The scenes where Marion wore only lingerie were a unique challenge for the costumers: what kind of undergarments should they be, and how racy could they be without offending the censors? There was some talk of having the actress’s bra and slip made to order, but the director scotched that. Marion’s undergarments would send a clear message to the female sector. “That just won’t work for the character,” Hitchcock told the costumers. “We want that underwear to be identifiable to many women all over the country.”
“There was great equivocation,” recalled costume designer Riggs, “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.’ ”
Actually, the script would have two leading ladies, just as the film itself would fall into two halves. Part 1 was the theft and flight leading to Marion’s murder; part 2 involved the investigation of her disappearance and the story’s steady progress toward its climax and Norman Bates’s arrest. There were almost two separate acting ensembles, in the view of some involved in the production.
Vera Miles was still under contract to Hitchcock, and Rebello’s book claims that Miles seethed at being cast as Marion’s older sister, Lila, the lesser star of part 2. Dressed according to Hitchcock’s instructions, Lila looked “like a dowdy old-maid schoolteacher,” in the words of Rebello. That may have been a sly form of Hitchcockian revenge—“some of his perversity coming through,” in costumer Rita Riggs’s words—but it is also true that the director wanted to ward off any distracting hints of romance between Sam and Lila.
Hitchcock took a while to decide on the only male performer, besides Anthony Perkins, who would bridge both halves of the film. Marion’s lover, Sam Loomis, was described in Joseph Stefano’s script as “a good-looking, sensual man with warm humorous eyes and a compelling smile.” The director watched numerous screen tests and films, before gravitating to Stuart Whitman, whose ruggedness was tempered with a certain sensitivity. But MCA and Lew Wasserman preferred John Gavin, an MCA client and Universal hunk. “I guess he’ll be all right,” muttered Hitchcock, according to Rebello, after suffering through Imitation of Life, a Douglas Sirk tearjerker in which Gavin falls impossibly in love with older woman Lana Turner.
No matter: Sam was always a subordinate character in Hitchcock’s eyes. The director kept reminding Stefano that Sam and Lila were stick figures for the audience. Psycho really belonged to Anthony Perkins and Norman Bates. Whenever Stefano tried to breathe some extra life into Miles’s or Gavin’s roles, writing “purely a character scene” between them for part 2, Hitchcock found an excuse to cut it out.
The dogged detective Arbogast, whom the script describes as flashing “a particular unfriendly smile,” was also a second-half character, and after watching Twelve Angry Men Hitchcock cast Martin Balsam in the role. One character who wasn’t in the novel at all was the chatty secretary played by Pat Hitchcock O’Connell. Busy as the mother of three, Pat had all but retired from acting; she kept busy editing her father’s mystery magazine. Her father created a memorable walk-on for her in the scene where the oilman (Cassidy) visits the real estate office and boasts about putting a wad of cash down on a house for his newlywed daughter. Although Pat talks a blue streak, the lecherous Cassidy barely takes notice of her, too busy ogling the sexier Marion. “He was flirting with you!” Pat whispers to Marion, chin up. “I guess he must have noticed my wedding ring.”
Hitchcock was unusually specific about his daughter’s wardrobe too: green silk shantung. And as a point of pride, “his bit of sentimental whimsy,” in costumer Riggs’s words, the director was also specific about his own outfit for his cameo appearance, which he inserted near Pat’s scene; he can be glimpsed outside the real estate office, wearing a cowboy hat.
The subsidiary parts were deliciously written, and after running a television series for five years, Hitchcock was never more attuned to the available talent. Psycho would boast pinpoint performances from Frank Albertson as Cassidy the oilman, Mort Mills as a menacing California highway patrolman (Hitchcock insisted on his eerie dark glasses), John Anderson as a prototypical used-car salesman, John McIntire as an avuncular sheriff (wrong about everything, as usual), and Simon Oakland as the psychiatrist at the end of the film who fascinatingly diagnoses Norman’s deviant behavior for the benefit of audiences—and, as Hitchcock calculated, for the benefit of the Production Code. (Oakland was a kind of stand-in for the director, drolly explaining everything away at the tag end of his TV show.)
