? "Not much. There's very little I can do about it." She seems to find curiosity in others a vulgarity. She also says perhaps the strangest thing I've ever heard: "I have never been frightened of anything." This is Hitchcock's daughter, his only child. At first, I thought this was a withholding, a refusal to acknowledge his power. But it's not. It's about control. Control is what she learned from him. She is Hitchcock, but without the imagination. The sort of person who might go to one of his films and come out saying, "So what." As if she thinks that by denying fear she can make life safe. Make it a controlled environment, like a movie.

There must have been insults and slights. As a small child she was made to eat alone in the kitchen. Aged eight, before the family left England for America, she was sent to boarding school for two years. "They always kept me with them. They took me everywhere," she had said earlier - but, clearly, they did not. Did she mind boarding school? "It's what people did at that time." But did she send her own three daughters to boarding school? "No, I would never do that. I've never understood this thing with the English sending their children away." Did she always want more than one child? "Always."

It was Hitch who decided that she wasn't going on to college after school - maybe he was frightened that she, his only child, wasn't bright. He would, of course, have been protective of her. "I would have liked to have gone to university. I should have gone." Men, she says at one point, are much cleverer than women. Was her dad cleverer than her mum? "No. They were equals." So you see. Though she's not talking, she's a great no-sayer, like her dad, who once wrote an essay about his wife praising her "for keeping her mouth shut". Still, little dissents leak out.

It was Hitch's decision to send Pat back to England from Hollywood when she was 18. She had decided that she wanted to be an actress, had done a couple of Broadway plays. Hitch, predictably, never saw her in any of them. Too busy. Alma attended them all. In his rather fawning biography of Hitchcock, the film critic John Russell Taylor has this to say about Pat's going to England to train at RADA. "It was the most spectacular present he [Hitchcock] could possibly have given her at this point." Was it, though? Sure, it gave her the chance to learn her craft. "He could hardly have shown his confidence in her ability... in a more serious way." But it also took an awkward young woman away from the person she loved most in the world - her mother - and placed her across an ocean with members of a family, Hitch's two spinster cousins, whom she didn't know at all. Respect could just as easily be read as banishment.

And it's not as if she's even felt the faintest desire to revisit England. "I never go, not unless I have to, to support a film opening." As she says of herself, she is tough. "You have to be." Not only did she stay in London, but she asked her parents if she could remain a further year - a pretty clear indication that she was enjoying herself, you might think. Yet, when asked to recall her time at RADA, she can scarcely even remember names of students in her class: "Lionel Jeffries, Dorothy Tutin... that's all." She made only one friend, Louie Ramsay, still her friend today. Maybe she did revel in her freedom, or maybe she thought that to ask to go home would betray weakness, and her father was not a man you could trust with weakness.

What is certain is that in 1949, for the first time in a decade, Hitchcock returned to England to make a film, Stage Fright, adapted by Alma from Selwyn Jepson's novel, Man Running. Maybe it's too much to read into this Alma's desire to be with her daughter, but Stage Fright is the first Hitchcock film since the 20s in which Alma gets a sole credit, and the last film in which she gets any credit at all. What had Pat said? "My mother was much more involved than she ever got credit for." Pat, who was still, of course, in London, was given her debut role, "a tiny part", in one of her father's movies, playing a character called Chubby. And this from a man who could never tolerate even the smallest reference to his own corpulence.

The family, all three of them, then returned home to Hollywood and to Hitchcock's first major hit in four years, Strangers on a Train. This time, Pat was rewarded with the best of her three cinematic roles for her father (the third was another bit part, in Psycho). She played Barbara Morton, the sister of Ann, the woman Guy Haines wants to marry. She was, by general consent, very good. It could have been the beginning of a career. But within a year, by 1951, she had met her husband Joseph, a devout Catholic, and married him. Any thoughts of a serious acting career were given up for good. Hitchcock's response? "Alma and I were relieved, in a way, when our daughter decided that being the mother of sticky-fingered children required all her creative attention." He had never taken her seriously as an actor at all.

It was an escape. Hitch, of course, desperate to control his son-in-law, tried to get him involved in the movie business and signed him up in the mailroom of a radio station, where David O Selznick's son was also employed - Hitch, a grocer's son, never relinquished the entrepreneurial ethic that you work your way up from the bottom. To his credit, Joseph O'Connell was having none of it. He gave up radio, went into the trucking business and remained there until his sudden death from a heart attack in 1994.

It shouldn't have happened or, put another way, it should happen only in movies. They were looking forward to their retirement together. On Alma's death in 1982, two years after Hitch, Pat and her family inherited the entirety of her father's vast estate. The only other bequest Hitchcock made was $28,000 to his sister - but only in the event that Pat didn't need it.

Pat and Joseph's daughters were happily married, and there are eight grandchildren. Pat had her horses, which she loves - it was Alma who taught her to ride when she was a child - and she could now ride every day. "Until my knees gave up."

I said she showed no emotion. But this isn't true. When she talks about her husband, his kindness, his moral probity, how much she loved him, she is forthcoming, even tender. And she loves, too, to talk about her children. Was she a good mother. "Do you expect me to say no?" But she is laughing as she says this. She tells me in painstaking detail the names of all the grandchildren, what they are doing, about the eldest granddaughter's cystic fibrosis. She has been very ill. "Recently, we thought we had lost her." But she recovered after her mother and aunt both donated a lobe for each lung, and now she is well. "Though she has to be careful. I say a lot of prayers."

Her religious faith is something else she has never questioned. "Never, no." And now, for the first time, I find myself liking her and thinking that, perhaps, it was not her and not me who had made the encounter so difficult, but the subject. She didn't want to talk about her father. Nothing to say, or just not saying; it's impossible to know. Any ambivalence is her secret, and she's hanging on to it. Certainly, she looked after him when he was dying. "He was very ill the last two years." She went to visit him in hospital every day. "I lived close by," she explains.

As I leave, mid-afternoon, with the Californian sun pouring down and the five gardeners still busying themselves among the many acres, I hear her lock the door. First one heavy turn of a key and then another. "Love and fear," William Maxwell, the great American novelist, has written, "so well taught at home." And that's where, I guess, from Alma and Hitch, she learned them both.

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