The dust jacket of Donald Spoto’s SPELLBOUND BY BEAUTY: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies depicts what appears to be a composite shot of the famous director and one of his typical blond starlets. He sits in a director’s chair (i.e., the place of honor from which one literally calls the shots), while she poses on a bare object that could be construed as a crude bed. One of her hands is held to her chest in a gesture of what? Surprise? Defense?

Spoto would have us read all sorts of dire meaning into this illustration as a way of introduction to his premise: that the late, great director abused his female stars, subjecting them to mental and, at times, physical humiliation. Such a theory is not original. Hitchcock had long been accused of boorish treatment against his actors, male and female. The question is why. Was this a power game? Perhaps a motivational tool to draw out the best from his performers?

The author of THE DARK SIDE OF GENIUS: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (1983), Spoto takes a film-by-film examination of Hitchcock’s relationship with his starlets. In The 39 Steps, for example, the director asserts his authority by handcuffing Madeleine Carroll to co-star Robert Donat and pretending he cannot find the key to set her free. In other cases, he subjects his film women --- Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Vera Miles, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh, Doris Day, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint and Grace Kelly, to name but a few --- to unflattering makeup and costumes, or treats them roughly via their scene work (drenched by faux rainstorms, dragged through rocky terrain, and other menacing situations). Many of the actors would later complain about such treatment and how it brought them to tears or to seek refuge in the offices of studio producers who were basically powerless against the renowned “Hitch.”

Spoto picks his anecdotes carefully to “prove” his thesis. Take these comments by Hume Cronyn, who appeared in the 1944 classic Lifeboat:

“We were always falling in and out of water…. We were covered with crude oil, and when we finished a scene there might be an hour or so of waiting time for a new camera setup. We were soaking wet, there were wind fans and water-spraying machines, and then we waited under hot lights, were soaked again --- and as a result, all of us in the cast came down with colds and sore throats, and some even got sicker.”

Whatever happened to suffering for your art?

But Spoto is inconsistent in such assertions. In the preface, he tries to explain the “need” for another book (by him) of Hitchcock, writing that the director “rarely had anything to say about his male stars.” So why, then, the issue that “Many of his leading ladies, on the other hand, achieved international stardom precisely because of their Hitchcock roles....That he maintained an insistent silence abut the quality of their performances is a curiosity that cannot be ignored”? What’s good for the gander…

Spoto, who has written the biographies of such Hollywood luminaries as Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier and others, offers sexual innuendo at every opportunity, describing many of Hitchcock’s female characters with employing sexual blackmail, predatory behavior and other qualities unbecoming a proper lady. There’s a lot of repressed sexuality going on throughout his portfolio, it seems. Perhaps, as Spoto would have us believe, it stems from Hitchcock’s relationships with the women in his life, including his mother, wife and daughter.

Spoto’s examples seem almost silly in these libertine times. Hitchcock’s teasing and jokes both practical and dirty might be considered a form of sexual harassment, but in retrospect they hardly seem like casting couch accusations or salary kickbacks.