Alfred Hitchcock liked to control everything about the blonde ice maidens he put in his films. He told them how to behave, how to dress and even what to eat and drink. Transforming women, he boasted, was one of his greatest achievements.
He also said that ‘blondes make the best victims — they’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints’.
So when Tippi Hedren asked to know why he was sending her character, feisty heiress Melanie Daniels, up to an attic room in a house besieged by angry gulls, crows and ravens in the climactic scene of the 1963 horror-thriller The Birds, he saw no need to explain himself. ‘Because I tell you to,’ he said.
He reassured her they’d be using mechanical birds, but on the morning of filming, an underling broke the news to the shocked star that they’d actually be using real ones for the scene, in which her character is almost pecked to death.
‘It was brutal and ugly and relentless,’ she later recalled. She described how three animal handlers wearing leather gauntlets up to their shoulders ‘hurled’ birds at her for five days solid just for a minute’s screen-time.
Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren (centre) film with cast members on the set of The Birds
The director (left) and his star Tippi Hedren pose for promotional images for 1963’s The Birds
The crew even tied them to her dress with elastic bands and finally, on the last day of filming, a bird pecked her on the cheek and ‘really cut me, way too close to my eye’.
She threw them off her and ‘just sat in the middle of the set crying, because I was totally exhausted’.
It has to be said that Hitchcock was notorious for driving his actors hard to get as much out of them as possible and Hedren, a model and single mother (her daughter is the actress Melanie Griffith) who he’d plucked from obscurity after seeing her in a diet drink commercial, was making only her first film.
‘She’s already reaching the lows and highs of terror,’ he’d approvingly told a reporter earlier during filming.
Hedren, however, insists the British director always intended to use real birds because he was determined to get revenge for her having rebuffed his sexual advances. While others were happy to indulge his ugly behaviour on account of his brilliance, she was not, she said.
In a 2016 memoir, she recounted how one afternoon, soon after production had got under way, the portly director ‘threw himself on top of me and tried to kiss me’ in the back of a limo outside their hotel.
Worse was to come, she claimed, when she and Sean Connery later made the psychological thriller Marnie with him, more of which later.
The issue of Hitchcock’s treatment of women — and particularly of Hedren, his chief accuser — has for years been a dark stain on his legacy as one of Hollywood’s most revered filmmakers.
The East End greengrocer’s son loved to inflict the most brutal cruelties on women in his movies — stabbed to death in the shower in Psycho, strangled in Strangers On A Train, and raped in Marnie — but the question of whether this reflected his own deep-rooted misogyny and predatory nature has long divided Hitchcock experts.
Even now, as befitting a movie-making colossus, biographers continue to duel over whether the the post-MeToo era has done him a terrible injustice by now portraying him as some sort of Harvey Weinstein-like monster of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
While aspects of Hedren’s account of Hitchcock’s behaviour — his alternating fawning and bullying, and his sexual boorishness — have been echoed by other women since he died aged 80 in 1980, some biographers and collaborators, including production team members on The Birds, have challenged her version of events and her insistence that he ruined her career as revenge for spurning him.
Another Hitchcock blonde, Vertigo star Kim Novak, further muddied the waters by insisting he was always a gentleman with her.
Now the controversy has been reignited by a new play that re-examines the Hitchcock-Hedren clash during the making of Marnie, the second and final film they made together.
A new play at Hampstead Theatre re-examines the Hitchcock-Hedren clash during the making of Marnie, the second and final film they made together
The play, written by John Logan, stars Joanna Vanderham as Hedren and Ian McNeice as Hitchcock (pictured in rehearsals)
Double Feature at London’s Hampstead Theatre was written by John Logan, whose scripts for films such as Gladiator and Skyfall have made him one of Hollywood’s most successful screen writers.
It shows Hitchcock as a ‘vindictive sexual predator’, and Logan, who says he spent ten years investigating ‘the darkest part of his psyche’, claims he now struggles to watch Hitchcock films because he cannot ‘separate the artist from the man’.
The play appears to plough a similar furrow to the 2013 BBC drama The Girl, which portrayed Hitch as a seedy lecher who tormented Hedren.
News of the production has sparked anger among some Hitchcock scholars who this week rushed to defend the director.
John Russell Taylor, who wrote the first biography of Hitchcock in 1978, told the Mail: ‘It really rather upsets me. Lord knows, Hitch was no angel, but in this instance I resent what Tippi has done to blacken his character.’
He accuses Hedren — who, like Hitchcock, he got to know while researching his book — of changing her story over the years in a bid to remain in the public eye.
Fellow British Hitchcock expert Tony Lee Moral, who has written four books on his work — including one on the making of The Birds — told the Mail that portraying him as a vengeful sexual predator was ‘grossly unfair and grossly exaggerated’ and a view of the filmmaker that was contradicted by everyone else he had interviewed in the course of his research.
He believes the untrained actress has used Hitchcock as a scapegoat for her underwhelming subsequent career, adding: ‘If she wants to point the finger at anyone over the failings of her career, she just needs to look in the mirror.’
Both biographers complained how, following the Harvey Weinstein scandal, it is now open season on Hitchcock and there is a tendency for people to automatically believe everything Hedren has said.
