Christopher Zara - Tortured artists : from Picasso and Monroe to Warhol and Winehouse, the twisted secrets of the worlds most creative minds

On a quiet street in Leytonstone, a remote section of East London, a six-year-old boy exits the greengrocery that bears his family name. Clutching a note that his domineering father had placed in his hand a few minutes earlier, the boy starts off toward the local police precinct a few blocks away. He stops for traffic, which in 1905 is mostly horse-drawn streetcars, then proceeds nervously to the precinct walkway.

The boy is homely by any definition. Hes plump, with a round face and protruding bottom lip. His overt shortcomings are compounded by a debilitating shyness that cripples him in the presence of authority figures. Still, the boys father gave him explicit instructions: Take the note to the station and hand it to the policeman on duty. Knowing that he had misbehaved earlier in the day, the boy is terrified that some form of punishment awaits him at his destination. Nevertheless, he carries out his fathers orders. He enters the station and hands the note to the officer at the front desk. The officer reads it in silence and looks down with an impassive stare.

Come with me, he says.

The two of them start down a long corridor and approach an empty jail cell, where the officer orders the boy to enter. With escape not an option, the boy does as hes told. He comes to the center of the cell and awaits further instructions, but before he can turn around, he hears the rumbling sound of hinge bearings rolling along the iron doorframe until the cell doors clank shut behind him. He turns to face the officer, who meets his gaze with narrowing eyes.

This is what we do to naughty boys.

The boy watches helplessly from behind the cold, rusty bars as the officer disappears around the corridor, leaving the child alone to ponder his incarceration. Minutes passfive, maybe six. However, they feel like hours to the boy, who spends the time wrestling with the apparent injustice of the situation. Even at this early age, he understands the concept of cruel and unusual punishment with perfect clarity. Its true he had misbehaved, but this sentence is harsh by any standard. And why was he not given a chance to defend himself? A tremor weakens the boys knees as he is overcome by a burgeoning sense of powerlessness, until finally he is devastated by the idea that he has been forced, without cause, to surrender control to authority.

After a few more minutes, the police officer returns and unlocks the door. He smiles and pats the lad on the head, explaining how the boys father, a personal acquaintance, had requested in the letter that his son be taught a lesson for misbehaving. However, what the boy truly learned that day went beyond a lesson in manners. He felt the helplessness of being wrongfully accused, the frustration of excessive punishment, and the complete loss of dignity that accompanies such a predicament.

Fast-forward to 1959. The boy, now pushing sixty and pudgier than ever, attends a screening of his latest film, North by Northwest, which he had just directed for MGM. Audiences and critics alike are riveted by the fast-paced story of a Madison Avenue ad exec, played by Cary Grant, who is mistaken for a government agent and accused of crimes he didnt commit. The film is a huge hit, and its director, Alfred Hitchcock, couldnt be more pleased.

After the screening, members of the Hollywood press, always eager to pigeonhole a person of complex talent, ask Hitchcock about his obsession with stories involving falsely accused heroes. Its a theme in Hitchcocks work that had already been well established: Richard Hannay was the target of a nationwide manhunt in The 39 Steps; Robert Tisdall was wrongfully accused of murder in Young and Innocent; and as for The Wrong Man, well, the title pretty much speaks for itself. Some years later, Hitchcock explains to his biographer, Charlotte Chandler, how the incident at the police precinct in Leytonstone has always stayed with him, how he never forgot the sound of the cell door clanking behind him, how a fear of incarceration and wrongful accusation has plagued him throughout his life. Many of his movies, which have come to define the suspense genre for British and American cinema, are, quite simply, an expression of that fear.