It's Only a Movie

by Charlotte Chandler

  Janet Leigh was his first choice for Marion Crane. He told her that her part would be enlarged and made more sympathetic, if she agreed to do it.

  “He explained to me that my death so early in the film was going to be a great shock to the audience,” Leigh told me. “It was to me.

  “It wasn’t a very big part, but I was told it would be written up for me, if I took it. I grabbed it, and the part was made bigger.

  “I knew right away that it was going to be a very good picture. Something special. But who could have imagined what it became?

  “He said something to me before we did it. Then, he didn’t say much of anything else during shooting. He said he would stop me if I did it wrong. He didn’t want too little or too much, and he expected me to come up with nuances. We had a wonderful working relationship.

  “I didn’t need to ask what my motivation was. It was passion. That’s a pretty good motivation, I’d say.

  “He made me so aware of the power of imagination. I always took it for granted. There had to be something that the audience has to imagine in a characterization and they’ll never forget what they put in.

  “He only told me about ‘position,’ and if I was off-base. He said, ‘You can do pretty much what you want.’ There was a very nice meeting of the minds. There was this understanding that he appreciated what we were doing, and we knew what he was doing. We knew the rules, and we abided and we didn’t argue, because it made sense.

  “Saul Bass did a storyboard for the shower scene, and that was what was followed. It was perfectly planned, but it still took a week of standing in a shower. It was a drenching experience. The shower scene was a baptism to wash away Marion’s crime.”

  Hilton Green recalled the shower scene from the other side of the curtain: “That was a tough scene for Janet. I mean, to be in the water for so long. Although she was covered, it was still not very pleasant.

  “We shot, I think, five days. She was in the shower every day for most of it. Of course, the water was heated, but it wore on you after a while. She’d have time between shots, but it was very difficult.”

  Actually, neither Janet Leigh nor Anthony Perkins was there for the famous forty-five seconds of slashing. Leigh’s body double took her place for the murder, and Perkins was in New York doing a play.

  The scene had seventy-eight setups, some lasting less than a second. Though the body double was nude, nothing censorable was ever shown, and the knife was never seen to penetrate her body, though the illusion was that it had.

  “If you allow the audience to imagine what’s happening rather than see what’s happening, that’s what stays with them,” Leigh continued. “That’s what Alfred Hitchcock believed. The whole point being the manipulation of the audience, and that’s what a magician does, and that’s exactly what he did.

  “After the film, we were friends, and we knew each other socially. We didn’t double-date, we’re not in the same generation, obviously, but we had rapport. If we went to dinner parties, they would always put us at the same table because it was mutually enjoyable.

  “At his seventy-fifth birthday party that they had at Chasen’s, everybody in town who was anybody was invited. There were the klieg lights and the red carpet, and there was a receiving line with the Wassermans and the [Jules] Steins and the Hitchcocks. He’d spotted my husband, Bob, and me coming along, and as soon as he got to me, he leaned down and whispered to us the dirtiest story that we’d ever heard. We were in the aisles laughing, and people were trying to figure out what was happening. Everybody was craning their neck. ‘What the hell is going on?’ they were wondering.”

  Leigh characterized Hitchcock as “an imp, a mischievous pixie, and a genius.” Her only regret was that she could never again appear in a Hitchcock film. “Hitch told me, ‘Audiences will immediately think of Psycho, and that wouldn’t be fair to the new picture or your character.’”

  Psycho was Patricia Hitchcock’s last feature film, though she continued to appear on television.

  “I had mixed feelings when Pat chose marriage and family as her primary life, and her career and acting only as secondary,” Hitchcock told me. “I thought she was a talented actress. I would never have cast her in three films and numerous television programs if I hadn’t, but Mrs. H. was happy because she thought it would be a happier life for our daughter.

  “The Madame was a romantic. Though I tried not to let it show, I suppose I am one, too. So it was natural our daughter would also be one of those.

  “I did miss her when she left our house.”

