Alfred Hitchcock by Patrick McGilligan Read Free Book Online

the same opening, and saying her prayers, while outside the window shrapnel was bursting around a search-lit Zeppelin—extraordinary image!”
    His World War I memories mingled horror with comedy, much like his films. But living through wartime in his formative years deeply influenced a body of work that is filled with crazed assassins and spy plots, bombs that destroy innocents, and villains with German accents. And it reinforced a psychology that already understood life as fragile and arbitrary.
    The war and his father’s premature death, coming as Hitchcock embarked on his first job, formalized his break with the family profession, and put a grim seal on his boyhood.
    Founded by William Thomas Henley in 1837, Henley’s was an early manufacturer of electroplating apparatuses and insulated conductors, and later of telegraph and electrical cables, including both shore ends of the Atlantic cable as well as a Persian Gulf cable. Recently the company had shifted itsemphasis from telegraph cables to cables for light and power, and to production of all types of electrical distribution equipment. Besides home orders, Henley’s had contracts and foreign branches around the globe, including in Europe, east India, China, Australia, and South America.
    Hitchcock swiftly graduated to the sales section, where he honed his design and draftsmanship skills. There he would cultivate his habit of diligent planning, with notes, drafts, and multiple revisions. There he would also learn various means of publicity and promotion. No one ever had a better procedural grounding for film than Hitchcock did at Henley’s. The job educated him technically, artistically, and commercially.
    Henley’s was a vast operation, with several hundred employees at the Blomfield Street office block alone. Like a film studio, the company was not only a business enterprise but a social enclave—a small world unto itself. The calendar of sponsored employee events included sports and dramatics, recreational clubs, company mixers, river trips, picnic parties, and other get-togethers.
    Hitchcock liked to say that as a young man he was shy and solitary, but there he is at company outings, beaming in group photos. He liked to say he was a fat young man, but his weight fluctuated, and in some photographs he looks almost debonair, a round, sleek egg of a fellow. He still had hair, he affected a mustache, he sported bow ties on occasion, and in those youthful days he often wore a homburg.
    Unlike at St. Ignatius, there is no question as to how Hitchcock fit in at Henley’s: he was decidedly well known and well liked. “The only thing that matters,” Hitchcock once wrote to his friend and producing partner Sidney Bernstein, “is who I work with day-to-day.” He was speaking of the film world, but he might as well have been speaking of Henley’s, where he first learned the importance of camaraderie on the job. Whatever his nature as a young boy, at Henley’s he became the opposite of a loner: an inspired leader and motivator of people.
    Throughout the war Hitchcock worked in the sales section, gradually realizing he didn’t want to be an engineer. So, with the self-motivation that defined his character, he enrolled in art courses at Goldsmiths’ College, a well-known, forward-looking branch of London University. The teachers sent him out to railroad stations to sketch people in various attitudes. He studied illustration and composition. Among his classes was a mesmerizing lecture presided over by the illustrator E. J. Sullivan, renowned for the detail and craftsmanship of his line drawings in newspapers, magazines, and books.
    It was at Goldsmiths’ that Hitchcock first began to pay attention to the history and principles of art: composition, depth of field, the uses of color, shadow and light. He began to frequent art galleries and museums, especially entranced by the French moderns.
    Art courses sharpened his interest in theater and film. Hitchcock now became