"Childhood and the Challenge of Fat Masculinity." Hitchcock's Appetites

McKittrick, Casey. "Childhood and the challenge of fat masculinity." Hitchcock’s Appetites: The corpulent plots of desire and dread. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 123–138. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 24 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501311642.0009>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 24 September 2021, 10:43 UTC. Copyright © Casey McKittrick 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 5 Childhood and the challenge of fat masculinity I have rather a placid personality and I think I take after my mother in that respect. We both have what used to be called the cottage-loaf fi gure — a big oval, and on top of that is stuck a smaller oval. 1 I received a very good job offer. An Italian actress needs a stuntman to take a bubble bath for her in her next picture. I was hired when it was discovered that the actress and I had the same measurements. In different places, of course. 2 s we witnessed repeatedly in Chapter 1 , Hitchcock was no stranger Ato poking fun at his weight, whether in an interview, a guest column, a speech, a press photo, or on his weekly TV shows. The fat humor he so often deployed, I have argued, served to diffuse and defl ect the very real anxieties and depressive feelings he had regarding his weight and his inability to maintain control over it. In the two self-deprecatory quotes provided above, we witness a very rare variety of Hitchcock ’ s fat joke — one that likens his body to a woman ’ s. In the fi rst, he claims his ample pear shape as an inheritance from his mother. In the second, he portrays his body as having an inappropriate or misplaced voluptuousness. The rarity of remarks like those above in his repertoire of self-deprecating humor brings me to the focus of this chapter. In addition to his portly fi gure, Hitchcock embodied several other traits that ran conspicuously counter to the hegemonic signifi ers of heterosexual manliness, HHitchcock.indbitchcock.indb 112323 228-04-20168-04-2016 112:41:162:41:16 124 HITCHCOCK’S APPETITES particularly in 1940s and 1950s America: his Englishness would cause him in many contexts to be read as “ effete, ” and his immaculate, dandy-like habits of hygiene and dress did nothing to obscure that reading. In addition to these potentially suggestive facets of his public persona, he was a self-confessed sexual innocent, mystifi ed by the motives and meanings of femininity, and he was, above all, a sophisticated artist ensconced in a profession populated by the more expressively inclined. Hitchcock ’ s artistic genius certainly did not exempt him from feeling the compulsory demands of gender conformity and masculine identity. He may have stood apart in his exceptional talent, but he desperately sought a life of normalcy and stability, and the sine qua non of his assured validation as “ normal ” rested in his role as husband and father of a traditional nuclear family. In this chapter, I suggest that, just as Hitchcock ’ s fat humor depressurized the “ open secret ” of his fatness, it also demonstrated an anxiety that his fatness may have read as effeminacy or embattled masculinity. In what follows, I examine these anxieties and discuss the various strategies, both inside and outside of his fi lms that he employed in order to assuage or lessen the insecurities so fi rmly planted in his self-image and public perception. In particular, I engage with his construction of public persona, the fi lmic and extra-fi lmic characterizations of his relationship to children. In forging these connections between his experience of fatness and the remedies he sought to forestall the perceived questioning of his manhood, I produce an account of how Hitchcock ’ s vulnerabilities surrounding childhood found their way into, and fundamentally marked, his cinema. “ You ’ ll outgrow it ” : Hitchcock ’ s youth Hitchcock was born and christened Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, August 13, 1899, into a middle-class family of four, in Leytonstone; he was the youngest and fi nal child, with an older sister and brother, seven and nine years older, respectively. Due to the considerable age gap between him and his siblings, Hitchcock recalls, “ They didn ’ t have much interest in me when I was growing up, so I had myself almost entirely to myself. ” 3 His homemaking mother was his primary companion throughout his childhood, and his father was an overworked greengrocer who seldom spent time with the family, apart from Mass on Sundays. The Hitchcocks were Catholic in a heavily Anglican environment, which gave them something of a self-perceived minority