On November 4, the team trooped over to Universal to look for the Psycho house among the standing sets, doctoring one into a blend of Charles Addams and Edward Hopper. (“California Gothic, or, when they’re particularly awful, they’re called California Gingerbread,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut.) On lower ground the Bates Motel would be constructed.
“I must say that the architectural contrast between the vertical house and the horizontal motel is quite pleasing to the eye,” remarked Truffaut.
“Definitely,” replied Hitchcock, “that’s our composition: a vertical block and a horizontal block.”
On November 16 he moved to Universal offices. On November 17 and 19 he approved final sets and locations, based on the scouting in Phoenix and Fresno, which had included detailed requests for photos of a “shoddy hotel exterior, with the street outside with taxis and passersby”; “the interior and exterior of a real estate office, including a bank”; and “exterior of a small house in which two girls live, including a two-car garage and street; a bedroom of the same house.”
“Hitchcock wanted to know things,” Hilton Green told Rebello, “like exactly what a car salesman in a small town in the valley would be wearing when a woman might come in to buy a car. We went up there and photographed some salesmen against a background. He wanted to know what people in Phoenix, Arizona, looked like, how they lived, what kind of people they were. He wanted to know the exact route a woman might take to go from Phoenix to central California. We traced the route and took pictures of every area along the way.”
“Putting the writer through it” was the first order of business. Putting the actors through it was the second. Putting himself through it was the sum of the process. And putting the audience through it was the ultimate goal.
From his first day in Hollywood, Hitchcock had sought to bring an American authenticity to certain films, and he had incrementally built up this quality in his work over the years, especially after leaving Selznick International. From his writers and stories to his stars and settings, from Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, and Strangers on a Train, to Rear Window and North by Northwest, the director proved increasingly adept at conveying a trenchant vision of his adopted homeland. By the end of the 1950s the soaking-up process was complete—and no film would be more quintessentially American, or Hitchcockian, than Psycho.
In his new Universal office the director made notes on the script, studied his storyboards, and hung up a road map with pushpins tracing Marion’s travel route.
Hitchcock “had reached a point in his professional life when he was ready for a totally different kind of picture,” Joseph Stefano reflected later. “In his previous films he told things about himself he thought were true, but in Psycho he told more about himself, in a deeper sense, than he realized. He had been very concerned about his health, and I think he made the picture at the very time he was grappling with his own mortality. After all he had been very ill in 1957, and Alma had been very ill in 1958. And then in 1959 along came this murderous film. I think it was the sudden-death aspect that involved him emotionally.”
After handing in his final draft at the end of November, Stefano met with Hitchcock one last time at Bellagio Road. They stole an extra day “to break down the shooting script,” according to Step
hen Rebello, brainstorming ideas for close-ups and angles. At lunch they toasted the script for Psycho with bubbly on the rocks (the director apologized for “such a terrible solecism” in his home, wrote John Russell Taylor, “merely because they had no champagne properly chilled”). All of a sudden Hitchcock “looked very sad,” recalled Stefano, “and said, ‘The picture’s over. Now I have to go and put it on film.’ ”
The photography began on November 30, 1959. If, in hindsight, people talked about the filming of Vertigo as being an experience heavily suffused with brooding and tension, the making of Psycho seems to have been a crisp, clockwork affair.
Now—and for the rest of his career—Hitchcock would be working with a significantly younger generation of actors and actresses. He was old enough to be their father. They listened to his instructions reverently (from now on, for example, he chose the lingerie). They knew him primarily as a Great Director, a celebrity. They knew the public image, not the human being. It was at this stage that Hitchcock really became the embodiment of his image, a man who walked onto the set just as he did at the opening of his television show, moving to fit his India-ink caricature. Everyone accepted common truths about him—even if those truths were superficial.
