Phyllis Thaxter

            Thursday was the seventh day of my fast. I’ve been eating mostly tomatoes, avocadoes, grapes, bananas, canned peaches, strawberries and oranges. I run out of tomatoes pretty quickly, so in the early afternoon I rode down to Freshco to get some more. I also bought black grapes, strawberries, a cucumber and some Garden Cocktail.

            I spent a lot of the day catching up on my journal.

            That night I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay starring Phyllis Thaxter as Nora, the matriarch of a banking family. The story begins with $200,000 missing from the bank and Robbie, one of her two sons, the apparent thief, has disappeared. The other son, George goes looking for him while their stepfather, Ralph, stays at home to comfort Nora. After Nora has gone to sleep, Ralph comes downstairs with a suitcase, looking like he’s about to take a trip. Before he can reach the door though, it opens and Robbie walks in. Robbie did not steal the money. He had been missing because he was investigating the theft and he reveals that he knows that Ralph was the thief. Kills Robbie and then hangs him in Robbie’s bedroom. He starts writing a suicide note but the sound of the typewriter wakes Nora. Thinking that Robbie has returned she gets up and goes to find him. When she sees her son hanging there, Ralph tries to tell her he’d killed him by accident. She backs out of the room in shock but tumbles backwards down the stairs, hitting her head. In the hospital she is paralysed and the doctor doesn’t know how much brain capacity she has left. But Nora is fully conscious with only some memory loss. A nurse named Jean is assigned to her care but Ralph is anxious to have Nora at home with him because he wants to make sure she doesn’t begin to speak again and expose him. He hires Jean to be Nora’s nurse. One day while Jean is typing up her report to the doctor, the sound of the typewriter brings back her full memory and she knows that Ralph wants to kill her. When she is alone she struggles to regain movement in her right hand, but she does not give any indication to anyone that she is no longer fully paralysed. One night Ralph arranges for George to take Jean out to dinner. Afraid that she is becoming conscious and will speak soon, he plans to give Nora an overdose of sleeping powder, but she refuses to open her mouth. He decides to smother her with a pillow but Jean and George return from their date early. She sees that Nora is stressed and asks Ralph to leave the room. Nora is moving her hand but Jean wants to be sure that it’s not a convulsion, so she asks her to just squeeze her hand once for “yes” and twice for “no”. This way she discovers that Nora has conscious movement. She asks Nora if she is afraid of Ralph and she squeezes once. Ralph tries to kill Nora again but when Jean tries tom stop him he begins to strangle her. Nora sits up and screams, alerting her son to come running and knock out Ralph.

            Phyllis Thaxter played Martha Kent in the first big Superman movie, but she starred in several Alfred Hitchcock Presents stories, my favourite of which was “The 5:48” in which she plays a woman that confronts her ex-boss and lover at gunpoint on a train after he’d humiliated her and ruined her life. She was a great actress.