Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  With that in mind, Robertson circled in ink Anthony Roucher’s strong review in his “Criminals at Large” column. She had read the “coverage” of the novel by Paramount reader William Pinckard (he of the “impossible for films” verdict), but brushed that aside. She also ignored the fact that the novel was reviled by the studio decision-makers. Robertson was an assistant well attuned to how her boss often resonated to obscure material rather than to classics by better-known mystery writers. Psycho began to impress Robertson all the more.

  Hitchcock holed up with the novel for a weekend in his home on Bellagio Drive in Bel-Air. The working-stiffs milieu, two shocking murders, a twist finale peppered with transvestism, incest, and necrophilia—these were catnip to a man who fancied himself a connoisseur of abnormal psychology. Hitchcock would observe: “I think that the thing that appealed to me and made me decide to do the picture was the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue. That was about all.” Elaborated Robert Bloch: “[Hitchcock] said that the things that attracted him to Psycho were that it had characters with whom the reader could identify and care about. He felt it was very important for shock value that the audience care about the characters who get killed. Then, of course, the cleverness of the device of transvestism.” Bloch’s novel spoke to Hitchcock’s savage sense of irony as had few pieces of material in ages. “I am aware,” Hitchcock said, “that I am equipped with what other people have called a fiendish sense of humor.”

  MCA agent Ned Brown, who struck the deal for the Hitchcock acquisition of the book, once said: “Hitch was fascinated by the idea that the story starts out as one thing—the girl’s dilemma—then, after a horrible murder, turns into something else. But frankly, we all thought he would keep the shower murder of the girl and come up with a whole new situation and characters!” Michael Ludmer, who also assisted Hitchcock in finding suitable material, observed: “Often, all Hitchcock was looking for was a springboard or a trigger, even just a relationship. Raw material was all he ever needed.” Despite the consternation of some of his colleagues, Hitchcock—to keep the surprises of Psycho as surprises—reportedly ordered Peggy Robertson to buy up as many copies of the novel as possible from the publisher and from bookstores.

  Hitchcock had finally laid claim to something he had craved since 1955. That year, French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Quai des Orfèvres; The Wages of Fear) had beaten Hitchcock to the punch by buying the rights to a recently translated French suspense novel, Celle Qui N’Etait Plus (The Woman Who Was No More) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. On the rebound, Hitchcock purchased D’Entre Les Morts (roughly, From Amongst the Dead), another book by the same authors. Clouzot turned The Woman Who Was into Les Diaboliques, a gimmicky shocker with a surprise ending that won in 1955 surprising worldwide success with both audiences and critics. In 1958, Hitchcock turned his Boileau-Narcejac property into the haunting, elegiac Vertigo, which took a drubbing from most critics and the paying public. Alfred Hitchcock had a score to settle with Clouzot.

  Although he rarely acknowledged the influence of any sound-era films or directors, Hitchcock clearly scrutinized Les Diaboliques (released in America by United Motion Picture Organization as Diabolique or The Fiends) as well as its publicity campaign as if with a jeweler’s loup. Clouzot and cinematographer Armand Thirard photographed Les Diaboliques in moody, dirty-dishes-in-the-sink black-and white. Boileau and Narcejac’s serpentine plot hinges on the strange bond between birdlike Christina Delasalle (Vera Clouzot) and cool, predatory Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret), respectively the wife and the mistress of a venal schoolmaster, Michael Delasalle (Paul Meurisse). The two women conspire to murder the rotter, but when the wife unravels from a case of the jitters, Nicole drowns her lover in the bathtub. The screws turn as snoopy Inspector Fichet (Charles Vanel) asks too many pointed questions and the dead man’s presence seems to cry out from beyond the grave for vengeance.

  The set pieces of Les Diaboliques—the murder in the bathroom of a grimy hotel room, the hidden corpse that is almost discovered by the schoolboys in a foul swimming pool—build to a finale that made audiences gasp and scream aloud. In France, newspaper ads discouraged moviegoers from seeing the picture except from the beginning. Theater entrance doors were closed at the start of each performance. Titles at the conclusion chided, “Don’t be diabolical yourself. Don’t spoil the ending for your friends by telling them what you’ve just seen. On their behalf—Thank you!” When the United Motion Picture Organization imported the film and opened it in New York at The Fine Arts Theater on E 58th Street between Park Avenue and Lexington on November 20, 1955, both the ad campaign and end titles emulated the exploitation gimmicks that had worked so well in Europe.

