Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession
By Laurence Leamer  
(G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 336 pages, $29)

When I first heard about Laurence Leamer’s Hitchcock’s Blonds: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession, I was intrigued by the subject matter but had reservations about the premise. Perhaps it was the words “dark obsession” in the book’s subtitle — coupled with the image of Grace Kelly, sporting the black fitted top over the flowing white skirt that she wears when she first appears onscreen in Rear Window (1954) — that led me to initially dismiss the book as yet another titillating account of director Alfred Hitchcock’s well-known failed attempts to seduce his leading ladies. However, while Hitchcock’s Blondes does include coverage of the corpulent director’s rebuffed advances to blondes such as Kelly, those episodes represent only a small component of the fascinating story that Leamer has woven.

Hitchcock’s Blondes uses the same narrative technique that Leamer deployed for his best-selling work Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era (2021). That is, he provides detailed backgrounds of the actresses to further elucidate the director’s character. Kelly, June Howard-Tripp, Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, and Tippi Hedren — who, collectively, starred in 14 of Hitchcock’s films — were each a manifestation of the director’s ideal woman: a beautiful, sophisticated blonde with an outward reserve but smoldering interior sensuality. As Hitchcock stated, “I think the northern Germans, the Scandinavians, and the English are much sexier, although they don’t look it, than those farther south — the Spanish, the Italians.”

Hitchcock was simultaneously aware that the women of his day made the lion’s share of household movie-ticket-purchase decisions, and he was careful to select actresses who were beautiful in a way that did not offend the average housewife. To that end, he usually consulted his wife, Alma Reville (1899–1982), a screenwriter and film editor with whom Hitchcock collaborated on scripts for several of his films, including The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

Leamer posits that these leading ladies were more than muses to the celebrated director; they were each imbued with a unique blend of intelligence, ambition, talent, and intuition that catapulted them from obscurity to celebrity. Moreover, their compelling personal stories were every bit as interesting as those of the characters they depicted on the silver screen. Three of these actresses, Hedren, Novak, and Saint, are still alive today, and Leamer had the pleasure of interviewing the latter two for his book, which, in addition to these exclusives, includes detailed accounts of the interactions between the aforementioned actresses and their famous co-stars, including Cary Grant and James Stewart.

Searching for Sophistication: Kelly and Bergman

Hitchcock took a Svengali-like approach to his female stars — especially the blonde ones. He would seek to mold their physical appearance and onscreen persona into his idea of a given character. He also had a propensity for pushing actors beyond their physical capacity in the name of verisimilitude and a penchant for telling dirty jokes, the latter of which made some of his actresses uncomfortable. Yet he could still be intimidated by a beautiful woman, especially if she came from a family of means and cultural sophistication.

There was, for example, a striking similarity between his relationships with Swedish-born Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982) — who starred in Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and Under Capricorn (1949) — and Philadelphia’s native daughter Grace Kelly (1929–1982), who starred in Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955). While Hitchcock tried to teach his less-sophisticated actresses about culture and fine wine, he was deeply concerned with personally impressing Bergman and Kelly. To camouflage his insecurity, he attempted to control their behavior, holding each to a high standard. He felt strongly betrayed when Bergman left her husband, Petter Lindström, for director Roberto Rossellini, with whom she had a child out of wedlock. Hitchcock reasoned that this bad publicity precluded him from casting Bergman as Margot Wendice, the female lead in Dial M for Murder, a role that ultimately went to Kelly. (READ MORE from Leonora Cravotta: When the Suburban Dream Becomes a Nightmare: Connecticut in the Movies)

Hitchcock also took issue with Kelly’s reported sexual behavior. Although the movie-going public saw Kelly as the epitome of elegance, with her white gloves and perfect strand of pearls, her sexual promiscuity was well-known in the Hollywood community. Hitchcock once commented, “That Grace! She f**** everyone!” Just as Hitchcock was disappointed when Bergman’s affair with Rossellini curtailed her appearances in his films, he felt abandoned when Kelly left Hollywood in 1956 to marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco. 

Kim Novak: A Star Remade

After Kelly’s retirement, Hitchcock needed to find another blonde starlet for his upcoming film Vertigo (1958), starring James Stewart, and he found just what he needed in Kim Novak (born 1933), a former model. While Novak wasn’t thought to be much of an actress, she was considered in 1956 to be the second-most-popular female at the box office, after making only six movies.

Born Marilyn Pauline Novak to a lower-class Czech-American family in Chicago, Novak experienced a traumatic childhood. She was raped as a young teenager in the back of a car and had a father who suffered from bipolar disorder (Novak would later learn that she had the disorder as well). When Novak was discovered, she was a small-market, overweight model who mumbled during her screen test. Yet she still had that mesmerizing star quality. She was placed on a strict diet, sent for teeth whitening, given acting lessons, and — because Hollywood already had a Marilyn in Monroe — reborn as Kim Novak.

While Hitchcock appreciated Novak’s box office cachet, he was not very pleasant and constantly made her feel inadequate. Novak’s diva-type behavior on set did not help matters. Despite these struggles, she was, in many ways, the perfect choice to play the dual role of Judy/Madeleine, the woman whom Scottie (Stewart) makes over to look exactly like his deceased paramour. Novak had an intimate connection with the role, having been remade herself, as she describes: “Judy surrendered herself to being made over…. So many women do that.… It was so real to me, the coming out and wanting approval in that scene.” Unfortunately, Hitchcock did not appreciate her performance. The best compliment that he could muster was: “Perhaps I should say modestly that under my direction she isn’t lousy.”

