Once Bloch had invented the characters of a snoopy sister and the lover who search for the missing heroine, his story beats fell perfectly into place. “The story basically wrote itself,” observed Bloch of the first draft, on which he worked six weeks. “I added various embellishments as I went along to strengthen the story. The moment I finished it, I sent it off to my literary agent, Harry Altshuler, who handled me in science fiction, fantasy, and suspense.”
Altshuler, based in New York, promptly sent the Bloch manuscript, titled Psycho, to Harper & Row. Almost as promptly, the publishing house rejected it. On the rebound, Altshuler tried Clayton Rawson, an editor at Simon & Schuster and a noted mystery writer himself. Rawson snapped up Psycho for Simon & Schuster’s popular, one-per-month Inner Sanctum Mystery book series.** “I received the staggering advance of $750,” recalled Bloch. To acknowledge the speedy sale his agent had made, Bloch inscribed Psycho with the dedication: “10% of this book is dedicated to Harry Altshuler who did 90% of the work.”
At Simon & Schuster, the corridor talk pegged Psycho as a sensational read and a highly exploitable commodity. Art director Jeffery Metzner hired graphic artist Tony Palladino to design a title concept that would convey the shock aspect of the storyline. Palladino’s distinctive title logo evoked letters slashed by a knife or shattered by a scream, or even madness itself. In fact, Palladino’s graphic was to become synonymous with the title Psycho and remained so for three decades. The illustrator recalled: “The book and title were on the tongues of a lot of people at Simon and Schuster at the time. That title was so descriptive, I let the title become the graphic. It was much stronger than any illustration one could do. The guy [in the novel] was quite cracked up, so, in the graphic, I cracked up the lettering to reinforce the title.”
Simon & Schuster published Psycho in the summer of 1959, just months before the second anniversary of the discoveries at the Ed Gein farmhouse. In the novel, Bloch transformed Midwestern Plainfield into “Fairvale,” a graceless, humdrum town in the American Southwest. The writer fictionalized real-life Gein into the pudgy, mother-dominated motelkeep, Norman Bates, whose flights of madness are fired up by liquor, pornography, Saint-Saëns, and Beethoven. Bates encounters a pretty, vulnerable guest, Mary Crane (Gein’s first victim was named Mary), en route—with forty thousand stolen dollars—to her lover who owns a hardware store (Gein’s second victim owned a hardware store). During a supper and conversation, Mary arouses the compassion—and the lust—of the pathetic Bates. After Mary begs off, she is slashed to death in a shower stall, apparently by Bates’s possessive, maniacal mother. When an insurance sleuth is also knifed to death while tracking Mary, the boyfriend and sister of the dead girl pursue the mystery. They eventually unmask Norman Bates as a matricidal, transvestite, multiple murderer.
The first printing of ten thousand copies of Psycho enjoyed brisk sales and, Bloch observed, “some very flattering reviews, including one in the New York Times.” Indeed, on April 19, 1959, writer and anthologist Anthony Boucher, in his “Criminals at Large” column of the New York Times Book Review, raved: “[Bloch] is more chillingly effective than any writer might reasonably be expected to be … [and] demonstrates that a believable history of mental illness can be more icily terrifying than all the arcane horrors summoned up by a collaboration of Poe and Lovecraft.” The Herald Tribune critic marked the novel as “adroit and bloodcurdling,” and Best Sellers thought it “A terribly chilling tale … may well be the most unusual story of the year.” Fawcett picked up the book for a paperback version that sped through nine printings of its first edition.
Among most of the mainstream literary cognoscenti, Psycho, a genre piece, was rebuffed. As Raymond Chandler described the lot of fellow mystery writers in a 1944 letter: “However well and expertly he writes a mystery story, it will be treated in one paragraph while a column and a half of respectful attention will be given to any fourth-rate, ill-constructed mock-serious account of the life of a bunch of cotton pickers in the Deep South.” However, such contemporary writers as Stephen King compare Bloch’s trio of psychological novels (The Scarf, The Deadbeat, Psycho) to James M. Cain’s (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce). “In their own way,” wrote King in Danse Macabre, “the novels that Robert Bloch wrote in the 1950s had every bit as much influence on the course of American literature as did the Cain ‘heel-with-a-heart’ novels of the 1930s.”
