Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  Another departure from the standard was the costumes for Vera Miles, Hitchcock’s former protégée, once groomed as a successor to Grace Kelly. In Psycho, Hitchcock relegated Miles to the lesser of two important female roles. According to Rita Riggs, “Vera was gorgeous, very bright, very independent, and very angry throughout the filming of Psycho. Mr. Hitchcock made her look like a dowdy, old-maid schoolteacher although Vera ended up having her things done at Paramount by Edith Head. For most of the film, we saw a lot of the back of her head and she was pretty much stuck in one dress and coat, although they were of a beautiful Rodier fabric in taupe. I have great respect for Miss Head, but I remember thinking ‘Gosh, that’s a rather dowdy fabric and color.’ But it was Mr. Hitchcock’s choice. He was very disappointed with Vera, on whom he had invested a lot of time, thought, and emotion in preparing Vertigo for her before she got pregnant. That was some of his perversity coming through.”

  Although Hitchcock had been known to be as finicky about costumes for his male stars as for his female, Psycho saw him in a more laissez-faire mode. Noted Helen Colvig: “I recall Hitch saying, ‘Either they wear the clothes and do the part the way I want, or they’re not going to be in it.’ But Tony asked Hitch if he might wear clothes of his choice, like the shirt and certain cut of the sweater that holds [the shirt] there, because he has a long neck. Hitch approved because the look worked for Bates, not just for Tony. He had the whole picture so thoroughly in his hands—every element—that I never worked for anyone who was so easy.”

  The shower stabbing sequence loomed as a crucial element that was to require maximum coordination on the part of Hitchcock’s collaborators. “Hitchcock knew the nude scenes were going to be difficult because he was casting a star,” Helen Colvig commented. “In those days, stars tended not to go nude, so he told me they would probably ‘double’ that—but he still wanted options for costuming and makeup if she was willing to go nude or partially nude.”

  Makeup

  Jack Barron, head of the Universal makeup department, supervised the effects for Psycho, and Robert Dawn acted as the on-set artist. Barron, an industry veteran who began as a self-described “makeup flunky” on Citizen Kane, was to work on six subsequent Hitchcock projects. “Even on a ‘small’ picture like Psycho,” Barron said, “you would be summoned to [Hitchcock’s] office expecting a five-minute talk about a specific thing and wind up hearing a discourse on art, current affairs, Hollywood, wine. He loved to talk about having fish flown in from Boston or about his wine cellar that was stocked with rare vintages. The poor man was such a gourmand and couldn’t partake because of blood pressure, his weight, or whatever. It was hard to say if he was a lonely man or just wanted to talk about the picture.”

  During the process of preproduction, Barron was to detect several other idiosyncrasies peculiar to his director. “Hitch wouldn’t say much,” observed Barron, “but sometimes, you had the feeling he believed you should know exactly what he was feeling or thinking. But, a cat can look at a king. Anytime anybody had a question, we asked the king. If you stood up to him and explained your reasons, he would back down. If you didn’t, he’d railroad you. For some reason, he had decided he didn’t want Mort Mills, who was playing the highway patrolman, to look like himself. He said: ‘Change him.’ ‘How far do you want to go?’ I asked. He said: ‘Change him simply.’ So I brought in some mustaches and he immediately pointed one out. Later, he decided against that for the sunglasses, which were not common then. He came up with details that seem tiny but that added a lot to the overall outcome.”

  Hitchcock also defined his expectations of Barron in the matter of the corpse of Mother to be revealed in the Grand Guignol finale. “‘I want this to be a shocker,’” Barron recalled Hitchcock insisting. “‘This woman has been sitting around a long time.’ He only wanted to see the skull and dried skin over that, with a steel-gray hairdo parted in the center.” Hitchcock had based his concepts on the information he received in response to a memo he sent in early November to the studio research department: “What would be the condition of the corpse of a woman who had been poisoned at age forty—embalmed and buried—then, after two months, disinterred and kept in a residence for ten years?” The details (“mummified … [with] brown leatherlike skin over the bones”) were provided by an instructor at a Los Angeles college of mortuary science and Hitchcock conveyed them precisely to Jack Barron and Robert Dawn.

