How I met Alfred

This post came about in response to a Blog-a-thon thing, hosted by Squish at the Film Vituperatem. However, this is not what everyone else is writing about. Here I will discuss no movies, ponder no motifs, think on no merits. This is a story. The story of how I met Alfred before I really knew him, and how I knew him without realizing I had met him before.

Alfred Hitchcock is my favorite director. But why? All of his films came out before I was born. I was less than a year old when he died. I started seeing movies of his in high school. As a budding film buff, surely I would view the “necessary” movies in his canon. Now I’ve seen nearly everything he made. For some reason, though, my connection to Alfred was much deeper than the appreciation of his films. It was something inside, something firmly rooted, something that had to have started long before I saw any of his films.

So what the heck was it? For your viewing pleasure, I explore for you here a trio of meetings, in reverse chronological order:

III. Where do I know him from…?

I think the first Hitchcock film I ever met was either Rear Window or Psycho. I was in high school. If it was Rear Window, then I saw it with my younger brother some weekend night, in between Pulp Fiction and Heat and The Usual Suspects and all the other movies that high schoolers always want to see.

So let’s pretend it was Psycho.

I saw Psycho for the first time with a group of friends in a small tv room in the middle of the night. Only one of them had seen it before, and he was giddy with the expectation of our reactions. I have since become giddy with the expectation of the reactions of friends of mine.

I had wanted to see it, but I don’t know why. I don’t know how I heard of it. I had heard of Alfred Hitchcock (How could I call myself a film buff if I hadn’t?), but had yet to experience his filmmaking.

I enjoyed the film, though it didn’t become a favorite until I truly got “into” movies, and got to see it on the big screen, and came to appreciate Hitchcock and his filmmaking talents.

It was my introduction to Alfred. Or was it? He seemed awfully familiar…

II. “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”

We didn’t have cable growing up. So while I embraced “Duck Tales” and “Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers,” I was denied one great beacon of childhood media: Nickelodeon.

My house was Nickelodeonless. My grandparents’ houses were a different story. During the couple times a year that we visited grandparents my brother and I, over the frownings of our elders, caught ourselves up on the years of cable children’s programming we were continuously being denied.

Of course, Nickelodeon didn’t play kid’s shows all day. Around 5 pm they shifted to something called “Nick at Nite.” A bunch of old shows, from a-way back. Did we let that stop us? No! We were going to watch that Nickelodeon whether it was being marketed to us or not!

So in maybe fourth or fifth grade, inbetween “Taxi” and “The Patty Duke Show” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Green Acres,” I discovered “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

Things that purport to be scary are exciting to most kids. In the last several years, it’s been R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps. For me, it was Camp Haunted Hills, or The Monster’s Ring, or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” fit right in with this childhood fascination with fear.

It was here that I first saw Alfred, stepping out from his famous silhouette to introduce each episode. Though I didn’t see many episodes (we didn’t spend that much time at the grandparents’, and “AHP” was always on at dinner time), I remembered them, and was always excited to see a few during each visit. I enjoyed the thrill of the episodes, and particularly looked forward to Alfred’s usually humorous introductions and interludes. It is quite possible that I liked Alfred’s segments even better that the show itself. Why was that, do you think?

I have always assumed that it was my desire to see something “scary” that drew me to “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” Or the basic, childhood desire to watch as much television as possible. As a child, I never needed a reason to watch tv. After I came into contact with Alfred’s films, I eventually made the connection between the man who introduced each episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and the man who walked in front of that car in Psycho. And that was that. Now you know how I met Alfred. On a television screen in Dillon, Colorado.

But wait! There’s more!

I. The Three Investigators

The Three Investigators was (and is) a children’s mystery book series created and originally written by Robert Arthur. Its publication began in the 1964, and during the 1980s, when I was in elementary school, it was my mystery series of choice. I had read some Hardy Boys, and many of my mom’s Nancy Drews, but neither of them (even with a girl named George) grabbed me like the adventures of the Three Investigators.

