Spellbound by Beauty—Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (review)

When Hitchcock launched his TV show Hitchcock Presents in 1955, he turned himself and his instantly recognizable silhouette into a trademark. Historically, Hitchock's career blatantly exposed the relationship between merit and savvy marketing. Then came the film-by-film interview with Francois Truffaut, first published as a book in 1968. The book-length interview turned Hitchcock into an "auteur" in the public eye. Truffaut defined the British-born director as the single most important creative force behind all of his films. The auteur theory and its inherent near-deification of the director exemplified the theoretical approach of the Nouvelle Vague critics-turned-filmmakers.

At the time, this idolization was practically unheard of for a commercially successful director thoroughly entrenched in the Hollywood mainstream. Today, however, when we utter names such as Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese, we evoke the same critical auteur perspective.

Spoto published his first book, a film-by-film analysis of Hitchcock's oeuvre, in 1976. In 2008, New York Times critic Janet Maslin called it "a work of polite hagiography." The success of his debut book jumpstarted Donald Spoto's career as a celebrity biographer. His next book, the Hitchcock biography The Dark Side of Genius, was published in 1983, three years after the director's death. In this book, Spoto responded to Truffaut's perspective of Hitchcock: "It also hurt and disappointed just about everybody who had ever worked with Alfred Hitchcock, for the interviews reduced the writers, the designers, the photographers, the composers, and the actors to little else than elves in the master carpenter's workshop" (495).

Thoroughly researched and based on countless interviews with every key collaborator, as well as the director himself, The Dark Side of Genius was the first book to question the myth "Hitch" himself had worked hard to create. All subsequent literature on Hitchcock has increasingly dispelled the fiction that in Hitchcock's words, as quoted in Spoto's latest book, Spellbound by Beauty, "when moving pictures are really artistic, they will be entirely created by one man" (84).

Spellbound by Beauty is the final book of an unofficial Hitchcock trilogy by the now-accomplished celebrity specialist. In it, he tries to give Hitchcock's leading ladies the recognition they have been denied so far not only in the literature about the director but also in comments by the director himself. "That he [Hitchcock] maintained an insistent silence about the quality of their performance is a curiosity that cannot be ignored" (xvi). In the same preface, Spoto further clarifies his quest: "But the craft of biography requires that the shadow side of subjects be set forth and comprehended—otherwise, their humanity is diminished, their pain minimized, and those they hurt are ignored" (xx).

Spoto's book is not just another study of Hitchcock's work but a revelatory personal biography that fits perfectly into the marketplace of the early twenty-first century where the personal and private by now have become intensely public. Any Hitchcock biographer is faced with at least two problems: The richness and intricacy of his body of work have led to a vast research where every aspect seems to have been scrutinized. The other problem is of course how, in the age of American Idol audiences, to generate interest in a director whose beginnings reach back into the silent film era and whose work is by now decidedly classical. Spoto's solution seems to lie in nothing short of sensationalism.

Spellbound dutifully records Hitchcock's career-long obsession with blondes. The director's obsession seems to be matched by Spoto's determination to document, actress by actress, how Hitchcock abused his power as a director. The most prominent actresses to star in his most celebrated films were, consecutively, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, and finally, Tippi Hedren.

A key piece of Spellbound is the description of how his professional relationship with Tippi Hedren crossed over into personal and (possibly sexual) harassment starting during the filming of The Birds...