  Films and Filming from England called the thriller “beastly and brilliant” and Bosley Crowther of the New York Times thought it “one of the dandiest mystery dramas that has shown here in goodness knows when. To tell anybody the surprises … is a crime that should be punishable by consigning of the culprit to a diet of grade-B films.” The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner critic wrote: “If director Henri-Georges Clouzot isn’t the master of the suspense thriller today, then who is? True, Hitchcock is suaver; but this Frenchman is joltier, a master of timing and building an almost unbearable suspense.” How could Hitchcock help but feel a bit superannuated when the “joltier” Clouzot and Les Diaboliques won the prestigious Delluc Prize in France for highest achievement in originality?

  Soon after the release of the movie, Hitchcock would cast the actor who played the shabby detective of Les Diaboliques, Charles Vanel, in a small role as Bertani, another enigmatic character, in To Catch a Thief. But the director would later appropriate much more from the directorial competitor whom writers were already calling “the French Hitchcock.”

  Hitchcock had also been carefully tracking the box-office figures of low-budget horror pictures turned out by Universal-International, American-International, Allied Artists, Hammer Film Productions, and others. Such shockfests as Macabre, I Bury the Living, and The Curse of Frankenstein drew crowds while many Hollywood “A”-budget pictures barely drew flies. Hitchcock had begun to quiz his associates—everyone from his limousine driver and barber to agents and studio executives—as to how profitable they thought a first-class, low-budget shocker by a major director might be? Other “name” directors had gone that route before: Howard Hawks (with Christian Nyby) on The Thing (1951), Charles Laughton on The Night of the Hunter (1955), or Mervyn Leroy on The Bad Seed (1956). Hitchcock’s colleagues were accustomed to the puckish Buddha’s posing rhetorical questions solely for his own amusement. They passed off these new queries as more of the same. But when the egocentric Hitchcock, hardly given to self-criticism or self-analysis, began to dismiss his recent James Stewart or Cary Grant pictures as “glossy Technicolor baubles,” associates of the director realized that Hitchcock had something else up his sleeve.

  Hitchcock lived a hermetic life: driven to the studio daily for story conferences or shooting, or to Chasen’s for dinner with his wife, gossiping with the high-rollers of the business while puffing imported cigars. But even a monied man who viewed the world through the windows of a suite at Claridge’s Hotel in London or a home whose walls were lined with Klees and Vlamincks must have sniffed change in the wind. Television news and franker, more adult movies from Europe were shifting the expectations of audiences toward a grittier reality on screen. All the better for Psycho that it exposed the grinning skull beneath the rhythms and routine of the ordinary—workaday jobs, make-do relationships, dreams deferred, backwater locales. Psycho took place in a world much closer to the one in which most moviegoers lived. Having been born the son of an East End greengrocer in a second-floor apartment above the shop, Hitchcock was as much fascinated as horrified by that world.

  Considering a recent track record that included the successful Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock was surely confident when he met with the Paramount bosse
s on an early June afternoon to announce Psycho as his fifth and final commitment under his existing contract. Studio president Barney Balaban and vice-president George Weltner had reason to arrive at that meeting with some confidence themselves. Balaban had come up through the ranks. A run-of-the-mill Chicago band singer, he hit paydirt when he and partner Sam Katz opened a chain of nickelodeons in 1916. Years of trafficking in Mafia payoffs had steeled Balaban to tough negotiations. While television had many rival studios on the ropes, Balaban had steered Paramount to a $12.5 million profit in 1958, the studio’s largest takings in nine years. But even in a relative boom, to the Paramount brass, Hitchcock and Psycho sounded like a bad mix. Corridor talk at the studio had leaked the rumor that Hitchcock wanted to try “something different.” Similar motivations had led to The Wrong Man at Warner Bros, and to The Trouble with Harry and Vertigo at Paramount—three box-office busts.

