By Suzie Mackenzie
Translator: Yi Ersan
Proofreader: Qin Tian
Source: The Guardian (28 August 1999)
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's birth, his films have come under extra scrutiny. Throughout the process, his daughter Patricia has been loyal to his talents and kept a tight liar about family matters. But, as a girl, is she also a victim of her father's skillful manipulation of fear? Susie MacKenzie visits Patricia in search of psychological truth.
Hitchcock and Pat
Pat Hitchcock O'Connell – it had to be Pat: "I don't know why I was called Patricia, it's always been Pat. It's like some kind of advertising stage name." Anyway, Pat Hitchcock O'Connell lives on the outskirts of Santa Barbara and has a very beautiful home — a house she and her late husband Joseph bought from tennis star Rod Laver 10 years ago. Five gardeners wandered around the car-like fixtures, keeping the garden very traditional and unpretentious.
There's a funky dark green Jaguar parked in the driveway with a license plate that says PAT – don't make her name wrong again. When Ms. Hitchcock appeared at the door, she was dressed in a neatly buttoned formal dress, a golden yellow, and a kind expression. Entering the living room, which was filled with elegant works of art—crystal lamps, silver bowls, porcelain; above the fireplace was an oil painting by Yutrillo from her father's collection, and on the opposite wall hung a painting by Klee—and she lay gracefully on the soft cushioned sofa, silent.
Pat Hitchcock O'Connell
This impression is immediate and lasting. I looked at this wealthy 71-year-old lady who seemed to have seen the world anymore. There was nothing mysterious about it, and the tightly closed lips seemed to say it all. But she did say, "My life couldn't be more ordinary." She once said that normal has become abnormal. "My parents were ordinary people. I know a lot of people who insist that my father must have had a dark imagination. Not really. He's a brilliant film director, he knows how to tell a story, that's all."
As she spoke, her voice was tense and constricted. "People think what they like, that's what my father used to say. They paid so they had the right to evaluate. Anyway, I don't care what they think." This is not out of anger, nor is it defiance, but a completely neutral tone. It was as if betraying any feeling would be a decadence, or worse, even handing over the weapon to the enemy.
Maybe it's all Hitchcock-esque sets—she manages the surface of her life meticulously and precisely on stage—but I'm starting to think there's something else, something that's not said, or that she's only halfway through. Like I asked her if she felt in her father's shadow. "Shadows? How can a daughter feel like she's living in the shadows?" She also volunteered, "I'm writing a book about my mother."
Alma Revere is a respected film editor who originally worked at Twickenham Studios, where she shot seven films, including D. Reinhardt. W. Griffith's The Heart of the World. In 1923, at Islington Studios, Alma met Hitchcock, who was no more than a script assistant. Alma entered the film industry at the age of 16 – six years before Hitchcock. Interestingly, their date of birth is only one day apart, he is August 13, 1899, and she is August 14.
The Heart of the World (1918)
In some of Hitchcock's early films, notably The Lodger in 1926, Alma served as an assistant director. By 1935's Thirty-Nine Steps and several subsequent films, Alma had become a field note. In 1939, as soon as they arrived in the United States, Alma was even less involved, co-writers of only a few films, including Hitchcock's own favorite, Hot Hands Destroying Flowers. But during his most active period, between 1951 and 1960, Alma's name almost completely disappeared.
"Hot Hand Destroying Flowers" (1943) "Hot Hand Destroying Flowers" (1943)
So, when Pat says, "My mother's relationship with these films is much closer than what is recorded in the cast list—he depends on her for everything, absolutely everything," that might be interpreted as a veiled criticism of Hitchcock — or else? But when asked this question, Pat was noncommittal. "What answer do you want?" It's best to forget about it. Any in-depth investigation is futile. She would not directly criticize the parents. "They're all great."
Pat said her story is simple. A happy and happy childhood, two interesting people who love each other deeply and love her very much. "We're very close." It's not a movie. Because it can hardly constitute a chapter. Crucially, it lacks the element that allows the story to unfold, and that element is exactly what her father excels at—tension. Hitchcock seems to have been born with a grip on tension. He knows that tension is not inherent in the story itself, but arises between the story and the audience. He always said, you have to play with the audience, play with their emotions, tease them. "Let the audience use their brains."
