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An Introvert as Famous Recluse (II)
Recognized the world over yet essentially a very private person? Where filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) was concerned, there was no contradiction in that.
Through cameo appearances in such classic movies as To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds as well as his introductions to Alfred Hitchcock Presents on TV, British-born filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock’s pudgy, mock-proud face became just about as well known around the world as Queen Elizabeth’s. Accordingly, some famous-people websites list him as an extrovert.
However, people who had close contacts with him and observed his lifestyle and preferences called him “reclusive,” which by definition contradicts him being an extrovert. Film critic John Russell Taylor sat down to lunch with Hitchcock three or four times a month for years, for instance, yet did not claim to know him well. “Many took the façade for the man,” Taylor wrote. Hitchcock actually was “an intensely private person who carried his own world around with him.”
As a plump, sensitive youth, Hitchcock entertained himself by pursuing solitary (and thus introverted) hobbies like collecting maps and timetables of the London bus system and memorizing the geography of New York City. As young man working for the advertising department of a firm that produced telegraph cables, he developed a cheerful, obliging persona – someone who was at ease, imperturbable, a good fellow to have around the office. He did not smoke or drink and avoided conflicts with others. That mask of confident good humor, along with a dab of the macabre, became his lifelong public image.
One quirk that showed up early in Hitchcock’s working career was his penchant for practical jokes. For example, he would enter a crowded elevator with a colleague and begin to tell a funny story, timing it so that he would exit the elevator a beat or two before the punchline, leaving the other riders, raptly listening, bereft of the story’s ending. Once he switched to the film industry, some of his pranks verged on sadistic. After one actress confided her fear of fire to Hitchcock, he arranged for one of his technicians to pump smoke into a telephone box that she was locked into. I found Taylor’s comment on this penchant of Hitchcock’s intriguing: “Practical jokes have been defined by psychologists as the desperate attempts of the intensely introverted to establish communication,” he wrote.
Perhaps related to such little capers were the eccentricities that Hitchcock cultivated. For instance, like any true-blue Briton, on the set he drank a lot of tea – but then would always toss the drained teacup over his shoulder, letting it smash wherever it landed. Less flamboyantly, he adopted a uniform of a distinctive dark suit and tie that gave him the look of a cross between a funeral director and a bank manager. (This habit made me think of other male introverts whose standardized outfits not only kept their lives orderly but allowed them to concentrate better on their work: Steve Jobs with his black turtlenecks, Mark Zuckerberg with his gray T-shirts and hoodies and Barack Obama, who as President filled his closets with just gray and blue suits.)
An assistant on one of Hitchcock’s early silent film sets, Alma Reville, became Hitchcock’s closest collaborator, wife and the mother of their only child. Despite the ever-increasing glamour of the film business, the Hitchcocks largely stayed away from social events. Hitchcock rarely gave interviews, declined to sign autographs and did not even attend the premieres of many of his films. On the one hand, he preferred to let his directing, story crafting and camera work speak for itself. On the other hand, his reticence helped to preserve a cocoon of privacy for him amidst his family or his trusted studio crew. In addition, such holding back undoubtedly helped prevent him from getting derailed by unpredictable incidents, keeping his introvert ambitions on keel.
I leave it to others to analyze the intense messages and motives in Hitchcock’s emotionally charged, frightening and sometimes twisted movies. When it comes to his personality, I just want you to remember that world-class professional accomplishments, even accompanied by an affable manner and massive publicity, do not necessarily indicate that someone is (or was) an extrovert.