Hitchcock

à la Carte
Jan Olsson
 Hitchcock
à la Carte
Jan Olsson

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2015

© 2015 Duke University Press
© 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of  America on acid-­free paper ∞
Designed by Natalie F. Smith
Typeset in Quadraat by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Library of  Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Olsson, Jan, 1952–
Hitchcock à la carte / Jan Olsson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5790-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5804-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7602-6 (e-book)
1. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899–1980—Criticism and
interpretation.  2. Human body in motion pictures. 
3. Human body on television.  i. Title.
pn1998.3.h58o47 2015
791.4302'33092—dc23
2014032512

Cover: Photograph by Jim Miller for Los Angeles

Magazine (cover, August 1974). Courtesy of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
C ON TE N TS

Acknowledgments vii

INTRODUCTION   1
A BODY FOR ALL SEASONS

1. FEEDING THE LEGEND   13

INTERLUDE I   63
TASTY BODIES

2. SMALLER SCREEN, BIGGER BRAND   69

HOSTING “HITCHCOCK”

INTERLUDE II   109
DOUBLE HOSTING

3. HITCHCOCKIAN REFLECTIONS   117

TRACES, PROXIES, DOUBLES, AND CORPSES

CONCLUSION   183
VIOLENT ENDINGS WITH A TWIST

Appendix 215
Director Credits for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour

Notes 219  Selected Bibliography 245 Index 253

 ACK N OWL E DG ME NT S

From first fancy to final form, fabulous facilitators and formidable sparring
partners have been highly influential for my attempt at serving up the Hitch-
cock brand. Lynn Spigel got me under way when she invited me to teach a
Hitchcock seminar at Northwestern University. Throughout, she has acted as
a veritable champion for the project. Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press
discreetly steered the process from first pitch to book design with unfailing el-
egance. For the masterminding of  the final hands-­on process and copyediting,
I’m beyond grateful for having had Liz Smith in my corner. Her unfailing
sense of  style and graceful attention to matters big and small are nothing
short of  superb. During the cumbersome process of  securing rights for the
book’s figures, Elizabeth Ault was a rock when I needed one.
The resources at Northwestern University, especially the efficient Inter-
library Loan Division and the many digital resources on campus, have been
essential for my research. In the triangulation of  Hitchcock beyond Evanston,
the fantastic staff  of  the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of  Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, especially Barbara Hall (during her tenure) and
Faye Thompson, have been model archivists  —  as always  —  and the New York
Public Library, particularly the cheerful young staff  in the Microforms Read-
ing Room, as well as their colleagues at the branch for the Performing Arts at
Lincoln Center, went beyond the call of  duty to gratify my scholarly appetite.
From my perspective, no one can write a film book without regularly
consulting Ned Comstock at the Cinematic Arts Library at the University of 
Southern California. He cannot be praised enough for pertinently sharing his
vast knowledge of  the collections and film culture at large. I have also bene-
fited immensely from his colleague Dace Taube and her unrivaled command
of  the regional history collections at usc. Francisca Folch at the Harry Ran-
som Center, University of  Texas at Austin, patiently helped me to dig out rare
Hitchcockiana  —  and not only from the Selznick Collection. Jane Branfield
at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Buckinghamshire, England,
generously gave me access to unique source materials from the production of 
“Lamb to the Slaughter,” the Hitchcock franchise’s most famous teleplay. The
knowledgeable staff  of  the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of 
Congress maximized my payoff  from the wealth of  imagery in the collections.
At the British Film Institute, Dave McCall went out of  his way to assist me in
ransacking the rich collection of  Hitchcock stills. Michael Shulman at Mag-
num Photos worked miracles in the late stages of  photograph hunting. I am
particularly indebted to Howard Mandelbaum and his colleagues at Photofest
for their willingness to take even the most eccentric requests in stride.
Will Schmenner, during his time at the Block Museum, Evanston, com-
missioned my very first draft for this project in conjunction with an exhibition
in 2007. His infectious enthusiasm and energy were important for the future
of  the project. I’m also much indebted to Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern Uni-
versity; Bart van der Gaag, Stockholm University; and Jan-­Christopher Horak
and Mark Quigley, both at the University of  California, Los Angeles, Film and
Television Archive, for all kinds of  assistance and support.
Input from Steve Wilder was key in the early stages of  drafting, while Anitra
Grisales proved absolutely indispensable down the stretch. I cannot thank my
readers enough; one of  them, especially, exerted a truly formative influence
during the manuscript’s revision phase. Jakob Olsson has lent his profes-
sional eyes and dexterous hands to optimize the visual materials. The Laurit­
zen Foundation for Film Historical Research, Stockholm, has once again pro-
vided much-­needed funding.
I want to express my sincere appreciation to Norman Lloyd, the Hitchcock
franchise’s stellar producer, actor, and director, for inviting me to his home
and eloquently discussing his work. Similarly, James (Jim) Allardice took time
to talk to me about his father, James B. (Jimmie) Allardice, and to ferret out
materials from the family vaults bearing on the ingenious scripting of  Hitch-
cock’s on-­tube segments and more.
If  Marina Dahlquist is fed up with Hitchcock reflections, she lovingly man-
ages to turn them into creative observations and astute advice. Daily life apart,
joint research trips for our separate projects have turned into marvelous ad-
ventures irrespective of  the long hours in the archives.
This is for my late father, Bertil, and my still spry mother, Sonja. Without
them . . .

