Hitchcock's leading ladies reveal his fetishes, desire for 'total control'

His reputation as a harsh but brilliant director is well established, but Alfred Hitchcock's "total control" over his leading ladies has now been revealed in disturbing detail.

A bizarre predilection for glasses and a desire to dictate the outfits and social lives of actresses starring in his films are among a catalogue of accusations in a new book about Hichcock's life.

Women who appeared in some of the film-maker's most successful pictures have said he was "peculiar" and had a "schoolboy obsession with sex".

He was "a very complex man" according Ann Todd, who played the barrister's wife in The Paradine Case (1947).

He was "an overgrown schoolboy who never grew up and lived in his own special fantasy world. He had a schoolboy's obsession with sex that went on and on in a very peculiar way," she said.

"He had an endless supply of very nasty, vulgar and naughty stories and jokes. These amused him more than they amused anyone else, but I think he was really a very sad person."

Meanwhile, Joan Fontaine recalled of Hitchcock's direction of her in Rebecca (1940) how he wanted "total control over me". In one of many weeping scenes Fontaine had run out of tears.

"I asked her what it would take to make her resume crying," Hitchcock said at the time. "She said, 'Well, maybe if you slapped me.' I did, and she instantly started bawling."

The book, titled Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd, touches on another of Hitchcock's obsessions: women wearing glasses.

In Spellbound Ingrid Bergman wears glasses, as does Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps (1935), and Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo (1958). Ingrid Bergman said that if she came on the set without her glasses on, "it irritated the devil out of Hitch. He had a fetish about glasses."

Tippi Hedren reflected on her relationship with Hitchcock, saying, "He started telling me what I should wear on my own time.

"What I should be eating, and what friends I should be seeing. I began to feel very uncomfortable because I had no control over him." One of his screenwriters, Arthur Laurents, remarked that Hitchcock thought everyone was doing something physical and nasty behind every closed door - except himself".

(China Daily 04/04/2015 page10)