  When Dawn immediately began sketching prototypes, Hitchcock informed him that they were of no use to him. The director only wanted to view tangible models. “Hitch was a stickler for accuracy,” Barron explained. “He didn’t want anything just for the sake of shock. At one point, stuff like maggots crawling in and out of the eye sockets was brought up as a notion, but Hitchcock’s idea was that the corpse had been there for so long—it wasn’t a fresh thing. We did several subtle variations on the head. I mean, what can you do with a skull and skin? But Bob was a heck of a good ‘rubber’ man [a prosthetics man] so he got a real skull, applied rubber to it and colored that.” Hitchcock inspected each successive prototype dummy head presented by the makeup men, always requesting to keep the prosthetic device overnight before suggesting refinements. Some believe that the director wanted first to test the model on Alma Hitchcock, whom makeup artist Barron assessed as “a smart, shrewd lady who had a lot of influence over him.” Aside from the exacting Mrs. Hitchcock, Janet Leigh was another woman whose reactions mattered to Hitchcock. Leigh recalled: “[Mr. Hitchcock] liked teasing me because I’m a good audience, and he loved scaring me, so he’d experiment with Mother’s corpse by using me as a gauge. I’d open my dressing room door and find this horrible creature sitting in my chair. My screams made him decide on his choice of the Madame.” The final result was so effective that costumer Rita Riggs admitted: “Having to go down into the set to get that dummy dressed and shoed so gave me the chills, I would actually dress her from behind.”

  Hitchcock vs. Censors: Round One

  On November 18, twelve days before the scheduled start of principal photography, Hitchcock sent the script to the Motion Picture Association of America, the overseeing body of the Hays Office, which was a self-regulatory code of ethics organization created in 1930 by the movie industry, run by former postmaster general Will H. Hays. In 1934, Joseph I. Breen became administrator of the Code that policed many of the very themes and techniques that lay at the heart of Hitchcock. The Code, for instance, stipulated that “… the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” The Code also insisted that “excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embracing, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown”; but, oddly, that “brutality and possibly gruesomeness … be treated within the careful limits of good taste” (italics mine). Ironically, many of the powerful and suggestive moments in Hitchcock films gained their force because the Code endorsed the understated style that was a hallmark of the director.

  If the Code office threatened to deny a seal of approval to a prospective film, it meant that most theaters would refuse to show it; hence, most producers would think twice about making it. Directors Howard Hughes (The Outlaw) and Otto Preminger (The Moon Is Blue) had successfully challenged the absolute power of the Hays Office, but problems for Hitchcock with the then-administrator, Geoffrey Shurlock, could spell trouble for Psycho.

  In 1959, Luigi Luraschi was the Paramount studio liaison with the Code office. Six days after Luraschi had submitted the Hitchcock script to the Shurlock office, Hollywood’s watchdogs of morality not only warned Hitchcock that it might be “impossible to issue a certificate on a finished film based on this script,” but also virtually predicted a campaign against the film by the influential and even less tolerant National Legion of Decency of the Roman Catholic Church.

  .

  Aside from the standard complaints by the Code office about dialogue peppered with uses of “damn,” “God,” and “hell,” the censorship board expressed deeper, more substant
ive reservations. The censors red-penciled a line of dialogue to be spoken to the heroine by Cassidy, the Texas oilman: “Bed? Only playground that beats Las Vegas.” But more serious were charges that the Stefano script was shot through with “[a] very pointed description of an incestuous relationship between Norman and his mother.” In Stefano’s script, Mother refers to Norman as “ever the sweetheart,” and aflame with the “fantasy of making love.” Norman himself observes that a son is a poor substitute for “a real lover” and the psychiatrist terms the mother-son relationship “more that of two adolescent lovers.” It was also suggested that “the discussion of transvestism … be eliminated.” In her detention cell, Mother shudders as she recalls Norman, “Always peeping … and reading those … obscene books and disgusting me with his love.”

