Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  In his book Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob, Dan E. Moldea weaves a politically nefarious, byzantine plot regarding the financing of Psycho. In interviews conducted by the FBI for an investigation of ties between MCA and Paramount, a source told Antitrust Division attorney Leonard Posner, “[Psycho] was produced on the Universal lot by MCA. … Financing for the picture came from the company that is going to distribute the picture—Paramount. … In other words, MCA represented Hitchcock and told Paramount that if it wanted to finance and release the Hitchcock picture, it would have to be produced on the Universal lot so that MCA could get its cut from the below-the-line facilities. This arrangement was made in spite of the fact that Paramount had a lot that was half empty at the time. Obviously, Paramount would have preferred to have had the picture made on its own lot, so that it could have gotten some of its money back toward overhead.”

  If Hitchcock savored his coup, few in his inner circle shared his glee. Producer Herbert Coleman, perhaps the director’s closest on-line associate, had served as second-unit director on all Hitchcock productions since Rear Window. Coleman had been with Paramount for over thirty years, having risen from the script department to assistant director to William Wyler on such films as Roman Holiday. Throughout the summer of 1959, the seasoned, exacting Coleman helped Hitchcock steer Psycho through the straits of preproduction. Having worked several times on abandoned Hitchcock projects in the past several years, Coleman apparently hoped this might be another of them. As Psycho looked more and more like a “go” project toward the fall, Coleman withdrew. He intended to establish an identity within the movie community outside of Hitchcock. He also had objections to the direction the dark project was taking. Similarly, Shamley production head Joan Harrison reportedly refused profit points in Psycho in lieu of a raise. “This time, you’re going too far,” Harrison reputedly advised Hitchcock about his new project. Not even his closest colleagues envisioned just how far Hitchcock planned to go.

  5.

  The Screenplays

  Writing Is Rewriting

  THE DEEPER HITCHCOCK WADED into preproduction on his forty-seventh picture, the more obvious it became that to make it would cut him adrift from his moorings: long time associates, plush production values, picture-postcard locations, major stars, and expensive screenwriters of the reputation of Samuel Taylor (Vertigo) or Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest). By necessity, Psycho would mark Hitchcock’s break with his moviemaking past and put the industry on notice that a sixty-year-old directorial workhorse could shock and innovate with the best of the youngbloods. For an insulated and entrenched creature such as Hitchcock, one might liken that prospect to the dizzying attraction-repulsion that acrophobic Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) experienced when he looked down from the heights in Vertigo.

  Hitchcock kept secret the specifics of his new project from all but his closest remaining associates, and began to search for a suitable screenwriter. “This is going to need someone with a sense of humor,” the director insisted. According to Hitchcock, “When you mention murder, most writers begin to think in low-key terms. But the events leading up to the act itself might be very light and amusing. Many murderers are very attractive persons; they have to be in order to attract their victims.” Among writers whom Hitchcock considered to adapt Psycho was novelist Robert Bloch, who was eking out a living in the Midwest. According to Bloch, a client of another agency, MCA agents advised Hitchcock that the writer was “unavailable.” The “black-suited Mafia” played upon Hitchcock’s loyalty (and frugality) by suggesting that he hire from their wide client list.

  In the end, Joan Harrison and MCA prevailed upon the director to hire thirty-eight-year-old client James P. Cavanagh, which Hitchcock did on June 8, 1959. Cavanagh had impressed Harrison with his flair for macabre comedy in teleplay credits for Shamley, including “The Hidden Thing” (broadcast May 20, 1956), “The Creeper” (broadcast June 17, 1956), and “Fog Closes In,” all “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” episodes, and the last an Emmy-winner. Psycho would mark Cavanagh’s motion picture screenplay debut.

  To bolster the case for Cavanagh, Harrison reminded her boss that he had directed the writer’s teleplay, “One More Mile to Go,” based on a story by F. J. Smith, in January 1957. Broadcast on April 7, 1957, the show virtually suggests a dry run for Psycho. In it, David Wayne plays a henpecked husband who—when his wife dies accidentally—stuffs her corpse into a sack in his car trunk, then heads for a lake to dispose of the body. En route, a menacing motorcycle cop hounds him and a burned-out taillight leads to disclosure of his cargo.

