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The Hitchcock Paradox
The necessary flexibility in power can manifest in a variety of ways. Consider the extreme situation where one partner seeks to dominate relentlessly and ruthlessly. Alfred Hitchcock is a legendary example. In 1961, he put an obscure thirty-one-year-old model named Tippi Hedren under contract. She thought she’d be a background actor on TV. Then she learned that Hitchcock had cast her as the star in his next feature film, The Birds.
“I really found it so new and difficult,” Hedren said, noting that she “overcompensated by working too hard, by sometimes being too accommodating.” “She was very nervous and unsure of herself,” said the actor Martin Balsam, who worked with her during a screen test, “but she had studied every line and every move that was asked of her, and she tried very hard to do everything.”
Here was a blank slate, exceedingly eager, entirely submissive—just what Alfred Hitchcock liked. “I controlled every movement on her face,” he said. “She wasn’t allowed to do anything beyond what I gave her. It was my control entirely.” Hitchcock began to dictate to her what clothes to wear, what food to eat, and whom she could see. To keep tabs on her, he had her tailed by members of his crew.
This was his thing. When he hired Kim Novak to star in Vertigo, he had her over to his house and talked about everything but the film, choosing topics he knew she’d be unfamiliar with. “By the end of the afternoon,” the film’s producer said, “he had her right where he wanted her, docile and obedient and even a little confused.” It’s tempting to write Hitchcock off as a monster, but at the upper reaches of many industries we often find leaders with a power style edging into the tyrannical. Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour’s leadership style earned her the nickname Nuclear Wintour. Scott Rudin, the superproducer behind everything from The Truman Show to The Book of Mormon, was reported by the Wall Street Journal to have fired 250 assistants over a five-year period. (Rudin said the correct number was 119.) He once fired an assistant for bringing him the wrong kind of muffin. He threw his office phone at assistants so frequently that they measured the cord. “The rookies often stood too close,” one told the Journal.
According to Mark Lipton, a professor of management at the New School, stark bullying, tantrums, and other behaviors associated with nine-year-olds commonly intersect with high-level vision, leadership, and prestige. Many CEOs behave so badly, he said, that they exhibit classic symptoms of psychopathology. “What saves them,” Lipton told me, “and I see this in just about every instance where they remain effective, is a deputy, or a spouse—someone who is by their side.”
To succeed in these situations, betas must find a way to both submit and engage—to work in a position of great asymmetry while still making their creative presence felt. In the psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby’s studies of narcissistic visionaries, he found they typically depend heavily on sidekicks Maccoby calls “productive obsessives.” These sidekicks have to be sensitive to the narcissists’ needs—but stand up to them when necessary. In Apple’s early days, when Steve Jobs pressured Steve Wozniak to change the hardware to make the computer smaller and more affordable, Wozniak shot back: “If that’s what you want, go get yourself another computer.” Jobs backed down. All of Jobs’s top partners, Walter Isaacson observed, had the quality of being “deferential” but also “pushing back”—“a tricky balance to maintain.” “I realized very early that if you didn’t voice your opinion,” Jobs’s COO Tim Cook said, “he would mow you down . . . So if you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.”
“It’s true of alphas in general,” the executive coach Eddie Erlandson told me, “that working for them is not for the weak of heart.” But as much as alphas want to dominate, they also want to be effective. They may bristle at pushback, but they need it.
That pushback might mean bringing the gloves to the alpha’s face. Or it might mean simply summoning the energy—and will and talent—to stay in the ring. Hitchcock’s pattern was to choose an actress, isolate and unsettle her, and withhold signs of approval, which would keep her on a gerbil wheel, running round and round, striving to be noticed, striving for praise. “He controlled me totally,” Joan Fontaine said. “He kept me off balance, much to his own delight. He would constantly tell me that no one thought I was any good except himself, and that nobody really liked me and nobody would say anything good about me except himself.”
Fontaine may have been knocked off balance, but she righted herself artfully. In 1940 and 1941, she starred in two Hitchcock releases—Rebecca and Suspicion. She was nominated for an Academy Award for both performances and won an Oscar in the second instance.
How is it that something creative can emerge from a situation that might well be described as abusive? It seems to go like this: the alpha behaves in a tyrannical way, inducing some flavor of fear in his subordinate, who then works all the harder to please or satisfy—or to challenge him. As William James suggested, “the fighting impulse” has been appealed to; “pugnacity and pride” have been roused. This leads to good work—so much that even the abused underlings often want to do it again. And if they don’t, there are others waiting.
Hitchcock surely had no shortage of actors, even though he once left his leading man and lady handcuffed to each other for much of the day, claiming that he had lost the key, when in fact he had deposited it with the studio guard. But for the extremes of domination, nothing beats the story of the climactic scene in The Birds where Tippi Hedren’s character is trapped in an attic. Hedren was told they’d use mechanical birds, but she came to the set to find a cage built to keep the live birds in the room. They spent a week on the scene—“really the worst week of my life,” Hedren said. “Each day I thought—and they told me—just one more hour, just one more shot.” But when she collapsed on the ground—as the scene demanded—the birds would fly off too quickly. Hitchcock had wardrobe sew loops to Hedren’s clothes and he tied the birds to the loops. Her fright, exhaustion, and ultimate surrender didn’t need to be acted.
At one point, Hedren was so beaten down physically and emotionally that her doctor insisted Hitchcock cancel shooting for a week. She spent the week away from the set—but then she came back and finished the film. This is the core characteristic of betas working with extreme alphas. They return. According to Hedren, on the set of the next film they did together, Marnie, Hitchcock insisted she make herself available to him sexually. “That was the moment,” she said, “after three years of trying to cope, when I finally had enough—that was the limit, that was the end.” Hitchcock couldn’t force her to work, but, extreme alpha to the last, he refused to let her out of her contract for another three years.