  PSYCHOWAS BASED ON a novel by Robert Bloch, a contributor to the TV series. The novel was inspired by an actual Wisconsin serial killer, and the screenplay was written by Joseph Stefano.

  Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals $40,000 to start a new life with her lover, Sam Loomis (John Gavin). Then, in a remote motel, she is murdered in the shower after she had decided to return the money. The motel’s owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), an amateur taxidermist, thinks his mentally ill mother is responsible, so he puts everything, including the money, into Marion’s car and sinks it in a nearby swamp.

  When Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) and Sam search for Marion, private detective Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam) appears. He has been hired to get the money back in exchange for all charges against her being dropped. He tells them Marion stayed at the Bates Motel.

  Later, Arbogast is stabbed to death in the Bates house. Not hearing from him, Sam and Lila investigate. They believe Norman has the money. Lila searches the house, looking for his mother. When Lila sees Norman approaching, she hides in the fruit cellar. There, she finds Mrs. Bates—a mummified corpse embalmed by Norman.

  A crazed Norman, dressed like his mother, rushes at her wielding a knife, but Sam disarms him.

  A psychiatrist explains that Norman became both mother and son after he murdered his mother and her lover. Now, the mother side of him has taken over completely.

  In a cell, Norman, now his mother, smiles a skull-like smile as she regards a fly on her hand and says, “Why, I wouldn’t even harm a fly.”

  Draining the swamp, the police find other victims.

  “For the opening love scenes,” Janet Leigh said, “I wore a white bra and white half slip. After I stole the money and was off to Sam to show him what I’d done for him, I wore the black bra and black half slip. Mr. Hitchcock wanted to show Marion Crane as having both good and evil within her.”

  Leigh told me she would appreciate my making it clear that not only were these underclothes bought over-the-counter, because Hitchcock instructed it, but that it was also what she wanted. Someone wrote that she had wanted made-to-order lingerie, “which was ridiculous,” Leigh said, “since I never wore made-to-order lingerie. Why would that be the moment I wanted to?

  “Hitch was particularly anxious that I purchase a popular brand, so that women would recognize their own brassiere, and identify with me. It happened that my own brand was a very popular model.”

  The opening scene shows lovers Janet Leigh and John Gavin in bed, making love during her lunch break from the real estate office where she works.

  “In real life, we knew each other casually,” Leigh told me, “and there we were in our first scene, hopping into bed in front of a lot of people. Mr. Hitchcock did more takes than usual, so I knew we weren’t giving him what he wanted.

  “He called me over and very discreetly, so no one else heard, whispered to me, ‘I think you and John could be more passionate. Would you please try it and see how it works out.’

  “I went back and wondered what he had said when he spoke to John. I thought perhaps he’d put it somewhat differently in more specific terms when he coached him. I didn’t know what to expect.

  “I went back to bed with John, determined to give my all to ardor.

  “It was only much later that I realized Hitchcock’s mischief was at work, and I’d been had.

  “When I asked John how Mr. Hitchcock had instructed him, and I s
aid I didn’t want him to leave out the lurid details, John told me Mr. Hitchcock hadn’t said a word to him about our love scene.

  “I understood immediately then that was how Mr. Hitchcock got what he wanted from me, which was to show that my character, Marion, wanted her lover more, very much more, than he wanted her. Mr. Hitchcock wanted me to be the one who was then more aggressive.

  “At one point in bed, John said to me rather urgently, ‘Janet, stop! You’re getting me excited.’

  “It was a pretty sensual scene, I think.”

  COMPOSER BERNARD HERRMANN said, “Originally Hitch told me, ‘Write whatever you like, but please, no music for the shower.’ He was adamant, but I felt music was needed.

  “When the music was recorded, and we were dubbing the film and got to the murder scenes, we ran the scenes without music. Hitch was unhappy. I suggested he listen to the same scenes with music. He said, ‘But I thought we had agreed not to have any.’ I said, ‘Sure, we can do it that way, but at least listen to what I’ve written.’ So we ran it with the music, and he said, ‘We must have the music, of course.’

