‘Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession’
By Laurence Leamer
G.P. Putnams Sons, 336 pages

The cast includes Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, Janet Leigh, and Tippi Hedren — the actresses the director envisioned as part of a design to seduce and shock filmgoers. Laurence Leamer manages deft variations on the beauty and the beast fable. 

Tippi Hedren seems to be the only actress who called Hitchcock “a fat pig” to his face, but Kim Novak probably said as much elsewhere; and the genteel Madeleine Carroll might well have thought so, while the sly Grace Kelly kept her own counsel; and Eva Marie Saint and Janet Leigh remained so professionally aloof that he had no cause to mistreat them.

Nothing about an actress’s dress or speech or behavior escaped Hitchcock’s meticulous, and some would say tyrannical, notice. Neophytes like Novak in “Vertigo” and Hedren in “The Birds” were groomed to excite as much sexual desire as possible, and to conform to all aspects of Hitchcock’s motion pictures, becoming his perfect instruments — even if that meant days of torture in handcuffs that bruised Madeleine Carroll’s delicate wrists in “The 39 Steps,” or terrorized Hedren, who nearly lost an eye from the pecking of birds tied to her during those frightening scenes in “The Birds.”

Was Hitchcock a sadist? Mr. Leamer does not say, though his director is certainly a man who seemed to enjoy the suffering of certain actresses, treating them as extensions of his own sexual fantasies. The worst that can be said about Hitchcock derives from Hedren’s accounts, published after the director’s death; they are, Mr. Leamer suspects, distortions of what actually happened. 

Janet Leigh apparently had no trouble with the director. She submitted to take after take of that notorious shower scene in Psycho, though some of the work, it must be said, was done by a body double. The confident Leigh did not mind that she was murdered well before the film was half over.

Eva Marie Saint also seemed unconcerned about Hitchcock’s reputation for abusing actresses. He treated her well, she joked, because of her last name. More likely, though, Ms. Saint, who is alive at 99 and has been interviewed by Mr. Leamer, was let alone because she was so grounded, so self-possessed and down to earth that she did not mind Hitchcock’s efforts to transform her into the “sexually provocative woman of his imagination.” It was just acting to her, after which she went home to her husband and children.

Ingrid Bergman also seems to have been all right with Hitchcock’s tutelage. In Mr. Leamer’s telling, this self-absorbed actress appreciated the director’s no-nonsense approach. When she told him she had trouble motivating herself in a scene, he advised her: “Ingrid, fake it.” Rather than feeling insulted, she was enormously relieved. She happily and movingly delivered a public tribute to him when he received the 1979 American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award.

I have to say a word about Mr. Leamer’s treatment of Cary Grant playing opposite Ms. Saint in “North by Northwest.” Approaching his mid-50s, the aging male beauty was worried about camera angles and lighting that might illuminate physical flaws. Grant kvetched about the script and much else when Hitchcock wasn’t around, and then pretended on set that all was copacetic.

One of Hitchcock’s producers, Norman Lloyd, told me that after “North by Northwest” became a tremendous success, to Grant’s delighted surprise, the star spotted Hitchcock and Lloyd in the studio commissary, came over to them, and genuflected in front of the director, saying: “You are the master.”

That is how Hitchcock thought of himself with every movie he ever made, and certain actors, both women and men, simply accepted their roles as his tools, ignored or tolerated his manipulative methods, while he offended others who were, as in Hedren’s case, perhaps doubtful about their identities and talents.

Mr. Leamer plays fair. His Hitchcock is hardly just a beast, even though he could be beastly. He really did see the whole picture and rarely wanted actors to muck with what he had meticulously storyboarded. There are other ways to make movies, but none that seemed of the slightest interest to Alfred Hitchcock.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag” and of the forthcoming “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero.”