  A Hollywood Reporter squib on June 10 announced that Hitchcock had signed Cavanagh, who was en route from Paris to begin work on his next film. The same article leaked the title of the project as Psyche, which led some observers to wonder whether Hitchcock might be turning to Greek tragedy in search of unusual suspense material. The director teased: “It’s the story of a young man whose mother is a homicidal maniac.” While on a publicity tour to promote North by Northwest and awaiting a first draft of the Cavanagh script in late July, Hitchcock dropped the first hints about his new project to the general public in a June 22 New York Times piece by A. H. Weiler. Although he suppressed the title of the Bloch novel (“It would undo any effects I will try to put into the picture”), Hitchcock showed uncharacteristic candor when he promised a film “in the Diabolique genre.”

  “It takes place near Sacramento, California, at a dark and gloomy motel,” elaborated the director. “Some very ordinary people meet other ordinary people and horror and death ensue in a manner that can’t be unraveled unless you have the book as a guide.” Making virtue of necessity, he underscored how modest a budget he planned for the project. Observed Hitchcock: “Nothing about it to distract from the telling of the tale, just like in the old days.” In other words, just like in the years in England before Hitchcock came to expect the posh production values that only a Selznick or a Paramount could provide him.

  An undated, first-draft screenplay by James Cavanagh, stamped “Revue Studios,” not only provides a glimpse of a Psycho that might have been but also illustrates the early stages of the development of Hitchcock’s visual scheme. As in the novel, the action begins with Mary Crane’s absconding with cash from her banker boss, Mr. Lowery, to free her to marry her lover, Sam. By the twelfth page of the script—or, approximately, twelve minutes into the film—the fugitive Mary has traded in her car and, in a rainstorm, taken shelter at the brooding Bates Motel. As she unpacks, Mary overhears Norman Bates and his invalid mother bickering viciously, then joins Bates for an awkward late supper. Much of Cavanagh’s script has a sketched-in, tentative feel with little of the density of detail common to Hitchcock scripts. Yet the supper bill-of-fare is oddly specific: “sausage, cheese, pickles, and rye.”

  During the supper conversation, the empathy that develops between Mary and Norman deepens when Bates reveals that the bank is about to foreclose on the motel. Both Mary and Norman are trapped by lack of money. Their sympathy toward each other builds and peaks when Norman makes an embarrassing pass, that Mary only just rebuffs. “You don’t like me, do you?” he asks. “As a matter of fact, I do,” she replies. “But I wouldn’t like you to think your mother was right about me.” As Mary begs off and returns to her cabin, it is apparent that she intends to return the stolen cash. As she begins to undress, Cavanagh employs tedious description to misdirect the audience as to Norman’s action and whereabouts. With frequent cuts to a ticking clock, Cavanagh details Norman checking in on mother (“a sleeping figure lying in bed”) and, later, drinking himself into oblivion after reading the foreclosure letter.

  At this stage of the screenwriting process, Hitchcock and Cavanagh took so indecisive a tone as to suggest that one or both of them were questioning whether the ideal venue for Psycho would be theaters or TV. One almost hears them hedging their bets: “How much should we moralize on the actions of Mary?,” “How much or little can we ‘show’ of Mother Bates without ti
pping off the audience?,” “How graphically can we depict the murders?” As described by Cavanagh, the shower scene is quite cinematic, complete with the slashings of an “old-fashioned straight razor” that slits Mary’s throat. And this: “For a brief moment, we see the mad figure of old Mrs. Bates and hear her high, shrill, hysterical laughter.

  After the killing, Norman wakes from “a drunken stupor,” discovers Mary’s cabin door ajar, then finds a bloody dress and razor in Mother’s room. In the finale of the first act, Bates sinks Mary’s car in the nearby swamp. Unlike the earlier sections of the script, the latter scene reads like a virtual blueprint for filming—down to the moment when “The car stops sinking. Norman’s terror mounts.”

  Unfortunately, Cavanagh himself sinks in the second and third acts of the script. Scene after scene fritters away the action to detail an unconvincing romance between the dead girl’s lover, Sam, and her sister, Lila. Rather than propel us headlong toward the Bates horror house, Sam and Lila discuss whether Mary was “good” or “bad” as if they were team captains in a high school debate. The pot boils anew when “Mrs. Bates comes walking down the stairs” toward private detective Arbogast: “Now that she is this close, even in the dim light, the grotesque makeup, the disordered hair and mad eyes makes [sic] him take a step back almost in fear.”