viii  Acknowledgments
 IN TRODU CTION
A BODY FOR ALL SEASONS

“But I’m Alfred Hitchcock, I am, I can prove it.”

“Sure, sure everybody is.”
“I am, I insist.”

Alfred Hitchcock’s double when removed by the orderlies, as scripted

by James B. Allardice for Alfred Hitchcock Presents

“Goooood eve-­en-­ing,” and welcome to a study of  the intertwined strands of 
Alfred Hitchcock’s creative world. As Hitchcock’s trademark television greet-
ing suggests, this is predominantly a foray into tv territory, where Hitch-
cock’s famously rotund profile ushered in a teleplay per week for ten seasons,
summer reruns included. Though they were most obviously paraded in his
television hosting, Hitchcock’s impish designs and voluble conceits spread
across a vast body of  work that is inseparable from Hitchcock’s commanding
physical form. Scaling one of  the most written-­about bodies in the twentieth
century as a matter of  course, countless texts equated Hitchcock’s poundage
with excessive fat. Through such slanted, unblushing stabs, and the sheer vol-
ume of  these ink ruses  —  mainly found in gossip columns  —  blots, patterns,
and identity markers were affixed to a body that fronted for the franchise.
Take this “portrait” from the New York Times, for example, offered as a
lead-­in to an exchange around Hitchcock’s film poetics, which the director
outlined in a series of  talking points while eating lamb chops:

If  you look at Alfred Hitchcock obliquely, which is the way he likes to
look at things, he appears absolutely the same from any angle  —  as nearly
spheroid as a man can be. Push him gently and he might rock on his
axis like a humpty-­dumpty. Reaching their greatest girth at approximate
 equator, Mr. Hitchcock’s 290 pounds taper off  evenly to both extremities.
Beyond the undulating chin, the immense jowls, the dome of  his head
glistens like an inaccessible summit. His small buffoon’s eyes twinkle
beneath high brows in the vast expanse of  his face, and the sagging lower
lip is permanently compressed between the heavy cheeks on either side of 
which the immense lobes of  his indented ears sprout incongruously like
pink buds. Mr. Hitchcock, in short, resembles a baroque cherub.1

This flippant style illustrates a prevalent mode of  writing that pivoted around
outlandish descriptions of  Hitchcock’s body, like the derogatory remarks one
associates with a demeaning variety of  private gossip. In the public genre of 
gossip columns in the 1940s and ’50s, it is hard to find similar unflattering
inventories of  bodily traits in regard to anyone else.
Not merely an abstract logo or cameo figure, Hitchcock created his fran-
chise via bodies or embodiments in a variety of  ways. He began by playing
up and using his own body  —  fat by default, except after crash dieting, and
English by design. Strategies of  multiplicity, doubling, and surrogacy  —  both
textually and in a production sense  —  were also key. Actors’ bodies, not just
his own, also became brand signifiers on and off  the screen, while his pro-
duction team conjured up stylistic earmarking in his name. And of  course,
there are the countless bodies that were strangled, poisoned, bludgeoned,
stabbed to death, and buried under his macabre trademark. Over the years
and through this corporeal prism, audiences, critics, scholars, and the talk-
ative biographical legend himself  partook in cooking up the discourse on a
public figure tantamount to a brand: Hitchcock. Thus, as one writer explains,
“for many years he was known as fat man, a description that never particularly
troubled him. In a sense it was his trade mark.”2
Television turned Hitchcock into a star, and the trappings of  television
marketing shaped his public performance all the way to his last film. In this
book, Hitchcock’s cinema will play second fiddle for a change, in spite of  the
celebrity status the director managed to stir up around his films and his per-
sona. Hosting the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (ahp, 1955 – 1962)
and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (ahh, 1962 – 1965) for a decade gave Hitchcock a
novel scope of  visibility, ample screen time, and a reverberating voice in a me-
dium with a deeper cultural penetration than cinema. As Hitchcock spiritedly
performed Hitchcock on television, the convergence of  art, commerce, and
ingenious brand building formed “a multi-­million dollar suspense factory
turning out feature-­length films, a weekly television series, and a line of  books
and magazines.”3 The media confabulation around the versatile Hitchcock

