Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Psycho
, he suggested, could become another Alfred J. Hitchcock film—not a Paramount production. The director would defer his salary ($250,000 by now), and direct
Psycho
absolutely
free of charge
, while keeping the budget (charged to Paramount) to an agreed-upon shoestring. In exchange,
Hitchcock would claim 60 percent ownership of the film until Paramount earned a set amount of money drawn from a guaranteed percentage of the gross, after which all revenue and ownership would revert to the director.
Further distancing the parent studio from the unseemly shocker, Wasserman proposed that Hitchcock shoot
Psycho
over at Universal, leasing the soundstages and renting the equipment to Paramount. Later the Justice Department would investigate the theory that
Psycho
was part of a clever kickback to the new MCA-Universal management, and Hitchcock himself was deposed by the government. Although nothing was proved, it was certainly true that Wasserman, with breathless speed, had snatched his number one client from a competitor and sold him back to himself, making money on both ends of the deal.
Money was rarely Hitchcock’s motive, however. Once more he was setting his established salary aside, and putting his reputation on the line, for something he wanted to try—against all opposition. Few in his own circle were enthusiastic about the unsavory
Psycho.
His associate producer over six years and seven films, Herbert Coleman, had been hoping to establish himself independently as a producer, and he took
Psycho
as his cue to quit Hitchcock’s staff. But Coleman was also Paramount’s supervisory link with Hitchcock, who was now, therefore, effectively on his own. Though sorry to lose Coleman, the director gleefully forged ahead.
James Cavanagh had the summer of 1959 to work on the script for
Psycho.
Hitchcock took the time to tend to
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, directing his 1959–1960 episodes and performing all his introductions for the upcoming season. In July he directed “Arthur,” a black comedy about a chicken farmer who grinds his murder victims into feed, starring Laurence Harvey (left over from
No Bail for the Judge
). In August he filmed “The Crystal Trench,” about a woman who loses her husband in a mountain-climbing accident, spends years pining for him, and then is stunned by a twist in the story when, in her old age, his perfectly preserved corpse emerges from a glacier, bearing a revelation.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
had developed a split personality: half the shows were stubbornly English; but as the series progressed, it increasingly explored the dark side of the American Dream—the artificiality, hypocrisy, neuroses, violence, and evil that lurked in boardrooms and bedrooms across the United States.
Psycho
would be the culmination of this trend in Hitchcock’s thinking.
Cavanagh finished a draft in August. According to Norman Lloyd, the writer wrote one key scene that departed from what Hitchcock had explicitly outlined, and the director got no further in his reading than that scene; then he closed the script angrily, and discharged Cavanagh.
According to Stephen Rebello, “Much of Cavanagh’s script has a
sketched-in, tentative feel” and “straddled episodic television,” but at the same time Rebello’s review of the various drafts reveals that much of Cavanagh’s foundational work found its way into the final film. This included “elaborate details of the heroine’s harrowing car trip; the poignant, impactful supper conversation between Bates and Mary [Marion in the film]; the obsessive cleanup by Bates after the shower murder; and the swamp’s gobbling [Marion’s] car. Even the shower murder sequence anticipates the intricate camera movement that ends in a close-up of blood mingling with shower water gurgling down the drain.”
Psycho
needed a new writer, but as with so many Hitchcock projects, casting and preproduction raced ahead of the script. Over the summer of 1959, Hitchcock held preliminary meetings with Saul Bass and Edith Head. And already he had tapped his leading man—changing Norman Bates in the process from the middle-aged slob of the novel into a character who could be played by slender, handsome twenty-seven-year-old Anthony Perkins.
Hitchcock had made the all-important decision to hire Perkins way back in early summer, before there was any script. Perkins, who had made his screen debut in 1950, had the facade of a “bobby-soxer’s dreamboat-with-a-brain,” in Rebello’s words; he even recorded pop music albums. But Hitchcock liked Perkins as soon as he met him: he was a sensitive, intelligent actor eager to take a dare and play a cross-dressing serial murderer. Although it was never mentioned between Hitchcock and Perkins—repeating the pattern set by
Rope
—the actor’s homosexuality was an open secret in Hollywood, and Perkins as Norman Bates couldn’t help but draw on that subtext. More conveniently, the actor owed Paramount a film on a previous contract, and was available for a salary of only forty thousand dollars.