  In the matter of Mother, the Cavanagh script cheats. In a scene in which two policemen confer outside the room in which the corpse of Arbogast lies (unlike in the film, the motel and house are connected), Bates and Mother “converse” in frantic whispers, “his head buried against her breast.” In other matters, the script fumbles. When Arbogast fails to return, Sam and Lila carry on the investigation. As they approach the office of the motel—despite their fear/certainty that Norman is lurking just out of sight and that he is behind the disappearances of Mary and the detective—they kiss passionately.

  Finally, in Mary’s cabin, Sam and Lila turn up a clue in a bloodstained earring; in the film, a scrap of paper with “figuring” on it serves the same function. Then, Sam confronts Norman, who bashes Sam with a liquor bottle and drags the body into a closet. From there, the thrills unfold much as they do in the novel and in the finished film, except that the local sheriff, not a psychiatrist, explains Bates’s psychological kinks for the audience.

  Hitchcock spent a weekend at home pondering a script that straddled the then-distinct line between episodic television and feature films. But long before he reached the climactic revelation of Mrs. Bates as “a dummy with staring glass eyes and the blank face of a huge doll,” Hitchcock undoubtedly knew the script did not play. In fact, the script falls so short of the mark, one might question the motivations of Joan Harrison. After all, she was neither a fan of the project nor did she lack for experience in matching a writer with a project. Yet Harrison had take special pains to recommend to one of the most exacting directors in the business this inexperienced, inexpensive writer. Did she hope that the collaboration might persuade Hitchcock to get Psycho out of his system by doing it for TV? Or to drop it altogether?

  Despite the letdown Hitchcock surely experienced, many typical details that had presumably evolved during story conferences with Cavanagh were to find their way into the completed film: the elaborate details of the heroine’s harrowing car trip; the poignant, impactful supper conversation between Bates and Mary; the obsessive cleanup by Bates after the shower murder; and the swamp’s gobbling Mary’s car. Even the shower murder sequence anticipates the intricate camera movement that ends in a close-up of blood mingling with shower water gurgling down the drain.

  Presumably, Cavanagh enjoyed access to eight pages of handwritten notes by Hitchcock in which the director laid out precise camera movements and sound cues for certain key sequences. In the scene in the used-car lot, writes Hitchcock, “The CAMERA pans along a series of California plates.” He emphasizes “The relief of the traffic cop’s whistle” that breaks the tension when Mary’s boss peers at her through the windshield of her stopped car, stolen money in her purse. And to describe Mary’s car journey after stealing the money, Hitchcock writes:

  The long traffic-laden route along Route 99—the roadside sights—the coming of darkness. Mary’s thoughts about Monday morning and the discovery of her flight with the money. The rain starts.

  So assured and cinematic are his concepts that Hitchcock even inserted an intriguing bit of self-parody or foreshadowing here and there. In a scene in which Norman Bates prays for the swamp to gulp down Mary’s car, a small plane buzzes overhead like a deranged fly. The moment simultaneously recalls the pursuing crop duster in Hitchcock’s previous film (North by Northwest); refers to Mother Bates, who “wouldn’t even harm a fly,” in the last line of his present film; and anticipates the winged furies of his next (The Birds). In the precise notes to the sound editor that the director dictated months before he cut Psycho, Hitchcock would continue to insist on the insertion of the buzzing of the plane.

  Hitchcock might well have puzzled over the deficiencies in Cavanagh’s draft. Where were the self-confidence, insouciance, and black wit of the writer’s TV work? There seemed no percentage in commissioning a rewrite. Without so much as a personal word of explanation to Cavanagh, Hitchcock cashiered him, to the tune of $7,166, on July 27. Michael Ludmer, to whom the director often delegated the responsibility of dropping writers, observed: “It was very difficult for Mr. Hitchcock to express his feelings. There was a great deal of input that Mr. Hitchcock gave a writer. He didn’t know how to say, ‘I’d like to tell you how I feel about these pages,’ if there was a problem. He knew that a writer would be upset or disturbed if he were to find out that somebody else was coming on the script. So he would delegate the delivery of that message.” Cavanagh was to write the scripts for several of the more well-received Hitchcock TV shows, including “Arthur,” “Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?,” and “Coming, Mama.” He died at age forty-nine, in 1971.

