Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  Other “fan” letters might have cut Hitchcock—the compleat detail man—to the quick. Multiple complaints from ophthalmologists pointed out a technical gaffe: In the extreme close-up of Janet Leigh after the violent stabbing, the pupils of her eyes should have been dilated, not contracted. “A simple drop of belladonna would have handled it,” chided one doctor. The director made restitution for his error in Frenzy (1972) in the insistent, freeze-frame close-up of actress Barbara Leigh-Hunt, who played the victim of rape and strangulation by a psychotic fruit seller. Her pupils were dilated in the proper manner of poststrangulation.

  Hitchcock also saved many laudatory fan letters, but the wrathful letters outnumbered those. One woman wrote, “I don’t give a Goddam whether you continue to make movies like Psycho because, believe me, I will not be viewing them.” A favorite of the director was the offended Canadian classical music fan who voiced an objection to the close-up of Beethoven’s Eroica during the scene in which Vera Miles searches the bedroom of Norman Bates. He called it “a direct insult to the composer and a very poor attempt to prove that his music is good for lunatics only.”

  Naturally, the notoriety surrounding Psycho only served to ensure its high status among the most seen and written-about movies of 1960. “At the time we were making Psycho,” assistant director Hilton Green admitted, “I don’t think any of the crew felt we were making anything but a good movie. At the time it came out, it was not a critical blockbuster. But it just gained and gained over time.” Hitchcock cameraman Leonard South claimed that, originally, Psycho “embarrassed” the director. “‘Here’s this bloody piece of crap,’“ the director told South, “‘and the money doesn’t stop coming in.’“ Similarly, writer Joseph Stefano recalled a luncheon meeting with Hitchcock shortly after the opening of the movie. “I walked in, seeing Hitch for the first time since all the rumpus and commotion started. He gave me this completely baffled look and just shrugged his shoulders.” Costumer Rita Riggs, whom Hitchcock would hire for his next two pictures, said, “Mr. Hitchcock was stunned that this simple, black-and-white picture made so much money. I remember him saying, ‘Now I have to hurry up and do another picture because of taxes!’”

  Not all of the critical and public scrutiny under which Psycho put Hitchcock was welcomed. Since the thirties, the director had been accustomed to banking on his own quotability. Yet never before had his press statements been sifted by sociologists and psychologists for hidden meaning and implication. And never before had Hitchcock been publicly taken to task for the moral vision that one of his films allegedly expressed. Psycho began to be cited in discussions of serious and frivolous phenomena: the rise in crime; the decline in sales of opaque shower curtains; the alarming upswing in violence, particularly toward women; the downturn in motel stays. In interviews, Hitchcock hid behind the breezy speeches and patter that James Allardice wrote for him. Hitchcock willingly wore the mask of a maker of “fun pictures.” It seemed the director would not—or could not—respond to such charges any other way.

  A nineteen-year-old man, Leroy Pinkowski, drew a life sentence for the “thrill slaying” stabbing of a fourteen-year-old. Pinkowski allegedly admitted that he had seen Psycho several times and that it had influenced him. When police convicted twenty-nine-year-old Henry Adolph Busch of slaying three elderly women, he also allegedly cited the Hitchcock movie as his inspiration. Reporters pressed Hitchcock for a statement. “These boys have killed before,” the director responded, inaccurately in the case of one of the young men. “I want to know what movie they saw those times, or did they do it after drinking chocolate milk?”

  For Redbook magazine, Hitchcock agreed to talk with psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, an author and outspoken critic of media violence. The published account of their dialogue suggests that Hitchcock was not about to be pinned down. Wertham, after admitting that he had not seen Psycho, tried several times to get the director to admit that the violence in the film was “A little stronger than you would have put in formerly—say ten or fifteen years ago?” Hitchcock replied, “I have always felt that you should do the minimum on the screen to get the maximum audience effect. Sometimes it is necessary to go into some element of violence, but I only do it if I have a strong reason.” Wertham persisted: “But wasn’t this violence stronger than your usual dose?” Eventually, Hitchcock conceded: “It was.” “More?” asked Wertham. “More,” Hitchcock replied. So it went for Wertham, and one suspects that it was, for him, much like dealing with a particularly defensive patient.

  The psychiatrist may have hoped to elicit from Hitchcock at least an artistic, if not moral, justification for that violence. Yet one is left with the clear impression that Hitchcock might justify the bloodletting in Psycho similarly to the way in which he had justified to Francois Truffaut the risqué opening scenes. “Audiences,” Hitchcock said, “are changing. I think that nowadays you have to show them the way they themselves behave most of the time.” Thus, the filmmaker implied that he was a reporter, not a shaper, of human behavior.