Hitchcock once said he found Horrors funny. Of course, it was interesting to him; he was working on the structure of the film. How to break an unwritten rule that the heroine won't be killed in the opening half hour of the film — he let her die, leaving a deep fear in the audience's mind and dissipating the violence for the rest of the film.
Hitchcock believes that fear, like an injection of adrenaline into the heart, will wake you up. He believes that fear is good for people. Scaring people will make people laugh. "I know they're going to giggle." He doesn't admit it, or says it outside of his films: the oppressive nature of fear, which makes people hide their minds.
Pat said that when he came home from the studio late at night, the first thing he did was go to her room and then paint a clown on her face, just so that she would wake up and look in the mirror to be frightened. "I'm not afraid. I know he did it on purpose." Much later, while filming "Train Freak," he bet $100 that she wouldn't dare ride the Ferris wheel —"he knew I was afraid of heights"—but she immediately climbed up, and when her cockpit turned to the top, she stopped the ferris wheel and turned off the lights, leaving her alone for an hour. "The only abuse thing about this is that I never got that $100."
Train Freak (1951)
But wait, Hitchcock must have violated his own rules. He always says that in his films, the reason for fear, and the real thrill, is that the audience knows it's safe. That's the difference between life and movies – life isn't safe. But the girl sitting at the top of the Ferris wheel is not a character in the movie, and the man who puts her there is not a director, but her father.
I asked her if she was scared to cry. "This is the strangest question I've ever been asked." Hitchcock knew she wouldn't cry—she was his daughter after all, and he had trained her well. From an early age, she learned to suppress feelings. "I don't delve into myself very much." But, unlike her father, she never found a place to store these hidden emotions.
The strangest thing about Pat Hitchcock was that she had no curiosity about life. Is she interested in politics and the outside world? "Not much. And there's nothing I can do about it." She seemed to find her curiosity about other things vulgar. She also said what was probably the strangest thing I'd ever heard: "I've never been afraid of anything." She was Hitchcock's daughter, his only child.
At first, I thought it was a form of restraint, refusing to acknowledge his authority. But it's not. It's about control. She learned control from him. She was also Hitchcock, just not as imaginative. Such people, after going to Hitchcock's movies, might say, "So what?" It seems that she thinks that denying fear makes life safe. Make it a controlled environment, just like a movie.
The rest of the story is somewhat hurtful and dismissive. She was asked to eat alone in the kitchen at a very young age. At the age of eight, she was sent to boarding school for two years before the family left the UK for the United States. "They always keep me by their side. They took me everywhere," she had said before—but apparently, they didn't.
Does she mind going to boarding school? "That's what everybody did back then." But did she send her three daughters to boarding school? "No, I would never do that. I never understood why the British were sending their children away." Did she always want multiple children? "It's always been like this."
Hitchcock also decided to let her skip college after high school — perhaps he was worried that she wasn't smart enough. Of course, he would always protect her. "I wanted to go to college. I should have gone." She once said that men are much smarter than women. Was her father smarter than her mother? "Nope. They're on par." Although she didn't talk much, she was a very good no's, and like her father, he once wrote an article about his wife, praising her as "tight-lipped". Still, some objections leaked out.
When Pat was 18 years old, Hitchcock decided to send her back to England from Hollywood. She had originally decided to be an actress and had appeared in several Broadway plays. Unsurprisingly, Hitchcock never saw any of them. He was too busy. And Alma went to watch every play. In a biography of Hitchcock, film critic John Russell Taylor mentions sending Pat to the Royal Academy of Drama for training.
"It was the best gift he [Hitchcock] could have given her at the time." Is it? Naturally, this gave her the opportunity to hone her acting skills. "He barely showed confidence in her abilities... With a more serious attitude." But it also left a girl away from the people she loved most in the world—her mother, who had been sent to relatives across the ocean, Hitchcock's two unmarried cousins, whom Pat didn't know at all. It is hard not to be understood as expulsion.
