Alfred Hitchcock (112 page)

“But she’s harmless!” insists an agitated Norman. “She’s as harmless as one of those stuffed birds.”

Apologetically, Marion says she meant no offense.

“People always mean well,” Norman continues resentfully. “They cluck their thick tongues and shake their heads and ‘suggest,’ oh so very delicately. It’s not as if she were a maniac—a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”

In September, Hitchcock also made changes in his team for
Psycho.
He would carry Saul Bass (titles), Bernard Herrmann (music), and George Tomasini (editing) over to Universal for the new film, but over the summer cameraman Robert Burks and production designer Robert Boyle were assigned to other Paramount projects. Their absence gave Hitchcock an opening to shed his familiar skin and attain an edgier look.

He raided
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
for John L. Russell, who had photographed features (including Orson Welles’s version of
Macbeth
) but was also the cameraman for nearly every TV episode Hitchcock directed; quick, high-contrast photography was his forte. Assistant director Hilton A. Green, also from the series, replaced Herbert Coleman as Hitchcock’s first lieutenant. (Green would share a title card with Saul Bass, who is actually credited twice—once for titles, and again, as “Pictorial Consultant” for the story-boards he created for key sequences.) For his production designers, Hitchcock recruited Joseph Hurley and Robert Clatworthy from Universal. The latter had been an assistant to Robert Boyle on
Saboteur
and
Shadow of a Doubt
, and then graduated to art director on productions ranging from the glossy
Written on the Wind
to the seedy noir of Orson Welles’s
Touch of Evil.

The shower victim in the book is a brunette, but Hitchcock wanted Marion Crane to be a blonde—a very particular blonde. Janet Leigh was the front-runner early enough that Hitchcock mentioned her name to Stefano at their first or second meeting. After starting out in wholesome, perky roles, the onetime MGM contract actress had consciously expanded her range, most recently demonstrating a surprising sexiness in
Touch of Evil.
Leigh was an MCA client under contract to Universal, and Hitchcock liked her personality; mixing socially with her and her husband, Tony Curtis, he found a warmth and ease with Leigh.

In October Hitchcock sent the actress a copy of the Robert Bloch novel, assuring her that even though her character would be vividly murdered in the first half of the film, Marion Crane would “be improved upon [from the book] and, of course, the descriptions of the characters will be completely different.” Leigh understood that he wanted “a name actress because of the shock value, but he also wanted someone who could actually look like she came from Phoenix,” in her words. (“A perfectly ordinary bourgeois,” Hitchcock said.) “I mean, Lana Turner might not be able to look like someone from there,” Leigh said. “He wanted a vulnerability, a softness.”

Leigh accepted the requisite invitation to lunch at Bellagio Road, where Hitchcock encouraged the serious-minded actress to deep-think her character. “His deportment was cordial, matter-of-fact and academic,” Leigh wrote in
There Really Was a Hollywood.
“He outlined his modus operandi. The angles and shots of each scene were predetermined, carefully charted before the picture began. There could be no deviations. His camera was absolute. Within the boundary of the lens circumference, the player was given freedom, as long as the performance didn’t interfere with the already designed shot.”

“I hired you,” Hitchcock told Leigh reassuringly, “because you are an actress! I will only direct you if A, you attempt to take more than your share of the pie, or B, if you don’t take enough, or C, if you are having trouble motivating the necessary timed motion.”

At that first lunch he was already brimming with ideas for her wardrobe. Hilton Green and a crew had visited Phoenix and taken still photographs of typical residents and city streets; finding a Marion type, they “photographed everything from her closet, her bureau drawers, her suitcases,” in the words of wardrobe supervisor Helen Colvig. After absorbing the research, Marion’s wardrobe was then plucked off the rack at the Beverly Hills boutique JAX. Hitchcock was specific about Leigh’s wearing “good wool,” recalled
Psycho
costume designer Rita Riggs (who had also costumed Hitchcock for his TV intros), “because it takes light so beautifully and photographs a very rich gray.”

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 Stephen 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.