Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  For the role of Sam Loomis, the heroine’s lover, described in the script as “a good-looking, sensual man with warm humorous eyes and a compelling smile,” Universal lobbied for contract player John Gavin, a strapping mannequin in the Rock Hudson mold. Hitchcock knew the role was too small to attract a major player, but he stonewalled the studio heads while he, Peggy Robertson, and, sometimes, writer Stefano viewed film on other candidates: Stuart Whitman, Cliff Robertson, Tom Tryon, Leslie Neilson, Brian Keith, Tom Laughlin, Jack Lord, Rod Taylor (who was to star in The Birds), and Robert Loggia (who would play Sam in Psycho II in 1983). Again, budget constraints and availability forced Hitchcock to choose Gavin over top-contender Stuart Whitman. An MCA client, Gavin could be borrowed from Universal-International for six weeks at $30,000. “I guess he’ll be all right,” Hitchcock said with a shrug after watching Gavin’s dramaturgic talents taxed by a Ross Hunter tearjerker. Contracts were final for all four leads by November 18. Several Hitchcock associates recall the director’s taking wry amusement in the film’s highest acting salary: $40,000—the precise amount heroine Mary Crane pilfers from her boss.

  Hitchcock ribbed the press by announcing that Judith Anderson and Helen Hayes were the top candidates to play Mother. The quote prompted a deluge of letters and telegrams from senior actresses and their agents desperate to play the role. “Will I be with you this time?” wired actress Norma Varden, unforgettable in Strangers on a Train as the flighty Washington dowager nearly throttled by maniacal Bruno Anthony. Wired back Hitchcock, with a touch of malice: “I am afraid not. What a pity!”

  In fact, Hitchcock was to employ a small, faceless platoon to capture the many moods of Mother. Margo Epper, a twenty-four-year-old stunt double, was hired for shots of stalking toward the shower curtain with the raised knife. Ann Dore handled shots involving physical contact with the terrified victim. For the overhead shots of Mother sashaying from the bedroom to stab Detective Arbogast or being carried downstairs by Norman, Hitchcock employed Mitzi Koestner, a little person who did stunt and double work and had appeared as a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. Paul Jasmin, today a fashion photographer and painter who has sold work to such stars as Barbra Streisand and Robert Stack, provided Mother’s offstage voice, while character actress Virginia Gregg dubbed the voice-overs. As Anthony Perkins pointed out, “Everybody had a bit of a crack at it. He [Jasmin] has a line. Virginia certainly has a lot of them. I think another actress has a couple, too.” Veteran actress and Emmy-winner Jeanette Nolan is the third voice.

  For the supporting cast, Hitchcock acted on two suggestions from screenwriter Stefano. His first recommendation was stage and television actor Martin Balsam for the role of Detective Arbogast, described in the script as possessing “a particularly unfriendly smile.” Stefano also recommended Simon Oakland, another stage and TV scene-stealer, to play Dr. Richman, the glib psychiatrist who verbally unravels Norman’s psychological peccadillos for the benefit of Mary’s sister, Mary’s lover Sam, and any audience member rusty on his Freud.

  Hitchcock cast his daughter Patricia (Stage Fright [1950], Strangers on a Train [1951] in a small role as the heroine’s chirpy, poignant office mate, Caroline—uncharitably characterized in the script as “a girl in the last of her teens.” Upon learning that his daughter wanted to pursue acting as her profession, Hitchcock had advised: “If you’re going to be an actress, be an intelligent one.” While Patricia was studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Hitchcock cast her in a small role in Stage Fright, explaining, “I want to see if she learned anything at the academy and also if it was worth the money.” On signing Patricia for Psycho, Hitchcock half-jibed the press: “After ten years I thought it was time I gave her a job.” But the director could hardly be accused of nepotism in the area of salary: Miss Hitchcock was paid $500 per day with a two-day guarantee.

  Hitchcock hired reliable supporting players in Frank Albertson as the lecherous oilman Cassidy (although he wanted Alan Reed), John McIntire and Lurene Tuttle (who received $1,250, total) as, respectively, the bucolic sheriff and his wife, Mort Mills as a menacing highway patrolman, and, as a deputy who brings “Norma” Bates blankets in her detention cell, TV star Ted Knight (who was paid $150 per day) making an early film appearance. With his players in place, Hitchcock was nearly ready to begin shooting.

