‘Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away’
By Christopher McKittrick
University Press of Kentucky, 320 Pages

Vera Miles was supposed to star in “Vertigo.” Hitchcock had spotted her in an impressive television performance and was, according to Christopher McKittrick, “positioning Ms. Miles as his favored leading lady, a role that had been abandoned by Grace Kelly.” On screen and off, Ms. Miles was dressed only in “black, gray, or white,” with only pearls as jewelry. A famous costume designer, Edith Head, followed the director’s specifications for a “complete wardrobe.” 

Just after the November 1956 makeup and hairstyle tests and other pre-production procedures, Ms. Miles in February 1957 told Hitchcock she was pregnant. Rather than delay production of “Vertigo,” the director turned to Kim Novak. He would use Ms. Miles later in “Psycho” in the role of Lila Crane, but Hitchcock lost interest in making her a star.

Neither Ms. Miles nor Hitchcock appear to have resented what happened. She does not seem to have been the kind of actress to harbor regrets, and she was outraged when the late Donald Spoto’s “The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock” spotlighted his abuse of female leads, especially Tippi Hedron, who was vociferous about his viciousness.

So incensed was Ms. Miles that she refused to be interviewed by Spoto. The “strong-willed’ Ms. Miles detested the very idea that she would have permitted herself to be the director’s victim. She went on to a very active career in television and to significant roles in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “The Searchers.” A sign of Ms. Miles’s independence, Mr. McKittrick points out, is the television work she did while under contract to Hitchcock. She never allowed him, as did Hedron, to treat her as his exclusive property. 

Vera Miles is 95 years old and has been retired from acting for nearly 30 years. She has not written a memoir, and has not made herself available to be interviewed for quite some time — how much time is hard to say, and Mr. McKittrick makes no mention of having tried to contact her. His biography is mainly based on secondary sources, not on interviews or archival work.

With an unwilling subject, what is a biographer to do? Certainly, the subject should be approached, no matter how hopeless the biographer may think such contact would be. A persistent biographer would do even more — talk to the subject’s friends, interview them if they are willing, and then return to the subject herself, explaining how much the biographer has accomplished, and also what the subject might wish to clarify, given the testimony of others.

Ms. Miles might not relent, and might not even answer a query letter, but without making the effort, the biographer and his readers will never know what might have been missed. 

At the risk of becoming a pest, I’d try various approaches, asking Ms. Miles, say, to comment on Spoto’s Hitchcock biography. Ms. Miles is on record briefly stating her rejection of Spoto, but a biographer in Spoto’s wake ought to explain why it is important for her to say more, to set the record straight, to point a new biographer in what she considers to be the right direction. 

If she is unresponsive, show the biography to her friends, who might seek her comments. The point about biography is to secure some kind of proximity to the subject. 

Mr. McKittrick regrets that Ms. Miles is not better known but feels she is deserving of the biography he has written. That is a statement that ought to have been addressed to her. Not to be proactive, as Donald Spoto was, signifies a missed opportunity, even though such aggressiveness may excite hostility — even from Vera Miles herself

Mr. McKittrick quotes Rebecca McCallum, the creator/host of the “Talking Hitchcock” podcast, who has called Ms. Miles “very tenacious.” A biographer has to have the same implacable drive, not only to do justice to his subject but to biography itself, which, as Samuel Johnson said, owes an obligation to the truth most of all.

Mr. Rollyson has written biographies of living subjects, including Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag.