With the sheer number of Alfred Hitchcock biographies out there, you can easily find a warm one, such as the official bio, John Russell Taylor’s “Hitch” (1978). The back flap of Donald Spoto’s “Spellbound by Beauty: Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies” (2008), features a picture of Hitch and Spoto shaking hands over the first of the author’s three Hitch bios, 1976’s “The Art of Alfred Hitchcock,” and the director said kind words about it.
Robustly researched foundation for his analysis
He wasn’t around to comment on “Spellbound by Beauty,” which came out 28 years after his death, but he likely would not have been effusive with praise, unless he underwent a personality shift. This is an ice-cold biography. You’ll feel sad after reading it. Spoto concludes his well-researched armchair psychoanalysis with the belief that Hitch’s unrequited loves for some of his actresses (Ingrid Bergman and Tippi Hedren being his unhealthiest obsessions), along with his social inability to make close friends, left him angry and depressed until he died at age 80.
Though quotes from cast, crew and industry colleagues (along with the author’s personal observations) are well-cited in the back of the book, Spoto severely underplays the opinions of the three women who best knew the director: his wife, Alma; his daughter, Pat; and his assistant for three decades, Peggy Robertson.
“Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies” (2008)
Author: Donald Spoto
Genres: Biography, analysis
Alma and Robertson, both deceased by the time of the book’s publication, go untapped beyond the sense that they were Hitch’s handlers and wouldn’t say a bad word against him on the record. And Spoto gives Pat one paragraph where she says: “I know a lot of people insist that my father must have had a dark imagination. Well, he did not. He was a brilliant filmmaker and he knew how to tell a story. That’s all.”
I can see how Spoto was performing a balancing act. Had he allowed Pat, who died in 2021, to rebut all of his negative conclusions about Hitch, it might seem like he was attacking her bias.
And, although a biography focusing on Hitch’s obsession with his actresses would benefit from other women’s perspectives, to be fair, that’s not what the title promises. Maybe it’s a faulty premise, artificially limiting the scope of a life to one facet in what otherwise reads like a bio similar to Taylor’s – with Spoto sharing his opinions on each film.
More about Hitch than the ladies
“Spellbound by Beauty” gives little bios of several actresses in Hitch’s films; they could almost be bland pullout boxes. Others he skims over. The determining factor seems to be how much they said about Hitchcock in interviews.
Still, Spoto’s book becomes an increasingly dark character drama via trends such as Hitch’s tendency to tell gross sexual jokes – sometimes on set to get performers in a certain mindset or facial expression for the scene, but other times because it was his brand of humor. Reactions ranged from appreciative to disgusted, but Spoto’s point is that he did not calibrate the jokes for his audience; Hitch was in control.
As we know, great power leads to great abuse. That, combined with his undiagnosed unhealthy fantasies, led to his emotional and at one time physical abuse of Hedren (multiple times if you include every take of the upstairs bird-attack scene on the “Birds” shoot).
“Spellbound by Beauty’s” humorless and unironic final-act turn would not fit in a Hitchcock movie; the closest would be “The Wrong Man,” mostly based on a true story of a bedraggled victim of police incompetence, and “Topaz,” about the realistic travails of spy gaming. But even those find the protagonist coming out OK.
Hitchcock never paid a legal or professional price for his abuse of Hedren — and briefer transgressions against others, including her “Marnie” costar Diane Baker, who unlike Hedren wisely dodged Hitch’s offer of a seven-year exclusive contract. It’s interesting to learn from this book that Baker’s bizarre underuse in “Marnie” likely came from her soured relationship with Hitch and his two handlers.
No Hays Code to require a happy ending here
It almost feels like Spoto is making Hitch pay the price in this book by dismissing the four films after “Marnie” (which he compellingly sees as a veiled admission of the director’s horrific treatment of Hedren). The author argues that Hitch’s heart wasn’t in these late efforts and says anyone who liked “Topaz” is “the most defensive (of) Hitchcock aficionados.” “Frenzy’s” “icy brilliance” gets dismissed with: “(T)here is nowhere for the audience to apply its sympathies, no one with whom to identify, root for or support.”
Fair, but “Frenzy” and “Family Plot” are hugely entertaining movies, and I’m one of those defenders of “Topaz” as a worthwhile, smart picture.
Spoto is aiming for narrative shape to stick the landing of the sad ending. He earns it if we accept that a man was obsessed with attractive younger women (specifically Hedren, the “Final Girl,” to use a horror metaphor) 24/7, but I question whether Hitchcock’s life was that one-dimensional.
Spoto doesn’t believe it either (if you view his Hitch trilogy as a whole), but he has a premise to serve, and a point to make. The second of his three Hitch books is titled “The Dark Side of Genius” (1983), and “Spellbound by Beauty” is equally dark. But it lasers in on how improbable romantic fantasies bobbed and weaved with the director’s worldview. Spoto’s arguments wouldn’t hold up in court, and no one can totally get into the mind of another person, but the author’s research and conclusions are – aside from my nitpicks — hard to assail.
Watching an artist’s entire catalog and being swept away by most of it, one becomes somewhat attached. But geniuses are human beings. “Spellbound by Beauty” is a tough book to read – and not a good choice if you want to get happily swept away by the artistry of Hitchcock’s catalog — but an important one.
RFMC’s Alfred Hitchcock series reviews works by the Master of Suspense, plus remakes and source material. Click here to visit our Hitchcock Zone.