Measured by the yardstick of contemporary horror literature, when readers have been Stephen King-ed and Clive Barker-ed to a bloody pulp, Psycho now looks like a model of restraint. Yet in 1959, Mickey Spillane or Agatha Christie were about as far as mainstream thriller literature went. Psycho came on like something on which Edgar Allan Poe and William Gains, master of the horrifying E. C. Comics of the fifties, might have collaborated while hopped-up on Krafft-Ebing. Robert Bloch had sexed-up and Freudianized the Gothic, revitalizing such creaky elements as the rattletrap Old Dark House, the stormy night, and the crackpot madwoman locked in the dank basement. Into the brew, Bloch stirred a motel on the skids and a randy, alcoholic, mama’s boy whose scrambled psyche and way with taxidermy could keep several shrinks in summer houses in the Hamptons for years.
Despite howls of protest from critics who believed that their genteel sensibilities had been violated, Bloch actually tidied up and made palatable the far more unsavory facts of the Gein case.*** Explains Bloch, “In my novel, following on Freudian precepts, I made Norman Bates a transvestite who dressed up as his mother with a wig and dress whenever he committed these crimes. Much to my surprise, I discovered that the actual killer dressed up also, but he allegedly wore the breasts and skins of his mother. I also discovered he was subject to amnesiac fugues and had no memory of committing these crimes. He was a necrophiliac and a cannibal. Busy, busy, busy! He had a fixation on his mother, who had died twelve years previously. He kept her room inviolate and untouched since that time and the gentleman was also given to perversions in the time-honored tradition of the Nazi death camps.”
It was when Bloch realized the weird similarity between the true-crime revelations and his own novel that he began to find himself staring into mirrors and wondering about himself. “In other words,” Bloch mused, “in inventing my character I had come very close to the actual persona of Ed Gein. It horrified me how I could think of such things. As a result, I spent the next two years shaving with my eyes shut. I didn’t want to look in the mirror.”
During mid-February 1959, Bloch’s agent, Harry Altshuler, had sent out advance copies of Psycho to several movie studios. A typical response to the book was script reader William Pinckard’s; on February 25, he offered this opinion to Paramount executives: “Too repulsive for films, and rather shocking even to a hardened reader. It is original, no doubt about that, and the author practices clever deceptions upon the reader, not revealing until the end that the villain’s mother is actually a stuffed corpse. Cleverly plotted, quite scary toward the end, and actually fairly believable. But impossible for films.”
“Impossible” or not, in April 1959, Music Corporation of American (MCA) agent Ned Brown tendered a $7,500 “blind bid” to Altshuler for the screen rights. Bloch recalled his agent’s buoyantly phoning him with the news: “When I asked who was buying the book, he said, ‘They won’t tell me.’ I said, ‘We’ve got to get more than $7,500. Why don’t you try $10,000?’” Altshuler complied and, in a wire dated May 6, agent Brown counteroffered a sum of $9,000. Altshuler advised Bloch to accept. “Harry came back and said, ‘I can’t get them any further.’ I said I’d take it and signed the contract believing agents are supposed to know about such things. I’d sold nothing to films before that. So, under the terms of my contract, Simon and Schuster got 15 percent off the top and my agent got 10 percent, which left me with about $6,750 before taxes. In the end, I imagine I wound up with about $5,000.”
At roughly the time that Bloch learned that his contract with Simon & Schuster included no bonus or percentage of profi
ts in the event of a sale to Hollywood, the writer reeled from another blow. “It was then,” said Bloch with a sigh, “I learned that Psycho had been bought by Mr. Alfred Hitchcock.”
*As written, the passage actually reads: “Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.”
**Simon & Schuster’s Inner Sanctum imprint took its title from a popular forties radio mystery series. From the 1940s through the 1970s, the line published top writers Anthony Boucher, Ira Levin, Philip MacDonald, Ellery Queen, Craig Rice, and lesser lights. In the early forties, Universal Pictures produced a series of Inner Sanctum shockers as second features (Weird Woman, Pillow of Death, The Frozen Ghost). TV had a go at an Inner Sanctum series in 1953.
