Free Alfred Hitchcock by Patrick McGilligan Page B

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    We have yet to discover a really useful and satisfactory method of pea eating. A recent inventor evolved a process by which a pipe was placed in the mouth and the peas drawn up by pneumatic means. But in the trials the inventor unfortunately turned on the power in the reverse direction, with the result that the victim’s tongue is now much longer than hitherto.
    Another person suggested that they might be electrically deposited, but the idea of the scheme was so shocking that it was not considered.
    One of the most sensible ways which is at present in the experimental stages is receiving the attention of a well-known market gardener, who is endeavouring to grow square peas so as to eliminate the embarrassing habit which peas have of rolling off the cutlery. It is to be hoped that the experiment will prove successful.
    In order to help on this very important scientific development, suggested methods from our readers will be welcomed, and forwarded to the proper authority. Please direct any suggestions to The Manager, THE HENLEY TELEGRAPH.
    Gainfully employed, creatively engaged, the young advertising man practiced a new persona in public, taking long lunches at posh West End restaurants, adopting the uniform of businessmen and lawyers, slowly reading his
Times
, fingering his first cigars.
    In 1920 he turned twenty-one, voting age, and the age when a young Englishman officially became an adult and was rewarded with “the key of the door.” The lunches grew longer. Hitchcock had been at Henley’s for six years now, and he was becoming bored, restless. His boss perceived that his young protégé was ill-suited for any longtime sinecure, in advertising or any other department.
    Hitchcock “caused me much worry by his carefree lack of attention to the essential details of an Advertising Department’s organization,” remembered supervisor W. A. Moore. “Printing blocks would be sent off and no records kept. When they were again wanted, no one knew where they were. Records were a thing outside his understanding—matters too insignificant to bother about.”
    Hitchcock shuffled his creative options at Henley’s the way he later shuffled alternative versions of film scenes to accommodate a lowering budget or threatening censors: “We could always get another block, or putsomething else in if there was not time to get another,” Moore recalled as Hitchcock’s work philosophy. “I do not suppose ‘Hitch’ ever realized how much he worried me in that respect. He was always too lighthearted.”
    What really happened is that Hitchcock had fallen completely under the spell of motion pictures—just the field that might combine his technical and design prowess, his gift for gab and word pictures, his salesmanship and his leadership. More than once Moore came upon his employee furtively turning the pages of a screen trade publication. And in his spare time (he made no secret of it), Hitchcock was prowling around the film studios in the central city and suburbs, hovering on the sidelines of productions, waiting and watching.
    Perhaps the twenty-one-year-old had already caught sight of the woman he one day would marry. Love at first sight was a cliché to which his films were not immune. Perhaps a glimpse of Alma Reville, busy on a film set, reinforced the young man’s growing determination to leave Henley’s. Hitchcock would not necessarily have said anything; he was a bider of time. Mrs. Hitchcock once told a journalist that it took her husband several years to speak to her, after first registering her existence. “Since it is unthinkable for a British male to admit that a woman has a job more important than his,” Alma explained, “Hitch had waited to speak to me until he had a higher position.”
    Hitchcock’s final piece in the
Telegraph
, published in March 1921, is short, and perhaps his most enigmatic contribution. Some of the detail is quite precise, however. Hitchcock is specific about the Bank, for