Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  According to many crew members, Hitchcock was extremely class conscious. “Hitchcock was a terrible snob,” asserted an actress who was directed by him in two films. “You had to be conversant about fine food, wine, travel. You had to dislike or have low regard for the same people. Sometimes, it was funny. Mostly, it was maddening.” Makeup man Jack Barron observed: “He never talked to extras. I remember him asking an assistant to move an entire group of extras because he didn’t like the color they were wearing.”

  As the shooting progressed, Hitchcock consciously helped create of Psycho a set divided. As he once admitted to an interviewer, “I felt … that the characters in the second part were merely figures.” Wardrobe expert Rita Riggs observed: “There were two camps,” referring to the schism that Hitchcock tried to maintain between the stars of “Part One” of the film—Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins—and “Part Two”—Vera Miles and John Gavin. “[Hitchcock] loved that kind of tension. John Huston was the same way. Tony’s camp played between takes an extremely erudite game he invented, called ‘Essences.’ It was a little like ‘Twenty Questions.’ The person who was ‘it’ chose a historical or literary character while the others had to guess [the identity] by asking questions like ‘If you were a car, would you be a beat-up Pontiac or a Ferrari?’ The guessing sometimes went on for days and got so heated that we couldn’t wait to finish our work to run back to the game. I think Mr. Hitchcock liked Tony a lot, but he was a very shy, quiet young man. And [many of us] only got to know him because we could see how his mind worked through that wonderful game.”

  Actress Vera Miles felt the big chill from Hitchcock but acknowledged her role in their estrangement. “I just found it difficult to have someone saying ‘Here’s what you do,’” she said. “I was stubborn and he wanted someone who could be molded. It wasn’t a nasty situation. I would get my barbs and walk away. I didn’t do battle. I just said, ‘Take it or leave it.’ That’s how my relationship with Hitchcock ended. There were a few bitter comments from him, but I never retorted in kind. I look back on him very fondly.”

  The Director Innovates

  As much as Hitchcock amused himself with mind games, with feuds, and with the flexing of his directorial muscle, technical challenges were his great delight. For example, in the long day’s journey into night that the heroine makes by car, he was determined to avoid cliché. In those days, standard filmmaking procedure for car scenes entailed use of a mock-up “process” body half-car and the rear-projection process. “That’s how they do it in the movies” was one in the director’s arsenal of put-downs. Marshall Schlom explained: “For night-driving scenes, you don’t normally use rear projection because, other than the headlights of people behind, it’s basically black.”

  But Hitchcock fixated on finding a means of visually conveying that the heroine had lost her way and was turning off the main road. “One day he told the special effects people and the electricians, ‘Fellas, this is what we’re going to do,’” Marshall related. “With Mr. Hitchcock, it always how ‘we’re’ going to do, which was wonderful. His idea was ingenious and took no time. He had the crew drape a black velvet backing over the whole rear of the stage behind the mock-up car to make it absolutely black. To [simulate car headlights] behind [Janet Leigh], he had the electricians concoct a three-foot-wide wheel and mounted lights on it. The wheel had a hub in it that could rotate 360 degrees. To convey the illusion that car headlights behind her were going off to camera-right [that is, to the left of Leigh], he had the grips pull the light away from the car body at an angle and control the spin. The lights had little baffles on them, so once they passed camera, they would shut off. Through the car window, it looked as if the car headlights just disappeared to the left or right behind her. As you pulled the wheel away to the rear of the stage, the lights diminished in size until they were thirty or forty feet back from the car.”

  Delayed by several days of bad weather and concerned about the looming specter of a strike by the Screen Actors Guild, Hitchcock deleted some location shooting as well as elegant camera moves and replaced them with simple, medium shots. During preproduction, Hitchcock asked art director Joseph Hurley to work up moody illustrations of his conception of the Bates swamp scenes. These drawings were used to convey to the crew what the director hoped to find from real-life settings. Suitably desolate locations were found near Travis Air Force Base and at Grizzly Island, near Fairfield, in northern California, but time and money pressed Hitchcock to substitute “Falls Lake” on the backlot. Similarly, the generic, homespun Main Street on the Universal backlot became the script’s “Fairvale” and the studio’s main executive office building (which was demolished soon after the shooting) served as a county courthouse. Hitchcock shot these scenes so rapidly that his TV crew detected few differences between the feature film and one of the director’s “three-day wonder” TV shows. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano said, “He was working with people who knew him, so there were no displays, no showing off. By this time, Hitchcock didn’t have anything to prove to anybody anymore.”