***Bloch’s fascinating account of the Gein case alone makes The Quality of Murder (Dutton, 1962) worth reading. Edited by Anthony Boucher, the book compiles some of history’s most fascinating crimes and criminals, as seen by members of the Mystery Writers of America.
3.
The Director
The Trouble With Alfred
WHY ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND Psycho? Most would understand the glee of a relatively obscure author on learning that one of the world’s most celebrated directors had snapped up the film rights to one of his books. Yet even to a flattered novelist, Psycho and the Master of Suspense seemed an odd coupling. In the spring of 1959, Alfred Hitchcock had the movie world wrapped around his pudgy finger. Having been a household name for decades, Hitchcock earned $250,000 per picture, plus a healthy chunk of the gross. Since 1953, after several bumpy years at Warner Bros., Hitchcock and his retinue had presided over a knotty pine-paneled suite in the Producers’ Building of Paramount at 5555 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood.
Paramount gave Hitchcock carte blanche over story selection, screenwriter, cast, editing, and publicity for any project costing $3 million or less. The studio superstructure so coveted the director’s services that they also turned over to him the highly lucrative rights to Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo after release. No wonder a Paramount executive had written to a counterpart at MGM, while Hitchcock was making North by Northwest in 1958, “Paramount functions practically as a studio setup for him.”
In the late spring of 1959, Hitchcock was gearing up for the July release of North by Northwest, a $3.3 million Technicolor chase featuring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Mount Rushmore in a larky Ernest Lehman screenplay involving spies, microfilm, and sex. Having mushroomed into MGM’s biggest-budgeted project of 1959, aside from Ben-Hur, the picture went on to become one of the great Hitchcock audience pleasers. But there is reason to suspect that the fifty-nine-year-old suspense maestro felt bullied by his brilliant present and past.
Forty-six feature films and three successful seasons on television had put Hitchcock on constant guard against repeating himself. To “recharge the battery,” as Hitchcock put it, he had already confined the action to microcosms (Lifeboat, Rope, Rear Window) and gleefully splashed it across public spaces and national monuments (Blackmail, The 39 Steps, the British and American versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Saboteur, Foreign Correspondent). He had gussied-up melodrama with ruffles and flourishes (Jamaica Inn, Under Capricorn) and tricked-out stageplay adaptations with such technical gimmicks as the ten-minute take or 3-D (Rope, Dial M for Murder). He had pumped up the adrenaline with chamber pieces about neurotics (Rebecca, Suspicion, Notorious) and full-on psychopaths (Spellbound, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train). He had played comedy light (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) and autumnal (The Trouble with Harry). He had tried on semidocumentary (The Wrong Man) and haunting, sexy metaphysics (Vertigo). There had even been a couple of lumbering musical numbers (Waltzes from Vienna, Stage Fright); Hitchcock’s hand was so practiced, he made top-ten Neilson ratings for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” on CBS look like something one does in one’s sleep.
Alfred Hitchcock was only half joking when he told the press, “If I made Cinderella, the audience would be looking for a corpse to turn up in the coach,” or ruefully observed of the trap in which he had caught himself, “Style is self-plagiarism.” H. N. Swanson, friend to Hitchcock and agent to such suspense novelists as Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, put it this way: “Hitch never casually looked for ‘something different.’ He was relentless.” Another longtime Hitchcock associate, agent Michael Ludmer, insisted, “We scoured everything—plays, novels, short stories, newspaper clippings. ‘Whodunits’ were out of the question and he mistrusted science fiction, the supernatural, or anything to do with professional criminals. Since one couldn’t second-guess what little spark might turn him on, it was terribly back-breaking tracking material for him.”
