BETSY PALMER:
My first day on the set, I drove up in my Mercedes that was still clunking along. I just made my way out, and I see the sign "Crystal Lake," and I say, "Wow! That's a good omen!" Because I had spent my summers as a kid growing up on Crystal Lake in Warsaw, Indiana. So I arrive and the first person they shoo me off to is Tommy Savini because he's got to make the mock-up of my head. And the first thing he says is, "Do you have claustrophobia?" Then he mixed up some goop and put it on my face, with straws in my nose so I was able to breathe. And Tom had this cute little chinchilla—we would all be putting raisins in our mouths, and the chinchilla's eating raisins from our puckered lips.
RICHARD FEURY:
Betsy was great. I kept thinking, "What is she doing in a horror film?" But she was just like me, she needed to work and the price was right. But to her everlasting credit, she could have come in there, not wanting to do it, and have been a real bitch. A lot of people who come up and are successful in Hollywood would be hard to deal with. But I think she came from a different era. She was a woman from the 1950s, she had Broadway training and the morals and the backbone to say, "I signed on to do this. I'm going to do the best I can and be the best person I can be." How many actors—leading ladies—sit every night with the crew? There are actors who will just go to their dressing room for lunch and it has to be brought to them by a production assistant. Then there are actors who will stand in line with everybody else. That was Betsy.
MARK NELSON:
The first time I met Betsy Palmer, I had just gotten there the night before. I was a fan because I had grown up watching her on I've Got a Secret. So I go to Tom Savini's cabin to get my makeup and he says, "Hey Mark, I want to introduce you to Betsy Palmer!" I looked over in the corner and she is leaning against a worktable with a down jacket draped over her shoulders, her hands both on the table. Or what I thought were her hands. So I walked over and said, "Oh Betsy, I'm so glad to meet you!" And her real right hand came out from inside the middle of her shirt to shake hands with me, and I screamed. She was wearing prosthetic hands that Tom had set her up with to fool me. After that, I was too suspicious to fall for any of their tricks again.
"Sean Cunningham had a lot to do with the effectiveness of the murder sequences," says Adrienne King of her director. " For instance, after I wake up, and I go off looking for Bill in the woods, I knew that Harry Crosby was going to be on the back of the door, but I didn't know what he was doing there or how he was going to look. Sean purposely did not let me see him beforehand. So when I close the door to the generator shed and see poor Bill, with the arrow through his eye, that was a real scream. From the gut. And it was the one and only take. Sean was able to keep it pure."
JEANNINE TAYLOR:
I'm one of the few in the cast who actually got to meet Betsy Palmer—to see the transformation from the all-American, sweet, wholesome TV personality into a monster. I remember I had a great time meeting her. She was preparing for a scene, standing on the shores of the lake and getting into character. And summer had turned to fall and it was a very blustery, very chilly night, and she was wearing this really baggy sweater. It made her look really scary. She was pacing up and down and growling her lines and making herself go to a very scary place. I thought she was a rollicking barrel of laughs. She was having a ball doing the part.
The only other time I saw Betsy was a little while after Friday the 13th, in New Jersey, when the State Theatre was inaugurated. It was a star-studded gala with the governor and Helen Hayes and Ginger Roger and Betsy as the mistresses of ceremony, and everyone dressed in wonderful gowns. Betsy looked drop-dead gorgeous! And I was the ingénue in that evening's performance, and Betsy came around to all the rooms to personally thank everyone in the cast. She thanked me, though she may or may not have remembered me. I didn't mention Friday the 13th and she didn't mention it to me. But she was great.
VICTOR MILLER:
In the years since the writing of the movie, I have had a very helpful psychiatrist explain Mrs. Voorhees to me. He said, "My God, don't you know what you've done?" And I said, "I'm totally clueless." He pointed out to me that I had created a mother, in some ways very much like my mother, but a better version of her because was killing people that had not taken good care of her son. In some ways she was the best mother of all—she loved her son so much that she would commit these horrible acts for eternity just to make up for her loss.