2  Introduction
figure resulted from a calculated strategy of  staging and performing starting
in the mid-­1930s, as he began perfecting his recipe for stardom during his
transition from England to Hollywood.
On the threshold of  his television tenure, Alfred Hitchcock was the con-
summate purveyor of  ritzy consumerism, flight of  fancy, and ultra-­elegant
fashion. Off  frame and in public print, he was an enigmatic, eloquent figure
with a conspicuous appetite and a perennially discussed and photo-­friendly
body. His film fame, food reputation, and fabulous physicality were supreme
assets when he signed up for ahp in 1955, on the cusp of  Hollywood’s tele-
vision era. Hitchcock television, designed for the suburban living room  —  a
symbolic site of  media consumption indicative of  1950s middle-­class ideals  —  
and elsewhere, dished out stories with humorous subtexts about dysfunc-
tional domestic life that was often cut short by murder at the dinner table.4
At the time, black-­and-­white television images came with less lustrous con-
notations than did Hollywood movies, but Hitchcock was able to bring star
charisma and Hollywood glamour to the home screen as he straddled two
forms of  moving images. Similarly, he traversed the cultural divide between
England and America, mainly by standing apart and quizzically observing and
reflecting on both societies with a cool eye and glib tongue.
Eye and tongue apart, I argue that the enduring success of  the Hitchcock
franchise hinged on embodiment in all senses of  the term: Hitchcock’s own
sensational English figure and how he performed it for American media;
hosting a television series with his own body as mediator; inserting himself 
in the frame through strategic body doubling via cameos and surrogates; and,
not least, manipulating audience bodies by creating suspense and fear that
swirled around imperiled character bodies. Combined, these brand-­building
strategies distanced him from the run-­of-­the-­mill role of  mere film director.
Hitchcock’s tactic from the beginning was to ceaselessly draw attention to
his larger-­than-­life persona and pose as the only true star of  the franchise.
His pert comment comparing actors to cattle took the spotlight away from
the movie stars in his productions by repurposing screen dazzle as an effect
of  his own storyboarding  —  actors were mere afterthoughts and “dummies”
articulated by the master ventriloquist.5 From a related vantage point, a set of 
weighty film characters figured readily as Hitchcock stand-­ins or surrogates
of  sorts. In such convoluted processes, the ventriloquist has total command
and crafts the characters he controls. The impression of  a singular Hitchcock
experience across the production process, created by his role as host for the
series, bracketed the formidable team in charge of  the day-­to-­day operations
of  the television franchise. As I will show, the spin and marketing efforts, the

A Body for All Seasons  3

hosting and directing, the intricate presence through cameos and surrogates,
and the palpable fingerprints on the stylistic manipulation of  screen content
(irrespective of  hand and screen size) ushered in the generic quality labeled
“Hitchcockian.”
American journalists were taken aback when encountering the incongru-
ous figure behind the stylish story worlds. Hitchcock cleverly capitalized on
this shock and quickly turned his “real” grotesque body into the embodiment
of  the suspense thriller. This conflation was created by his super-­visibility and
talent for generating copy, as he blended himself  with his genre through witty
talking points, cultural observations, and outlandish pranks. John Belton has
perceptively theorized the stakes of  Hitchcock’s relation to classic filmmak-
ing: “Hitchcock’s visibility tends to function in a somewhat paradoxical fash-
ion. It undermines the invisibility of  the classical paradigm while harnessing
his own authorial visibility as a dominant feature of  the narrative experience,
as that which makes it ‘Hitchcockian.’ ”6 As I will make evident, excessive “au-
thorial visibility” goes way beyond his literal visibility in cameos, for example,
to the inescapable but somewhat nebulous identity markers associated with
the term “Hitchcockian.” I begin, in chapter 1, with the mise-­en-­scène of  the
Hitchcock figure in the transition from England to Hollywood.
Before taking on television, Hitchcock had indeed marketed himself  in
table talks, promotional contexts, and photo-­essays. His celebrity, still not
fully flourished, relied heavily on an appropriation of  the grotesque as he
stuffed himself, dieted, and cheerfully talked about his embonpoint while
journalists tried to outdo both each other and Hitchcock in whipping up
grotesque, often belittling physical cracks. This discourse was partly the re-
sult of  a novel type of  gossipy celebrity journalism bent on producing slangy
barbs and pointed lampooning. The pioneer and unrivaled master of  this
was the legendary columnist Walter Winchell. The vilification of  Hitchcock
in America, however friendly and benign, is directly connected to the type
of  columns Winchell and his colleagues Leonard Lyons, Hedda Hopper, and
Louella Parsons  —  to mention only the stars  —  excelled in. Evidencing his al-
legiance with leading columnists, on several occasions Hitchcock stepped in
as a temp for journalists on a break from typewriter duties. More important,
this style existed alongside a somewhat more sober focus on personalities
that animated magazines like Time, Life, and Look.7 Hitchcock ingeniously
straddled this discourse when posing as master craftsman and prankster in
one magnetic package. One of  Hitchcock’s associates summed up the pen-
chant for showmanship in paradoxical terms: “Hitch is . . . painfully shy, but
a genius of  self-­promotion. For all his enormous dignity, he’ll still lend him-