  Although many of Hitchcock’s collaborators were familiar with his work methods, his knowledge of the technical resources of the medium provoked constant wonder. “He really knew lenses,” commented set designer Robert Clatworthy, assistant to Robert Boyle on Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943). “For many years, he carried this little pad with two frames and a pencil. As he’d explain something, say to the cameraman, he’d draw the image of what he wanted from the shot. The cameraman would put a lens on and that’s exactly what he’d get.”

  Despite Psycho’s being a “small” picture, Hitchcock exploited a range of techniques that were designed to intensify audience involvement. The director insisted on cameraman John Russell’s shooting virtually the entire movie with 50-millimeter lenses. On the 35-millimeter cameras of the day, such lenses gave the closest approximation to human vision technically possible. “He wanted the camera, being the eyes of the audience all the time, to let them [view the action] as if they were seeing it with their own eyes,” script supervisor Marshall Schlom explained. Again, Hitchcock reinforced the sensation of voyeurism—of “cruel eyes studying you,” as Norman Bates puts it—that permeates the entire film.

  No Photographs, Please

  As word of the film spread like wildfire through Hollywood, Hitchcock demanded even tighter secrecy from the cast, crew, and publicity flacks. Hitchcock suppressed any synopsis of the plot for public consumption. No other director had done this since Cecil B. DeMille on The Ten Commandments. However, as a master of self-promotion, Hitchcock provided “impromptu” photo opportunities at the drop of a clue. Art director Robert Clatworthy recalled: “All through the shooting, Hitchcock kept a director’s chair with ‘Mrs. Bates’ written on the back in prominent view. That was Hitchcock’s humor. Mrs. Bates was a real person, by God, so she’s got to have a chair.” Late one afternoon, Hitchcock plopped into the chair himself—a photo premeditated (and dutifully recorded) as a sop to the studio publicists; later, every key cast member from Martin Balsam to Janet Leigh was also photographed with that chair. Except, of course, for Anthony Perkins.

  Paramount grew restive over Hitchcock’s insistence on preventing the chief of the studio’s still photography department William “Bud” Fraker (who later became the cinematographer of such major films as Rosemary’s Baby and Heaven Can Wait) from shooting any material that might allude too directly to the subject matter or plot surprises. The director tried to fob off the publicity flacks by releasing such innocuous photos as a smiley portrait of Janet Leigh in a striped sweater (“Exactly the kind of attire Mr. Hitchcock did not approve of,” costumer Rita Riggs observed). Herb Steinberg, who had joined Paramount in New York in 1948 and became director of advertising and publicity for the studio, fired off a memo to Hitchcock on December 30. Steinberg wailed about the “static” stills, “which don’t give us either the excitement or flavor of what I know you are getting on the screen. I understand
your need for secrecy and recognize its value as an exploitation device. I wish, though, that you would allow us to cover everything you shoot, so that we can at least have a record for future use at such time that these secret elements concerning Psycho may be released.”

  Publicist Steinberg proposed a compromise: If Hitchcock would allow the photographer to “shoot as much film as he possibly can,” the photographer would hand over his undeveloped film to anyone whom the director might designate until such time that the stills might be released. Hitchcock knew too much about studio photographers and publicists to back down. All of the stills from the picture were designed to be as unrevealing as possible.

  For all the apparent precautions about secrecy—Hitchcock had photographs of guards at the door to the soundstages widely distributed to the press—novelist Robert Bloch encountered none of it. “I found myself on the Universal lot on business one day,” recalled the writer, several of whose teleplays had been aired on the Hitchcock show by the time Psycho was in production. “I walked over to the soundstage where Psycho was shooting. In those days they weren’t quite so careful about strange and unwanted visitors. I watched Hitchcock direct Tony Perkins walking down along the rows of motel rooms and that was all. I neither introduced myself nor spoke to anyone. Nobody spoke to me.”

