Dave Barbor Collection on Alfred Hitchcock

The collection consists of materials related to Alfred Hitchcock that were collected by Dave Barbor. It includes the following:

One letter written by Alfred Hitchcock to his assistant director, Herbert Coleman (1955).

One letter written by Francois Truffaut to Alfred Hitchcock (circa 1966).

Six letters from Patricia Hitchcock to Peter Halliday regarding "Strangers on a Train" and other matters, 1950-1956, 1983.

Eight photographs, including three taken in 1949 at the set of "Under Capricorn" (one of Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph Cotten, and Michael Wilding; one of Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman sitting opposite an unidentified man; one of Hitchcock and his film crew); four of the extended Hitchcock family (Alma, Patricia, her husband, and children, 1956); and one publicity photograph of Patricia Hitchcock (circa 1950).

Two Hitchcock autographs: one on the inside cover of an Avery Fisher Hall program (1974) and one the other on a page from a 1964 mass market paperback edition of "Marnie."

A birthday card, postcard, program for Hitchcock's memorial mass (1980), and an unopened package of Alfred Hitchcock U.S. postage stamps (1997).

[Detailed descriptions provided by the donor]

Alfred Hitchcock letter: Five-page typed letter signed and annotated, to Hitchcock’s assistant director Herbert Coleman. London, November 6, 1955. The letter begins with a detailed description of the royal command performance of the then-just-released “To Catch a Thief,” punctuated by a humorous interaction with the Duke of Edinburgh and an admission by the Queen that she’d never been to the south of France and looked forward to seeing it in the film. Hitchcock goes on to discuss the mixed test runs of his new film “The Trouble With Harry,” a source of frustration for the director who describes his struggles with Paramount executives over its lack of well-known, profitable actors. He goes into detail on the process of dubbing this film into French. (In the event, the film became a huge success in France.) He then skips ahead to “The Man Who Knew Too Much” - which must have been in post-production - asking Coleman to rearrange some dialogue in the Albert Hall lobby sequence. At this point in his letter he begins making allusions to what must be “The Wrong Man” which was in pre-production ( “I do not know what the answer to my cable is concerning the location of the interiors - whether New York or Hollywood”). Next, he discusses Ugo Betti’s play in London, “The Queen and the Rebels,” which he’s evidently optioned for Broadway (“By the way, would you try and get the copy of the play back from Grace Kelly”). He closes, “Dick Mealand called me and said he had had a conversation with Holman and wanted to know would I be interested in having Audrey Hepburn for “Among the Dead.” I said it was pretty premature and I would not give any answer at this moment.” “Among the Dead” was the working title for “Vertigo” on which production would not start for another two years. Signed, “Yours extremely truly, Hitch” with a holograph annotation “Herman has a copy of this letter.”

Francois Truffaut letter: Eight-leaf autograph letter signed, to Alfred Hitchcock. On Truffaut’s personal letterhead, circa 1966. In French. An enthusiastic, celebratory letter broadly discussing the success of the groundbreaking book, “Le cinéma sélon Hitchcock,” its release in English (“Hitchcock/Truffaut”), and the pair’s respective film projects. Truffaut opens the letter by noting that he has heard news of Hitchcock working on the screenplay for his 51st film (“Topaz,” released in 1969), and congratulates the director on the effort. He quickly shifts to descriptions of the book’s reception in France, favored with universally good reviews: “élogieux, tous sans exception,” save what some saw as the book’s excessive price - 50 francs, approximately $10.00. Truffaut also addresses the forthcoming English and American editions of the book, reassuring Hitchcock that he will be able to take a last look at the translation before publication. Regarding the UK edition, Truffaut notes he has made good progress with publishers Secker and Warburg, including a profitable advance of 3000 pounds, more than double the amount offered by the American publisher Simon and Schuster. As result of the book’s publication Truffaut registers a recent proliferation of Hitchcock film festivals in Paris and the French countryside, but notes that Paramount appears to no longer distribute Hitchcock’s older films, including “Rear Window,” “Vertigo,” and “Psycho” in France, and expresses his hope that the films have not been removed from circulation in Europe. Truffaut succinctly describes his latest film, “The Bride Wore Black,” stating that filming will begin at the end of May in Cannes, and offering to send the English translation of the script to Hitchcock. Tangential to this, Truffaut mentions that he is taking another round of English classes, “car je ne désespère pas d’avoir un jour une conversation directe avec vous,” in spite of the helpful mediation of their shared interpreter Helen Scott. Truffaut closes the letter with a heartfelt tribute to Hitchcock: “Lorsque le livre a été fini et que je l’ai vu imprimé j’ai ressenti le même sentiment de vide et la même tristesse que lorsqu’on livre au public un film achevé. J’avais vécu plus de quatre ans avec et comme il s’agit de vos propos et de vos Idées sur le cinéma, je peux dire qu’il s’agit la, pour moi, du meilleur livre de cinéma avec les écrits d’Eisenstein.”