Not to say, of course, that any of this was on a conscious level as I was writing it. But it was perfect for me that the two counselors were making love when they should have been watching that poor little boy Jason. And it is a theme that I would repeat throughout the movie, so that we knew right from the get-go that this whole thing has a lot to do with psychosexual craziness.
BETSY PALMER:
I'm a very sincere actress. I was taught "The Method." So I created a whole autobiography of Mrs. Voorhees. She was a gal my age, and she had grown up in the 1940s like I did. And in the script she had a class ring. Back in school you went steady, and in those days girls did not go to bed with anybody. So I said "OK, what happened to her was she's in love with this guy, and they did make love, and she became pregnant. And after a while she said to him 'I'm pregnant,' and he said, 'Well, don't brush it off on me. Bye, bye.'" He tosses her off, she tries to hide it from her family, and pretty soon six months or so and she's showing. Her father has a fit and throws her out of the house.
So here's this poor thing, wandering around pregnant. She hasn't even finished high school; she has no way of earning a living. I figure she probably went to the Salvation Army. They always took in a lot of the girls, the unmarried girls, and let them have their babies in the home. And then she has the kid, and now he's a mongoloid! When it rains on her parade it pours. The bluebirds are dropping doo-doos all over her. So she makes the best of life and her little boy. She gets this job to cook at summer camp. And she thinks, "My little boy can be with other kids, and he can swim, and he can have this wonderful camp experience, and we'll be there together." And of course you know what happens, the kids go off and make love and her boy drowns.
I was in some city once, doing a radio show and the kids were calling in to talk to "Mrs. Voorhees." And I asked one of the girls, "Why do you kids love this woman so much?" And she said, "Because we know why you did it." That is the reason why I think the character has stayed alive as long as she has. I didn't think I was a bad lady. I thought I just got the short shrift in life. If her little boy hadn't drowned she never would have killed all those counselors. I just tried to save those other children every summer when they tried to reopen the camp. Doesn't the movie talk about how I had set fires and poisoned the water, and it eventually closes the camp down? Doesn't it make sense?
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
You're always a little worried about stage actors for a lot of reasons. The biggest is that they are in complete control of their performance. You can give direction, but when the curtain goes up, the actor does whatever he or she wants to. In a film, it's the absolute opposite. And when that lack of control is realized by the actor, panic often sets in. So in film, what has to happen is that he or she has to trust you as a director. And Betsy decided to trust me on the decisions she made. Consequently, when we were rehearsing her stuff, it started off very big. A lot of time was spent toning her down, and keeping her madness limited to subtler eye and head movements. But Betsy always had something cooking inside that I liked.
BARRY MOSS:
I hope I don't get shot over this, but I would have directed it a little differently. I think Sean tried to make Betsy look a little like Estelle Parsons. When he put Betsy in a windbreaker and a short haircut so she could look as tough as possible, it was just the opposite of what I had in mind when I recommended her for the part. I just thought it was such a cool idea to have it be someone you would never suspect.
BETSY PALMER:
There was no hairstylist. There was no makeup person. I did it all myself. There w
as a cold little cabin that had a wood-burning stove in it—that is what they called the make-up room. I did just a straight make-up on my face and, as I had also divorced my husband at the time, I'd cut all my hair off. Women sort of do that somehow—it's like freedom, you know. And I'm also not built like Estelle Parsons—I'm slender, and five foot seven and a half. So I wore heavy thermal underwear, and they gave me two sweaters to wear so that would make me look heftier. Like I could throw a body through the window, and whatever other horrible things I did.
ADRIENNE KING:
This is what I really want to know: do audiences feel cheated that Mrs. Voorhees only shows up in the last part of the film?
"When Brenda flies through the window, I was so freaked out!" remembers Adrienne King. "I didn't know when the moment was going to come, and it was done entirely in one two-minute take. It was a totally real situation."
