Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  “Another of his pet ideas, and he expounded on it a lot, was his philosophy that deep down, audiences enjoy being frightened. So he liked the idea of this movie and saw great possibilities for certain sequences—the staircase killing, the revealing of Mother. He probably knew the moves and technical aspects of a camera as well or better than any cameraman. He started preparing … these shots that would be very difficult, especially for that day, when we didn’t have the kind of equipment we do now.”

  In filling other key creative positions, Hitchcock strayed outside of the Shamley “family.” In late November, Hitchcock asked composer Bernard Herrmann, his musical alter ego since The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), to score the film. The brilliant, contentious Herrmann, who had magnificently scored Citizen Kane for Orson Welles and, for other directors, The Devil and Daniel Webster and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, was easily Hitchcock’s equal in prickly pride. “Benny had this repertoire of themes he could pull out of his hat,” observed actor-producer John Houseman, who worked closely with Welles and Herrmann on Citizen Kane. “That is not to say he didn’t compose original pieces for films, but directors’ needs tended to be quite similar and one of Benny’s favorites he called ‘frozen music,’ an eerie, keening kind of theme for strange sequences in pictures like The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

  Hitchcock was attuned to Herrmann’s predilections and wanted nothing by-the-numbers for Psycho. In turn, Herrmann balked at the director’s offer of near-scale salary. For a while, Herrmann let Hitchcock stew. Finally, the director wired the composer: “Awaited call from you all day Thursday following my call. However unnecessary have agreed to your terms $17,500 the job. We are up to schedule and expect film to finish by mid January or thereabouts and picture must be handed over not later than February 22nd. Yours in sunshine, Hitch.”

  The preparations of another non-Shamley collaborator, graphic designer Saul Bass, enhanced those of assistant director Green and others. At thirty-nine, Bass had already created a stir by designing bold title sequences for Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and The Seven-Year Itch. “The best thing about the movie is the Saul Bass credits” had almost become a critics’ cliché. Superb Bass titles for Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North by Northwest seemed to announce an uncommon meshing of sensibilities. On November 10, 1959, Hitchcock sent Bass the first twenty pages of the Stefano script; on the twenty-ninth of the same month, Bass received pages seventy through seventy-nine. As Hilton Green observed: “Hitch had it completely storyboarded [by Bass].” But internal Shamley memos suggest that the hiring of the designer sparked a territorial squabble or two. Early on, Herbert Coleman had been among several Hitchcock aides who advised their boss to offer Bass a less-substantial salary than $10,000 (plus three 16-millimeter prints of his main titles) for his thirteen consecutive weeks of work under the rubric “Pictorial Consultant.” According to a terse memo, Hitchcock, a tight man with a dollar, “vetoed the suggestion.”

  Bass recalled: “Hitch was generally viewed as a fairly opaque person. He had a curious, dry view. But our relationship was an extremely warm one. He was, of course, the grand ‘patron,’ I the eager, interested, talented student. On Psycho, he came to me with a much more ambitious expectation. He wanted me to do the titles, of course, in addition to which he wanted me to do ‘something’ with the shower sequence, the Arbogast murder, the revelation of the desiccated body of the mother, and with the ‘haunted house.’ He had identified those key elements as something that needed special care.” Following a series of meetings with Hitchcock, Bass began to draft conceptual sketches at his Hollywood office.

  Concurrently, Hitchcock again bypassed his Shamley production roster by choosing editor George Tomasini (To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man) over his TV cutters Edward W. Williams and Richard G. Wray. “Hitch hired George for two reasons,” noted an associate of the editor. “His overall cutting expertise and for the shower sequence. He knew that would be the stickler.” On November 16, Hitchcock hired Tomasini at a salary of $425 per week.

  Casting

  “Once you cast a star in a part,” the director had often groused, “you compromise your original intentions to a great extent.” On Psycho, Hitchcock had determined that he and the story were to be the stars. “Hitchcock’s thing about actors was very strange,” observed screenwriter Joseph Stefano of the director who had gotten so much press coverage out of calling actors “spoiled children” or “cattle.” Even two of the director’s blue-ribbon specimens did not escape his scorn. In private, Hitchcock referred to Ingrid Bergman, the lustrous heroine of Spellbound, Notorious, and Under Capricorn, as “so beautiful, so stupid.” After James Stewart gave Hitchcock four of his finest performances, the director rewarded the star of Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much by denying him the lead in North by Northwest, accusing the actor of having “looked too old” to have made a financial success of Vertigo.

