March 11, 1993 | There’s at least one brightly charming story in The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, Donald Spoto’s controversial 1983 biography of The Master of Suspense, and it deals with the birth of his only child, Patricia.
According to Spoto, Patricia arrived into this world on the morning of July 7, 1928. The birth took place in the family’s London apartment, with Alma Reville Hitchcock under the guidance of a midwife and the care of a doctor — but without her husband actually being present for the blessed event. “The tension in the apartment had closed around him,” Spoto writes, “and he had bolted out the door until late afternoon.” When Hitchcock returned, contrite and abashed, he found his wife sleeping, his infant daughter bawling. He waited until Alma awakened, then sheepishly presented her with an expensive sapphire-and-gold bracelet as a peace offering.
It’s a lovely anecdote, illuminating and entertaining, the sort of story any biographer would delight in unearthing.
Trouble is, it isn’t true.
At least, not according to Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell.
“Actually,” O’Connell said a few days ago in her Wyndham Warwick Hotel suite, “it was a pearl bracelet that he gave my mother after I was born,” which she in turn gave to Patricia — and which Patricia recently gave to her own daughter, Mary, as a Christmas present.
More to the point, O’Connell added, the bracelet was a token of love, not a plea for forgiveness.
“Of course he was there,” she said, shaking her head in bemusement at the very suggestion that the great filmmaker would not be around for his daughter’s grand entrance. “Actually, the story I’ve always been told in the family is that he and the doctor apparently were drinking gin and orange juice the whole time. And the doctor, I think, was a little swacked by the end of the birth.”
O’Connell came to Houston last weekend for the opening of Early Hitchcock, an ambitious traveling retrospective that kicked off an international tour at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. (The film series, featuring newly struck prints of classic Hitchcock shorts and features, includes the U.S. premieres of Bon Voyage and Adventure Malgache, two WWII era shorts Hitchcock directed for the British Ministry of Information) And during her brief stay, she had much to say, and many questions to answer, about her late, great father. Such has been her legacy as the only child of a legendary figure, and she handles it with uncommon grace, charm and good humor.
“It’s so gratifying that he lives on through his pictures,” O’Connell said of her father, who died in 1980. “And the thing that fascinates me the most is the young people who love his pictures.”
But she is ever quick to note that, to paraphrase a line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when it comes to separating fact from legend about Alfred Hitchcock, most writers prefer to print, and most audiences prefer to hear, the legend.
“It’s like, he never really said, ‘Actors are like cattle,’ even though everyone says he did,” O’Connell insisted. “What he really said was, ‘Actors should be treated like cattle.’”
That wisecrack, O’Connell added, came back to haunt her father when she made her Broadway debut in 1941 as a poor little rich girl in John Van Druten’s Solitaire. “Someone actually sent him a telegram — I think it was Joan Crawford — after I opened in Solitaire, saying, ‘Your calf has done very well.’”
According to O’Connell, her father strongly encouraged her acting ambitions, to the point of financing her advanced studies at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She made her movie debut in his Stage Fright (1950), and continued to appear in plays, movies and TV productions (including several episodes of her father’s TV series) even after her 1952 marriage to trucking executive Joseph E. O’Connell Jr.
Her last acting credit, O’Connell admitted with a grin, was an Old Milwaukee beer commercial in the early 1980s. She and her husband now live in retirement near Santa Barbara, Calif., and spend much of their time keeping up with news of their three grown daughters and five granddaughters.
In addition to co-starring in Stage Fright, O’Connell also appeared in two of her father’s greatest movies: Strangers on a Train (1951) and Psycho (1960). “But he was very businesslike,” O’Connell insisted. “He never put people in movies just because they wanted to be in a movie.”
Once he did cast you in a movie, however, you were never safe from his practical jokes. Not even if you were his daughter.
“There was the time when he was making Strangers on a Train,” O’Connell said, “and we were doing the scene at the amusement park. I wasn’t working in the scene, but I was visiting the set that night, and he asked me, ‘How much would you want to go up on that Ferris wheel?’ And I said, ‘You know I’m petrified of heights!’ So he said, ‘Well, seriously, how much would you want?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d want $100.’ He said, ‘OK.’”
So O’Connell and two young male co-stars climbed aboard one of the Ferris wheel gondolas, posed and waved for publicity photographers, braced themselves as the ride began — and panicked when, while they were at the very top, the Ferris wheel shuddered to a complete stop.
“And then they turned out all the lights,” O’Connell recalled, “for I would say maybe three minutes at the outside, pretending like they were all going away to film something else. But then they came right back, turned the lights on, and we came down.”
Somehow, though, Hitchcock’s prank came to seem much more mean-spirited as news of it spread, and the stories about it were embellished over the years. By the time Spoto wrote his Hitchcock biography three decades later, the incident had evolved into a sadistic stunt that kept O’Connell atop the Ferris wheel for more than an hour, and left her a sobbing, hysterical mess.
“The only sadistic part about it,” said O’Connell, “was that I didn’t get $100.”
According to O’Connell, her childhood was as normal and serene as it could possibly be as the daughter of one of the world’s most famous moviemakers.
Even after her parents moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s, so her father could make Rebecca for producer David O. Selznick, they lived frugally — Alma continued to do most of the family cooking — and held fast to family traditions. (Hitchcock, born and raised a Roman Catholic, drove his daughter to Mass every Sunday morning she was home.) Just as he always was a perfect gentleman on movie sets, he remained unruffled and soft-spoken at home. Rather than raise his voice when his daughter misbehaved, he would mournfully lecture: “Do you have any idea how much you’ve hurt your mother and me…?”
Little Patricia received most of her education in boarding schools, where her parents frequently visited her when they weren’t working together on films.
“My mother was his No. 1 helpmate,” O’Connell said. “If he found a story, he had her read it first, before anybody else, to see if she thought it would make a movie.
“Before they were married, back in England, she had started out as a scriptwriter, and then a cutter, on silent movies. And later on, sometimes she would spot things in his movies that other people had missed. Like, when they were working on Psycho, and they screened it right before it was to be released, she noticed there was a shot of Janet Leigh taking a breath after she was supposed to be dead. She was the only one who caught that. Even my father had missed it.
“After my mother died in 1982, Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote a very nice bit about her, in which he said, ‘The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two of them were Alma’s.’ Which is absolutely true.”
Which is more than she can say about some stories she has read and heard about her father.
“Most of the things that are spread about him really sprang from his sense of humor,” O’Connell said. “But people didn’t realize that he was joking, and took it seriously. So much of his stuff was done in humor. Now, granted, it was a macabre humor…
“There was a time, when I was attending boarding school in New York, and we were playing a game, and I was accidentally locked in a trunk. They got me out, but I was terrified. And I was still shaken the next day when my father came by to visit on his way to England. But all he says after I told him what had happened was, ‘Well, you got out, didn’t you?’
“And then he says, ‘You know, it’s like the old story about the girl who goes up to the attic in her wedding dress to get something, and the door slams shut, and she can’t get out, and they never find her until 20 years later. And then they find just the bones in the wedding dress…’ And this is what he tells me after I’ve been locked in a trunk.
“But, see, he’s laughing about it. That, to him, was very funny. And, looking back, it was funny. But at the time, when I was 16…
“You had to know him to appreciate his humor. And, obviously, a lot of people didn’t know him.”