Jupiter took out a card and handed it to the officer. It was one of the firm’s business cards. It said:

THE THREE INVESTIGATORS
“We Investigate Anything”
? ? ?
First Investigator. . . . . . . . . . . .Jupiter Jones
Second Investigator. . . . . . . . Pete Crenshaw
Records and Research. . . . . . . .Bob Andrews

I loved them. They were guys. They were smart. They had business cards (as a kid I often had my dad make me business cards, though my occupation was not nearly so glamorous; I was usually a toy maker). They rode around in a Rolls Royce (thanks to a contest won by Jupiter Jones). They figured out the mysteries all by themselves. And maybe the clincher: They had the coolest headquarters I had ever heard of. Jupiter’s family owned a junkyard, and the guys created their headquarters out of an old trailer, buried in other junk, with secret entrances, entry codes, and even a telephone.

In a moment all three boys were scrambling through the long section of corrugated pipe which formed Tunnel Two, the secret entrance they used most. They had put some old carpets on the bottom, so that the corrugations didn’t bruise their knees, and they could slither out through the exit as fast as eels. In a moment they were threading their way through the stacks of junk which Jupiter had had Hans and Konrad, the yard helpers, arrange to hide their workshop and Headquarters. They emerged in the open space around the neat shack which served as office for the salvage yard.

All through my elementary years I would dump out my cars and arrange them to make a secret headquarters behind the “junk.” I even had a perfect yellow truck which gave me my own secret entrance. All my best forts were called Headquarters. In my heart, I wanted to be a member of the Three Investigators.

So you can see the deep connection I had with the Three Investigators, the way they affected different parts of my life, my thinking, my beginnings as a consumer of story.

A few years ago I thought of the Three Investigators, and set out to rediscover them, via amazon.com. At this point in my life I had seen most of Alfred’s movies, Psycho and Rear Window were among my favorites of all time, and I was at the tail-end of a rather snobby phase of film-going. I had finished school and was teaching fourth grade, thinking back to my own life as a fourth grader. You can imagine my complete surprise when an alternate series title came up as “Alfred Hitchcock & the Three Investigators.” That didn’t seem right. I would have remembered that. Something as big as that.

For the first thirty books in the Three Investigators series, Alfred Hitchcock wrote lent his name to an introduction to the story. In the first book, The Secret of Terror Castle, he is a major character, enlisting the boys’ help in looking for a haunted house for his next film. In subsequent mysteries, he acts as a sort of mentor or benefactor, going over the clues and discussing the case after the boys have uncovered the solution. If he felt that the boys had done a nice job, he agreed to introduce the story in their next book.

The following day, when Bob’s notes were completed, they went to call on Alfred Hitchcock, who took a keen interest in all their cases since he had agreed to introduce them–if he thought they were well handled.

In the big office, the boys sat upright waiting while the famous motion picture and television producer read over the details of the case. From time to time he nodded and a couple of times he chuckled.

Finally he put the sheaf of papers down.

“Well done, lads,” he said. “Quite an adventure.”

“I’ll buy a double helping of that!” Pete said fervently.

. . . .

“Luck,” Mr. Hitchcock said, “has to be aided by ability. I feel all three of you showed great ability in this case. I will be happy to introduce it.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jupiter said, and they rose. They were almost out of the office when Mr. Hitchcock called to them.

What would my opinion of Alfred be if I had not read these stories? Or if I had even been born a few years later? After Alfred’s death in 1980, the boys’ benefactor for subsequent editions became fictional detective Hector Sebastian. In 1984 and ’85, the publishers of the revised all thirty of the Hitchcock editions, replacing Alfred with Sebastian, and replacing him in the first story with a fictional film director, Reginald Clarke. I found the series at the tail-end of its Hitchcock window. Though the series is still published (our school library has several titles), Alfred is nowhere to be seen. He’s been written out and forgotten.

I would speculate that without the Three Investigators, I would not have so readily embraced Alfred Hitchcock’s films, or found “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” so interesting and appealing. Perhaps I wouldn’t even be so interested in movies. My whole existence as a media consumer may have shifted severely.

So I found, much later, that Alfred had permeated my thinking long before I even knew who he was, or that he was a real person. And by the time I came to this realization, he had already become a part of my life through another path. He came at me from two directions, affected me from both, shaped me. When I discovered the Three Investigators connection, it was as if I had come full circle, or like a light that had always been dim-but-present had suddenly been flicked on.

I met Alfred on three different occasions, but I’ll never forget who he is again.

‘Nuff said.

All Three Investigators passages come from The Mystery of the Green Ghost by Robert Arthur, © 1965 by Random House, Inc.