Read It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock for Free Online Page B

self-respect.
    “My parents loved the theater and took me with them, whenever my father could be free, and that very much influenced my life. I could feel how much they enjoyed it. I did, too, and I never forgot those green-lit villains in the melodramas, accompanied by sinister music. The heroine always had rosy-pink light to help her to be more beautiful and pure.”
    Very early, other children made fun of the way young Alfred looked, one of them telling him he was “funny-looking.” He went home and looked in the mirror. He turned to check his profile. His mother saw him doing it.
    “Do you think I look funny?” he asked her.
    “You’ll outgrow it,” she said. It wasn’t the answer he was hoping to hear. “I didn’t outgrow it,” Hitchcock said. “I just outgrew. No one wants to be fat. That’s a universal. With a small u.”
    His pudgy, overweight appearance, his lack of interest in the games the other children played, and little athletic ability, isolated him and led to his development of more solitary interior interests. As a boy, “I led an active inner life. The other boys judged everyone on their outer lives. I may not have been athletic, but I was well coordinated.” Hitchcock said that he rather came to enjoy not having to participate in games he considered a waste of time. In those first years, his mother was his best and only companion.
    “My mother was so consistently there for me, I took her presence for granted, which is a very good thing for a child. I felt I was her favorite.
    “I wasn’t a popular type, so I was forced to live in my imagination, and I believe that helped me to develop my creative resources. I don’t need much stimulation from the outside world.
    “There are internal people and external people. External people are more likely to spend or waste their creative resources. They are constantly faced with temptations that did not come my way. It was an advantage that the homely, less popular child has. I was forced to develop my interior self, not be dependent on the others. Then my work brought me a kind of appreciation, even love, you might say, that I never expected. Perhaps that made it all sweeter, the cream on the bun.
    “My private person, the real me, is a very shy person, not at all the public impression,” he told me. “The man is not different from the boy. To understand me, you have to accept that I’m really, truly shy, you know, and I have been so all of my life. When you start out that way as a child, it’s rare that you lose it. I certainly didn’t. As a child, I found solace in my mother’s company, and in my own.”
    A childhood passion he could pursue alone was collecting anything to do with travel, especially tram and omnibus maps. “I kept my collections of maps, timetables, schedules, tickets, and transfers in an orderly, careful way. I liked to see each thing in its place and in perfect condition.”
    He imagined himself traveling every route, and then he set out to do just that. This interest was then extended to other cities. “I’d never been on the New York subway,” he said, “but the first time I visited New York, I felt I could have traveled anywhere in the city because I had memorized every line.”
    He collected maritime schedules. “The magical moment in any journey,” he told me, “is that first moment the ship or the train departs. It’s as if you’re already a thousand miles away from where you started. I never get the same feeling with air travel.”
    Hitchcock disliked the names Alfred and Joseph, and was soon known as “Hitch” to his classmates. Later in life, he was known to say to people he met, though not to women, “Call me Hitch, without a cock.”
    Hitchcock’s education in Catholic schools left a lasting impression on him, particularly the Jesuit school, St. Ignatius. “What did I learn in Jesuit school? A consciousness of good and evil, that both are always with me. They taught me control, organization,