Alfred Hitchcock (114 page)

Two scenes involving Janet Leigh really stuck in the craw of the Hollywood censors: most of the focus, in March and April, was on the postcoital opening and the shower stabbing. Censorship officials couldn’t decide which was worse: the opening, with Leigh in her undergarments, or the murder of a seemingly nude Leigh in the shower. Hitchcock approached the negotiations, as usual, like a poker game, shuffling and reshuffling his hand.

Right from the moment he recruited her, Leigh recalled, Hitchcock had alerted the actress as to “how he planned all along to manipulate the censors, by deliberately putting things in so bizarre, he could come back to them and say, ‘Tsk-tsk. All right, I’ll take that out, but you’ve got to give me this.’ He deliberately inserted more questionable shots in the script, knowing quite well they would be unacceptable,” she said, “but with each disallowed one he gained leverage in his bargaining for the ones he had really wanted all along.”

Hitchcock successfully convinced censors, for example, “that the unprecedented shot and sound of a toilet flushing was a vital component of the plot,” in Leigh’s words, because when Lila found the scrap of paper it substantiated the crime, and proved that Marion had been at the Bates Motel.
^*
Similarly, he insisted that “Marion’s half-clad appearance in the opening shot with her lover Sam was necessary to prove the furtiveness and futility of the affair, which prompted her theft,” said Leigh, while “the mixed blood and water gurgling down the drain was the necessary chilling substitute for any blood spurting or bloodstains.”

The censorship board seesawed back and forth over the opening, but went unanimously “berserk” over the shower scene, according to Rebello. Yet they couldn’t agree among themselves about what it was, exactly, that upset them. “Three censors saw nudity,” Rebello reported in his book; “two did not. Memo from Shurlock office to the Hitchcock office: ‘Please take out the nudity.’ ” The censors demanded a second viewing, and
Psycho
was returned to them for additional scrutiny. “Now the three board members who
had
seen nudity the previous day did
not
and the two who did not now
did.
”

The rear shot of Leigh, which he had trumpeted so loudly in the press, was Hitchcock’s wild card. The overhead shot of “the lifeless body of Janet
Leigh, sprawled over the bathtub, her buttocks exposed,” in Rebello’s words, was preordained as a casualty. “A perfectly heartbreaking shot,” recalled Stefano, who championed the shot after seeing an early version of
Psycho
, “so poetic and hurtful.” When Hitchcock admitted to Stefano that he was dropping the shot to mollify the censors, the writer was infuriated.

Hitchcock ultimately charmed the Production Code officials, and wore them down. His final maneuver was volunteering to reshoot the opening if he could leave the shower sequence alone—adding the stipulation that the censors had to show up on the set for the reshoot because he was confused as to how to satisfy their objections. The story—perhaps apocryphal—is that the reshoot was scheduled, but the censors never materialized, so nothing was changed. “And,” script supervisor Marshal Schlom said, “they finally agreed they didn’t see the nudity in the shower sequence which, of course, was there all the time.”

The Production Code, in the end, voted its approval, and Paramount held its breath for the Catholic Church. The Legion of Decency issued a B—“Morally objectionable in part for all”—which was as low as could be tolerated. But in deference to the Code, the Legion had stopped short of condemning
Psycho
, and so the Legion’s rating amounted to another victory for Hitchcock.

While the censorship battle was raging, George Tomasini did his brilliant editing, and Bernard Herrmann composed what many regard as his quintessential score. Herrmann’s frenetically paced all-strings orchestration—what one critic called “screaming violins” and another “pure ice water”—would set the all-time standard in film music. The main
Psycho
theme is “repeated so often and at such musically strong points that it seems to be not only a point of departure but a point of return as well,” according to film music scholar Royal S. Brown. The musical backing went beyond any previous Hitchcock theme “in its array of jarringly dissonant chords, the bitonality of which reflects on the film’s ultimate narrative theme.”

Although the director originally intended the shower scene to be one of his silent short stories, he changed his mind after hearing the piercing music. So Marion’s ordeal would begin with “an extremely high-pitched string passage,” in the words of film scholar James Naremore, “punctuated by Marion’s screams and a series of notes that are like whistles,” abruptly shifting, after Mother has stopped stabbing and fled, “into a loud but slow sequence of bass chords in a minor key.” Only after Mother leaves the room does the music fade away, as a staring Marion slides down the wall. The final shot of her lifeless eye is complemented only by the natural noises of running water and a drain gurgling.

While the film was being edited and scored, Hitchcock convened a series of meetings in Lew Wasserman’s office to plan the publicity, advertising, and release strategy for
Psycho.

It was a campaign Hitchcock had really begun
before
the filming, making a series of provocative statements about the intentional shocker he had planned—complete with nudity, bloodshed, and transvestism—and then closing the
Psycho
set to journalists.

This created an aura of supersecrecy that extended even to the cast members. According to Vera Miles, the ensemble actually had to raise their right hands and swear not to divulge the plot twists of the film. That Hitchcock actually took such self-serving pains was unlikely, as was the rumor that the director bought up all copies of the book in Los Angeles.
Psycho
was a popular novel that hasn’t gone out of print since its original publication.

