Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  But when they met, Hitchcock offered Stefano no suggestion that he saw in Psycho anything more than a chance to show the low-budget horror schlockmeisters a thing or two. Stefano said: “I told him part of the problem was that I really didn’t like this man, Norman Bates. I really couldn’t get involved with a man in his forties who’s a drunk and peeps through holes. The other problem was that there was this perfectly horrendous murder of a stranger I didn’t care about either. I just kept talking to him in the vein ‘I wish I knew this girl,’ ‘I wish Norman were somebody else.’”

  As to the writer’s qualms about the central male character, Hitchcock pacified Stefano with a question: “How would you feel if Norman were played by Anthony Perkins?” The writer recalled: “I said, ‘Now you’re talking.’ I suddenly saw a tender, vulnerable young man you could feel incredibly sorry for. I could really rope in an audience with someone like him. Then I suggested starting the movie with the girl instead of Norman.”

  A great screenwriting collaborator of Hitchcock’s, Charles Bennett, (The 39 Steps, Young and Innocent) once described the director as “literate” only to the extent that “he liked to read the dirtiest parts of Ulysses.” Instinctively, Stefano played to the sexual imp that lay inside the director. Stefano recalled: “I told him, ‘I’d like to see Marion shacking up with Sam on her lunch hour.’* The moment I said ‘shack up’ or anything like that, Hitchcock, being a very salacious man, adored it. I said, ‘We’ll find out what the girl is all about, see her steal the money and head for Sam—on the way, this horrendous thing happens to her.’ He thought it was spectacular. I think that idea got me the job.”

  Neither writer nor director committed to another meeting beyond the first. Hitchcock seemed particularly wary about repeating his experiences with James Cavanagh. But Stefano felt that he had penetrated the Hitchcock armor. “He found that I was very funny and we had a lot of laughs together,” said the writer. Soon after, the Hitchcock office arranged a second meeting, which the director began by excitedly proposing: “What if we got a big-name actress to play this girl? Nobody will expect her to die!” Stefano observed: “He wanted somebody much bigger than Janet Leigh—someone I didn’t think was terribly good. But once he mentioned Janet Leigh, the whole thing really began to get me: She was someone with no association with this kind of movie—a suspense-horror movie—and neither were Perkins, Hitchcock, nor I.”

  By mid-September 1959, Hitchcock had been sufficiently convinced: He hired Stefano, but only on a week-to-week basis. The arrangement was hardly secure for Stefano, but it gave Hitchcock a ready escape hatch if their collaboration failed to ignite. Yet, ignite it did, and the writer was eventually to receive $17,500 for his labors. But Stefano continued to harbor hopes that he and the director would expand, deepen, and glamorize the source material into what Stefano called “a real Hitchcock movie, where a lot of money is spent just because it’s there.” But, no. “When I asked him why he had bought the book, he said he noticed that American-International was making movie after movie for under a million dollars, yet they all made ten or thirteen million. Then I saw it: He had bought this tight little novel and had no intention of blowing it up.”

  Hitchcock completely scuttled the James Cavanagh first draft, and, according to Revue intraoffice correspondence, that draft was never shown to Stefano. “He told me there was no point in reading it,” Stefano explained. “Even in [Robert Bloch’s] book, I don’t think Bloch was aware of some of the things he came up with, like the shower scene. But the dynamics of it were there. What excited me was the thought of taking this warm, sympathetic woman away from the audience and replacing her with Tony Perkins, not the Norman Bates of Bloch’s book.”

  For his part, Hitchcock was more charitable toward Bloch and his novel. The director told writer Charles Higham in The Celluloid Muse, “Psycho all came from Robert Bloch. Joseph Stefano … contributed dialogue mostly, no ideas.” Robert Bloch attributes Stefano’s peckishness to simple turf rivalry. “It’s a good thing Mr. Stefano didn’t adapt The Bible.” But it had long been Hitchcock’s tendency to appropriate any good idea as his own.

  Hitchcock and Stefano held five weeks of daily story conferences at Paramount, beginning at 10:30 A.M., the hour to which the director agreed to accommodate Stefano’s ongoing sessions with a psychoanalyst. According to the writer, “When it got down to ‘Let’s get some work done,’ he was never very eager. He was very hard to pin down. I wanted him to tell me what he expected this movie to be like, but he preferred gabbing, gossiping, and he loved to laugh. I think he really got a kick out of me. He told me his last writer, Ernie Lehman [North by Northwest], was a worrier and a bitcher. But I was laughing all the time, thinking to myself, ‘You didn’t expect to be in movies in the first place and here you are working with Hitchcock.’”

