While they were eating, Grace Kelly came by and stopped to talk to Hitch. They made nice nice for a while, then she went off upon her business. As she walks away, Hitchcock looks over at Cavett and says, "The most promiscuous woman in Hollywood".
Well, Freud would have had a field day with Alfred Hitchcock. He had so many sexual conflicts about blonds and bathrooms and birds, it amazes me he could concentrate long enough to finish a film. But his obsession for detail and plot made him a master of his craft.
He verbally abused women who starred in some of his films. Janet Leigh, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak (
especially Kim Novak) and Tippi Hedren. If you look closely at them and the way they're portrayed in films like
Psycho,
Vertigo, and
The Birds...
they're basically all the same woman. Leggy blonds, perfectly coiffed, faultless skin, etc., etc. (the total opposite, by the way, of his own wife).
He started out liking (loving?) his female stars, but ended up despising them because they rejected his gifts and advances. He would then begin making derogatory remarks about them in public, humiliating them as he thought they
deserved to be humiliated. He was obsessed with blonds. Next time you watch
Vertigo, note Jimmy Stewart's obsession with Kim Novak and dressing her to look like another blond. That's Stewart actually acting out Hitchcock's own obsessions. In the film, Stewart's as loony as Hitchcock.
Hitchcock saw women as victims, as things to be used, often abused and violently treated, then discarded. If you look at the bird imagery in
Psycho...the mounted dead birds and birds in the paintings on the wall...that gives the viewer a hint of Hitchcock's thinking...he saw birds as prey...ditto for women.
I love Hitchcock, but he was sure one confused and somewhat disturbed man.
That's right up there with the old phrase, "in like Flynn", meaning Errol Flynn, an Australian actor who had a way with ladies. Now, he should have been more careful. When he died at just 49 or 50, his fiancee was just 17 and had been with him for a couple of years. With the famous actor gone, the DA in CA charged his girl's mother for letting her live with Flynn, although this was common knowledge in Hollywood. She wrote a book about that. It's very expensive now. Told a lot about Flynn.