  Stefano remarked: “It was as though he really didn’t live in the same world with them, or they in his. Somehow, we were the moviemakers, they were the ‘others.’ It was like he had one of England’s great houses, now he had to let the tourists loose in it.” The first performer that Hitchcock had signed for Psycho had done so before he had read the script. Joseph Stefano’s screenplay describes Norman Bates as “somewhere in his late twenties, thin and tall, soft-spoken and hesitant … [with] something sadly touching in his manner.” Then twenty-seven, Anthony Perkins had made his movie debut for director George Cukor in The Actress (1953). Whether playing a Civil War-era Quaker for director William Wyler in Friendly Persuasion (1956) or—less convincingly—baseball star Jimmy Piersall suffering a breakdown in Fear Strikes Out (1957), Perkin’s callow vulnerability had turned him into a bobby soxer’s dreamboat-with-a-brain. Perkins’s popularity had even turned the vapid “Moonlight Swim” into a Top-Forty hit.

  Conveniently for Hitchcock, Perkins owed Paramount a film under an old contract and could be hired for $40,000. By contrast, signing Cary Grant to star in North by Northwest cost that production $450,000 plus 10 percent of the gross over $8 million. The willingness of a late-fifties fan magazine cover boy to play a transvestite—even under the direction of Hitchcock—was admirable. The fifties were conservative years and perhaps few other actors might have taken the risk. Even fewer would have been nearly as “right” for the part. (Only Dean Stockwell strikes one as a viable alternative.) Paul Jasmin, a close pal of Perkins and himself a struggling actor at the time, recalled: “Even though Tony was a friend, what he was doing was a complete mystery, very hush-hush. Tony thought he was in the middle of making the career move of his life. And he was right.”

  Yet even the unconventional Perkins, whom teen fans would mob if he dared step from his powder-blue T-bird, suffered misgivings. Perkins commented: “The question was ‘Was it a wise thing to rush into in the sixties?’ Probably less so than in the eighties, when it seems to me people get away with anything. Look at Vanessa Redgrave in Second Serve [in which the actress played a tennis pro who undergoes a sex change], just as an example.” Perkins shared his misgivings only with his director. “[Hitchcock] agreed that it was a gamble,” the actor said. “He had no idea of the real possible success of the picture, but he suggested that I give it a try anyway.”

  For the plum role of the blonde, Mary Crane, Hitchcock was anxious to sign the most prominent star appropriate for the part, the better to maximize the shock value of the onscreen killing. The Stefano screenplay describes the character thus: “Her face … betrays a certain inner-tension, worrisome conflicts. She is … an attractive girl nearing the end of her rope.” The name of Eva Marie Saint often cropped up in casting discussions in the Hitchcock office. The director had grown especially fond of the lovely, solidly professional leading lady of North by Northwest. But perhaps because Hitchcock had taken such pains to transform Saint’s screen image from drab, in On the Waterfront, to sleek, he could not bear to let her backslide. At the behest of the studio, Hitchcock and his staff viewed foot
age of every likely (and unlikely) fair-haired type of the day, including Piper Laurie, Martha Hyer, Hope Lange, and wholesome Shirley Jones of Oklahoma! (1955) and Carousel (1956), who would soon do an impressive about-face as a trollop in Elmer Gantry (1960). There was even talk, mercifully brief, of MCA client Lana Turner, suddenly hot again because of the success of a Douglas Sirk—directed soap opera, Imitation of Life (1959), for Universal-International.

  Hitchcock surprised some Hollywood observers by signing perky, reliable, thirty-two-year-old Janet Leigh to play Mary Crane. Another client of MCA, Leigh would receive a salary of $25,000. Despite the efforts she had made under the direction of Josef von Sternberg, Fred Zinnemann, and Orson Welles, Leigh had been relegated to turns in costume epics such as Prince Valiant (1954) or comedies on a par with The Perfect Furlough (1958). Still, Leigh was a darling of the fan magazines, a member of the Peaches-and-Cream brigade with Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day, and June Allyson, who were counterpoints to sultry mantrap types Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. Leigh’s “storybook” marriage to fifties beefcake prince Tony (“Yondah lies the castle of my foddah”) Curtis cemented her status as Hollywood royalty. Like Janet Leigh, Curtis, another MCA client and Universal-International contract player, had to gut it out in such hash as Kansas Raiders (1950) and Son of Ali Baba (1952) before showing he could be more than just a torso and a smoulder. Hollywood irony: Just as Janet Leigh would begin playing scenes opposite Anthony Perkins in his role as a transvestite for Hitchcock, Tony Curtis would be removing his lipstick, eyeliner, and chemise after playing a drag role for Billy Wilder in Some Like It Hot (1959).