The ultimate irony of extreme alphas is that they often have someone who dominates them. We’ve touched on this in the discussion of the star and the director. Valentino Garavani is the epitome of an alpha male—a swaggering, indomitable figure—except, from the account Matt Tyrnauer has given of their relationship, it is clear that Giancarlo Giammetti is actually the dominant presence. Gertrude Stein appropriated her partner Alice B. Toklas’s identity—she wrote under Toklas’s name—to create a self-serving portrait of herself. But as the New York Times reported in its obituary of Toklas, “If Miss Stein dominated the couple’s salon, Miss Toklas seemed to command Miss Stein.” In 1935, Stein was giving a shipboard interview to a group of reporters in New York when, the New York Herald Tribune reported, “Miss Toklas’s slight, menacing figure appeared in the doorway. ‘Come, lovey,’ said Miss Toklas, in a steely-sweet voice. ‘Say good by to your guests. They are leaving.’ Miss Stein leaped to her feet and bounded off into the corridor.”
The star may present as swaggering and all-powerful, but this is a symptom of a profound uncertainty. It’s natural, then, for the star to associate with someone who is quietly self-assured—who can assure him. The frontperson may still need to be seen as in control—that’s often part of the shtick. But he is constantly watching his bellwether.
Perhaps the height of this paradox can be seen with Hitchcock, whose wife, Alma, was “the ultimate arbiter” for his movies, wrote Donald Spoto. “To tell the truth,” said Elsie Randolph, an actor who was close with the couple, “she bossed him.”
Of course, alpha/beta dynamics do not need to be fraught. Not everyone wants to be the boss. “I’m a professional number two man,” Kris Lotlikar, the cofounder of Renewable Choice, a green energy company, told me. “This is what I do best, support someone who has the charisma to sell the world on a vision that I share, and that I help create.” Quayle Hodek, the company’s CEO, considers Lotlikar his “best friend and partner,” but he told me that one key to their relationship is the lack of ambiguity around who gets the final call.
Another common strategy for pairs is to work with authority not as a matter of endemic fact but as a position. Often power is a direct function of roles—each partner will have the final say in his domain. At South Park, Trey makes the final calls on the shows themselves but Matt tends to run lead on business deals. My editor and I have an understanding that, if we disagree about a matter in the text and are not able to come to an agreement, I have the final call, but he has the final say on the cover.
Several pairs told me they solve conflicts by deferring to whoever feels most strongly about the topic at hand. One pair I interviewed went to a couples therapist to negotiate power domains. “We fight like any couple,” said Cathryn Michon, who makes films with her husband, W. Bruce Cameron. “But you can’t do it in front of a film crew.” Since Bruce dealt with budgets, they agreed he’d have authority on money questions. Since the film they were working on at the time was adapted from Cathryn’s book, she got the last word on character and story. “We just laid out clear areas of responsibility and authority,” Cathryn said. “This is how armies function. And film sets are like an army.”
Surprisingly, rigid divisions of power can actually lead to the most fluid exchanges. Kris Lotlikar and Quayle Hodek, the cofounders of Renewable Choice, both told me that Kris, the ostensible deputy, ends up making more management decisions day-to-day. Knowing that a disagreement could be brought to an end at any moment, Quayle told me, makes it far less likely that disagreements will escalate, and easier for him to defer to Kris’s judgment.
Turn-taking may also be a potent strategy when each member of a pair is a natural alpha. Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson, authors of The Alpha Male Syndrome, say they commonly find multiple alphas in organizations. They propose that each alpha should identify his strengths, be it as a “commander,” “visionary,” “strategist,” or “executor.”
The case of the subordinate alpha is a curious one—the aggressive, domineering type who nevertheless finds himself in thrall to a partner. I’ve seen this a number of times. Ralph Abernathy deferred to Martin Luther King Jr. but acted superior to everyone else. Vincent van Gogh put himself in a position where he depended entirely for his sustenance on his brother Theo, yet Vincent was an extremely dominant character. Suzanne Farrell, at times, put an extraordinary drive for domination aside in relation to her primary partner.
James Watson is another example. He told me he was “always the younger brother” in relation to Francis Crick, which is intriguing on both sides, because Crick presents as rather the less competitive of the two of them. He had, Horace Freeland Judson writes, “a talent for friendship in science,” and over his career “coordinated the research of many other biologists, disciplined their thinking, arbitrated their conflicts, communicated and explained their results.” Watson, by contrast, developed a reputation for battle. Competition, he said, “is the dominant motive in science. It starts at the beginning: if you publish first, you become a professor first; your future depends on some indication that you can do something by yourself. It’s that simple. Competitiveness is very, very dominant. The chief emotion in the field. The second is you have to prove to yourself that you can do it—and that’s the same thing.”
Watson has said that, six or seven times in his life, “I had to create a situation where if I lost, I’d be out of a job.” Unless you do that, he said, “someone will run over you.” In one of those situations, at Harvard University, Watson was on the biology faculty with the eminent scientist E. O. Wilson, who pronounced him “the most unpleasant human being” he had ever met at work.
When I asked Watson why he and Crick never worked together after they discovered the mechanism for life in less than a year and a half, he said, “You couldn’t be with Francis and be the boss. Whereas I enjoy being the boss.”
“Crick was the only person to whom you would take second place?”