  Production Design

  Hitchcock believed that canny art direction and set design were crucial to the mood of the picture. When the director’s first-choice designers Robert Boyle (North by Northwest) and Henry Bumstead (The Man Who Knew Too Much) proved to be unavailable, Boyle recommended Joseph Hurley. Hurley was a highly respected, personable production illustrator, and Hitchcock overlooked the fact that he had no previous credits in art direction. “No bad habits to unlearn,” Hitchcock confided to his colleagues. The director hired Hurley on November 30, less than a month prior to the scheduled start of principal photography. But the relationship between Hitchcock and Hurley got off to a rocky start when the production designer, somewhat insecure about his first feature assignment, miffed the penny-pinching Hitchcock by requesting to be partnered with production designer Robert Clatworthy (Touch of Evil). Hitchcock acquiesced when he realized that Psycho would enjoy the services of two talented designers for about half the price of Boyle or Bumstead. “Joe and I went to Hitchcock’s house in Bel-Air to discuss the film,” recalled Clatworthy, a six-time Oscar nominee for art direction who had assisted Robert Boyle on Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942). (Joseph Hurley died in 1982, after contributing to such pictures as Altered States and Something Wicked This Way Comes.) “Even though Hitchcock was an art director himself originally, he spoke only very generally. On the Bates house, he didn’t say he wanted any particular look—which was one of the great things about him. He let you present your ideas. I was happy the picture would be in black and white because I always attempted to take out the color, gray it down so it didn’t look like a carnival.”

  With a rapidly approaching production date staring them in the face, Clatworthy and Hurley immediately began to design the Bates house and motel. Contrary to the assertion by some that the Psycho house was a standing set at the studio, and to the assertion by novelist James Michener that the residence was based on a “haunted house” built in the early 1800s in Kent, Ohio (a house that served as a center for the radical Students for Democratic Society after the Kent State student killings), the designs of Hurley and Clatworthy were original. Their concepts sprang from solid backgrounds in art theory, history, and canny movie design. “Joe did a lot of illustrations for the movie,” Clatworthy said. “It was pretty simple with Hitch, who was a quiet, not particularly exciting man to work with—except that he excited you about his project. If he liked the sketches, that was it. If he didn’t, he’d give you very specifically what he wanted changed—just once and that would be it. On the house and motel, he didn’t say anything much, so we picked a spot kind of off by itself on the back lot and built the thing from the ground up.”

  Studio crews spent weeks erecting the facades of the house and motel—the former like a skeletal finger pointing skyward, the latter a rangy horizontal—on a hill off “Laramie” Street, named for a Revue sagebrush-and-six-guns series then on NBC. For a modest studio, such set construction smacked of the big time. An apt inspiration for the Bates house may have been the playfully eerie Addams Family residence familiar from the celebrated Charles Addams cartoons in the New Yorker. A more direct influence was surely Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad, the canvas depicting a melancholy mansard-roofed house, which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hurley and Clatworthy’s design for Hitchcock was very suggestive of Hopper’s creation—from its garret-story, roof-cresting and oculus window, to its cornices and pilasters. One might almost expect to glimpse Mrs. Bates silhouetted in the window of the sloping dormer in Hopper’s 1925 painting.

  In published dialogues with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock characterized the architectural style of the house as “C
alifornia Gothic, or, when they’re particularly awful, they’re called ‘California Gingerbread.”’ Construction costs for the Bates manse—the most expensive set of the picture—came to a mere $15,000. Clatworthy and Hurley cannibalized several “stock unit” sections, including a tower from the house used in the James Stewart man-and-his-rabbit comedy Harvey (1948), as well as majesterial doors originally from the Crocker House of San Francisco. Costs of refurbishing another standing exterior, the one used for the Fairvale church, came to $1,250.