status. Alfred was the only child in the family not to follow in his father’ s professional footsteps by adolescence. While his sister later gave up the business to marry, his father ’ s namesake William Jr. took over the family business after the death of William Sr. at the age of fi fty-two, in 1912. Hitchcock muses, “ Perhaps I disappointed my father because I never showed any interest in his business HHitchcock.indbitchcock.indb 112424 228-04-20168-04-2016 112:41:162:41:16 CHILDHOOD AND THE CHALLENGE OF FAT MASCULINITY 125 and no inclination to follow him into it. I could not imagine how a wilted lettuce leaf could be of such concern to him. ” 4 Hitchcock in fact struggled to fi nd much that fi lially bonded him and his father. He cleverly fi nds one point of intersection, however abstract: “ My life ’ s work has put me in a position not so different from that of my father — a speculator in perishables. ” Though he admits to feeling estranged from his father based on their lack of common interests, he nevertheless remembers, “ Some of my happiest memories were on the rare occasions when my father took me with him to the countryside. He would buy a whole fi eld of cabbages and that sort of thing. ” The only other positive memories of his father that Hitch shared publically were the occasional family outings to plays and concerts. He observes, “ My father never seemed carefree, except at the theater. ” 5 It is interesting to consider that Hitchcock chose as his avocation the one place that he experienced paternal harmony as a child. Hitchcock felt his father was emotionally remote, but powerful, nonetheless, and a good provider. One way in which he emulated his father was sartorially. He relates, “ I remember my father going to work in a dark suit with a very starched white shirt and a dark tie. I never saw him when he wasn ’ t clean-shaven. It wasn ’ t for the cabbages. It was a matter of self-respect.” 6 The description of his father ’ s work apparel matches exactly the uniform he himself wore to his movie sets almost invariably for fi fty years. His other shared recollection was of his father ’ s strong sense of discipline and order. Of course there is the ubiquitous tale Hitchcock told ad nauseam : that his father punished him at a very early age (fi ve or six) by sending him to the local police station with a note asking the attending offi cer to lock up his son for a short period of time. If the story is true, the offi cer complied and ended the punishment with the now proverbial, “ This is what we do to naughty boys ” — an aphorism Hitchcock entertained putting on his tombstone. Apart from this apocryphal story that Hitchcock would often use to explain his aversion to policemen and other authority fi gures, his father William was, in the words of Donald Spoto, “ a Cockney merchant who insisted on discipline, order, and simplicity in life as in diet. ” 7 This paternal attitude toward strict diet was perhaps another cause of Hitch feeling estranged and considering himself, in his words, a “ disappointment. ” From early on, Alfred enjoyed eating his mother ’ s cooking and looked forward to visiting the local bakery. He recalls, “ I was always given a free cookie or two. The bakery had the most wonderful aromas. Like perfume. Lemon Cake Number 5. Guerlain Ginger Biscuit. ” 8 Without a doubt, his mother and food were the primary signifi ers of comfort and stability in his youth. He recalls that his mother would customarily require him each night to stand at the foot of her bed and report what he had done that day. We see this image of the son at the foot of the mother ’ s bed used in Notorious with Alex Sebastian (Claude HHitchcock.indbitchcock.indb 112525 228-04-20168-04-2016 112:41:162:41:16 126 HITCHCOCK’S APPETITES Rains) and his emotionally demanding mother (Leopoldine Konstantin). And of course some version of the “ Mama ’ s Boy ” is played out by Herb (Hume Cronyn) in Shadow of a Doubt , Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho , Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in The Birds , and, less obviously, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) in Frenzy . Hitchcock attended a Jesuit-run school, where, he claims, his primary lesson was in fear. Less facetiously, he concedes that his schooling instilled in him an almost obsessive contemplation of right and wrong. Socially, however, school was not a productive place for him. In the words of Hitchcock’ s friend Charlotte Chandler, “ His pudgy, overweight appearance, his lack of interest in the games the other children played, and little athletic ability isolated him and led to his development of more solitary interests.

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