  In other magazines and forums, Hitchcock also played the role of glib entertainer. Penelope Houston, author of “The Figure in the Carpet,” a major assessment of Hitchcock in Sight and Sound, asked Hitchcock, “What is the deepest logic of your films?” and he answered: “To put the audience through it.” To the man whose daughter would not bathe after seeing Les Diaboliques or shower since Psycho, Hitchcock suggested: “Dry cleaning.” Such statements and others like them only fueled the argument of those who contended that Psycho was the creation of a cynical, irresponsible filmmaker whose sole allegiance was to the box office. One had only to see Psycho truly—or almost any other Hitchcock work—to discover what the director was actually “about.” Beneath the shock and suspense tactics lies a reservoir of profound understanding of the fragility of life. Lurking beneath the adventure and thrills is Hitchcock’s outrage toward the cruelty we inflict upon each other in the name of love.

  Should Hitchcock have spelled out his philosophy and thematic concerns or should he simply have hoped that audiences and critics would discover those for themselves? One could argue either way. “I’m more interested in the technique of storytelling by means of film rather than in what the film contains,” he said, disclaiming any intellectual content in his films. But Hitchcock the interviewee often struck one as more facile than erudite, more cleverly concealing than revelatory. Further, as a moviemaker, he impressed one as more informed by craft, passion, and intuition than by erudition. In any event, Hitchcock seemed content to utter things like, “I could never have made a film like Psycho without a sense of humor.” He let his films do the real talking.

  From Psycho onward, Hitchcock would be interviewed and profiled as never before. The movie that solidified his status as one of Hollywood’s most imitated, envied, and powerful directors also caused him to be studied, psychoanalyzed, tried, and judged from the armchair. There are indications that the international hullabaloo over Psycho disoriented the delicate internal clockwork that ran Hitchcock’s world. “He had been a man without much ego,” observed cameraman Leonard South, who had known the director since 1950. “He only knew that he was successful, that he could put on film the things that his mind could dream up.” Writer Joseph Stefano commented: “Psycho had much more of an effect on Hitchcock than Hitchcock had on it. A man goes for years and years feeling he’s not properly appreciated—although he’s loved, respected, well-paid—but deep down, he feels that nobody really knows how good he is. Suddenly, with this strange little picture, there begins all this rumbling about his work, about who he is. ‘They’ began to say, ‘You were right. You really are good!’ Hitchcock went to pieces. I think it just blew his mind. He got his dream and it only made him more frightened. Who knows? Maybe he didn’t think he was all that good.”

  No matter how Hitchcock assessed his own work, slowly but surely after Psycho, the moviemaking and journalistic worlds would begin telling him just how good he was. Hitchcock career retrospectives at maj
or museums throughout the world became commonplace. Much of that to-do rapidly accelerated after the embracing of Psycho by the Cahiers critics. “If there is anyone who loves to hear the art of the director extolled,” wrote Vincent Canby describing the auteurist adulation of Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and others in the New York Times, “it is the director. [Admirers of Hawks and Hitchcock] suffered through I was a Male War Bride [Hawks, 1949] and The Farmer’s Wife [Hitchcock, 1928], and the directors submitted equally uncomfortably to hours of exhaustive interviews by erudite French historians.” Hitchcock may have tried to mask his ambivalent responses to the attention that Psycho had brought on. Yet some within the Hitchcock camp believed that a new self-consciousness had already begun to creep in.

  Talking to an interviewer from TV Guide about a review in The New Yorker that described an aspect of Psycho as “unconscious,” Hitchcock railed, “The stupid idiots! As if I don’t know what I’m doing. My technique is serious. I am consciously aware of what I am doing in all my work.” Stefano asserted: “I think [Hitchcock] was appalled and a little insulted by having made such a low-budget movie and getting a response such as he’d never gotten before, even when he’d spent all that money and done such lavish things. It was like serving people extraordinary feasts time after time, then serving hot dogs and they say, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted!’ What happened to all those great meals I’ve served?”

  Several Hitchcock associates suggest that Psycho, besides increasing Hitchcock’s self-awareness, also may have heightened his uncertainty as to his next, best career move. One collaborator speculated that Hitchcock may have poured Herculean effort into promoting Psycho to delay his having to search for a follow up (though his efforts also brought added revenue to the film). Yet postponing that inevitability might have taken a toll on Hitchcock, as well. “He was a picture-maker,” script supervisor Marshall Schlom said. “And when he wasn’t doing that, he felt that he was not functioning.”

  A Hitchcock associate described how he once found the director deep in conversation with the head of a marketing research firm. Hitchcock wanted precise data from the researcher as to why Psycho was such a hit. The colleague said, “The implication seemed that Hitchcock wanted to crack the spine of the movie, boil it all down to a formula to find out how he might do it again. That was completely alien to the old boy I had known.” However, perhaps truer to the old boy was the fact that Hitchcock dropped the whole notion once he found out what such research would cost him.

