Authors: Patrick McGilligan
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.
Blond dripping hair, dark gaping mouth, blood spattering everywhere.
It took seven days to collect the individual shots—seventy-eight pieces of film (Hitchcock could stipulate the exact number for interviewers). Pat Hitchcock O’Connell has said that her mother conceived the precise order of the images. Saul Bass later claimed that he was on the set and actually
directed
the scene, though of course he didn’t—yet it was possible, if unprovable, that Bass was nearby (it would have been like Hitchcock to keep him around).
The hardest shot was the last one of Marion, dead, “starting with the eye in full frame and gradually easing back to disclose the draped body still clutching the torn curtain, the running water, the entire bathroom,” in Leigh’s words. They filmed it some twenty times before Hitchcock was satisfied—and then during the postproduction, according to legend, Mrs. Hitchcock detected a blink from the actress, and a freeze shot was ordered.
Norman Bates, of course, was Marion’s costar in that scene. But Anthony Perkins had been let off for the week; he was safely on the East Coast when the shower scene was filmed. The knife-wielding Mother was actually a costumed “double”—stuntwoman Margo Epper. Hitchcock deployed slow motion to cover Leigh’s breasts—“the slow shots,” the director told François Truffaut, then “inserted in the montage so as to give an impression of normal speed.” Leigh’s lifeless eye was optically enlarged in postproduction, according to Rebello’s book, “so that orb appeared to be a perfect ‘fit’ in the bathtub drain as his camera spiraled down the drain.” All of Hitchcock’s long experience and magicianship went into these, his most spectacular forty-five seconds of terrifying illusion.
After a Christmas break filming resumed on the second half of the film, with Arbogast going to meet Mother and meeting his maker instead, and Lila stumbling upon Mother in the basement.
Mother herself was a piece of elaborate Hitchcockery. For the film to work, audiences had to think Mother was alive, right up to the climax. Paul Jasmin, an actor friend of Anthony Perkins, offered up his talent for doing an old-lady, Marjorie Main kind of voice; when Mother spoke, sometimes it was Jasmin, sometimes lines that had been looped by actresses Virginia Gregg or Jeanette Nolan (John McIntire’s wife). Hitchcock
spliced and melded the voices together, keeping moviegoers guessing until Mother’s actual “appearance” as a mummified corpse in a rocking chair. That bit of stagecraft was even more troublesome than the shower sequence.
“First of all it was very difficult to get Mother to turn,” Hilton Green recalled. “A prop man had to be squatting down on the back of his heels, out of sight, turning the chair in unison with the hitting of the light bulb, in sync with the movement of the camera. Trying to get all of that in one precise moment proved extremely tough. Oh, I’ve never seen Hitch so furious. He looked at the dailies and it wasn’t the way he wanted.” They had to try it again.
Only the last voice, with Bates sitting forlornly in jail, his mind subsumed by Mother, is entirely female: “Virginia, with probably a little of Jeanette spliced in,” according to Jasmin.
Hitchcock paid more attention to Mother, some people involved in the production thought, than to Lila and Sam. Joseph Stefano kept arguing that the stars of Part 2 of
Psycho
deserved “a few seconds of silent memory” at the end, reflecting on what had happened to Marion, but the director was reluctant to stir the ashes. In order to keep the pace moving he cut dialogue Stefano had written for the pair, expressing their feelings of loss.
That may be one defect of
Psycho
, and especially of the final scene (among the last Hitchcock filmed, in late January 1960): the psychiatrist’s monologue dissecting the psyche of Norman Bates. The scripted version of that sequence included exteriors outside the police building, a television crew broadcasting news of Bates’s arrest, and a patrolman holding crowds back. Inside, an errand boy brings take-out coffee into the office of the Chief of Police. Sam asks Lila, “It’s regular, okay?” and Lila answers pointedly, “I could stand something regular,” followed by small talk that would give audiences a chance to decompress.
But Hitchcock didn’t want the audience of
Psycho
to decompress. He wanted the final crescendo, then a quick coda. He shot the coda sequence virtually as scripted, before deciding to eliminate the atmosphere and small talk and focus purely on the psychiatric explanation of Norman’s pathological relationship with his mother. Sam and Lila received only terse cutaways. After Simon Oakland, a smooth, authoritative actor, breezed through his lines, Hitchcock brought two months of photography on
Psycho
to a close on February 1, 1960.
Once filming was completed, the big question was how Hitchcock and
Psycho
would fare with the Production Code. American society was at a turning point, and the country was shaking off the Eisenhower decade and moving on to the bright new era of the Kennedys. Hollywood censorship
was in transition. The director correctly gauged that he had fans and friends among Code officials—chief among them Y. Frank Freeman, who had retained his position as liaison between producers and Code authorities, and Geoffrey Shurlock, the more liberal Englishman who had succeeded Joseph Breen as chief enforcer.