By July, Cavanagh knew he was writing for Anthony Perkins—and at the end of the summer, his successor was able to start with that knowledge as well as a solid draft to build on. MCA agent Ned Brown had been pitching Hitchcock on a client of his, a newcomer to screenwriting named Joseph Stefano. A composer in his late thirties who had written for George Shearing, Eydie Gorme, and Sammy Davis Jr., Stefano had recently written a couple of well-regarded scripts: a
Playhouse 90
episode called “Made in Japan,”
*
and a Paramount film,
The Black Orchid
, with Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn.
Back in May, Hitchcock had watched about five minutes of
The Black Orchid
before shutting it off and opting for Cavanagh. But Brown was still
promoting his client, and Hitchcock had a soft spot for songwriters. So on September 1, Brown brought Stefano to Paramount for a brief meeting with Hitchcock. From Philadelphia, with only a high-school education, Stefano turned out to be “exuberantly cocky, volatile and streetwise,” in the words of Stephen Rebello, the kind of colorful, entertaining personality Hitchcock would look forward to spending time with. “He found that I was very funny and we had a lot of laughs together,” Stefano recalled.
A week later Stefano came to the studio for lunch with Hitchcock, who hired him at first on a week-to-week basis. It didn’t seem to bother the director that, like so many other writers he had encountered over the years, Stefano wasn’t jumping and cheering about his assignment; in fact, Stefano finished the Robert Bloch novel feeling oddly disappointed. To him the story was tawdry and depressing. Where was Cary Grant and all the glamour?
Hitchcock set about wooing his audience of one. He regaled Stefano with the whole story of
Psycho
—never showing him Cavanagh’s script, but integrating the best parts of it into his working version of the story. He played up the oddball casting of Perkins as Norman Bates, and revealed his plans to enlarge the part of the shower victim for a major star.
The shower scene occurs in the third chapter of the book; Hitchcock’s twist idea was to cast a marquee name, then shock the audience with her sudden, early demise. That made it all the more vital to play up Marion’s few scenes. How, without damaging the integrity of the film, could Marion’s part be enhanced? Stefano’s suggestion spoke Hitchcock’s language: “I’d like to see Marion shacking up with Sam on her lunch hour.”
“The moment I said ‘shack up’ or anything like that,” Stefano recalled, “Hitchcock, being a very salacious man, adored it. I said, ‘We’ll find out what the girl is all about, see her steal the money and head for Sam—on the way, this horrendous thing happens to her.’ He thought it was spectacular. I think that idea got me the job.”
The week-to-week job lasted roughly three months. They usually began with a morning meeting, often not starting until 11
A.M.
because Stefano was undergoing regular psychoanalysis—which, he later reflected, probably influenced the “Freudian stuff” that gradually permeated the final script.
Psycho
would be influenced by television, by Anthony Perkins, and now by Freud—and it was also another chance for Hitchcock to emulate
Diabolique.
Back in May Hitchcock had described
Psycho
to the
New York Times
as a story in “the
Diabolique
genre.” He told Stefano that the French film had influenced his decision to shoot
Psycho
in black and white (like
Diabolique
). Their afternoon meetings were leavened by screenings; and
Diabolique
was shown more than once to Stefano and others on the staff. Stefano was also encouraged to order up his own private festival of Hitchcock titles. Afterward, the director patiently answered all questions about
each film. Stefano’s favorite, he told Hitchcock, was
Vertigo.
The compliment “brought him to near-tears,” Stefano recalled.
Hitchcock seemed happy for interruptions. He broke almost daily to visit with Lew Wasserman, who usually stopped by to chat about stocks and bonds. Hitchcock loved to digress; “usually not more than ten or fifteen minutes [of each day] would be directly concerned with
Psycho
,” according to John Russell Taylor. The ten or fifteen minutes might be devoted to a major scene, or as likely to a passing fancy of Hitchcock’s—such as his idea that Stefano should write scenes for rooms with lots of mirrors.