  For Stefano, keeping Hitchcock’s quicksilver mind attuned to Psycho was an uphill battle all the way. According to the writer, when Hitchcock talked about the job at hand at all, it was usually to throw out “wild ideas” that he expected one to weave into the scenario. It almost seemed as if the director felt it necessary to “school” a writer in the world according to Hitchcock: his brand of wit, wisdom, flippancy, and power. Stefano said, “One of the easiest times for anyone to get in to see Hitchcock was whenever he was in conference with a writer. Lew Wasserman used to come in and they’d talk stocks and money, money, money!” Yet despite the director’s quirky timetable, certain “givens” fell into line. “Purely for budgetary reasons, I knew he had decided to do the movie in black and white,” Stefano explained. “And without too much conversation, we decided this was going to be a picture of Gothic horror, something he had not really done before.”

  Stefano perceived that the way to engage Hitchcock’s imagination was to conceptualize and verbalize the story in terms of visuals. According to Stefano, “He was not interested in characters or motivation at all. That was the writer’s job. If I said, ‘I’d like to give the girl an air of desperation,’ he’d say, ‘Fine, fine.’ But when I said, ‘In the opening of the film, I’d like a helicopter shot over the city, then go right up to the seedy hotel where Marion is spending her lunch hour with Sam,’ he said, ‘We’ll go right into the window!’ That sort of thing excited him.”

  Left to grapple on his own with complexities of structure and character, Stefano found the freedom disarming and exhilarating. “I worked on a level of characterization that was probably unheard-of for what turned out to be a horror movie. In fact, I felt like I was writing a movie about Marion, not about Norman. I saw Marion as a girl getting on in years working at a dull job around undelightful, unimpressive people. She is in love with a man who won’t marry her because he has financial problems. The greatest thing about Marion is that she never stops to think ‘Can I get away with this?,’ which is exactly the way that someone performs an act of madness when they themselves are not mad. Once we got to the motel, the whole game changed for me. From then on, we were into manipulation of the highest order. Torturing the audience was the intention. Because there was no precedent for Psycho in Hitchcock’s body of work, I went at it with an incredible and surprising amount of freedom.”

  In other details of script construction, however, Hitchcock was the complete detail man. “We worked out the story piece by piece,” Stefano observed. “He was very big on technicalities, like the elaborate business of the girl’s trading in her car. He would say, ‘I think we ought to see her get important papers when she goes to her house to pack up. A pink slip, and such.’ He never wanted audiences asking questions. His theory was ‘Think what the audience is going to ask and answer it as fast as possible.’”

  To make certain Stefano got the details right, Hitchcock hired a Hollywood-based detective as a technical adviser. The Hitchcock office also had the screenwriter observe the style and manner of a used-car dealer, Ralph Outright, at 1932 Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. Stefano was also provided with data on every foreseeable plot point, from the to
pography of Route 99 (including names, locations, and room rates of every motel) to details of the administration and physical appearance of real estate offices; from traffic citations and mother fixations to amateur taxidermy.

  Stefano quickly found that no plot twist tickled Hitchcock more than predesigning the murder sequence. The writer recalled Hitchcock’s relish for the scene that would eliminate a sympathetic character—played by a star actress—one-third of the way into the story. “We had the longest discussion about laying out the shower murder,” Stefano recalled. “Both of us wanted to know exactly what was going to be on film. I remember sitting on a couch at his Paramount office where we were working this particular day, discussing the murder in great detail. He rose from his desk, came round toward me, and said, ‘You be the camera. Now, we won’t have her really lying on the bathroom floor. We’ll show him lift up the shower curtain …’ And Hitchcock acted out every move, every gesture, every nuance of wrapping the corpse in the curtain. Suddenly, his office door flew open behind him. In walked his wife, Alma, who rarely came to the studio. Hitchcock and I yelled, ‘Aaaaaaaaagggghhhhh!!!’ The shock of the intrusion at that moment was so great, we must have laughed for five minutes!”

