Alfred Hitchcock by Patrick McGilligan Read Free Book Online Page B

mother, by the time he was seventeen or eighteen Hitchcock had moved from Salmon Lane into a London flat that was owned by one of his uncles. By the time World War I ended, he had been mired in sales at Henley’s for four years. He was nineteen.
    Though he performed his duties well, Hitchcock had developed into “somewhat of a square peg in a round hole,” according to W A. Moore, the head of Henley’s advertising department. “I was kind of lazy,” Hitchcock admitted in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich forty years later, “so I’d pile them [requests for estimates] up on my desk and they’d go up to a big stack. And I used to say, ‘Well, I’ve got to get down to this,’ and then I polished them off like anything—and used to get praised for the prodigious amount of work I’d done on that particular day. This lasted until the complaints began to come in about the delay in answering. That’s the way I still feel about working. Certain writers want to work every hour of the day—they’re very facile. I’m not that way. I want to say, ‘Let’s lay off for several hours—let’s play.’”
    Moore befriended the “square peg,” listening to Hitchcock’s pleas to be transferred to another department. “Routine clerical work was never his great feature,” Moore noted. “Art and strong imaginative work—creative work—were interwoven with his nature.”
    In late 1917 or early 1918, in accordance with his wishes, Hitchcock was sent over to advertising. His new job was more picture-oriented: designing, laying out, and pasting up the advertisements and brochures for Henley’s products.
    The tasks weren’t always exciting, but there were lessons to be learned. “You will notice in many ads,” Hitchcock reflected in a later interview, “the picture is contrapuntal to the words. You will see a shot of a locomotive rushing through the countryside and you’ll find it’s an ad for face cream. ‘A smooth ride over your skin.’”
    And there was opportunity for personal flair. “One example of his inventiveness,” narrated John Russell Taylor, “was a brochure for a certain kind of lead-covered electric wire designed specially for use in churches and other historic buildings where it would be virtually invisible against old stonework. The brochure was upright, coffin-shaped, and Hitchcock designed it so that at the bottom of the cover was a drawing of an altar frontal, with two big brass candlesticks on top of it, and then above, at the top of the page, the words ‘Church Lighting’ in heavy Gothic type. No mention of electricity, and of course no indication of wiring, since the whole point of the selling line was the discreetness.”
    In the advertising branch Hitchcock found himself surrounded for the first time by artists and writers. The myth that Hitchcock was an odd loner—a fat boy aloof from others, contemptuous of ordinary activity—is disproved by what happened next. Not yet twenty, Hitchcock emerged as a leader, a young man who attracted collaborators, spurred teamwork, and united people to pursue a common goal.
    It was no accident that within a year of his transfer Henley’s launched a new magazine featuring, apart from company news and gossip, “Contributions—Grave or Gay”: cartoons, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays.
The Henley Telegraph
, which sold for sixpence (“By Post: Eight-pence”), was beloved by employees and even hailed outside the company. The
Organizer
, a London business periodical, found it one of “the best written, best edited and best produced” of the city’s house organs.
    Not only was Hitchcock a founding editor, he also served as business manager, “very much to the despair of the chief accountant,” according to Moore. Not only that, he was the
Telegraph
’s most prolific contributor.
    Back at St. Ignatius there had been student publications, and Hitchcock may have tried his hand at writing, though the issues of those years are lost.