  Robert Clatworthy assessed the interiors required by Hitchcock as “simple” and the bare-bones aspects were reflected in low, below-the-line production costs. Total costs for building and dressing the foyer, hall, a partial kitchen, and stairway of the first floor of the Bates home came to $6,000. Costs for Mother’s bedroom and the basement/fruit cellar tallied $1,250 and $2,500, respectively. The Fairvale hardware store and storeroom owned by Sam Loomis cost $3,000. Totals for the corridor and detention room of the “Fairvale County Court House” in which Norman Bates is held: $2,000. Here again, the tight budget was to serve the film splendidly. Clatworthy had demonstrated a “feel” for expressionistically seedy motels and constricted interiors in Touch of Evil, another Universal-International picture, and one on which Orson Welles had predated Hitchcock by two years in being an A-movie director working on a B-movie budget. That both master directors tapped the skills and sensibility of Clatworthy may account for some of the visual echoes from Welles’s film that resonate in Psycho.

  Robert Clatworthy recalls Hitchcock’s being far more finicky about odd, unsettling details of decor—such as the kitschy sculpture of the hands folded in prayer in Mother’s room—than with the structures themselves. Crucial to Hitchcock, too, were the sets for Norman’s parlor behind the motel office, the bathroom, and Mother’s room. In the screenplay, Stefano writes of the parlor: “It is a room of birds… The birds are of many varieties, beautiful, grand, horrible, preying.” Equally telling is the description of the motel bathroom, the scene of the greatest horror of the film. Hitchcock disdained the cliché of staging suspense sequences against the usual set pieces of the dark, haunted house. Thus Stefano writes: “The white brightness … is almost blinding.” Production designer Clatworthy also recalls Hitchcock’s enjoining set decorator George Milo to make certain that the bathroom fixtures gleamed. Hitchcock also told Milo: “Let’s have lots of mirrors, old boy.”

  Another aspect of the film’s interior design on which Hitchcock insisted initially puzzled Clatworthy. “The Phoenix real estate office was really nothing special,” observed the designer. “But because Janet Leigh was the star of the picture, I tried twice to sell him on the idea of having her desk just outside the boss’s office. He never responded. I only found out the morning we were going to shoot that that’s where his daughter [Patricia] was going to sit. He put Janet way out yonder in Siberia.”

  Studio construction crews built the interiors of the Bates house on Stage 18-A, as well as on the venerable “Phantom” Stage. The latter soundstage was named for the 1925 Lon Chaney silent version of The Phantom of the Opera, one of Universal’s prestigious Super-Jewel productions, directed by Rupert Julian. With much fanfare by the studio at the time, the stage had been built to house a replica of the Paris Opera with its underground catacombs and five tiers of balconies. The Phantom was to undergo so much cutting before its release that one glimpses little of the set in the movie. No matter. For Hitchcock, the stage was ideal. It could accommodate the director’s high angles and basement, stairwell, and fruit cellar set pieces. Besides, think of the associations. Several Psycho crew members said that Hitchcock took ghoulish delight in having the Bates stairwell built on the exact spot on which the chandelier plunged in The Phantom of the Opera.

  While his construction crews completed their tasks, Hitchcock and the studio research department ironed out several script problems. On November 23, studio researchers discovered two names similar to “Mary Crane” in the Phoenix, Arizona, phone directory. They advised Hitchcock to choose a new name for his heroine from among “Marjorie, Martha, Marion, Mildred, Muriel, Maxine, Margo, and Marlene.” Hitchcock chose “Marion.” The legal eagles further suggested that the name of the psychiatrist (to be played by actor Simon Oakland) be altered from “Dr. Simon.” Joseph Stefano renamed the character “Dr. Richman.” Researchers also suggested that Hitchcock use a “dummy record label” rather than specify Beethoven’s Eroica in the scene in which Lila Crane searches the room of Norman Bates. Hitchcock declined to do so.

  Wardrobe

  Dressing Psycho became the challenge of Helen Colvig and Rita Riggs. Both were accustomed to working for the Hitchcock TV show, but were novices at feature films. Vincent Dee, their supervisor at Revue, had enjoyed several preliminary meetings with Hitchcock but had unexpectedly required surgery. Recalled Rita Riggs, who worked with Hitchcock on the set and would go on to dress films for such directors as John Huston and Arthur Penn: “We were so excited about the prospect because Mr. Hitchcock had such a circle of collaborators around him. In those days, there really was a caste system of film people as opposed to television. But once you were enveloped in Mr. Hitchcock’s projects, you were in.”

