THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: The Boy Who Would Be King of Scaring the Crap Out of You

And so it begins.

Starting off a biography is a tricky business. The very beginning of a person's life is usually the least interesting part. There's the being born and the growing up and stuff, but a lot of that is passive, and rarely has anything to do with the reason that this person got a biography written about them. Unless you're someone like Wayne Gretzky, I guess. He pretty much came out of the womb shooting goals.

So, what to do? You could just skip the whole thing entirely, and start out at the cool part. Your quickie biographies, like your Scholastic Books bio of Justin Timberlake, is like this. If your family is famous enough, like a John F. Kennedy, you can let them handle the narrative for a while, until you're grown up enough to start doing things on your own. Or you can always go for the long view. A biography of Neil Armstrong I thumbed through began hundreds of years ago, with some ancestor slogging through France or something.

Patrick McGilligan opts for this approach: everything matters. After a brief introduction, we start in on the very origin of Alfred Hitchcock's name (Hich was a corruption of Rich, as in King Richard the Lionheart), and then get right into the settling of his family on the outskirts of London. Fortunately, Hitchcock himself never strays far from the narrative. No matter how far removed from the man the story goes, he's still very present. Consider the tale McGilligan relates about how Hitchcock would introduce himself. "It's Hitch," the director would drawl, hesitating for the maximum shock value, "without the cock." This punctuates the etymology lesson.

This can get a little extreme. When a favorite aunt travels to Africa, the basket she is carried in is compared to one in Torn Curtain. A favorite author of young Alfred's later turns up as the reading material for a character in Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock's home had a staircase, and staircases figure prominently in his movies. It's a little heavy-handed. "Get it? Do you get it? It all started here! It all makes sense now!"

But hey, we all like to play armchair psychiatrist, and is the author didn't make connections, we would. Nowhere is this more evident than in the legendary tale of little Alfred Hitchcock in prison. Alfred's father, so the story goes, caught him doing something bad, and promptly took him down to the police station. There, he made a little arrangement with the local constable, who locked the boy in a bare cell, saying, "This is what we do to boys who've been naughty." After a few minutes, they came and got him out, and his dad told him to learn a lesson from this.

It's an interesting story, because so many of Hitchcock's narratives revolve around a man wrongfully accused of a crime. So he was thrown in jail, you think, and he knew he was innocent, and horror and despair overcame him, and then he turned his childhood terrors into movies. It all makes sense now!

But is it true? Hitchcock himself told the story, and yet his knack for storytelling makes him somewhat unreliable. His sister also confirmed it, but several key facts don't match up. If there's any definitive proof that it's true, it lies in the fact the Hitchcock was petrified of the police all his life. McGilligan hints that this fear stayed with Hitchcock all his life. If you're going to develop a lifelong phobia, this seems like the kind of childhood trauma that would do it.

A reader is probably strongly inclined to believe this story, if only because we need the drama. Alfred's early life is pretty happy. His father, first a greengrocer and then a fishmonger, is reasonably successful, and the family lives well. A devout Catholic family in Protestant England, Alfred goes to several very good private schools. (He was punished once for a minor infraction, and regretted it so deeply, he seems to have gone on the straight-and-narrow ever since. It all makes sense now!) The only dark stories are the ones he reads in Grimm's Fairy Tales, a favorite early book, and the ones he hears in the news, like the Crippen murder. All in all, it's a very happy childhood, and you'd be hard-pressed to find the dark side. Well, actually, Hitchcock could find the dark side. For example, he said, "The Bible can't be bettered for gruesome stories." So maybe this is just a guy who's born to like scary stories.

This last point is very important, because it relates to something McGilligan brings up for the first time (and I'm sure he's not done). An earlier biography about Hitchcock written by a man named Donald Spoto was called The Dark Side of Genius, and apparently portrays the master filmmaker as a monstrous individual, manipulative and cruel. McGilligan is clearly going to spend a lot of time debunking this portrait. The picture we've got so far is of a dutiful and earnest little boy, eager to please, troubled by little, kind of quiet...but with an early taste for things with a hint of the macabre.

Alfred Hitchcock was born in 1899. As we end Chapter 1, it is 1913. Still more education awaits us, as well as early attempts at gainful employment. The movies do not yet beckon...