One thing Hitchcock
did
buy was the book’s original cover design, from artist Tony Palladino, ordering the poster to be modeled after the book jacket. (Since early in his career, Hitchcock, who started out in design, had consulted on his titles and advertising, but this was the first time he was able to dictate the style. Harold Adler, who worked with Saul Bass on the title sequence—“nervous, balletic horizontal and vertical bars that expanded and contracted in mirror-image patterns,” in Stephen Rebello’s words—noticed that Hitchcock’s office “contained more art books and current magazines on graphics than I owned.”)

Having agreed to direct the film for a deferred salary, Hitchcock was a major investor in—and co-owner of—
Psycho.
At one of the early advertising and publicity meetings, Barney Balaban objected to Hitchcock’s promotional ideas, insisting they would never work, but Wasserman flourished Hitchcock’s contract, reminding Balaban of the director’s rights.

All his life Hitchcock had been a student of publicity; now he could take all the lessons he had been learning since Islington—lessons he had mastered with his television series—and apply them to
Psycho.
He hired his witty amanuensis James Allardice to write the
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
—type trailers, with the director himself offering a guided tour of the Bates Motel, lingering in the bathroom, flushing the toilet, and rolling his eyes.

“All tidied up,” Hitchcock says ruefully. “The bathroom. Oh, they’ve cleaned all this up now. Big difference. You should have seen the blood. The whole, the whole place was, well, it’s too horrible to describe. Dreadful. And I tell you a very important clue was found here [pointing to the toilet]. Down there. Well, the murderer, you see, crept in here very silently—of course, the shower was on, there was no sound, and uh …”

At which point, the director whips the curtain aside, and Bernard Herrmann’s screeching violins are heard. There crouches an undressed blonde (not Janet Leigh, but the accommodating Vera Miles in a wig) emitting a bloodcurdling scream. It was one of the world’s great trailers.

With the exception of the Selznick productions, Hitchcock had never enjoyed the big promotional and advertising budgets that came with studio affiliation. That was a continual gripe about his deal with Warner Bros.; Paramount was better, but some of his Paramount films—like
Vertigo
—received surprisingly modest press attention during filming, and only average budget support upon release. Now, with Paramount keeping to the shadows, Hitchcock had the opportunity to mastermind a film’s release as never before.

It was Hitchcock himself who made the unprecedented decision to exclude critics from advance showings (supposedly to prevent them from giving away the ending in reviews), and to advertise, “No one … BUT NO ONE … will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance.” As Rebello points out in his book, the latter gambit was not unique (Paramount had tried the same angle with
Vertigo
), but it never worked as well as with
Psycho.

Exhibitors were forced to comply. Publicity kits advised theater owners how to handle long lines and surging crowds, and cautioned them, in a recording from Hitchcock himself, “to close your house curtains over the screen after the end-titles of the picture, and keep the theater dark for half a minute. During these thirty seconds of stygian blackness, the suspense of
Psycho
is indelibly engraved in the mind of the audience, later to be discussed among gaping friends and relations. You will then bring up house-lights of a greenish hue, and shine spotlights of this ominous hue across the faces of your departing patrons.”

The postproduction gloss and release plans were then left to trusted subordinates as the Hitchcocks embarked on a two-month global vacation. They departed on the
President Cleveland
on April 3 for Honolulu, and from there traveled to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Rome, Paris, and London, as usual mingling publicity with pleasure.

In Tokyo, he later told Andy Warhol, he was escorted by an “extremely sedate” Japanese representative to a press club and steak dinner. Afterward they trooped upstairs, where Hitchcock had the kind of accidental encounter with undressed women that he also had been mastering since Islington days. He wasn’t expecting pornography: “Awful films … American ones, French ones … and then [after the films] they had two live girls sticking a brush between their ‘legs’ and writing on white paper in Japanese characters.”

The Hitchcocks wouldn’t return to Hollywood until mid-June, just before the national opening of
Psycho.
It was Lew Wasserman who urged booking the film into hundreds of theaters directly following its weeklong prerelease liftoff at two New York City showcases, the De Mille and the Baronet, and the Hollywood Theater in Los Angeles. As Wasserman had hoped, box-office records were shattered first at the deluxe theaters, and then at neighborhood venues across the nation, before reviews and controversy could catch up with the film.

Despite controversy everywhere (British censors, for example, gave the film an “X”),
Psycho
set new attendance records around the world, grossing over $9 million in the United States and another $6 million overseas. In 1960 that remarkable figure was second only to
Ben-Hur
—and since that film’s budget was $11 million,
Psycho
was really the year’s most profitable film. (Hitchcock always insisted that he had never envisioned such moneymaking—for him, a “secondary consideration” to making the film.)

Psycho
became a genuine phenomenon. Letters to the
New York Times
debated whether the film was “morbid” and “sickening,” or “superb” and “truly avant-garde.” There were “faintings. Walkouts. Repeat visits. Boycotts. Angry phone calls and letters,” wrote Stephen Rebello. “Talk of banning the film rang from church pulpits and psychiatrist’s offices.”

There was every manner of critical response, including a handful—like Wanda Hale of the
New York Daily News
—who immediately embraced the film (giving it four stars). More common was the kind of backlash handed out by Dwight Macdonald in
Esquire
, who vehemently diagnosed
Psycho
as “a reflection of a most unpleasant mind, a mean, sly, sadistic little mind,” or Robert Hatch in the
Nation
, who was “offended and disgusted.”