Enter Psycho. “It certainly seemed like a departure,” admitted Bloch in recalling the director’s interest in his despairing story of lives played out in dingy offices, run-down motels, and a decrepit house. “He had been doing big color films, with big stars and all the box-office insurances deemed necessary. Although I had no idea what to expect, I knew his film adaptations from novels were very much changed—The Secret Agent (which became Sabotage), Suspicion, or Spellbound, for example. However, I felt that there wasn’t much point in him buying this particular book unless he meant to use the storyline. There was hardly anyone else in the world I would have preferred to Hitchcock, except [director] Henri-Georges Clouzot, who had done Les Diaboliques.”
Yet in 1959, virtually no one but Hitchcock could answer “Why Psycho?” Cameraman Leonard South, whose first of fifteen Hitchcock assignments was Strangers on a Train (1951), explained: “Hitch had promised Universal a picture and decided that Psycho, a small project, would get that commitment out of the way.” Another reason for Psycho is that, for a director frantically in search of the unexpected, the Bloch novel came to his attention not a minute too soon. Earlier that year Paramount lost small fortunes on two aborted Hitchcock projects. Flamingo Feather had been an adventure-chase involving diamonds and tribal unrest in Africa that the director envisioned as a giddy, John Buchan-esque (The 39 Steps) fandango. Unfortunately, while busily combing Africa for suitable chase locations, Hitchcock had delegated the screenplay to screenwriter Angus MacPhail (The Wrong Man, Vertigo), who never managed to deliver a completed manuscript. No such problems awaited the sparklingly malicious murder comedy, No Bail for the Judge, based on Henry Cecil’s book about a lawyer who must defend her magistrate father against charges of strangling a streetwalker. The script by Samuel Taylor (Vertigo) was camera-ready when intended star Audrey Hepburn announced her pregnancy. Then British law cracked down on street prostitution—Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, the plot device that greased the wheels of suspense. In private Hitchcock railed. To the public he made light, as when he told the New York Times about his frustration in finding suitable material: “Newspaper headlines tell too many outlandish stories from real life that drive the spinner of suspense fiction to further extremes. I always regard the fact that we’ve got to outwit the audience to keep them with us. They’re highly trained detectives looking at us out there right now.”
Another fly in Hitchcock’s ointment was competitors who strayed onto his turf and competed for material. Directors William Castle (When Strangers Marry), Robert Siodmak (The Spiral Staircase), George Cukor (Gaslight), Otto Preminger (Laura, Whirlpool), and dozens of others, had each “pulled a Hitchcock” with varying degrees of finesse. And what about the 1955 French import, Les Diaboliques, one of the first breakaway hits from the art-house circuit, that had critics praising director Henri-Georges Clouzot as “the Gallic Hitchcock?”
Hitchcock had also soured at being held hostage to the salary demands of such stars as Cary Grant and James Stewart, or of Grace Kelly, whom he considered his once and future leading lady until she defected to Monaco to marry the dashing prince. “Stars’ salaries are becoming unthinkable,” the director complained. “The minute you put a st
ar into a role you’ve already compromised because it may not be perfect casting. … In television we have a greater chance to cast more freely than in pictures. Star names don’t mean all that much in television, at least in dramatic terms.”
Alfred Hitchcock trusted the film instincts of few. One of his inner circle was Peggy Robertson, a production assistant to him since Under Capricorn (1949). The wife of film editor Douglas Robertson, the razor-sharp, occasionally acerbic aide was one of three women—Alma Hitchcock, the director’s wife, and screenwriter-producer Joan Harrison being the other two—whose sensitivity to Hitchcock’s distress signals bordered on the telepathic. “I’ve never dealt with whodunits,” he often explained of his choice of material. “They’re simply clever puzzles, aren’t they? They’re intellectual rather than emotional, and emotion is the only thing that keeps my audience interested. I prefer suspense rather than surprise—something the average man can identify with. The audience can’t identify with detectives; they’re not part of his everyday life.”
Hitchcock depended on Robertson to wade through prospective material. In a year in which the Hitchcock office logged 2,400 submissions, Robertson passed on only thirty to the boss. Hitchcock often groused: “I can’t read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.” Robertson had been on the alert for material that might make what her boss had called a “typically un-Hitchcock picture.”
Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho Page 2