  After the second week of story conferences, Hitchcock departed without explanation for a two-week commitment. “I had the feeling this was going to be my screen-test,” Stefano recalled, chuckling. “He said, ‘Why don’t you start writing the scene with the girl and her lover in the Phoenix hotel?’ So I wrote it, right to the point where she walks out of the hotel room. When Hitchcock came back, I handed him the pages and we went on talking. The next day he said, ‘Alma loved it.’ He never said he loved it, but he kind of made me feel if he didn’t, I wouldn’t have been at the meeting.”

  The director’s sangfroid came as no surprise to the writer, who thought the Hitchcock staff “a strange organization.” According to Stefano, “They weren’t into compliments. It was like royalty. The compliment was that you were invited. Hitchcock was talking about John Michael Hayes one day—someone who had written several of his huge hits [To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, etc.]. Hitchcock said, ‘Oh, he had one good line in The Trouble with Harry where Shirley MacLaine says, ‘I’ve got a short fuse.’ Right there, I said to myself, ‘If you think you’re going to get any applause, Stefano, forget it.’” Longtime Hitchcock collaborator, screenwriter Charles Bennett (The 39 Steps) summed up that quality in Hitchcock as “a character flaw.” Bennett told journalist Pat McGilligan in Backstory, “And a very ungenerous character flaw, actually, because as I said, he is totally incapable of creating a story or developing a story. He has got good ideas—but he will never give credit to anyone but himself.”

  While attending to last-minute details on the foreign release of North by Northwest, Hitchcock dispatched a small crew to Phoenix, Arizona, to shoot additional “atmosphere” and research photographs. Stefano completed a first draft screenplay in three weeks and turned it in on December 19, 1959. Despite the screenwriter’s cavils about the original novel, he clearly helped himself to the best of Bloch—structure, characters, atmosphere, tone—while enlivening the dialogue with gallows wit and deepening the characterization. Whatever Stefano had believed about Hitchcock in terms of being a “time-waster,” certainly something of the director’s influence informed the screenplay.

  “He only asked me to change one scene and one word,” Stefano recalled of Hitchcock’s response to the script. “He didn’t think a scene where the highway cop wakes the girl after she’s been sleeping in the car was suspenseful enough. I had the cop as a handsome young guy coming on to her, preventing her from moving on. Hitch liked the idea during our discussions, but after reading the script, he wanted the cop to be more menacing. The offending word was in the first scene where the heroine is telling Sam she won’t see him anymore and he makes a crack about writing each other ‘lurid’ love letters. Hitch said, ‘I don’t like “lurid.’” I said, ‘Do you think it’s wrong for the character?’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘I just don’t like the word.’ So I said, ‘If that’s your only justification, I won’t cut it.’” Stefano didn’t. Surprisingly, neither did Hitchcock.

  Although Stefano read Hitchcock’s response as satisfactory, the director streamlined or dropped while shooting (or editing) the writer’s many attempts to challenge the censors and to enrich the complexity of the characters, context, and texture. In the opening scene—the tryst between Sam and the heroine (called Mary in the script) in the Phoenix hotel room—Stefano foreshadows the closing line of the movie (“Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly”) by interrupting a long kiss with “… the buzzing and closeness of an inconsiderate fly.” (The idea was cut.) The stodgy, unappealing Sam waxes eloquent about his and Mary’s being “a regular working-class tragedy” and tells her: “You know what I’d like? A clear, empty sky … and a plane, and us in it … and somewhere a private island for sale, where we can run around without our—shoes on. And the wherewithal to buy what I’d like.” (The lines were cut.)

  In the scenes set in the real estate office as written by Stefano, the vulgar oil man, Mr. Cassidy, makes a blatantly sexual remark to Mary that was cut from the film. In the scene as written, Cassidy leers at Mary, saying, “What you need is a weekend in Las Vegas,” to which she replies, “I’m going to spend this weekend in bed.” The oil man retorts, “Only playground that beats Las Vegas.” Stefano also tried to sustain the suspense of Mary’s flight with the stolen money by having her stop at a gas station to fill up, only to flee when a pay phone jangles; but this was cut. And lengthier than in the completed film was the scene in which the highway patrolman (“his face dispassionate,” although he is not described as wearing sunglasses) delays her.