  In a stern rebuke to Hitchcock, Luraschi delivered the message that “… if the picture were to contain this kind of a flavor, we would be in serious trouble with the Legion of Decency and also with the various censor boards throughout the international field.” Yet Stefano and Hitchcock had deliberately layered-in certain risqué elements as a ruse to divert the censors from more crucial concerns: primarily the action that took place in the shower and bathroom. Luraschi warned Hitchcock: “It will, of course, be necessary to exercise the utmost care in the scenes … in the bathtub, and of the effort of Norman to dispose of [Marion’s] naked body. These scenes, beginning from the time she steps into the tub, will have to be handled with the utmost discretion and good taste.”

  In the rebuke, Hitchcock was advised by the censors and the studio “that those scenes dealing with the stabbing of both the girl and the detective be cut and edited in such a manner as to permit smooth elimination of any excess footage involving the knife scenes, since scenes of this type are being drastically cut in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Scandinavian countries.”

  Experience had made Hitchcock a master at dealing with censorship problems. In the forties, the screenplays for Rebecca and Suspicion were laundered to render the motivations of the leading characters less pathological and—purportedly—more palatable to the audience. Censors in the fifties had also forced Hitchcock to tone down racy dialogue and situations in the John Michael Hayes screenplay for Rear Window. Similarly, objections to Ernest Lehman’s North by Northwest screenplay resulted in a less breezily sexy hero and heroine, and a buttoned-down homosexual in Leonard, the assistant to the spy Van Damm, played by Martin Landau. The Production Code office stamped the shooting scripts of Psycho with “Approved, subject to seeing the product,” an unusual circumstance meant to put Hitchcock and company on notice.

  7.

  Shooting

  Production #9401, Hitchcock’s “Thirty-Day Picture”

  ON NOVEMBER 11, 1959, HITCHCOCK CAPTURED the first footage for Psycho. He borrowed a crew from his previous TV production, #13599, to shoot “photographic tests” of Anthony Perkins. Although the nature of these tests was left unspecified on daily production sheets, it is likely that they may have entailed shots of Perkins as Mother, the only out-of-the-ordinary costume requirement for the actor in the entire picture.

  Script supervisor Marshall Schlom, son of RKO B-movie unit producer Herman Schlom, recalled the unceremonious beginning of production. He said, “All of us who regularly did his TV shows went straight from three days of that, then, the next morning, we started the movie with him. We never really got any idea of what was going to happen.”

  Fourteen days later, Hitchcock and his crew trekked to Fresno and Bakersfield, California, for several days, where they shot footage on Highway 99 that was to be used for the forty-nine process plates necessary for the car trip of the heroine. Hitchcock planned to stylize that sequence heavily, and the plan was to accomplish all of it by the process of rear projection. (By contrast, Hitchcock’s previous picture, North by Northwest, had required several hundred process shots and his next, The Birds, would require 412.) Simultaneously, a second unit spent nearly a week on locations in Phoenix, Arizona. Four of those days were spent on attempts to capture the helicopter shots approaching a hotel window that were to be used in the opening moments of the film. According to a scribble found on a production sheet, Hitchcock was amused by a notion of screenwriter Stefano to sweep the viewer—almost as if he were to become a fly on the wall—into the hotel room window to spy on Sam and Marion, post-tryst.

  In a squib that appeared in Variety on December 27, 1959, Hitchcock boasted that the film would “open with the longest dolly shot ever attempted by helicopter,” a “four-mile scene” that would even top the bravura dolly with which Orson Welles opened Touch of Evil. However, the problems of the second-unit crew in capturing the aerial footage were extensive, and most Psycho crew members concur that little of Hitchcock’s original intention was to come off in the final movie. “That was done before we ever had Tyler mounts or knew much about helicopter shots,” observed script supervisor Marshall Schlom.

  Psycho, or Production #9401, as the studio referred to it, began principal photography on November 30, 1959, with an estimated thirty-six-day shooting schedule. Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto has stressed the lengths to which Hitchcock would go in order to keep the nature of his new picture under wraps. Spoto adds, however, that “Wimpy” was used as a substitute moniker for all inhouse communications regarding the film. The story perhaps stems from the fact that the name of the second-unit cameraman on the picture, Rex Wimpy, appeared on clapboards and production sheets, and hence in some on-the-set stills for Psycho.