4  Introduction
self  to corny publicity layouts that would embarrass a burlesque comic.”8 This
“corny” buildup of  the Hitchcock persona in the United States was the result
of  his little-­discussed role as a fixture for leading American photo journals
alongside the Hitchcock prose in public print from his first visit to America
in 1937 up to the mid-­1950s. To fully appreciate the inventive consolidation of 
Hitchcock’s detached, mischievously playful yet very formal English persona
for television we need to walk through the period of  full-­blown grotesque
and the lampooning of  Hitchcock by columnists, which began when the di-
rector disembarked in New York City in 1937 and continued as he gradually
moved west.
Hitchcock’s first American boss, the legendary film mogul David O. Selz-
nick, was one of  the earliest to elaborate on Hitchcock’s role as a cultural fix-
ture beyond the frames. By 1943 Hitchcock had already established himself  as
a linguistic entity, according to his producer, who expanded on the adjectival
Hitchcock in a perceptive memo:

Hitch loves publicity, has been made into one of  the most important figures
in his field in the industry, and indeed into a figure known throughout the
world by publicity, and he has a real genius for it himself. I am sure you
will agree that Hitchcock has practically come into the language as not
merely a name but an adjective, as is demonstrated by the use of  his name
in hundreds of  stories and articles every year, and by such references as
appear in book advertising almost every week: “As thrilling as a Hitchcock
movie, et cetera.”9

In 1949, in an off-­the-­cuff  aside in a syndicated piece commenting on Hitch-

cock’s recent weight loss, Walter Winchell also tersely weighed in on the
meaning of  the adjective “Hitchcockian,” pronouncing it “synonymous with
suspense.” It had, Winchell opined, “been an adjective for good melodramas
for years.”10 Much later, in the release material for Marnie (Universal Pictures,
1964), it was reported that the term “Hitchcockian” had found its way into
modern American slang and that the term’s domain had expanded somewhat
to denote something macabre, bizarre, and suspenseful. Paula Marantz Co-
hen puts it well in terms of  the television context: “But more than the idea
of  the man was the idea of  the Hitchcockian experience, a composite of  ele-
ments associated with the films, the thriller genre, and cinema itself.”11
Hitchcock was an instant hit on television in 1955, and his performance as
host was sensational and very cleverly crafted. I elucidate this process in chap-
ter 2, with an emphasis on the hosting rather than the teleplays. Critics raved
about the playful irreverence in the way he always chided the sponsor, and

A Body for All Seasons  5

they celebrated the absurd pontifications regarding the meaning and after­life
of  story events. James B. (Jimmie) Allardice is the unsung presence behind
the franchise’s distinctive hosting. He was the scriptwriter for the prologues
and epilogues during all ten seasons of  the show, and a ghostwriter for many
of  Hitchcock’s public performances during the show’s tenure.12 Allardice’s
genius was in finding a truly unique style for Hitchcock’s television perfor-
mance. And it was the Hitchcock franchise’s genius to sense the value of  mar-
rying Allardice’s oblique creative mind to Hitchcock’s curious performance
range.
The core context for this study of  the Hitchcock brand is the popular
reception of  his persona in newspapers, general-­interest magazines, and
photographic periodicals; this mise-­en-­scène served as a prism for creativ-
ity throughout Hitchcock’s American career. Here salient aspects of  his self-­
styled identity as food connoisseur, fatso, and film director were inimitably
intertwined and rhetorically set off  in exchanges across high-­end tables and
in the Hitchcock family kitchen. In this spirit, the two television episodes
discussed as interludes between the chapters feature fine dining and murder
with food-­related twists.
Hitchcock’s already intense marketing mode culminated with the televi-
sion show during its decade on the air. The fame Hitchcock had managed to
stir up as an integral part of  his cinema was a prerequisite for the television
engagement, which in turn had repercussions for his cinema and particularly
its marketing. This media strategy turned the already showy Hitchcock into a
full-­fledged celebrity. In the transition from cinema to television and back, the
Hitchcock figure underwent considerable tweaking. The series names, Alfred
Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, clearly put premium on presenting
and hosting. In this quaintly framed role, Hitchcock became an icon on Amer-
ican television, and soon across the globe, while the teleplays offered refracted
perspectives on both English and American culture. I therefore give the pro-
logues and epilogues for ahp and ahh as much attention as, if  not more than,
the crime stories. As paratexts, they are tucked into and channel the text proper,
in this case the stories, while regularly flogging the commercials in between.13
Over the years, Hitchcock’s talking points and appearances across media
formed a poetics in fragments by providing interpretations for salient scenes,
singling out the most important films and teleplays, and in general reinforc-
ing the director’s mastery of  his oeuvre. In the late 1950s, with a mystery mag-
azine in his own name, edited book collections, and television ventures going
strong, the Hitchcock figure became increasingly cross-­medial, permeable,
and ubiquitous.

