New book on Hitchcock suggests that the master of suspense wasn’t a big creep, after all

By now, if you know anything about the personal life of Alfred Hitchcock, you know that he became obsessed with Tippi Hedren during the making of “The Birds.” You know that he made unwanted physical advances toward her and then later, resenting that she’d wanted nothing to do with him, set out to ruin her career. 

Except it’s possible that none of that is true.

Tony Lee Moral, a British documentarian and film historian, has written a well-researched new book about Alfred Hitchcock — “A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy” — that favorably reappraises Hitchcock as a man and as a filmmaker. The heart and main appeal of the book, published on June 9, is in the way it either disproves or casts strong doubt on many stories that have accumulated around the great director since his death in 1980.

It tells us, rather persuasively, that for 40 years Hitchcock has been the victim of a smear campaign, orchestrated by two people with something to gain from distorting the truth or inventing stories outright — actor Tippi Hedren and the late Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto. Both, says Moral, were motivated by “personal grievance.”

“He made a mistake when he tried to make her a star,” said Moral, speaking by telephone from England. Hitchcock worked closely with Hedren, in the vain hope of turning a non-actor model into the next Grace Kelly. He was controlling and exacting. He took an intrusive and almost proprietary interest in whom she saw and how she dressed outside the set.

But the notion that he was sexually demanding or that he tried to kiss her is considerably less likely, as Hedren didn’t even make that charge until 2008, in Spoto’s “Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies.” Before that, she’d made no such allegation, not even in Spoto’s previous Hitchcock biography, “The Dark Side of Genius” (1983).

“The smoking gun is the transcript of Spoto’s October 1980 interview with Hedren,” said Moral, “which Spoto made the mistake of leaving in the UCLA archive, and which I read in 2012 or 2013.” At the time of the interview, Spoto and Hedren were friends and had known each other for years. Spoto asked her if Hitchcock had ever made a sexual proposition to her, and Hedren answered, “It was never, ever a bold proposition, it was never, ever that kind of thing.” Yet she said otherwise later.

So, was Hedren telling the truth in 1980 or in 2008? Did Spoto set out to write a biographical hit job? If Moral is right, then Spoto was either lying or distorting, and Hedren was either lying or misremembering. The obvious next question is why they would do that — though in matters to do with Hollywood that question sometimes doesn’t apply. People do things for unfathomable reasons.

In any case, Spoto’s motives might not be quite so mysterious. Spoto had written an early, laudatory book about Hitchcock and had tried to break into his circle, but Hitchcock seemed to take an instant dislike to him and froze him out. Spoto could have been angry, and he could have recognized a good channel for his anger: In the early 1980s, writing a scandalous biography was a ticket to financial success.

As for Hedren, she endured the embarrassment of failure following her second Hitchcock film, “Marnie” (1964). “Marnie” was a critical and commercial disappointment, and Hitchcock lost interest in working with her. She had a small part in Charlie Chaplin’s last feature, “A Countess From Hong Kong” (1967), then pretty much faded into history.  

It’s probable that the biggest challenge Hedren faced was that she was a 1950s type trying to become a star in the 1960s — a would-be Grace Kelly in an era that had already switched to Julie Christie. In any case, it’s not hard to believe that someone who expected to become a star might prefer to attribute their disappointment to a malicious effort to stop them in their tracks, rather than bad luck and a certain paucity of acting ability.

But this is speculation. What’s not speculation is that others have come forward, in Moral’s book, to speak in support of Hitchcock. These include some of the women who worked with Hitchcock and knew him well: Louise Latham (Hedren’s co-star in “Marnie”), Jay Presson Allen (screenwriter of “Marnie”), Joan Harrison (worked with Hitchcock as a television producer) and Yvonne Hessler (Hitchcock’s secretary). Not that any of this proves anything, but then how does one prove that something didn’t happen? 

What’s also not a matter of speculation is that Hitchcock has been convicted in the public mind as a creep, based on evidence that is flimsy and shifting. A 2003 Hitchcock biography by Patrick McGilligan (“Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light”) debunked some of Spoto’s claims, but the shift in perception hasn’t yet penetrated popular culture.

Yet at least one myth can be set aside today: Despite what you may have heard, Hitchcock did not try to terrify Hedren’s 5-year-old daughter, the future actor Melanie Griffith, by sending her a doll of her mother inside a miniature coffin.

As Hedren herself has admitted over the years, he did give Griffith a doll, and it did come in a wooden box. But it wasn’t a coffin, nor was it meant to suggest a coffin, and he wasn’t trying to scare the child. He thought he was just giving a doll to a little girl — one that came in a nice box.