  “I said, ‘But you said you were against it.’

  “He said, ‘A mere importuning, my dear boy,’ which roughly translated meant he could admit when he was wrong.”

  Psycho was filmed at Revue television studios at Universal in five weeks during 1959 at a cost of $850,000. Three of the principal actors Hitchcock wanted to use were under contract to Paramount, the releasing company, and available for reasonable sums. Vera Miles, who played Marion Crane’s sister, Lila, was still filling out her five-year contract with Hitchcock. Herrmann received his usual fee, but compensated by scoring the film for strings alone.

  Assistant director Hilton Green described for me how Hitchcock merged television and feature film techniques to shoot Psycho.

  “Mr. H. decided he wanted to make a low-budget feature with his television crew. The difference between working on television and a feature was like night and day. When he was doing a feature, everything was very precise. In television, he didn’t have time. He had a great knack of being able to make very simple shots and get it done, rather than going into complicated camera movements and shots which he did on features.

  “On Psycho, I would say 75 or 85 percent of everything was planned more carefully than you would for a television show. To prepare for a television show, you’d show up the day before, and we’d walk the sets together, making sure everything was okay. And that was it. Then, he’d come in and you’d shoot the two days or three days.

  “He sent me to Phoenix, Arizona, for Psycho. That’s where Marion Crane’s office was. I had to meet people who worked in an office like hers and visit where she would live, and photograph closets of the clothes of young women who had jobs like hers. Then I drove the route she would take to go up to central California. I laid it all out and came back. I mean, that’s how much research we would do. Altogether different from a television show.

  “Mr. H. would cut in the camera. I mean, it wasn’t any guesswork of lining it up. It made my job very easy.

  “It was very difficult to do the scene when Mrs. Bates is discovered in the fruit cellar. The big problem was to cause a flare in the lens when she turned, with Vera Miles throwing out her arm and hitting the naked bulb, making it swing back and forth. This was what Mr. Hitchcock wanted, that effect, and it took a couple of retakes to get it, which he was very upset about. He wanted things to happen right away. We got it, the second day.

  “Of course, the dummy was a dummy. The only time she really moved was in the basement when she turned. The prop man had to lie prone underneath her and do it upside down, really, to get that head to move right. It was quite an ordeal, but it just had to be worked out.”

  John Landis, a young director on the Universal lot during Hitchcock’s last few years there, came to know him well.

  “I first saw Psycho on television, and it made a huge impact on me,” Landis told me. “I was fascinated by how funny it is. ‘Mother’s not herself today’ is one of the lines.

  “The ending is for me one of the great images of cinema. When he says, ‘I wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ Tony Perkins looks insane, plus that subtle ‘super’ of the skull that comes on and off his face is just terrifying.”

  Psycho has been criticized for the effect it might have on impressionable minds. Hitchcock did not agree.

  “I think it has an influence on sick minds,” Hitchcock acknowledged, “but not on healthy minds. When I made Psycho, a man was arrested in Los Angeles for murdering three women. He was alleged to have said that he was inspired to murder the third woman after seeing Psycho. I was called by the media for a comment. I asked what film did he see before murdering the second woman? Maybe he drank a glass of milk before he murdered the first woman.

  “A little boy came up to me once, he was about seven years old, and he asked me, ‘Mr. Hitchcock, in Psycho, what did you use for blood? Chicken blood?

  “I said, ‘No. Chocolate sauce’ And he said, ‘Okay,’ and went on his way, satisfied. He understood it was only a movie.”

  The Universal-

  International Years

  The Birds to Family Plot

  OUR SO-CALLED feathered friends are suddenly our feathered enemies,” was how Hitchcock described The Birds for me.

  When Lew Wasserman, longtime agent and friend of Alfred Hitchcock, and head of MCA, the powerful talent agency, acquired Universal Studios, he arranged for Hitchcock to trade his rights in the television series and Psycho for a major share in the ownership of Universal. Hitchcock moved to Universal where his first project was The Birds.