“He was not interested in characters or motivation at all,” Stefano reflected in later interviews. “That was the writer’s job. If I said, ‘I’d like to give the girl an air of desperation,’ he’d say, ‘Fine, fine.’ But when I said, ‘In the opening of the film, I’d like a helicopter shot over the city, then go right up to the seedy hotel where Marion is spending her lunch hour with Sam,’ he said, ‘We’ll go right into the window!’ That sort of thing excited him.”
In mid-October, Hitchcock flew to Paris and London for two weeks to promote
North by Northwest.
The tone-setting opening of
Psycho
was delegated to Stefano during his absence—a kind of informal tryout. When Hitchcock got back and read the pages, he paid Stefano the ultimate compliment: “Alma loved it!”
Stefano’s script would stay fairly faithful to the basic sequence of events in Robert Bloch’s novel, but he introduced many improvements in minor incident and characterization. And Stefano’s boldest innovation—the tone-setting opening, with Marion and Sam finishing up their lunch-hour sexual tryst—might never have been suggested by an experienced Hollywood screenwriter, glancing over his shoulder at the Production Code.
Hitchcock always told his writers to write bravely, and let him be the one to worry about the censors. Another place where Stefano deliberately flouted censorship is the scene where Marion, after eating supper and talking to Norman, decides to repent of her thievery. Then before taking a shower, Marion mentally calculates how much money she has spent and will have to repay to wash away her crime. Although this scene is in the book, it needed to be visualized somehow for film, so Stefano had Marion calculate the sum on a piece of paper. Then: “I would like Marion to tear up a piece of paper,” he said to Hitchcock, “and flush it down the toilet and see that toilet. Can we do that?”
Stefano recalled: “A toilet had never been seen on-screen before, let alone flushing it.
*
I thought if I could begin to unhinge audiences by showing
a toilet flushing—we all suffer from peccadilloes from toilet procedures—they’d be so out of it by the time of the shower murder, it would be an absolute killer.” Hitchcock raised an eyebrow before replying, “I’m going to have to fight them on it.”
According to Rebello, these “risqué elements” were, as usual, Hitchcock’s deliberate “ruse to divert the censors from more crucial concerns.” And sure enough, when Paramount submitted Stefano’s draft, Code officials said it would be impossible to approve such a film, predicting that if Hitchcock did not modify the objectionable scenes—especially the lunch-hour tryst, the toilet flushing, and the shower scene—
Psycho
would also be condemned by local censors and the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency.
Yet Stefano’s script was thoughtful as well as intentionally provocative. One example is the crucial supper scene, the only time Norman and Marion have a meaningful interchange and forge a connection. Norman talks about his hobby of taxidermy and voices qualms about his mother, yet takes offense when Marion suggests that perhaps Mrs. Bates should be put in an institution. “She’s not crazy!” he blurts angrily.
The book and film versions of that scene aren’t vastly different, except Stefano’s script puts the characters in an office den, a room eerily presided over by Norman’s collection of stuffed birds. “The [stuffed] owl, for instance, has another connotation,” Hitchcock informed Truffaut. “Owls belong to the night world; they are watchers, and this appeals to Perkins’s masochism. He knows the birds and he knows that they’re watching him all the time. He can see his own guilt reflected in their knowing eyes.”
But the conversational “duet” between Norman and Marion is longer in the film, more substantive, and it boasts some of Stefano’s finest dialogue—helping to lift
Psycho
out of the category of cheap horror almost into the realm of philosophy.
When Norman tells Marion she doesn’t look as though she’s had many empty moments in her life, she insists she’s had her share. “I’m looking for a private island,” Marion admits ruefully.
“You know what I think?” counters Norman. “I think that we’re all in private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and claw but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.”
Marion says yes, but (thinking of the money she has stolen) adds that sometimes people deliberately step into their own traps. Norman replies that he was born into his trap, but doesn’t mind anymore. Marion says he
ought
to mind, and asks gently, wouldn’t it be better to put his demanding mother someplace safe?