  Hitchcock’s enthusiasm for an “impossible” property sent Balaban, Weltner, and other Paramount moneymen into executive apoplexy. What was with Hitchcock and his cockamamie potboiler about a knife-happy madman who dresses up like dear old Mom? This was worse than Vertigo, which at least had class. “They were very unhappy about it,” admitted novelist Bloch in a classic understatement. “Hitchcock’s associate producer, Herbert Coleman, told me Paramount absolutely didn’t want to make it. They didn’t like the title, the story, or anything about it at all. When Hitchcock became insistent, they said, ‘Well you’re not going to get the budget you’re used to having for this sort of thing.’ Hence, no Technicolor, no Jimmy Stewart, No Cary Grant. Hitchcock said, ‘All right, I’ll make do.’”

  Hitchcock loathed anyone’s making a “scene.” He terminated the meeting with icy politeness. It had been decades since anyone, even someone as powerful as producer David O. Selznick, had the temerity to squelch the mighty Hitchcock. In private, the director may have fumed, but not for long. The score Alfred Hitchcock had to settle now went beyond H. G. Clouzot and Les Diaboliques.

  4.

  The Deal

  Hitchcock Outmaneuvers

  DEVELOPING PASSION FOR A movie property can be like falling madly for someone who leaves one’s friends cold. Hitchcock had been battling indifference, or outright bewilderment, toward his projects from the start. Producer David O. Selznick, who railed constantly against the director’s “damned jigsaw cutting,” seemed to have imported Hitchcock from England without comprehending that the sort of talent who can create The 39 Steps or The Lady Vanishes does not tend to flourish on a leash. Cary Grant complained throughout the shooting of North by Northwest that he could make neither heads nor tails of the script. A Paramount executive admitted: “I never saw what Hitchcock did in Rear Window until I saw the finished movie.” Lack of vision is one thing. Across-the-board contempt for a proposed Hitchcock movie was something new.

  Hitchcock refused to kowtow to Paramount. After all, studio executives came and went like this year’s starlet. Hitchcock had become a legend for being right more often than wrong. The director and his production staff quietly began exploring how to minimize the investment downside of Psycho. Hitchcock hit on the solution: plan his new production as scrupulously as he would any big-budget feature film, but shoot it quickly and inexpensively, almost like an expanded episode of his TV series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

  That popular anthology series, which debuted on CBS on October 2, 1955, had been a master plot of Hitchcock’s MCA agent, confidante and father confessor Lew Wasserman, nee Lewis Robert Wasserman. . A former burlesque-house usher and sweets peddler, Wasserman had been promoted by Jules Stein to vice-president of MCA after two years. Wasserman had risen to becoming one of the shrewdest, most powerful and respected power brokers in the trade. In 1946, Stein appointed the tall, spindly Wasserman head of MCA, and his style and comportment became the house style. It pleased Hitchcock that Wasserman negotiated charmingly and relentlessly in a dark suit, white shirt, and slim tie. MCA agents became known as “the black-suited Mafia.”

  In 1951, despite a storm of controversy over a bylaw of the Screen Actors Guild that prohibited agents from producing films without a Guild waiver, MCA created its first television show, “Stars Over Hollywood,” through its newly formed Revue Productions. Granted a waiver by then-president of SAG, Ronald Reagan, MCA premiered “GE Theater” in 1953; Wasserman hired Reagan to host that series. Soon, MCA and Revue enjoyed an ongoing arrangement with NBC, for which they produced such popular TV series as “Wagon Train,” “Wells Fargo,” and “M Squad.”

  Lew Wasserman had been waiting for an opportunity to capitalize on the offbeat charisma given off by Hitchcock’s manner of a macabre cherub. The director had recently agreed to lend his name to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, an enterprise funded by a rich Floridian, in which Hitchcock played no role in story selection or editing. Even the first-person story leadins were penned by attorney-novelist Harold Q. Masur. But the Hitchcock name was sufficient to send circulation skyward. Movie audiences, too, awaited the walk-on appearance the director made in each of his films. Wasserman understood Hitchcock’s seemingly contradictory dynamic of the exhibitionist and the recluse. “About his appearance,” observed an associate of the director, “Hitch was very contradictory. He seemed sometimes to delude himself into thinking that because he directed Cary Grant that he looked like him.”