6  Introduction
Intro.1. Stroboscopic exposures by Gjon Mili. Courtesy of Getty Images.

A set of  unpublished photographs from a photo session for Life magazine
in conjunction with the shooting of  Shadow of  a Doubt (Skirball Productions /
Universal Pictures, 1943) perfectly captures Hitchcock’s figurative multi-
plicity on a metaphorical level (fig. Intro.1). Gjon Mili later published one of 
them in his Photographs and Recollections, adding the telling caption comment
that Hitchcock “found the idea of  being directed very amusing and behaved
accordingly.”14
This convoluted doubling, or serializing, of  the multimediated Hitchcock
figure provides the critical focus for this book. Hitchcock’s own body and his
figure at large offer the grounding and rationale for expanding him into a
franchise. He enlisted a phalanx of  other bodies as surrogates to bolster the
brand together with his own cameo figures, his hammy marketing efforts,
and his friendly interaction with journalists, all under the marquee of  a style
that was read and experienced as Hitchcockian.
Mili’s photographic technique captures this multiplicity by bringing to-
gether fragments in suspended motion into an imaginary bigger picture  —  a
stroboscopic poetics featuring malleable bodies summed up under Hitch-
cock’s logotype, if  you will. Similarly, this book moves across printers’ ink,
photographs and photo-­essays, big and small screens, and big and small
plates when analyzing the ingredients and recipes for this multiple-­body-­
centered branding. Symbolically, Hitchcock’s body, in different postures and
by way of  complex forms of  surrogacy, is splendidly alone on the stage. In

A Body for All Seasons  7

chapter 3 I track down traces of  Hitchcock’s corporeal specter and multiple
modes of  surrogacy in both his television stories and some exemplary films.
In the way that so many critics, including Hitchcock himself, have used the
term, I refer to his “figure” to highlight the constructed nature and multiplic-
ity of  this renegotiated, refashioned, and paradoxical Hitchcock as a disci-
pline and identity in motion, across a body of  works and with many working
bodies. The figure came with a conspicuous physical frame that became a
logotype for the brand, yet it was highly malleable and fraught with anxieties
and constant scrutiny and supervision. Seemingly, there was always an extra
Hitchcock figure to mobilize for a brand obsessed with doubling in a mul-
titude of  constellations, some vertiginous, uncanny, and abyss-­like, others
playful, upbeat, and jolly.
During the first season of  ahp, this doppelganger (or “multiganger”) motif 
had its thematic counterpart on television in a story cleverly labeled “The Case
of  Mr. Pelham” (ahp 10). Mr. Pelham (first name Albert) is removed from his
humdrum life in a hostile takeover when a doubling copycat begins showing
up everywhere in his place. Tom Ewell played both Pelhams. Exasperated,
the first/original/real Mr. Pelham fatally tries to distance himself  from the
intruder/copy by sporting an out-­of-­character tie. The tie tactic backfires and
is used as evidence against him, making him seem like the impostor.15 In the
epilogue to this Hitchcock-­directed episode  —  and indicative of  Allardice’s
scripting style  —  Hitchcock doubles the spoof  by turning it on himself  when
he encounters a second Hitchcock, complete with gaudy tie, and is forcefully
taken by orderlies to a mental ward. The discursive Hitchcock personages and
look-­alikes function much like rotund matryoshka nesting dolls, but without
the progressively shrinking size. Although his physical format fluctuated dra-
matically over the years, the dark-­suit uniforms were tailored to fit all imagin-
able Hitchcock sizes. The gaudy tie, fatal in Mr. Pelham’s case, later became
a signature article of  clothing for Hitchcock’s imaginary brother, a frequent
guest in the host segment’s identity game and substitution play.16
My interpretation of  Hitchcock’s multiplicity follows Thomas M. Leitch’s
perceptive analysis of  Hitchcock’s work for television. To authorship theory’s
three concentric circles as developed by Andrew Sarris  —  technique, personal
style, and interior meaning  —  Leitch productively adds a fourth: the director
as a celebrity spreading his name beyond the confines of  his own creative
work to a franchise.17 Leitch’s fourth circle either encloses the three others or
is at the very core of  the enterprise, if  not oscillating between them all. Leitch
performs an inspired critical twist by moving the outer celebrity circle into
the very core of  the authorship project via the assumption that the television

