“I did not find him to be weird”: the only blonde who couldn’t see right through Alfred Hitchcock
If someone acts like a creep and repeatedly gets called a creep, then the chances are high that they’re a creep. It’s a simple matter of deduction that would hardly thwart Sherlock Holmes, but there was one of his signature blondes who defended Alfred Hitchcock from scorn.
Obviously, not every actor is going to have the same experience, but there were enough tales to emerge from the women who worked with the ‘Master of Suspense’ to indicate that lechery was more of a recurring habit than not, with several collaborators making their feelings on his behaviour very clear.
It wasn’t restricted solely to the people he worked with, either, since Ingmar Bergman watched Psycho for the first time and immediately decided that he didn’t even want to know anything more about Hitchcock’s feelings toward the opposite sex, or how he treated them in his personal and professional lives.
Tippi Hedren is the most obvious example by far, with the actor making it abundantly clear that she held the filmmaker solely responsible for stymying her promising career. Big things were predicted for her on-camera future, but Hitchcock had different ideas, and effectively held her down, and there wasn’t much she could do about it when she’d signed a contract he had no intention of letting her escape.
He also dropped Vera Miles like a bad habit when she became pregnant, with his former muse showing no inclination to prioritise his filmography over her family life, and his obsession with Grace Kelly reached such depths that he never seemed to recover from his favourite blonde of them all turning her back on Hollywood.
While it’s untrue to suggest the ‘Master of Suspense’ created an uncomfortable atmosphere around every single one of his leading ladies, it happened enough times to make it a recurring theme. Kim Novak, who starred opposite James Stewart in Vertigo, didn’t see that side of him and could barely believe the whispers.
“I feel bad about all the stuff people are saying about him now, that he was a weird character,” she told The Telegraph. “I did not find him to be weird at all. I never saw him make a pass at anybody or act strange to anybody. And wouldn’t you think if he was that way, I would’ve seen it or at least seen him with somebody?”
Well, yes and no, to be honest. Again, we’re merely speculating here, but Novak only made one picture with Hitchcock, while Hedren and Miles made two apiece, with Kelly starring in three, so they spent more time around the auteur than Novak did, and regardless, Hedren’s comments about what he’d done to her career shouldn’t be dismissed simply because another actor didn’t witness anything similar.
It was a bit of a recurring theme, and while Novak wasn’t exposed to that particular side of Hitchcock, enough people were to suggest that the things being said about him weren’t plucked out of thin air.