  Screenwriter Joseph Stefano was a regular visitor to the set, at least during the early days of shooting. The Hitchcock ego bloomed whenever he was surrounded by a relative neophyte such as Stefano, eager to learn the moviemaking ropes. But according to some crew members, Hitchcock later regretted his benevolent gesture. Marshall Schlom explained: “In those days, agents and writers were never allowed on sets. I think, out of courtesy, Mr. Hitchcock said [Stefano] could come and watch. Because I held the script in my hand, [Stefano] would watch and listen to his words. He’d whisper to me, ‘They changed it.’ Well, actors do that. Part of my job is knowing when to say something to the director and when not to. But he started to make certain suggestions and criticize a little bit, and I think he was shut up a little bit, too. I know he was. Mr. Hitchcock never missed a trick around the set. Those little things got to him. He knew when someone was imposing. He felt that Joe, at times, was imposing and he just didn’t allow it to happen.”

  Veteran vaudevillian, radio and film actress Lurene Tuttle, who played the role of the sheriff’s wife (“a small, lively stick of a woman,” said the script), had previously starred for Hitchcock in a forties radio adaptation of his great silent, The Lodger (1926) (a performance for which Hitchcock complimented the actress with a pat on the derriere). On Psycho, Tuttle was disconcerted when the roles played by her and John McIntire were truncated in the editing. She was also concerned that Hitchcock’s directorial manner seemed to have changed so much. The actress fretted as Hitchcock watched with apparent boredom her brief rehearsal with McIntire, Vera Miles, and John Gavin: “He trusted actors and didn’t give a lot of direction, except to tell me to be sure to stand on my mark. He staged scenes like blueprints. He told me, ‘If you move one inch either way, you’ll be out of my light,’ then slumped over in his chair like he’d dozed off. It worried me so that I went to the assistant director and asked, ‘Is he sleeping through our scene?’ He reassured me, ‘That’s a good sign. He’s designed the scene and your movements so carefully, he knows how it’s going to look. He’s just enjoying the sound of it.’”

  Tuttle sufficiently accommodated herself to the unorthodox Hitchcock style to relax. “Working for Hitchcock was like going back to the womb,” she said. “I think the four of us felt we were in some kind of safe cocoon.” While Hitchcock was clearly fond of the veteran actress, he hardly spared the venom if crossed. “I wasn’t hitting my marks right,” said Tuttle, recalling a brief scene shot on the “Circle Drive” on the backlot, representing the script’s Fairvale Presbyterian church. “He could be witheringly sarcastic. He was neither a sycophant nor a fool. He was very serious the day we shot the scene outside the church. He showed me what he wanted, even how I should walk and how fast, but I said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock, I do not make big male steps—I make ladies’ steps!’ He was very angry. I realized, though, if he told me I was standing in the wrong place, it was according to the design he had formulated for the action and his cameras. And you had to do it till you got it right.”

  Hitchcock Amuses Himself

  When Hitchcock wasn’t snoozing, sequestered in his bungalow with the London Times, or holding court with his company, he entertained himself in various trivial pursuits. One of his favorites was deciding exactly where and how he would make his famous cameo appearance in a picture. Although he enjoyed keeping his appearance a secret even from the crew, he occasionally dropped hints. “He wouldn’t tell us until the last possible moment,” wardrobe mistress Rita Riggs stated. “But he wanted to be in that scene with his daughter. It was his bit of sentimental whimsy.” (Others point out that the scene was the first available opportunity for Hitchcock to make his appearance without distracting the audience.)

  Hitchcock cast himself as a man standing curbside in a Stetson whom the heroine passes as she hurries back into the real estate office. Of their work together, Patricia Hitchcock has commented, “I’ve always been in such awe of him, he’s such a fine director. It doesn’t occur to us on the set that we’re father and daughter. Not that he’s severe, but always patient and calm. He knows what he wants.” Hitchcock père et fille brought off the scene smoothly.