He used to complain that actors who insisted on quitting after an eight-hour workday were “my hate of hates.” Nowadays, however, the director himself arrived promptly at 8:30 A.M., and tried to call an end to filming at 5:30 P.M. Everyone knew that Hitchcock stopped a little earlier on Thursdays, the night he and Alma customarily went to dinner at Chasen’s, a once trendy restaurant now growing a little old-fashioned. (Chasen’s made no effort, for example, to keep up with new culinary trends such as health food.)
He had almost always worn a black or blue suit and tie, never any ornamentation—no jewelry or wristwatch. Now that costume was expected of Mr. Hitchcock. All the articles commented on the array of similar suits that hung in his closet, offering a variety of fittings for his fluctuating weight. Between setups in Hollywood, he solemnly read the London Times. Hitchcock had so often commented that directing was boring, that now he felt obliged to act bored. His presence on the set intimidated many people, and not all the younger folk caught his dry jokes and subtle humor.
He had always gravitated to his favorite players, and his favorites on Psycho were Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh—the two actors the script and camera also favored. After Marion’s demise, the second half of the film switched its focus to Arbogast, and to Sam and Lila; and the script made a cursory effort to transform Lila into an avenger. But the scenes with Sam and Lila paid little heed to their feelings or personalities. Hitchcock’s interest was in getting to the crescendos.
Hitchcock got along wonderfully with Perkins, whose guarded personality intrigued him. The actor suggested aspects of his boy-next-door wardrobe, and it was Perkins’s idea for Norman Bates to munch candy corn. Even Perkins’s requests for extra takes were indulged, and at one point, when he approached the director to ask haltingly about making a few minor changes in his dialogue, Hitchcock, ruffling his newspaper, looked up.
“Oh, they’re all right—I’m sure they’re all right. Have you given these a lot of thought? You’ve really thought it out? And you like these changes?” When Perkins assured him he did, Hitchcock said, “All right, that’s the way we’ll do it.” Norman Bates was accustomed to pampering, and part of the strange power of Psycho comes from the fact that the serial killer isn’t harshly judged by Hitchcock, but is allowed to live and breathe—is even pampered—by the director.
Hitchcock was less enthusiastic about the film’s conventional lead, John Gavin, whom he is said to have referred to privately as “the Stiff.” Gavin also offered input on his costume and characterization, but his ideas pained the director. Costumer Helen Colvig remembered a scene where “John conveyed through the assistant director that he wanted to come through a door in a certain way. Hitchcock looked askance and told the assistant, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll just cast a shadow over his face. We can knock him out in no time.’ I think John was trying really hard to impress Hitch, but he was just irritating him.”
The opening tryst between Sam (Gavin) and Marion (Leigh) was crucial in establishing their characterizations—and the audacious atmosphere of the film. For some reason the scene embarrassed Gavin, who resisted playing it with his shirt off. Hitchcock fobbed the actor off on writer Joseph Stefano, who was on the set. “Stefano persuaded him by encouraging him to use that very embarrassment as part of the scene,” according to John Russell Taylor’s book, “particularly when having an argument while half undressed.”
The embarrassing nature of the scene was aggravated by the fact that it was the first one Gavin acted with Leigh—and unlike, say, The 39 Steps, he and she were not supposed to be “meeting cute.” “It isn’t easy to say, ‘Hello, nice to see you again,’ and then hop in the sack and make love, remembered Leigh. “We were bound to be somewhat awkward. I thought we had begun to warm up and were progressing fairly well. …”
After some lackluster takes, Hitchcock beckoned the white-lingerie-clad actress over and complained, “I think you and John could be more passionate! See what you can do!” (According to Rebello, Hitchcock actually instructed Leigh “in discreet but descriptive terms” to “take matters in hand, as it were. Leigh blushed, acquiesced, and Hitchcock got a reasonable facsimile of the required response.”) Then, almost as an afterthought, the director strolled over to Gavin and whispered something in his ear, too, tantalizing each performer by giving the other secret advice. “I wouldn’t have put it past him to pull my chain, and then to pull John’s chain,” said Leigh, “just to get the desired results.”