8  Introduction
episodes, mainly those that Hitchcock directed, “are as typical of  his work,
as revealing of  his range and his preoccupations, and as constitutive for our
image of  Hitchcock as his feature films.”18 For Leitch, the outer and inner
circles function as mutually reinforcing fields of  criticism blending with mar-
keting spins, depending on the angles from which Hitchcock’s figures are per-
ceived. The all-­embracing figure, or the deck of  multiple figures à la Mili, is
fully aligned with the adjectival form “Hitchcockian,” which encircles not only
the films and the Hitchcock-­directed teleplays but also the franchise’s overall
story universe and the photo-­essays featuring Hitchcock. Television, arguably,
is at the top of  the food chain in the feeding process for the franchise.
Critical standards and unflattering physical barbs aside, commentators
invariably noticed a novel type of  Hitchcock marketing across popular media
during the combined run of  ahp and ahh from 1955 to 1965. Hitchcock di-
rected episodes quite regularly during the first seasons, then progressively
less often as time passed  —  though he still put his indelible stamp on the show
and bracketed others’ contributions with his wit, whimsy, and overpowering
screen command as host. Where to place Alfred Hitchcock’s television work
in relation to his cinema within this rich cocktail of  artistry and self-­serving
promotion still poses a critical dilemma. In this sweep of  media, with a mag-
azine in his name (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, 1956 – ) and a phalanx of 
book anthologies, all elements feed off  each other. The lack of  scholarly at-
tention to small-­screen Alfred  —  with the exception of  excellent contributions
from Robert E. Kapsis, Thomas M. Leitch, and some minor overviews and
ambitious documentation volumes19  —  seems to indicate that the television
venture stands thematically decoupled from Hitchcock’s cinema and at best
resides among the footnotes to his film work. I argue that rather than just an
intertwined strand in the larger fabric of  the Hitchcock oeuvre, it represents
a resounding echo chamber for reception and reputation. For marketing and
global brand recognition the television work was truly paramount and served
Hitchcock well all the way to Family Plot (Universal Pictures, 1976).
Hitchcock’s television kitchen cooked up lethal fare 24/7. A morning ome­
let spiked with ground glass eliminated the need for lunch. For those who
survived breakfast, lunch was no picnic owing to premeditated aftereffects.
The nice cup of  tea or coffee in the afternoon could be fatal for anyone still
around, as arsenic lurked in many a pot or was mixed into the sugar bowl.
Next trial: the cocktail hour, featuring an array of  killing concoctions. And
then the dinner specials: not only was murder committed with the famous
frozen leg of  lamb, but prepared food also came fraught with murderous de-
signs, and the truly devious chefs even cooked up their dinner guests. When a

A Body for All Seasons  9

dinner dish went around for the second time, some husbands, as an inspired
afterthought, penciled botulinum bacteria on the leftover ham for the benefit
of  their wives. Desserts, too, reaped victims, while some killers preferred to
strike during the after-­dinner liqueur. Late-­night cocoa or tea was particularly
perilous, as wives poisoned husbands, husbands wives, and daughters their
mothers. The truly clever operators duped spouses trying to poison them with
bedtime cocoa by siphoning away the beverage and playing dead, thus turning
the game around come breakfast time. Around the clock and across the menu,
Hitchcock’s television world was a culinary ordeal running in tandem with the
marketing of  the host as a prandial authority.
The ubiquity of  on-­screen food reflects a brand built around a Hitchcock
who was perennially at the table, expounding on food culture in between his
observations on screen culture. Sizing him up for his poundage and perplex-
ing prowess, journalists joined Hitchcock in his element at the very best table.
Meanwhile, his characters sometimes celebrated food frugality to a fault. An
illustrative tidbit in the latter register seems in order before we turn to Hitch-
cock’s trendsetting table riches in New York City in 1937. “Cheap Is Cheap”
(ahp 143) is a witty, original gem featuring Dennis Day as a supreme penny-­
pincher.20 The teleplay was scripted by the writing duo Albert E. Lewin and
Burt Styler, who formed as a team for radio and wrote primarily for Bob Hope
before their long television career. The premise is immediately set up in the
inner monologue, as Day’s character, Alexander Gifford, comes home to his
dreary apartment, disappointed about not receiving a Christmas bonus. For
him, life is all about saving money  —  and so is death, as it turns out. In the
absence of  a bonus, he is too depressed to even sneak-­read the neighbor’s
evening paper. From this sorry state of  affairs things turn even worse, as his
wife, Jennifer (Alice Backes in her first of  many roles for the show), has found
Alexander’s six hidden bankbooks holding a grand total of  $33,000. After dis-
covering the couple’s relative affluence, she wants a divorce to escape their
gloomy life. She reveals her find when she serves dinner that night. To Alex-
ander’s horror, his wife replaces the cheap stew meat he habitually eats with
an expensive steak for herself. Later, as they once more sit down for a shared
dinner, again with separate dishes, the teleplay approaches its “happy” but
one-­sided resolution.
In between the dinner scenes, Alexander enterprisingly explores all kinds
of  options for killing off  Jennifer, since a divorce would rob him of  half  the
money. He ponders the situation in voice-­over, eliminating one alternative
after the next as being too costly a solution to his dilemma. Inspiration from
crime novels takes him nowhere, but then a visit to the county jail puts him