And she didn't seem to want to go to England anymore. "I'm not going back unless it's hard to shirk and ask me to support the premiere of a movie." As she said, she was strong. "You have to be self-reliant." Not only did she stay in London, but she also asked her parents if they could stay there for another year – you might think that this was a pretty obvious sign that she was having a good time.
However, when it comes to recalling her time at the Royal Academy of Drama, she can't even remember the names of her classmates: "Lionel Jeffries, Dorothy Tuting, that's all." She had only made one friend, Louis Ramsey, and the two remain friends to this day. Maybe she was really immersed in her own freedom, maybe she thought asking to go home would expose her weakness, and her father wasn't a weak man.
To be sure, in 1949, Hitchcock returned to England for the first time in a decade to shoot the film Sea Of Desire, based on Alma's novel by Selwin Jepson. Sea Of Hearts is Hitchcock's first film since the 1920s in which Alma was singled off, and the last film she made on the cast list.
Pat said, "My mother did much more than that." Pat was still in London at the time, and her first role was in the film as a character called Chabby, "a very small character"—from a man who never tolerated mentioning that he was obese.
Sea Of Desire (1957)
After that, the three of them returned to Hollywood to shoot Hitchcock's first hit film in four years, "The Train Freak.". This time, Pat got the best of three film roles in her father's films (the third was another minor role in Horror). She plays Barbara Morton, the sister of the heroine Ann, and the woman Guy Hines wants to marry. Everyone thought she was acting well. This could have been the beginning of her acting career.
Pat (left) starred in Train Freak
But less than a year later, in 1951, she met her husband Joseph, a devout Catholic, and married him. All the thoughts of seriously pursuing an acting career are forever forgotten. Hitchcock's reaction? "When our daughter decided to be the mother of a bunch of gluttonous children and give her all her attention, Alma and I were somewhat relieved." He never seriously saw her as an actress.
It's an escape. Of course, Hitchcock desperately wanted to control his son-in-law, tried to get him involved in the film industry, and arranged for him to send and receive emails on the radio. O. Selznick's son also worked there—Hitchcock, the son of a grocery store owner, never gave up on the entrepreneurial guidelines for starting at the grassroots level. To his credit, Joseph O'Connell was completely absent from this. He gave up broadcasting and entered the trucking industry until his sudden death from a heart attack in 1994.
This kind of thing shouldn't happen, or in other words, it should only happen in movies. Together they are looking forward to retirement. In 1982, two years after Hitchcock's death, Alma died, and Pat and her family inherited her father's entire inheritance. Hitchcock's only other legacy was $28,000 left to his sister — but only if Pat didn't need it.
Pat and Joseph's daughters were happily married, and they had eight grandchildren and granddaughters. Pat had her own horses, and she loved them—When she was a child, Alma taught her to ride horses—and now she could ride them every day. "Until my knees can't move."
I said she didn't show any emotion. But this is not the case. When she talked about her husband, his kindness, his integrity, and how much she loved him, she was frank and even gentle. She also likes to talk about her children. Is she a good mother? "Do you want me to say no?" But she laughed as she spoke.
She told me the names of all my grandchildren, what they were doing, and my eldest granddaughter's cystic fibrosis. She was very ill. "Lately, we thought we were about to lose her." But after her mother and aunt donated one lobe each of her lungs, she recovered to health. "But she has to be careful." I prayed a lot."
She never questioned her religious beliefs. "Never." Now, for the first time, I find myself in love with her and wonder, maybe it wasn't she or I who made this encounter so difficult, but the subject. She didn't want to talk about her father. There's nothing to say, or just don't want to say; the reason behind it is hard to know. Any ambivalence was her secret, and she held on to it. Of course, Hitchcock was in her care when she was dying. "He's been very sick for the last two years." She visited him in the hospital every day. "I live nearby," she explains.
Around three o'clock in the afternoon, when I left, the California sun was pouring down, and five gardeners were still busy in the vast land, and I heard her lock the door. First I turned around vigorously with the key, and then I turned around again. "Love and fear," the great American novelist William Maxwell wrote, "is taught so well at home." I think that's what she learned from Alma and Hitchcock.