Creator of the new play, John Logan, admits there are ‘conflicting versions’ of the Hitchcock-Hedren relationship. However, he told The Times this week: ‘I tend to believe Tippi’s version, which is that on one night he made an inappropriate advance, which we would now call sexual assault.
‘Whether it was physical or verbal, it was assault. And that led to the breakdown in their relationship because she would not play his game.’
Hedren, now 94, has said little about Hitchcock over the years beyond what she wrote in the two chapters devoted to him in her 2016 memoir. She claims the incident occurred one afternoon in his office at Universal Studios in 1964.
At the time, they were making Marnie, a film in which she took the title role as a woman with an intense fear of being touched by men.
‘I’ve never gone into detail about this and I never will,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘I’ll simply say that he suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly, and I couldn’t have been more shocked and more repulsed.’
She went on: ‘The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became. Then he started adding threats, as if he could do anything to me that was worse than what he was trying to do at that moment.’
Eventually, his face red with rage, she said he promised: ‘I’ll ruin your career.’ Hedren said she ‘finally managed to push him off me once and for all’ and stormed out telling him: ‘Do what you have to do.’
The pair never spoke directly to each other again during filming, instead using intermediaries. Hitchcock told John Russell Taylor she had deeply upset him by calling him a ‘fat pig’, touching a very raw nerve.
According to Hedren, Hitchcock later blocked Universal’s attempt to put her up for an Oscar for Marnie and insisted on keeping her under contract to him. By the time she was free, Hollywood’s interest in her had dwindled.
John Russell Taylor insists Hedren never mentioned to him any sexual misconduct by Hitchcock and instead said that their row during the filming of Marnie ‘all blew over and they were as happy at Larry’.
But he does accept that Hitchcock ‘certainly had a complicated relationship with sex’.
At 5ft 7in and weighing up to 24 stone, the gourmand director had an enormous ego but was deeply insecure about his appearance. He consequently had next to no intimate experience of women — his 1926 marriage to his close film collaborator Alma Reville, from Nottingham, was almost entirely sexless following the birth of their only child, Pat.
Vertigo star Kim Novak further muddied the waters by insisting he was always a gentleman with her. The pair are pictured filming Vertigo together in 1958
And unlike so many other powerful men in Hollywood, according to Taylor, he never used the notorious ‘casting couch’ sex-for-work system.
And yet, for all the protestations of his defenders, Hitchcock did sometimes reportedly behave badly with women other than Hedren.
He could be boorish with them, endlessly telling smutty jokes and talking dirty, although he could also be charming, romantic and kindhearted.
A later Hitchcock biographer, Patrick McGilligan, looked carefully into the darker claims against him and concluded they were often baseless. He found no evidence the director had ever had a full-blown affair.
However while he didn’t believe he was the sinister sexual predator some claim, he acknowledged Hitch was ‘capable of questionable behaviour’. Behaviour that would certainly get him ‘cancelled’ today even if he got away with it back then.
If he got too drunk at parties he’d start pawing at women, and a favourite trick was to thrust his tongue down their throat when he went to kiss them hello or goodbye.
Although friends dismissed some of Hitchcock’s tales — such as claiming he once got home to find Ingrid Bergman waiting for him in bed — as the product of his compulsive fantasising, he occasionally stopped being the voyeur and tried his hand as the seducer.
French actress Brigitte Auber, who appeared in his 1955 film To Catch A Thief, recounted how she came to look on him as a father figure and he would take her out for lavish meals whenever he visited Paris.
One night in the late 1950s, as they sat in a car outside the flat she shared with her boyfriend, he suddenly lunged at her and tried to kiss her ‘full on the mouth’.
Auber said she ‘shied away immediately’ while Hitchcock looked mortified and was immediately contrite. Their friendship was ruined, she said, although she felt sorry for him, believing his feelings of ugliness made him clumsy in his dealings with women. ‘The poor cabbage had a wonderful soul,’ she told McGilligan.
McGilligan said he ‘had at least two [other] friendships with actresses’ that soured in a similar way.
At 75, while making his final film Family Plot, Hitchcock ‘leapt at actress Karen Black and tried to give her one of his unsolicited French kisses,’ McGilligan reported. ‘She put it down to his “exuberant spirit”.’
Four years later, he caused scandal when it was revealed he paid a pretty secretary to strip topless for him, supposedly while auditioning for a screen role.
Joan Fontaine, who was slapped by Hitchcock while filming Rebecca to make her cry, was another actress who wasn’t offended by his extreme behaviour.
She once recalled: ‘Knowing that pretty young actresses wanted to feel that he was a dirty old man, he would play up to it. “Yes, I must get into your bloomers, young lady!”. I can just see him leering at them in jest, but they never realised he was teasing them.’
It seems most unlikely he was only ‘teasing’ Tippi Hedren, just as it’s difficult to believe she made everything up about him just to get attention.
And, of course, in his day, powerful Hollywood men had considerably more latitude.
‘Socially awkward, self-absorbed, and sexually frustrated, Hitchcock made passes at and assaults on young women because he failed to control his urges, but also because in the environment he inhabited, men of his standing were afforded licence to behave in that way,’ said Edward White, author of an acclaimed 2021 biography.
Both wanting to control them and to worship them, Hitch had a complicated, contradictory relationship with the beautiful women he cast in his films. Hedren says she found it traumatic and contemptible, even if others — perhaps more used to the ways of Hollywood — apparently did not.