10  Introduction
in touch with a contract killer. The gun for hire is far too expensive for Alex­
ander, but he is a family man himself  and very sympathetic, so he offers nu-
merous helpful suggestions. The wittiest, perhaps, is a method he has seen
on television (and we all know on which show): “A dame did it, she clobbered
her husband with a frozen leg of  lamb.” At fifty-­nine cents a pound, the meaty
murder weapon is unthinkable for the cheapskate. Finally, a perfect method
virtually presents itself: food poisoning. Alexander even manages to steal bot-
ulinum bacteria from a lab, putting it on the leftover ham Jennifer eats for
dinner while he cautiously sticks to a hamburger. Predictably, she gets sick,
but after the doctor’s prognosis that she might in fact recover, Alexander feels
obligated to secure the hoped-­for outcome. He suffocates her with a pillow
embroidered with the cheerful but misplaced adage “Home Sweet Home.” As
the doctor signs the death certificate, the next chilling cost dawns on Alexan-
der: the funeral. Once again, a happy solution rescues him. Alexander sells
Jennifer’s body to a medical institution and turns a threatening cost point into
a healthy seventy-­five-­dollar profit.
The Lewin-­Styler brand of  humor, predicated on a low-­key acting style with
absurd inflections, bizarre plot premises, and characters carrying out nutty
schemes in vignette style, worked splendidly in the ahp context of  merry mur-
ders, not least owing to the producers’ inspired casting of  Day. This episode
ingeniously blends the Hitchcock brand’s prime features: murder in the fam-
ily circle executed in a food context, here delectably humorous; a modicum
of  suspense; and ingenious casting that takes advantage of, and sometimes
tweaks, established roles, often in highly intricate ways  —  all in the hands of 
a capable production team, with Hitchcock on the sideline as “mere” host.
Here the outsourcing of  the Hitchcock experience to the producers and the
director, Bretaigne Windust, featured an original script with a Hitchcockian
in-­joke: the sly reference to one of  the most classic episodes, “Lamb to the
Slaughter” (ahp 106), a veritable master recipe for the show. Otherwise, the
series overwhelmingly favored published material, much of  it English. Hitch-
cock’s macabre, often self-­deprecating humor as scripted by Allardice took
hosting to an unprecedented level of  creativity. In “Cheap Is Cheap” the pro-
logue is cut in half  on the screen, with half  the screen blackened out. Hitch-
cock, too, has to economize in one of  the show’s many televisual jokes, always
in tune with the upcoming teleplay and with sly commentary concerning the
sponsor. As often was the case, murderous accomplishments are absurdly
punished by an off-­hand comment. In the epilogue, Hitchcock returns with
most of  the screen blackened out, telling the audience that Alexander did not
live happily ever after: “He was caught and paid the supreme penalty. In his

A Body for All Seasons  11

case, a heavy fine.” Furthermore, “the perfect murder should also include a
happy funeral and a decent burial.” Jolly interments, at times serialized or per-
formed in impromptu fashion, were closely associated with the franchise and
its focus on bodies  —  dead and alive  —  and body approximations. This par-
ticular host commentary neatly illustrates the tenet of  this study: that Hitch-
cock, by way of  his television hosting, reclaimed the body discourse  —  set in
motion during his 1937 gastronomic holiday in New York City  —  for his own
purposes and on his own terms. By the time the suspense factory was going
strong in the late 1950s, Hitchcock had found a template for his performance
and a perfect rapport between television and cinema, with added support
from photojournalism and print media. The Hitchcock brand, propelled by
the success of  his television show, turned the Hitchcock figure into a global
household name, eponym, and legend.