Breaking the Mold: Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint (born 1924) was perhaps the one actress who experienced none of Hitchcock’s misogynist behavior. He neither forced her beyond her physical ability nor subjected her to his off-color sense of humor. “How could you tell a dirty limerick to someone who’s named a Saint?” she mused. “Maybe he was influenced by that.”

Hitchcock’s attitude may have also been affected by Saint’s conservative personal life. Born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in a Quaker household in upstate New York, Saint had a solid middle-class upbringing and loving parents. When she arrived in New York to try her hand at acting after graduating from Bowling Green State University, she knew she had other options, like teaching, to fall back on. She was 34 years old, happily married to director Jeffrey Hayden, and the mother of two young children when Hitchcock cast her as Eve Kendall opposite Cary Grant in North by Northwest (1959).

As much as he respected Saint, who had won a best-supporting-actress Oscar for her performance in On the Waterfront (1954), Hitchcock insisted that she needed a different look to play the cynical Eve Kendall. To that end, he taught her to speak with a lower voice, changed her hairstyle, required her to wear heavy make-up, and handpicked her character’s wardrobe and jewelry. And he was proud of the final result: “I have done a great deal for Miss Eva Marie Saint.… She was always a good actress, but she is no longer the drab, mousy little girl she was. I have given her vitality and sparkle. Now she’s a beautiful actress.”

Janet Leigh: A Calculated Risk

Hitchcock took a calculated risk when he cast Janet Leigh (1927–2004) in Psycho (1960) as Marion Crane, the woman who steals $30,000 from her employer and is later murdered by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in that famous shower scene. Leigh was born Jeannette Helen Morrison in a lower-class community in Merced, California, that she desperately tried to escape. To that end, by the time she was 18, she had already been married twice.

Leigh’s Hollywood debut happened in a most unusual way. It all started when actress Norma Shearer saw Jeannette’s photograph on her father’s desk at the ski resort where he was employed. Shearer was so taken with the girl in the photo that she sent it to MGM talent scout Lew Wasserman; shortly thereafter, without even a screen test, Jeannette was placed on a seven-year contract under her new name, Janet Leigh.

When Hitchcock was casting the role of Marion Crane for Psycho, he thought: “What if we got a big-name actress to play this girl?… Nobody will expect her to die.” Leigh, having appeared in 32 films and now married to actor Tony Curtis, was a big enough star to generate the surprise effect Hitchcock was seeking. The director believed that without the right actress in the role, the shower scene wouldn’t work, and, consequently, the film would flop.

Casting Leigh wasn’t the only risk Hitchcock took with the film; he also shot it in black and white and used his television crew instead of his usual film crew. He wanted the film to have a more amateur, less polished look than his recent films. Psycho went on to become a commercial and critical success, with Leigh receiving an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress, and the shower scene has been repeatedly cited as one of the most iconic in cinema history.

Taking Advantage of Controversy: Tippi Hedren

Hitchcock handpicked Tippi Hedren (born 1930) to star as socialite Melanie Daniels in The Birds (1963) after seeing her in a commercial. Born Nathalie Kay “Tippi” Hedren in Lafayette, Minnesota, a small town of 200 residents, Hedren was a 31-year-old model and single mother — with a 4-year-old daughter who would grow up to become the actress Melanie Griffith — when she first came to Hitchcock’s attention. Hitchcock saw Hedren as someone he needed to guide and sculpt. While Hedren at first appreciated the attention Hitchcock paid her, she soon came to realize that he was trying to manage every aspect of her appearance, career, and personal life. As Hitchcock said at the time: “It’s like this girl Hedren. Until I have launched them, they belong to me, and they better face that fact.”

The Birds has generated controversy over the 6o years since its release due to the way the scenes with the birds were filmed, particularly the ones where they attacked Melanie. In a phone booth scene, the gulls bang against the glass while glass shards hit Hedren’s face. There’s also is the famous scene in which Melanie is assailed by the birds when she opens the attic door at the home of Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). “The birds have pecked a hole in the roof, and they assail her in a vicious, prolonged manner akin to rape,” Leamer writes. “The only sound is the thrashing of their wings as the assault seems to go on forever, cutting her face, arms and legs.” This two-minute scene was shot over an entire week. After the fifth day, Hedren walked off the set and took a week off for bed rest.

Although Hedren has since spoken disparagingly about the filming of the scene, accused Hitchcock of making advances at her, and criticized the way he micromanaged her on set, when he asked her to play the title role in his next film, Marnie (1964), a complex character with deep psychological problems, she readily accepted. Her criticisms of Hitchcock decades after she appeared in his films thus may have been an attempt to garner publicity for her 2016 book Tippi: A Memoir. Even Hedren’s former stepson, John Marshall, who was interviewed by Leamer for Hitchcock’s Blondes, questioned Hedren’s negative recollection of Hitchcock, explaining: “Tippi always said that she was pleased with The Birds. If Hitchcock had acted badly, she wouldn’t have done Marnie.”

In Hitchcock’s Blondes, Leamer has done a marvelous job of bringing these golden girls to life. Moreover, he has created another lens through which to examine Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most talented and complex film directors of all time.