Give Gavin credit: he was struggling with his role. Years later, when Leigh was researching her book Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller, Gavin told her that his chances weren’t improved by the odor he detected on the set. Hitchcock’s body odor? he wondered. Or perhaps the director’s breath? Or maybe his cigar, as Hitchcock sat there, puffing placidly away, mere inches away from the performers pretending a love scene. And that’s the way the tryst opening of Psycho plays: audacious but awkward, provocative but cold, sexy with a whiff of BO.
“In a strange way,” Leigh argued later, Gavin’s passivity “worked for the suspense. Real passion would have justified Marion’s theft. But the lack of the complete abandon with Sam might have led some audience members to think, ‘I wonder if he really loves her that much?’ It made Marion even more sympathetic, which Hitch was very concerned about her being.”
During the filming, however, those who watched the dailies thought they were seeing way too much of the back of Gavin’s head, according to Rebello’s book, whereas, under Hitchcock’s more sympathetic tutelage, Leigh was exposing unprecedented parts of her anatomy—while achieving her most immortal performance.
Leigh was a good sport, who got a kick out of the director’s off-color limericks, puns, and pranks. Kim Novak had arrived on the set of Vertigo on the day of her seminude scene (waking up from her “suicide attempt” in Scottie’s apartment), to be greeted by a plucked chicken hanging from her dressing room; her unamused disgust undoubtedly wrecked any second chance Hitchcock might have been giving her. The worst jokes on Leigh seemed to come just moments before her most important scenes—and she found most of them terribly funny.
Hitchcock had one running gag involving Leigh and Mrs. Bates—Norman’s mother—as he tested the various mummified skeletons created by the effects department. The director “relished scaring me,” Leigh wrote in her memoir. “He experimented with the mother’s corpse, using me as his gauge. I would return from lunch, open the door to the dressing room, and propped in my chair would be this hideous monstrosity. The horror in my scream registered on his Richter scale, decided his choice of the Madam.”
Hitchcock cared about Leigh (and the character she was playing), a concern reflected in the way he helped her out, even acting from the sidelines, during the protracted car-driving
interludes. In those scenes Marion wears “a troubled, guilty face,” according to the script, and the director “completely articulated for me what I was thinking,” Leigh recalled. “‘Oh-oh,’ he’d say, ‘there’s your boss. He’s watching you with a funny look.’ ”
The shower stabbing—Leigh’s most demanding scene—was scheduled for the week of December 17–23, just before Christmas. “During the day,” recalled Leigh, “I was in the throes of being stabbed to death, and at night I was wrapping presents from Santa Claus for the children.”
Darkness and light: Mrs. Bates’s knife was a retractable prop. The bathroom, at the director’s insistence, was lined with “blinding white tiles” and shining fixtures. Plenty of chocolate syrup, in a squeeze bottle, supplied the dark blood. A professional dancer stood by for the more intimate shots (Hitchcock had thrown a publicity lightning bolt when he announced he was planning a “rearview scene of Miss Leigh”), but Leigh herself appeared in most of the shots, wearing flesh-colored moleskin, though it occasionally peeled away under the watery onslaught.
“Hitch and I discussed the implications [of the scene] at great length,” remembered Leigh. “Marion had decided to go back to Phoenix, come clean, and take the consequences, so when she stepped into the tub it was as if she were stepping into the baptismal waters. The spray beating down on her was purifying the corruption from her mind, purging the evil from her soul. She was like a virgin again, tranquil, at peace.”*
In addition to the scene of Arbogast climbing the stairs to meet Mother, Saul Bass had storyboarded the shower sequence, sketching the “high shot with the violins, and suddenly the big head with the brass instruments clashing,” in Hitchcock’s words—the cuts coming staccato and furious, each lasting mere seconds. The montage conjured up complete nudity and savage violence, even though, as the director tirelessly explained in interviews, it was all an illusion—giving “an impression of a knife slashing, as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film,” in the words of the script.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 85