  Watching television, Hitchcock and Alma had seen a commercial that featured an attractive blonde. It was Alma who noticed her and thought she could possibly become Hitchcock’s new star. They both believed in the importance of first impressions.

  Nathalie “Tippi” Hedren, the model in the commercial, was contacted, and she met with agents and executives at MCA. At first, she thought she was being considered for commercials, but then she was told she was being offered a seven-year contract by Alfred Hitchcock. Hedren expected to be given parts on the television show. The salary was only about what she earned as a model, but it offered security, and Hedren was the mother of a four-year-old daughter, Melanie. (The child grew up to be actress Melanie Griffith.) By coincidence, Evan Hunter, who wrote the screenplay for The Birds, had given the name “Melanie” to the character Hedren would play in The Birds before he knew it was her daughter’s name.

  Hedren was given the news that she had been chosen to star in Hitchcock’s new film at dinner at Chasen’s, in the presence of Hitchcock and Alma, and Lew Wasserman. By her place at the table was a box from San Francisco’s Gump’s, one of Hitchcock’s favorite stores. Inside was a gold pin of three birds.

  Edith Head, who had created the wardrobe for Grace Kelly and Kim Novak, was to do the same for Hedren in her personal life as well as in her films. Hitchcock was preparing Hedren to be the next Grace Kelly. The problem was, Hedren said, she didn’t want to be the next Grace Kelly. She wanted to be the first Tippi Hedren.

  Georgine Darcy visited Hitchcock while he was directing Hedren.

  “He was directing Tippi like a robot. He said to me, ‘Now, watch this.’ If he wanted her to deepen her voice when it would get too high or she was getting nervous, he’d have a signal for that.”

  Before The Birds, Hitchcock had planned to film Marnie with Grace Kelly. She had hoped to return to the screen, but quickly realized those hopes were in vain.

  “My husband wanted the movie star without what went with it,” Grace Kelly told me years later. “In To Catch a Thief, my screen presence was certainly larger than life. I think my husband fell in love with that character. I probably confused the roles myself. I read that I was going to be a fairy-tale princess, and I believed it. I became a princess, but ‘They lived happily ever after’ was much more complicated than in fairy tales.

  “In
a way, it was Hitch who gave the bride away, but I don’t think he thought it was forever.

  “When we married, my husband said, ‘Being an actress wasn’t a princess-like thing to do.’ He was worried about how the citizens of Monaco would react to seeing me on the screen, but he said it would depend on the part.

  “He wanted the girl I was, with her spirit, but he didn’t want a wife with too much spirit.

  “I’d always thought I wanted, as an actress, to play a wide assortment of parts, but in life, once I agreed to be a princess, I was typecast.”

  HITCHCOCK READ IN NEWSPAPERS of a bird attack around Santa Cruz, a large flock of seagulls, lost in the fog, that flew into street-lights and broke windows. It reminded him of The Birds, a short story by Daphne du Maurier that he had purchased for possible development.

  The Birds told of a Cornish farmer’s cottage inexplicably invaded by angry birds. Hitchcock decided that The Birds, relocated from Cornwall to northern California, would be his next film rather than Marnie.

  Hitchcock selected novelist Evan Hunter to write the screenplay. Hunter had written The Blackboard Jungle as well as the short story “Vicious Circle” for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, which was adapted for the television program. He was also the writer of the 87th Precinct series under the pseudonym of Ed McBain.

  Hunter had the idea to contrast a “meet-cute” screwball comedy with the sudden horror of the bird attack. Hitchcock liked that, especially if Grace Kelly and Cary Grant could be the couple who “met-cute.” Hitchcock encouraged Hunter to create more articulate and glamorous characters than the farmer and his wife in the short story.

  Though Hitchcock was accustomed to solving impossible technical problems, The Birds proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated. He said that if he had judged accurately the technical difficulties involved, he would not have begun The Birds.