  Lew Wasserman also avidly hoped to give MCA a greater toehold in the production side of film and television. In the late fifties, top Hollywood talent generally steered clear of the “over exposure” that TV appearances seemed to threaten. But in 1959, when Wasserman orchestrated the sale of Universal-International Studios and absorbed the Revue production facilities for MCA for $11,250,000, Hitchcock took notice. “We ought to put Hitch on the air,” Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor quoted Wasserman as saying. The conglomerate mogul contended that a top box-office draw like Hitchcock would lend class to the weekly half-hour suspense-mystery series he envisioned for Revue. Bristol-Meyers readily agreed to bankroll the show, provided Hitchcock act as host as well as director of “several” episodes per season. Certain that Hitchcock would balk at any activity that he perceived as a diversion from feature-film making, Wasserman pitched the proposition masterfully. All rights to each of the episodes, budgeted at $129,000 each, would revert to the director after the first broadcast. Hitchcock consented.

  The director installed himself as president and chief executive officer of Shamley Productions, named after a summer place he and Alma, his wife, had bought in a village south of London in 1928. Housed in a modest bungalow, Shamley Productions was entirely separate from the Hitchcock Production Company, the corporation under which Hitchcock did his film work. To make certain he kept his schedule clear for movies, Hitchcock brought on Joan Harrison, who had risen from his secretary in 1935 to script collaborator (Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion) to independent producer (Phantom Lady, They Won’t Believe Me). Sharp, worldly, handsome, experienced, and genre-wise—Harrison was the wife of mystery writer Eric Ambler—she was a matchless choice.

  Hitchcock limited his role in the series to reading droll, macabre segueway monologues scripted by playwright James Allardice and to directing the scripts selected and developed for him by Harrison. A crack cadre of technicians made certain the boss needed to lavish no more than three days—one for rehearsals, two for shooting—on such episodes as “Revenge,” “Breakdown,” and “Back for Christmas.”

  In forming a creative team for his TV endeavors, Hitchcock duplicated the situation that he enjoyed on his feature-film work. Movie cameraman Leonard South explained: “[Hitchcock] was ill at ease around people. That’s basically why he had the same camera crew for fifteen pictures. After we finished Vertigo at Paramount, Hitch told us he was going to be inactive for a while because he had to have gallbladder surgery. So George Tomasini [editor], Bob Boyle and Henry Bumstead [art directors], Bob Burks [chief cinematographer], and I were signed to a two-picture deal with the prod
ucers William Perlberg and George Seaton. In the middle of our making for them But Not for Me, with Gable and Carroll Baker, Hitch decided to make something out of nothing: Psycho.”

  Among members of his TV team were cinematographer John L. Russell, assistant director Hilton A. Green, set designer George Milo, and script supervisor Marshall Schlom. Schlom, son of one of the prolific RKO B-movie producers, Herman Schlom, observed: “Mr. Hitchcock was the biggest thing around, especially on TV. To the studio, he was a hands-off client who got anything he wanted. The crews for the other Revue TV shows, ‘The Jane Wyman Show,’ ‘The Millionaire,’ kept changing, but he said, ‘I want my own little family.’ While we were doing the hour and half-hour shows, we kept hearing rumblings that he was toying with the idea of doing something different. One day, word came that he was about to make a feature and those of us that were close to him were going to do it with him.”

  With a trusted, competent talent pool at the ready, Hitchcock devised the idea of shooting Psycho—his “smallest” project since The Wrong Man—utilizing his television collaborators. The director reconvened the heads of production at Paramount to present this new cost-conscious option. He suggested that he thoroughly prepare the project at Paramount, then import his TV crew to shoot the picture on the studio lot, where he would also complete the editing and postproduction. The executives made it clear: Paramount would not finance Psycho. Further, they told Hitchcock that every studio soundstage was either occupied or booked, even though everyone on the lot knew that production was in a slump.

  Hitchcock was ready for them. He agreed to finance Psycho personally and shoot at Universal-International if Paramount agreed to distribute the picture. As the sole producer, Hitchcock would defer his director’s fee of $250,000 in exchange for 60 percent ownership of the negative. Such an offer Paramount could not—and did not—refuse.