Patricia Hitchcock materials: Assortments of materials from the actress, including six autograph letters to close friend Peter Halliday regarding “Strangers on a Train” and other matters, eight photographs, and a program for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1980 memorial mass at Westminster Cathedral. Los Angeles, 1950-1983. Two of the letters dating from 1950 offer uninhibited insights into Ms Hitchcock’s experience in the making of her father’s landmark 1951 film, “Strangers on a Train,” providing a rare contemporaneous account of the production including an amusing impression of her father’s cast: “The boys, Farley (Granger) and Bob (Walker), are going to be just wonderful. I’m not so sure about Ruth Roman - she’s the sexy type but terribly hard and by no means ‘a lady’! Another letter, later in the production, describes a freezing cold night on location filming the famous fairground sequence: “The picture is really a ‘blood and sweat’ toil. Ruth (Roman) is turning out to be quite tough to get anything out of and Farley (Granger) is just - well, Farley. Bob Walker is magnificent. It’ll be his picture and I’m so glad. He really needs it.” The fifth letter, signed and dated December 4, 1956, briefly discusses Hitchcock’s “The Wrong Man” (1956).

There’s synchronicity in my two collecting interests: Nabokov and Hitchcock were both born in 1899; in 1925 they each married women who would play inestimable roles in their creative output; they each immigrated to the United States in 1940; their respective masterpieces, “Lolita” and “Vertigo,” both appeared in 1958; while each was widely considered preeminent in his field, they were both denied the ultimate recognition that field bestowed - the Nobel Prize and the Oscar. Nabokov did pre-decease Hitchcock, however, by three years.

My first Hitchcock “acquisition” was a copy at retail of “Hitchcock/Truffaut” (Simon & Schuster, 1967) in which Hitchcock drew his profile for me during a location shoot in Georgetown for his 1969 film “Topaz.” Professor John Glavin, who was there with his wife Maggie, tells me he references the occasion in his screenwriting courses. That year I also acquired for about twenty dollars a complete set of original lobby cards and posters for “Vertigo” at Cinemabilia in Greenwich Village. A not infrequent part of collecting, I regret to say, is losing. That archive (i.e. the autographed book plus posters and lobby cards), which one appraiser estimates at $50,000 today, was left behind in a careless move over the course of many moves I made in the following years.

A five-page letter of 1955 that Hitchcock wrote from London to his associate producer Herbert Coleman in Hollywood is an exceptional document that I acquired fifty years after misplacing my original Hitchcock archive. The letter had been sold at auction more than once before I bought it from a book dealer in Baltimore; but it seems none of its previous owners read it closely enough to understand the extent of Hitchcock’s career in his prime that it covers, the number of major films it deals with as he juggled five projects at once. It opens with Hitchcock’s recounting of a command performance of his just released “To Catch A Thief,” goes on to discuss the mixed test runs of his newly completed film “The Trouble With Harry,” detailing the process of dubbing it into French. The care he took with the French version paid off as the film became a huge success in France. He then skips ahead to “The Man Who Knew Too Much” - which was in post-production - asking Coleman to rearrange some dialogue in the Albert Hall lobby sequence. Then he makes an allusion to what must be “The Wrong Man,” probably in pre-production (“I do not know what the answer to my cable is concerning the location of the interiors - whether New York or Hollywood”). Next, he discusses Ugo Betti’s play in London, “The Queen and the Rebels,” which he has evidently optioned for Broadway (“By the way, try and get the copy of the play back from Grace Kelly”). He closes discussing a suggestion of using Audrey Hepburn in “Among the Dead,” the working title for “Vertigo” on which production would not begin for another two years.

Twice, Hitchcock and Nabokov explored working together. In the early 1960s, Hitchcock wrote Nabokov proposing two possible scenarios on which they might collaborate - a spy thriller or a comedy thriller focussing on a family of crooks running a hotel. Nabokov nixed the cold-war thriller but expressed interest in the comedy. Nabokov wasn’t free, however, to start work immediately and Hitchcock’s needs were “immediate and urgent.” In the early 1970s Hitchcock telephoned Nabokov before he settled on making “Frenzy” to ask if there were any possibility of collaborating. By then, Nabokov could no longer contemplate undertaking a screenplay; his plate was full to brimming over with translating the rest of his Russian work and beginning new work in English.

While it’s a stretch to suggest that either man influenced the other, a number of studies explore an indirect influence (Alfred Appel’s “Nabokov’s Dark Cinema,” Barbara Straumann’s “Figurations of Exile,” Barbara Wyllie’s “Nabokov at the Movies”). In the 1920s, both Nabokov and Hitchcock were in Berlin where Hitchcock worked at the UFA studios and where Nabokov worked as an extra. German Expressionist tropes figure in the work of both men in that period and later. (Serendipitously, Nabokov met in 1937 a “very sharp-eyed little actress,” Elizaveta Nikolaevna Kedrova, in hot pursuit of a role in one of his plays; she turns up thirty years later as Lila Kedrova, Hitchcock’s avowed favorite actor among the cast of his dismal 1966 thriller “Torn Curtain.”) After 15 years in Berlin where he and Vera frequented a cinema in their Wilmersdorf neighborhood, there’s no evidence that Nabokov went often to films in Cambridge or Ithaca; but we do know that he saw and admired Hitchcock’s 1955 black comedy, “The Trouble With Harry,” whose humor he said was close to his own. (May I be the first to point out that Hitchcock hired Saul Steinberg, an artist Nabokov knew and admired from “The New Yorker,” for that film’s title credit background drawings?) In his speech at the Cornell centennial memorial for his father in 1999, Dmitri recalled “The Honeymooners” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” as his family’s favorite TV programs while they lived in Ithaca.