  Hitchcock, resplendent in his customary Mariani suit, white shirt, and tie, convened his cast for the first day of shooting on Stage 18-A. Every element of the production appeared to be ready. “Mr. Hitchcock said he would never direct a film in which the script wasn’t perfect before he started,” recalled Schlom. “So we shot a white script, not a ‘rainbow’ script which had gone through a lot of changes.” The director garnered much press by purportedly demanding a closed set for much of the time. Some of that secrecy was due to the unusual plotline, some to the no-nonsense schedule. Aside from Hitchcock’s hype to the press about secrecy, many in the cast and crew did not know the ending. “Mr. Hitchcock held up the last few pages of the script—and rightly so,” noted wardrobe supervisor Rita Riggs. “When we started to work,” observed actress Vera Miles, “we all had to raise our right hands and promise not to divulge one word of the story.” “Everything was keyed to that shocking ending,” observed actor Paul Jasmin, whose friend Anthony Perkins was to recommend him to Hitchcock for an unusual “voice-over” assignment on the film. “Hitchcock had the whole town talking about this strange, disturbing movie he was making. Everybody wanted to know what he was up to, but he asked all of us not to talk about it.”

  Even without the extra hush-hush precautions, a Hitchcock set was hardly one on which the idly curious might feel comfortable just dropping by. “Psycho was a very reserved set, very formal,” according to costumer Rita Riggs. “The male crew all wore shirts and ties. Sometimes I even went to work wearing gloves and a handbag. So the pressure to stay off the set was as subliminal as anything else. If a stranger dared to come on, one of the shirt-and-tie brigade might accost him with a firm, polite, ‘May we help you?’ Mr. Hitchcock never needed to turn his head. He could spot a newcomer out of the corner of his eye.” Thus, when Lew Wasserman, the sartorially conservative head of MCA, paid a call on Hitchcock, the dress and demeanor of the crew were up to snuff.

  Production began smoothly. A telegram on December 1 from his leading lady surely pleased the old-world, courtly Hitchcock: “Thanks for a nice first day and for the lovely roses. Now I know why it is such a pleasure to work for you. Affectionately, Janet.” Two other telegrams perhaps went underappreciated. “Happy Psycho, Love, Vera,” wired Vera Miles, while producer Herbert Coleman—for whom Hitchcock harbored a grudge for “defecting” from the inner circle—wrote: “All the love in the world with your Psycho. Love, Herbie.”

  The first week of shooting
centered primarily on the detainment of Marion by the highway patrolman, her arrival at Bates Motel, and her first encounter with Norman on the motel porch in the rainstorm. Script supervisor Marshall Schlom observed: “The very first day of shooting was on the Golden State Freeway, when she is pulled over by the cop. It was warm. Mr. Hitchcock perspired a lot and did not like the heat or the cold. In fact, he preferred to work on the soundstage, so that day he chose to stay in the car—but always within earshot.” Makeup artist Jack Barron noted: “A lot of Hitchcock’s scripts were written to accommodate the fact that he liked to start on page one and go right through the script. Of course, if the heroine was driving her car on page ten and again on ninety-two, it would be stupid not to do that at the same time.”

  Hitchcock also completed a day of “location” shooting more to his liking, since Harry Maher’s used car lot at 4270 Lankershim Boulevard was only a stone’s throw from Universal in North Hollywood. Because one sponsor of the Hitchcock TV show was Ford Motor Company, the car lot’s usual inventory was displaced in favor of shiny Edsels, Fairlanes, and Mercury models.

  Makeup man Jack Barron was not alone in his surprise at seeing cinematographer John Russell lighting the set during the first week of shooting. “I got on the set, looked around and said to John, ‘Isn’t this color?’ He said it wasn’t. When I asked Hitch about it, he said, ‘But, dear boy, it will have so much more impact in black and white.’” Budgetary considerations aside, Hitchcock provided actor Anthony Perkins with another justification: “Hitch talked about being a big fan of Les Diaboliques. It was one of the reasons he wanted to make Psycho in black and white.”