The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away by Christopher McKittrick
'Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away' by Christopher McKittrick
“What in the world can you write about me?” Vera Miles asked a journalist in 1958. Biographer Christopher McKittrick gives a belated answer with Vera: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away. Miles is remembered by cineastes and film scholars for supporting roles in Hitchcock’s Psycho (no, she didn’t die in the shower) and John Ford’s The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. She was almost cast in Vertigo, but pregnancy and other delays left Kim Novak with the unforgettable part.
Miles could be glibly dismissed as an also-ran, a footnote, but McKittrick is determined to chronicle a prolific actress who evaded stardom. She comes across as unconcerned with celebrity and eager to work at any acting job offered her while juggling the roles of wife and mother.
Although overshadowed in memory by stars of her day such as Janet Leigh, Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe, Miles was a familiar face if not a familiar name. Her career began when she was crowned Miss Kansas in 1948. The contest win led to a contract with RKO under the erratic reign of Howard Hughes. She received acting lessons but little work, and her contract was sold to 20th Century Fox in 1949. Fox paid her salary but gave her little work until the 1955 flick Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle.
However, Miles did not sit in idleness but hurled herself into the nascent medium of television as guest star on “Four Star Playhouse,” “Science Fiction Theatre” and a dozen other shows. Ford and Hitchcock discovered her on TV; Ford cast her in The Searchers (1956) and Hitchcock in The Wrong Man (1956).
Those films were the high watermark of her career. Perhaps one of the reasons she’s overlooked by film historians is her tenure as the “Disney mom” in a raft of forgettable live actions features by the studio in the ‘60s. She may have been playing herself, given that she refused roles demanding long absences from her family.
McKittrick’s biography will probably serve as the fullest account of her varied career. Vera: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away is published by University Press of Kentucky.