  Wardrobe supervisor Helen Colvig observed of her Hitchcock assignment: “[Hitchcock] had great fun with his collaborators, way before he even got into working with actors. His joy, and one of his great gifts, was in getting people stirred up about what stirred him. I was kind of shaky, but I’d been told Hitchcock had it in his mind to do it as television—realism, speed, with a documentary feeling around the edges. In our first meeting, his research was so pure, he laid out photographs for every major character. In Phoenix, he’d found a girl like Marion, went into her home, photographed everything from her closet, her bureau drawers, her suitcases.”

  Rita Riggs, who had “grown comfortable” with the director after costuming his droll introductory appearances on his TV show, marveled at how thoroughly Hitchcock had preplanned a modest-scale film. “The real difference working with Hitchcock and his circle was that you had an entire, cohesive picture laid out before you on storyboards. He truly used storyboards to convey his ideas and desires to all his different craftsmen. You knew every angle in the picture, so there was not a lot of time wasted talking an item to death. We also didn’t have to waste time worrying about things like shoes, for instance, because we knew he wasn’t going to show them in the shot.”

  Helen Colvig recalled “a long, solid meeting” after which she was left with an unshakable opinion of her director. “Not only did he already see the picture cut and edited, but he could already envision it advertised in the newspapers.” According to both costume experts, most of the clothing requirements on Psycho were “simple.” “Mr. Hitchcock insisted on classicism,” explained Riggs. “He said, ‘We may laugh at ourselves in ten years, but our fashions will come around again in twenty.’ He wouldn’t just think of the economic bracket of his characters, but of the line, the momentum of the film itself.”

  According to Riggs, Janet Leigh’s dresses and blouses were purchased off-the-rack from the popular, stylish Beverly Hills store, Jax. That in itself was unheard-of for a major film and a star player of the day. As Helen Colvig put it, “Why make the dress when you can buy it?” Riggs and Colvig hand-picked a medium-blue wool jersey for the actress because, said Riggs, “Mr. Hitchcock was very specific about good wool because it takes light so beautifully and photographs a very rich gray.”

  Both collaborators recall many of Hitchcock’s costuming dictates as being far more particular. “He was very specific about what his daughter Patricia wore in the picture,” Rita Riggs recalls. “It was a green silk shantung.” Another Hitchcock concern was the bra and slip worn by Janet Leigh in the amatory opening scenes in the Phoenix hotel room. “Janet Leigh wanted her lingerie made to order,” remembered Helen Colvig. “Mr. Hitchcock said, ‘Oh no, my dear. That just won’t work for the character. We want that underwear to be identifi
able to many women all over the country.’ She [Leigh] had a lot of trouble with that, but was satisfied when she got his point of view. He wanted to suck people in so deep, they didn’t have time to say, ‘Oh, this is just a movie.’” Janet Leigh recalls no such controversy. “I never wanted the lingerie made to order,” Leigh observed. “In fact, I suggested the half-bra because it was like what I normally wore.”

  “A bra and slip—even just showing the midriff section—was very racy then and fairly verboten,” Rita Riggs explained. “There was great equivocation about whether Janet would wear a black or white bra and slip in the opening. It went on and on. We had each ready, of course, and not until we were almost ready to shoot did Mr. Hitchcock finally choose white for the opening, black for after she steals the money. It was strictly for character statement. He had an obsession for the ‘good’ girl or the ‘bad’ girl.”

  Another Hitchcock costuming absolute centered upon the character of Mother. Although both the novel and the screenplay pinpoint the murder of Mother at age forty, Helen Colvig explained, “He wanted to go right to the image of the sweet little old bent-over lady, so that the public might be fooled. Right from the beginning, he told me he was going to trick the eye by using Anthony Perkins, a few stunt women, as well as a four-foot-tall little person.” Small wonder Rita Riggs called mama’s dresses “the most important pieces in the picture.” She said, “It had to be a print that one would recognize and would transfer from several different-sized figures, moving and static. In silhouette, that print had to look very important. We also had a terrible furor trying to get those old ladies’ lace-up shoes in enough sizes, including a women’s size ten for Tony Perkins!”