VICTOR MILLER:
Sean would say things that I always thought were really campy but right on. Like that it is a good idea to keep your villains masked, because if you start seeing your villain brush his or her teeth it becomes very ordinary. So I guess we went to the furthest extreme possible. It is a cheat, obviously, but it seems to have worked.
BETSY PALMER:
When my character makes her entrance at the end of the movie, I said to Sean, "You know, you're not fighting fair, fella. You're not even giving anybody a loose clue that I'm on the scene. They should at least have a glimpse of this woman somewhere earlier in the film. You should at least put me in that little diner Steve Christy visits, or at a stoplight in my Jeep. Whatever, just a flash somewhere." And he said, "The hell with it. Just let 'em guess."
ADRIENNE KING:
Alice is not the smartest person in the world, is she? When I run into the cabin, protecting myself from God knows who, I'm supposed to throw a rope over the beam to brace the door, and then start throwing all this stuff against it. Until I realized afterwards that the door opened out. Still, I was told to intentionally do it that way. What sense does this make? Hello! But my fans love to delight in the fact that after piling all this furniture up against the door, I then have to leap over all this stuff and run back out. I guess when you're scared, you are not really thinking ahead...
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
We had high ambitions for the climactic fight between Alice and Mrs. Voorhees. We couldn't afford stunt people, so I thought we'd do the "easier" dialogue stuff first. We had Betsy come out and shoot her long revelation scene in the cabin, which took a long time to do. Once that was done, we started staging a ballet of the fight. And that was the beginning of the longest two days of the shoot. We just could not get the action staged correctly. We spent the next two nights doing stuff I thought we'd get done in two hours. It was hard, but Betsy and Adrienne were both good sports and never complained once.
ADRIENNE KING:
We jokingly called it the "Ballet du Machete." We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. And then when we shot it, it was like gangbusters. We had all this adrenaline. And Sean wanted to make sure that nobody got hurt, which I was thankful for, because we were really on a beach and it was a real machete and there really was somebody smacking my head into the sand.
BETSY PALMER:
Before we went down to the beach. I said to Adrienne, "Let's rehearse our scene." She says, "Great!" This lovely young thing. So I haul off and I hit her. Because when you're onstage in the theater, you do. You cup your hand, and you get it along the jawbone so you don't break somebody's face. So I just gave her a potchky right on her cheek. And she fell to the ground, "Sean! Sean! She hit me!" Sean came over and I said, "Well, we were rehearsing this thing and I just hit her." He said, "No, Betsy, you don't hit people in movies! You miss them, and then we put a sound effect in later."
ADRIENNE KING:
Betsy and I did have a couple of very intense days and nights in the cabin. We had a few great fight scenes together. And she loves to tell that story where she slaps me and she says I broke into tears. Well, she did slap me really hard and I went flying through the air. She beat me up, man. It got to fisticuffs. No stunt double. I walked away from that scene with bruises. But Betsy was a real trooper to be cast in this film. She was bigger than life and funny off the set. On the set she was really into it, and she scared me. Betsy's very theatrical and very intense, but very sweet. I can't imagine anyone else that could have done a better job.
TOM SAVINI:
I remember the last day, when Taso and I were in the car on the way, ready to leave Camp No-Be-Bos-Co. Sean stopped me, saying they still had to shoot the fight scene between Betsy Palmer and Adrienne King. So Taso and I staged that. We're certified fight directors with The Society of British Fight Directors. And that was the last thing we did—and then we got in the car and just went home.
The fight between Adrienne King and Betsy Palmer is almost like the Road Runner and the Coyote, you know? If, at last, the Road Runner was going to get his comeuppance, you want him to die gloriously because of all the torment he's been giving the poor Coyote. Here's Betsy Palmer wiping out all these people. She has to die in a glorious way, so the idea was to cut her head off.
BETSY PALMER:
After the beach scene was shot, I went up to the cabin to get out of my wet clothes. One of the crew came to me and said, 'Hey, Betsy, we're going to cut your head off. Don't you wanna come down and see?' I just went, 'What!?'"