  In Stefano’s description of Mary’s harrowing car trip, which Hitchcock would later film like a heavily stylized descent into the underworld, Stefano several times describes quit cuts to the wheels of the car spinning in the driving rain. Hitchcock instead shot the sequence with intense subjectivity, never varying the point of view beyond alternating shots of the heroine with shots of what she sees. Stefano pokes a good deal of phallic fun at Norman. In the scene in which Mary arrives at “Mrs. Bates Motel” in a rainstorm, Stefano describes Norman’s umbrella as dangling “limply and uselessly at his side.” Later, Norman’s elaborate, post-shower-murder cleanup is continued with shots of him hosing away the tire tracks leading to the swamp. And following “An Extreme High Angle” that depicts Norman as he carts Mother’s bloodstained shoes and skirt to the basement furnace, Stefano proposes a silent, long shot of the Bates house and chimney, from which an eerie plume of smoke rises. All were cut from the final film. But Hitchcock was also to insert (then later cut) the last image into the screenplays for The Birds, Torn Curtain, and at least two never-realized projects of the 60s and 70s. The image first surfaced as early as 1939 in Hitchcock’s (largely unused) contributions to the Rebecca screenplay

  Hitchcock also dropped from the script an elaborate visual pun in a montage sequence in which the rented car of Detective Arbogast continually bypasses Bates Motel as he questions other hotel owners. In a screenplay rife with allusions to the connection between food and sex, Hitchcock cut a line that Norman utters to Arbogast during the interrogation about Mary: “She had an awful hunger.” Lost, too, were such touches as Norman tenderly caressing and hiding away a stuffed bird knocked off a lampshade during his conversation with Arbogast; a conversation in the hardware store between Sam and Lila played against a background display of carving knives; a grisly sight gag to occur when Sam leaves Lila in the store in search of Arbogast, “among some bathroom fittings a nozzle from a shower falls to the floor”; and an elegant camera move that begins in a medium shot on Sam and Lila talking in their motel room, glides past them to the flower pattern on the wallpaper, and ends in a big close-up of Norman’s eye peering in at them. The latter shot was to have “echoed” the earlier, similarly voyeuristic moment when Norman watches Mary disrobe.

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sp; Throughout the screenplay, Stefano went to some pains to flesh out the characters of Sam and Lila, whom Hitchcock called mere “figures.” If James Cavanagh had tried to trump up a flat-out romance, Stefano’s more subtle attempts center on a slow thawing of the initial chill between Sam and Lila as they hunt for the missing girl. Coos Lila while she and Sam wait vainly for Arbogast to return from the motel, “Whenever I start contemplating the panic button, your back straightens up and your eyes get that God-looks-out-for-everybody look and … I feel better.” Sam: “I feel better when you feel better.” Before Sam hurries off to question Bates at the motel, Sam advises Lila, who wants to accompany him, to stay behind and “contemplate your … panic button.”

  In a scene late in the action, when the couple drive to the motel to investigate the disappearance of Arbogast, Sam mutters, “I wonder if we’ll ever see Mary again—alive.” As Lila reminisces about how her sister sacrificed her own college career for Lila’s, she says, “Some people are so willing to suffer for you that they suffer more if you don’t let them.” Sam mumbles, “I wouldn’t let her lick the stamps,” a reference to one of Mary’s absurdly poignant lines in the opening scene in the hotel room. In the penultimate scene, when the psychiatrist explains Norman’s illness, Lila “begins to weep softly, for Mary, for Arbogast, for the destroyed human beings of the world.”

  Hitchcock excised it all, convinced that the audience would tolerate Sam and Lila only so long as they propelled the resolution of the mystery. Stefano regretted the loss of the sentimentality, but Hitchcock clearly preferred Stefano’s more subversive side. In that arena, Stefano prevailed. The script is shot through with obvious delight in skewering America’s sacred cows—virginity, cleanliness, privacy, masculinity, sex, mother love, marriage, the reliance on pills, the sanctity of the family … and the bathroom. Stefano said, “I told Hitch ‘I would like Marion [Mary] to tear up a piece of paper and flush it down the toilet and see that toilet. Can we do that?’ A toilet had never been seen onscreen before, let alone flushing it. Hitch said, ‘I’m going to have to fight them on it.’ I thought if I could begin to unhinge audiences by showing a toilet flushing—we all suffer from peccadillos from toilet procedures—they’d be so out of it by the time of the shower murder, it would be an absolute killer. I thought [about the audience], ‘This is where you’re going to begin to know what the human race is all about. We’re going to start by showing you the toilet and it’s only going to get worse.’ We were getting into Freudian stuff and Hitchcock dug that kind of thing, so I knew we would get to see that toilet onscreen.”