12  Introduction
 N OTE S

Introduction

1. Theodore Strauss, “The Fact Is Quicker Than the Lie,” New York Times, 12 April 1942,
x3.
2. Charles Mercer, “Credible  —  Incredible,” Baltimore Sun, 7 October 1956, a21.
3. John D. Weaver, “The Man behind the Body,” Holiday 36, no. 3 (September 1964): 86.
4. For an unrivaled analysis of  television’s domestic viewing fabric in the postwar pe-
riod, see Lynn Spigel, Make Room for tv: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chi-
cago: University of  Chicago Press, 1992). See also the excellent analysis of  a somewhat
later mediascape in David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (London:
Routledge, 2000).
5. Leonard Lyons reported one of  Hitchcock’s earliest comments along this line, in
an exchange with George Raft. Leonard Lyons, “The New Yorker,” Washington Post, 26 July
1940, 7.
6. John Belton, “Hitchcock and the Classical Paradigm,” in David Boyd and R. Bar-
ton Palmer, eds., After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality (Austin: University of 
Texas Press, 2006), 237.
7. For an excellent account of  Winchell’s career, see Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power
and the Culture of  Celebrity (New York: Knopf, 1994). See also Jeffrey Lyons, Stories My Father
Told Me: Notes from the “Lyons Den” (New York: Abbeville, 2011); Jennifer Frost, Hedda Hopper’s
Hollywood (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Samantha Barbas, The First Lady
of  Hollywood: A Biography of  Louella Parsons (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2006).
Concerning the journalistic agenda for Time and Life, see Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry
Luce and His American Century (New York: Knopf, 2010).
8. Weaver, “The Man behind the Body,” 86.
9. Memo dictated by Selznick to Mr. Rawson, 26 October 1943, Legal Series, box 901,
folder 7, “Consolidated Files 1936 – 1954 Hitchcock, Alfred,” David O. Selznick Collection,
Harry Ransom Center, University of  Texas at Austin.
10. Walter Winchell, “Ingrid Bergman’s Romance with Italian Is Favorite Hollywood-­
Broadway Topic,” syndicated in, for example, St. Petersburg Times, 30 April 1949, 12. The
term was soon established enough to be used in a non-­Hitchcock context. See, for ex-
ample, Basil Davenport’s review of  Michael Innes’s novel The Paper Thunderbolt, which
claims, “Friend may turn into foe with a Hitchcockian suddenness.” Basil Davenport,
“Grade-­A Gooseflesh,” New York Times, 11 November 1951, br14. When the Saturday Eve-
ning Post advertised an upcoming issue featuring Pete Martin’s interview with Hitchcock,
readers were told, “His name is a byword for ghouls, gags and the gruesome!” “Behind
the Screams with Alfred Hitchcock,” Washington Post and Times Herald, 23 July 1957, a4.
An upcoming piece in Look mentioned by Winchell was authored by none other than
Winchell himself  and titled “How These Celebrities Stay Thin” (19 July 1949, 46 – 49). Here
Hitchcock explained his formula for dropping one hundred pounds: “Give up all forms of 
gastronomic pleasure, especially alcohol. I followed a high-­protein diet and cut down my
intake”; to reduce “requires a masochistic period of  self-­denial” (47).
11. Paula Marantz Cohen, Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of  Victorianism (Lexington: Univer-
sity Press of  Kentucky, 1995), 165.
12. Throughout the text I will refer to the combined stretch of  the two series ahp and
ahh as one show, or as Hitchcock’s television franchise.
13. For a definitive analysis of  paratexts, see Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of 
Interpretation, translated by Jane E. Lewin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
14. Gjon Mili, Photographs and Recollections (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1980);
the stroboscope images of  Hitchcock are on pp. 68 – 69.
15. Aside from the doubling, the condensed outline does not have much in common
with the novel by Anthony Armstrong, The Strange Case of  Mr. Pelham (1957), on which it was
based. One of  the preeminent dandy figures in British literature was named Pelham: the
eponymous character in an Edward Bulwer-­Lytton novel of 1828. Bulwer-­Lytton’s Pelham
is fueled by a liberal agenda rather than putting forth the elegance of  the dandaical body,
the latter notion severely satirized by Thomas Carlyle in his Sartor Resartus (1833 – 1834).
16. In this scripting and its future paratextual derivations, Jimmie Allardice foreshad-
ows, by many decades, Johan Grimonprez’s scouting for Hitchcock look-­alikes. See Johan
Grimonprez, Looking for Alfred (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2007). In an indepen-
dent art project, Grimonprez conducted casting sessions in several gallery and museum
venues as a preamble to his book and other forms of  documentation.
17. Thomas M. Leitch, “The Outer Circle: Hitchcock on Television,” in Richard Allen
and S. Ishii-­Gonzales, eds., Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: bfi, 1999), 59 – 71.
18. Leitch, “The Outer Circle,” 64.
19. For the best account of  the Hitchcock reception over the years, see Robert E.
Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of  a Reputation (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1992).
For studies of Hitchcock television, see Steve Mamber, “The Television Films of Alfred
Hitchcock,” Cinema 7, no. 1 (fall 1971): 2–7; Gene D. Phillips, “Hitchcock’s Forgotten
Films, the Twenty Teleplays,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 10, no. 2 (summer 1982):
73–76; John McCarty and Brian Kelleher, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (New York: St. Martin’s,
1985); J. Lary Kuhns, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” in Ken Mogg, ed., The Alfred Hitchcock
Story (London: Titan Books, 1999), 130–135; Andrew A. Erish, “Reclaiming Alfred Hitchcock
Presents,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 26, no. 5 (October 2009): 385–392. 
20. This episode ingeniously transferred Jack Benny’s legendary persona from his
television show, on which Dennis Day was a fixture, to a character portrait à la Benny,
played by Day.

220  Notes to introduction