VICTOR MILLER:
Decapitation has always been something that I have found particularly disquieting ever since the French Revolution was explained to me. I thought that was just one of worst things that could possibly happen to someone.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
It hadn't been done before, and all we could keep thinking was, "How in the world can we chop somebody's head off and make it look as if it actually happened?" We had to be sure that we knew when we were gonna cut because it only works for maybe a second or two. I knew that if I had those seconds covered then I could sell the moment. You think you see a lot more than you actually do.
Right: A classically-trained stage actress, Betsy Palmer is devilish perfection as the diabolical Mrs. Voorhees.
TASO STAVRAKIS:
There was this old, dark, dingy shop in the Empire State Building in New York City where you could go and buy fake eyeballs, which we needed for Mrs. Voorhees' head. You walk in and they just say, 'Go over there and help yourself.' And there's a little drawer that you pull out, filled with eyes of every different shape and size, all staring back at you...
TOM SAVINI:
When Betsy Palmer's head goes off her body, her hands actually come up into the frame, as if looking for the head. That's our way of making fake stuff look real. But if you notice, her knuckles are full of black hair because that's Taso's hands. He was actually slumped over with Betsy's fake head stuck to the body with toothpicks. So that the machete, when it hit, would just break the toothpicks and the head would spin off. Another glorious death!
ADRIENNE KING:
Taso's head was actually under the sweater and they put Betsy Palmer's head on top of his neck, so it didn't feel fake because I really was cutting somebody's head off. I worked very hard on the moment after I deliver the fatal blow. Sean talked me through that whole scene. He said to me, "Just put yourself in the moment. What would your reaction be if you really did this?" I was supposed to be like, "I can't believe I'm doing this, but thank God I did. I'm alive." Those mixed emotions. I think I look perplexed. And I'm happy with that look, because it works.
Filming that shot was the culmination of everything we'd done. I wouldn't trade it for the world, because how many times in your life do you get to do something like that? It's hysterical. If there is going to be a memory of what I did in this lifetime, it is that I'm the person who decapitated Betsy Palmer with a machete.
For six weeks, the production of Friday the 13th had gone through highs and lows, surviving a lack of cash flow, constant practical jokes by Tom and Taso, weeks of
intense all-night shoots that left cast and crew wrung out, and a crowning, glorious decapitation. But there was one final, crucial element left to complete. One that, in retrospect, would spawn a franchise.
Almost an afterthought, the emergence of a little boy named Jason from the watery depths of Crystal Lake would prove to be more than a last-minute, tagged-on "chair jumper." It would be the birth, albeit a seemingly inauspicious one, of a cinematic icon.
VICTOR MILLER:
I went to school with a girl named Van Voorhees. I was always struck by the sound of the name because it was just creepy-sounding. My son Ian was born in 1968 and my other son Josh was born in 1972. I mixed the two together and that's how I came up with the name Jason Voorhees.
Originally, my script ended with Alice killing Mrs. Voorhees. Then Sean called me up and said we need a chair jumper after the climax. So I wrote the sequence where Alice is in the little canoe, she sets off, the sun rises, we think she's safe and Jason comes out of the water. Then she wakes up in the hospital bed. Which was as close as I could steal from Carrie without being arrested.
TOM SAVINI:
At that point there still wasn't an ending to the film—Betsy Palmer's killed and that's it. But I had just seen Carrie, and its ending was terrific. You think the movie is over: Amy Irving is walking to Carrie's grave and the music is playing as if the credits are going to roll any second, then suddenly this hand pops out of the grave—that scared the piss out of everybody. So great, let's do the same thing. But how are we going to do that here when everyone's dead?
So I said, "It might be psychologically disturbing if Jason suddenly pops out of the water and grabs her." Because you've kind of dismissed him, he's gone, and then just have Alice wake up out of a dream. Which worked, because if it's a dream, you can show anything and get away with it no matter how preposterous it is.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 10