  During shooting, Hitchcock insisted that his trailer be rigged with an intercontinental telephone hookup. “I wonder what the weather’s like in London?” he would ponder aloud between shots, only to waddle into his trailer to find out. “He had really nothing else in this world except food, wine, and fooling around with movies,” explained Marshall Schlom. “For tax purposes, he had this ranch up in Los Gatos and grew champagne grapes and lost money. He only drank Montrachet brought in for him from France, which, in the days of two-and three-dollar wines, cost fifteen. We shot Psycho just around Christmas and he called Maxim’s in Paris saying, ‘I want the foie gras.’ He had a deal with TWA, which he called ‘Teenie-Weenie Airlines.’ Maxim’s delivered the food to the TWA pilot in Paris who hand-carried it to the Los Angeles Airport to [Hitchcock’s] driver, who brought it to the studio. It never went through customs.”

  At Christmas, Hitchcock bestowed gifts upon only two of his Psycho collaborators. Assistant director Hilton Green received one of the first Polaroid cameras. And script supervisor Schlom learned why Hitchcock was so intent upon knowing whether Mrs. Schlom knew the recipe for “lemon curd.” Two days before Christmas, Schlom tore off the wrapping from an expensive, out-of-print book that Hitchcock had had shipped especially from New York. But when the intended gift, The Encyclopedia of Gastronomy, turned out to be The Encyclopedia of Astronomy, Hitchcock’s office went into a quiet uproar. “He personally called New York,” Schlom recalled, “and had one of his people locate and hand-carry the correct book overnight. He wanted me to have that book on that day. That’s the kind of person he was.”

  Inventions and gadgets were another Hitchcock pastime during the shooting of Psycho. Marshall Schlom said, “One day he wanted to figure if there was a way of making an electric whisk. We photographed his hand with a mechanical whisk, whisking eggs at a very high rate of speed so that it was projected at very slow motion. He had the special effects man take a Mixmaster and do the same thing, but set the blades on its side trying to make it revolve.” Hitchcock seemed to have no intention of doing anything with such inventions. For him, the pleasure was in the working out of the technical details.

  On another occasion, Hitchcock mused, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to shoot characters at the Eiffel Tower without ever having to go there?” The director dispatched Schlom on an expensive technical fact-finding mission on state-of-the-art special effects. Nothing that anyone turned up satisfied the director.

  Neither, apparently, did the handsome and elaborate St. Charles kitchen that Universal built in
the Hitchcock home during the shooting of Psycho. When the director found that the kitchen was 3/8 inch smaller than his specifications, he had it torn out and completely redone—at the studio’s expense. Script supervisor Schlom suggested that frustration by the director rather than capriciousness may have been at the heart of the matter. “His wife was a wonderful cook and he had just put in this beautiful kitchen, but he was so heavy, he couldn’t get insurance,” Schlom explained. “So he was on a diet limited to four ounces of meat a day, with an occasional glass of Dubonnet. He was stricken.”

  “He could be very funny and self-deprecating,” Stefano recalled. “Even though he was still quite heavy, he’d lost a lot of weight. ‘My stomach hangs down like an old apron,’ he said. Then he told me this wicked story about going to an incredibly lavish dinner at the house of a young director who had tried to impress him. He said, ‘The waiter came ’round to refill our wineglasses and he had a napkin around a bottle that wasn’t even chilled! What pretension!’ He just kept putting these people down unmercifully and I laughed because he was actually telling me about it.”

  Other Hitchcock associates saw the oddities of the director in a benevolent light. “He told me he never had a driving license because he was afraid of getting stopped by the police,” recalled Marshall Schlom. “His wife drove. But every year, Ford, one of the sponsors of his show, gave him a new Thunderbird. He’d just give it to his daughter, Pat.” On-the-set wardrobe mistress Rita Riggs also saw Hitchcock’s foibles in a benevolent light. “He and Alma asked me to dinner at their home one night, which I considered a great privilege,” Riggs said, recalling the evening with a grin. “One of my funniest moments in being with Mr. Hitchcock was watching him get into my little Volkswagen bug, filling it up with that wonderful profile that had become so well known. While we drove the freeway to his Bel-Air house, the double-, triple-, and quadruple-takes from other drivers were hilarious.”