  “He sent me the novel,” Janet Leigh recalled of the beginning of her association with Hitchcock. “With [the book] was a note saying that Mary was not as vital as he intended to have her in the movie. I was intrigued. I felt not only was she vital even in Robert Bloch’s novel, but, though you only saw her for a short time in the picture, you don’t know anyone else but her—except for Norman. He wanted a name actress because of the shock value, but he also wanted someone who could actually look like she came from Phoenix. I mean, Lana Turner might not be able to look like someone from there. He wanted a vulnerability, a softness. Actually, Mr. Hitchcock needn’t have sent me anything. Just the prospect of working with him would have been enough. I’ve always believed, as it is with the English theater and movies, it doesn’t matter how big the part, it’s what you make of it. I would see Ralph Richardson doing a minor part and think, if he can, I sure as hell can.”

  Once Hitchcock signed Leigh, he laid down for her the ground rules that so infuriated certain actors. “His camera was absolute,” Leigh commented. “Every move was planned before any performer even talked with him. He said, ‘Here’s your piece of the pie. What you bring to Mary other than what I want is fine. You can do almost anything with Mary and I won’t interfere, so long as it’s within my concept.’ The wardrobe, the suitcase, what I put in the suitcase when I left my job, everything was well-thought-out. He showed me models of the sets—especially the hotel in the opening—and told me exactly how the camera was going to go into the window and follow the characters, all for concise effects.”

  Hitchcock sold Leigh on the wisdom of her following his carefully choreographed gestures and movements within the camera frame. “Hitchcock’s films had so little cutting, he told me, because he had learned the hard way,” Leigh said. “Before he had the clout to have his pictures the way he wanted, someone else would cut them their own way; he’d given them too much footage. So he learned to preplan so precisely [so as] not to give them extra material, because it was either going to work or not. And if it worked, he didn’t want anybody to muck it up.”

  Contrary to his reputation as a director more comfortable discussing deep-focus than deep motivation, Hitchcock took pains to discuss with Janet Leigh the inner compulsions of Mary Crane. Leigh said, “She was an unspectacular, simple, frustrated person, getting older, seeing herself becoming an old maid, afraid Sam would go off, never having enough money. She was basically a compassionate, honest woman, not a thief. So her momentous, out-of-character decision to commit the robbery showed her passion and terrible frustration. She was a plain, ordinary person that something extraordinary happened to. Most of all, we both wanted to convey that no-place-to-go feeling. He said, ‘I will only interfere if you don’t come up to where I need you or you go too far.’ But there was no conflict in terms of approach to Mary.”

  But Psycho required another blonde, and in that requirement was conflict. To flesh out the role of Lila Crane, the young sister trying to solve the mystery of the vanishing lady, Hitchcock again sought a reliable, affordable actress. According to a character description in the Stefano screenplay, Lila is “an attractive girl with a rather definite manner, a look of purposefulness.” Actress Caroline Kearney, a “Doris Day lookalike,” had caught the director’s eye while playing Wendy Crane in a “Playhouse 90” drama by Arthur Hailey (Airport) called “Diary of a Nurse” as well as in a Universal horror shocker called The Thing That Couldn’t Die. Instead of newcomer Kearney, however, Hitchcock cast twenty-nine-year-old, Oklahoma-born Vera Miles. Five years earlier, Miles had similarly intrigued the director when he spotted her on an episode of a TV show, “Medic.”

  In September of 1955, Vera Miles was valiantly holding her own against Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves. Hitchcock persuaded the producers to release the actress for four days so that he could direct her in “Revenge,” the second episode he was to shoot for airing on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” During production, the cool beauty, smarts, and bearing of Miles so captivated Hitchcock that he replaced “Breakdown,” the episode originally scheduled to open his debut TV season, with “Revenge.” On January 2, 1956, Vera Miles officially began a five-year personal contract under Alfred Hitchcock to star in three films a year.

