No one can accuse Laurence Leamer of burying the lede. In his new book Hitchcock’s Blondes (due out Oct. 10 by Putnam), the Palm Beach-based author opens on the set of “The Birds,” a film that took verisimilitude to a new and, for lead actress Tippi Hedren, harrowing level.
After five days of shooting avian attacks—with real birds, trained by animal handlers—Alfred Hitchcock upped the ante. He wanted his terror in close-up. “To get the most intimate perspectives of the attacking birds, the crew attached elastic bands to Hedren and tied the feet of several birds to the bands,” Leamer writes. “Hedren already had bruises over much of her body from days of working with the creatures, but this was a new level of hurt. The assault continued until in the middle of the afternoon, when one of the birds pecked near Hedren’s eyes. An inch or two closer, and she might have lost her sight.”
Not all of Hitchcock’s starring women suffered fates so dramatic. But reading Leamer’s absorbing account of the director’s working relationship with such stars as Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Janet Leigh, patterns emerge. Leamer explores the dark but brilliant psyche of a sexless auteur who often tortured—whether physically, mentally or in his scripts—the beautiful women he could never have, while simultaneously drawing out of them some of the best performances of their careers.
Hitchcock’s Blondes is the second in a trilogy centered on, as Leamer puts it, “a creative genius and the women around him.” The first in the series, Capote’s Women, is the subject of the second season of Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology series “Feud,” starring Naomi Watts, Demi Moore and others. At the time of this writing, Leamer was in Spain on a respite from his work on the final entry in his trilogy, Warhol’s Muses.
Which of the actresses that you researched for Hitchcock’s Blondes did you feel the most connection to?
Well, I’d like to go out drinking with Ingrid Bergman. I’d like to sleep with Grace Kelly. And I’d like to marry Eva Marie Saint.
Did anything surprise you about the inner lives or the personal or romantic backstories of some of these household names?
[Laughing.] Just how much sex there was! I didn’t say, “let’s put more sex in this book.” Not at all … it just was there overwhelmingly with their lives.
You write about the inhumane treatment of Tippi Hedren on the set of “The Birds.” Based on your research and understanding of the psychology of a star like Hedren at the time, why do you believe that after a traumatic experience, she worked with Hitchcock on “Marnie” the following year?
First of all, he didn’t seek to do that to her personally. … He would do whatever he had to do to get the scenes he wanted. She said later, when there was an HBO movie made about the making of “The Birds,” that if it had been as bad as it was in the film, she wouldn’t have done it. So it wasn’t bad all the time. … And he was sympathetic toward her. There are transcripts of hours of time he spent helping her to have a decent performance. So in some ways he was a terrific director, but he was obsessed with her.
Do you believe Hitchcock was fundamentally a misogynist?
Look, the whole industry was misogynistic. He didn’t make these women come into his office and sleep with him. He was basically impotent. But that’s what the world was like; if you were a young woman who wanted to become an actress, you better look at the casting couch. It’s a sickening thing to even talk about these days, but that’s the way it was.
Are there acts of goodness that Hitchcock exhibited toward the women on his sets?
His ultimate goodness was to get great performances out of them. That’s the only thing that matters on a set, is what is the result going to be? And the result of his films is unparalleled. Maybe if you’re an actress, you had a difficult time on the set, maybe you didn’t. But in the end was this wonderful film. Isn’t the prize worth it?
Just in time for Halloween, Arts & Entertainment Editor John Thomason explores three of Hitchcock’s late-period horror classics—“Psycho,” “The Birds” and “Frenzy” in this Web Extra from the September/October issue of Boca magazine.