  On the rebound, MCA agents suggested to Hitchcock another young client, Joseph Stefano, a thirty-year-old former actor (stage name: Jerry Stevens) and pop music composer. Exuberantly cocky, volatile, and streetwise, Stefano, who had only owned a television for two years, had harbored no writing aspirations outside of music. Then, he had watched a live telecast of “Playhouse 90,” at the time a leading showcase for promising playwrights, directors, and actors, and thought; “I can do that.” Stefano recalled: “I wrote a one-hour teleplay and within two weeks, the boss of a secretary friend of mine had made a deal for me with [producer] Carlo Ponti. I’d never even read a screenplay. Somebody had to tell me about ‘Long shots,’ ‘Exterior,’ and ‘Interior.’”

  Stefano won respectable notices for his first produced screenplay for Ponti, The Black Orchid, a moonlight and Mafia soap opera, released by Paramount, starring Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren. He also won awards for his own “Playhouse 90” script, “Made in Japan,” also relationship story. Still bemused today by how quickly things happened, Stefano said, “I was offered a seven-year contract at Twentieth Century-Fox without knowing who the hell I was as a writer or even knowing that much about films.” Stefano’s wife, then pregnant, had always wanted to live in California; with the security of the movie contract, the writer abandoned his music career and moved west.

  Stefano grew so “miserable” with his first studio assignment, a Sam Engle production called “A Machine for Chuparosa,” he asked his agent to secure a release from the contract with Fox. Fox agreed. The neophyte writer fretted that such an action might blackball him within the industry, yet the same studio immediately hired him to adapt a J. R. Salamanca novel, The Lost Country, as a vehicle for rising young actor Anthony Perkins. Perkins never made the movie. Elvis Presley did, as Wild in the Country, from a script by Clifford Odets.

  Stefano hopped to MCA, where he was represented by Ned Brown, the very agent who had finessed the acquisition of Psycho for Hitchcock. Stefano presented Brown with a list of ten directors “who could teach me something.” Meetings for Stefano wit
h William Wyler and Otto Preminger had short-circuited when Lew Wasserman alerted Brown to Hitchcock’s immediate need for a writer. Hitchcock rejected Stefano sight unseen, telling agent Brown, “My fear about Mr. Stefano is that, from the work of his I’ve seen, maybe he doesn’t have a sense of humor.” The director had lumped Stefano with what he termed “the Reginald Rose—‘Playhouse 90’ crowd”—humorless, self-important types with Something to Say.

  To Stefano’s rescue came formidable agent Kay Brown. Brown, among her many accomplishments, had steered David O. Selznick toward the acquisition of the Margaret Mitchell novel, Gone With the Wind, and toward Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Brown had also negotiated Hitchcock’s first American contract with Selznick, and had influenced the director to hire playwright Samuel Taylor as screenwriter for Vertigo. “I hadn’t done anything to support my writing Psycho,” Stefano said, “but my agents felt I was exactly what Hitchcock needed—someone who could do characterizations. They thought it was a very inferior book, a very sleazy kind of property. Hitchcock was strange about a lot of things. He only liked to work with people he knew and wasn’t about to meet any new writer. Finally, there was enough pressure put on him by Lew Wasserman and everybody else, who kept saying, ‘Just meet him, that’s all.’”

  Yet when Stefano read the Robert Bloch novel as a preinterview preparation for Hitchcock, the writer puzzled over the big lobbying effort on his behalf. “I was very disappointed,” Stefano recalled. “Having loved all Hitchcock’s work, I had in mind The 39 Steps, Rebecca, and North by Northwest, not some strange little pulp fiction. [Psycho] didn’t even ring of a Hitchcock picture. I let [Hitchcock] know how disappointed I was as soon as we met.”

  “[Hitchcock] told me that he had a script by Robert Bloch that hadn’t worked out,” Stefano asserted. Bloch, who was living in Wisconsin at the time, today denies he wrote any such script. An intra-Revue Studios correspondence by Peggy Robertson dated December 19, 1959, confirms, “It is my understanding that Mr. Stefano has not been exposed to the James Cavanagh first draft screenplay. It is further my understanding that no synopsis, treatment, or material of the like has been written for this film other than the above two items.”