  “I feel the same way directing Vera that I did with Grace,” crooned a usually more circumspect Hitchcock to a reporter for Look magazine. “She has a style, an intelligence, and a quality of understatement.” Convinced that he had found in Miles another icebox blonde in the Grace Kelly tradition, Hitchcock ordered costume designer Edith Head and Paramount’s platoon of makeup and hair specialists to groom her expensively to his precise specifications. Hitchcock grumbled to Edith Head that Miles was “swamped by color,” so he decreed that from then on his protégée should be attired in nothing but black, white, or gray. Upon inspecting Miles’s portfolio of publicity photographs, Hitchcock announced to the Paramount publicity department that he was putting a moratorium on any further “cheesecake” shots. Hitchcock and his minions scrutinized and advised Vera Miles upon every public and private move she made—from the company she kept to her commercial tie-in arrangements, such as the one she enjoyed with Lux Soap. Costume designer Rita Riggs observed: “The sort of education one got from Mr. Hitchcock and Miss Head in publicity and the presentation of a new personality, one could not get anywhere else in the world. Although Vera was a lovely girl, she was far too intelligent to be an actress, and too independent to be anyone’s Trilby.”

  To the surprise of few, the relationship between the spunky Miles and her demanding Svengali deteriorated during the making of The Wrong Man, which was shot on location in New York and released in 1956. Miles found Hitchcock’s attentions toward her stifling and inappropriate. Hitchcock barraged her with flowers, telegrams, and demands for private conferences. Miles found herself constantly in arrears to express her gratitude. “Dear Hitch,” began a typical note from Miles, almost three months too late. “It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t thank you for the beautiful flowers you sent me, both when I started Beau James and on my birthday. I sincerely appreciate your thoughtfulness and good wishes. Sincerely, Vera.”

  Matters worsened irrevocably when Miles married Gordon Scott, the new movie Tarzan, during the shooting of The Wrong Man. However, Miles’s performance as the wife of Henry Fonda in Hitchcock’s spare, documentarylike, black-and-white thriller
prompted the director to design Vertigo as the picture to showcase her as the latest incarnation of the Hitchcock blonde.

  By the time the screenplay was ready and James Stewart was signed to squire Miles in the film, the actress enraged Hitchcock by announcing she was pregnant—for the third time. “He was overwhelmed,” Miles has said. “He said, ‘Don’t you know it’s bad taste to have more than two?’” Instantly, the director cooled toward Miles. Hitchcock had lavished on his budding star time, money, and, most precious, emotion. Hitchcock associates say that he believed that Miles should have been grateful and compliant. Privately, Hitchcock fumed like a rebuffed suitor. Miles observed: “Over the span of years, he’s had one type of woman in his films, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, and so on. Before that, it was Madeleine Carroll. I’m not their type and never had been. I tried to please him but I couldn’t. They are all sexy women, but mine is an entirely different approach.” Miles remained philosophical about losing the chance for stardom in Vertigo. “Hitchcock got his picture,” she said. “I got a son.”

  In the intervening three years, Miles worked well under masterful director John Ford in The Searchers but only competently in lesser pictures for lesser directors. During the contretemps over Vertigo in November 1957, terse letters had flown back and forth between Miles’s agent and the Hitchcock office as to whether the compensation she had already been paid in connection with that film could be applied to any further payment due her under her agreement. However, by September 22, 1959, with Miles still under contract when Hitchcock summoned her for the role in Psycho, Miles’s agent took a more conciliatory tone in his telegrams: “Be assured of desire to cooperate and intention of accepting your offer.” In what could only be read as a comeuppance, Hitchcock tossed his would-be ice goddess a drab, underdeveloped part. To worsen matters, Miles had just had her head shaved for a role in Five Branded Women in which she played a Yugoslavian girl punished for consorting with German troops. For Psycho, Hitchcock paid off his one-time contender for the throne of “the new Grace Kelly” with $1,750 a week and a dubious wig and wardrobe. “Vera was a pretty headstrong lady,” concurs makeup man Jack Barron, who recalled several set-to’s between leading lady and director. “She’d do things her way and stand up to anybody. Even him.”