  For a time, however, he may have tried to mask to the world outside and perhaps even to himself, the sea-change. Yet indications of changes in Hitchcock were to surface as time went by. In an unusually generous and expansive mood, Hitchcock sent writer-critic Anthony Boucher a case of fine champagne. As if to explain himself, he wired the writer whose “Criminals-At-Large” column in the Sunday New York Times the director and his staff scoured weekly: “You see, I bought the rights to Psycho after reading your review.” In what may have been another flirtation with largesse, Hitchcock debated with his financial advisers the possibility of distributing among his crew a percentage of the windfall profits from the film; director Cecil B. DeMille had done this when The Ten Commandments (1956) had made over $80 million in receipts. However, Hitchcock ultimately spurned the idea, prompting a disgruntled associate to observe, “Tax consequences, not generosity, had everything to do with the decision. He made so much money, he had to shelter it somehow.” Rumors persist that instead, Hitchcock cut in MCA president Lew Wasserman for a percentage—to show his gratitude for Wasserman’s promotional and booking suggestions that had helped mine gold from Psycho, and to shelter his personal profits.

  In Hollywood, few things turn a detractor into a sycophant faster than big box office. Such a veteran of the business as Hitchcock could not help but be aware of that fact of life. Throughout his life, the director appeared to pride himself on remaining aloof from industry opinion. “[Mrs. Hitchcock] and I entertain rarely, rarely go out,” Hitchcock occasionally told interviewers. “I have a few friends, businessmen mostly.” Yet as Hitchcock associates like Joseph Stefano have pointed out, the moviemaker appeared to crave acclaim from peers, even if he might have mistrusted it. Hitchcock certainly monitored the shifting opinion of Psycho within the moviemaking community. One dramatic sign of a reversal came when, in a yearly poll of British critics, Psycho tied for first place with The Angry Silence. The movie collected similar honors that followed great box-office receipts. Above everything, Hitchcock had his eye on Hollywood’s best revenge: the Oscar.

  Hitchcock and The Oscars: “Always A Bridesmaid?”

  If Psycho were to win Alfred Hitchcock an Academy Award for best director, the victory would be all the sweeter. Hitchcock told interviewers that he was most proud of three of his films: Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, and The Trouble with Harry. Yet there are those who believe that Hitchcock hoped to win an Oscar for his directing of Psycho—as much for intrinsic merit as for his lifetime of filmmaking. Would an Oscar help compensate Hitchcock for 1940, when Rebecca had won for best film but John Ford had been named best director for The Grapes of Wrath? Would it make up for Hitchcock’s going home empty-handed after nominations for Lifeboat (1943), Spellbound (1945), and Rear Window (1954)? “He really wanted the Oscar,” Joseph Stefano said. “He’d been nominated and lost many times before. He wanted that vote of confidence from the industry.”

  Hitchcock was fully aware that Oscars could sometimes have less to do with moviemaking artistry than with popularity, intimidation, or politicking. By Hollywood standards, Hitchcock was adept at none of those. “He was uncommonly shy and ill at ease around people and at functions,” cinematographer Leonard South said. “So many people mistook that for aloofness or rudeness. ‘Oh,’ they thought, ‘he’s a snooty Englishman.’” Most recently, Hitchcock believed that MGM had underplayed his own North by Northwest (1959) for another, more expensive production in its promotion within the trade for Oscar nominations. “I was told to expect no nominations for my picture,” he told an interviewer years later, “because they wanted to promote Ben-Hur.” MGM’s stately, culturally reputable biblical epic directed by William Wyler won twelve nominations. Hitchcock’s romantic spy thriller won only three. “Always a bridesmaid,” Hitchcock dead-panned for the press. But one suspects that his disappointment, and rancor, were no bluff.

  Hitchcock found cause for celebration from the Oscar nominations for spring of 1961. Nominated with him for best director were Jack Cardiff (Sons and Lovers), Jules Dassin (Never on Sunday), Billy Wilder (The Apartment), and Fred Zinnemann (The Sundowners). When Janet Leigh was nominated for best supporting actress, she told the press, “I think I have just as good a chance as any of the other girls,” the “girls” being Glynis Johns (The Sundowners), Shirley Jones (Elmer Gantry), Shirley Knight (The Dark at the Top of the Stairs), and Mary Ure (Sons and Lovers). Competing with the cinematography of John Russell were Joseph LaShelle (The Apartment), Charles B. Lang, Jr. (The Facts of Life), Ernest Laszlo (Inherit the Wind), and Freddie Francis (Sons and Lovers). Psycho art and set directors Robert Clatworthy, Joseph Hurley and George Milo won their nomination alongside Alexander Trauner and Edward G. Boyle for The Apartment, Joseph McMillan Johnson, Kenneth A. Reid and Ross Dowd for The Facts of Life, Tom Morahan and Lionel Couch for Sons and Lovers and Hal Pereira, Walter Tyler, Sam Comer and Arthur Krams for Visit to a Small Planet.

  Among the dozens of congratulatory wires that Hitchcock received was one from Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis: “If this is what it’s like to be Psycho, like to be like this all the time. Congratulations on your nomination and good luck.” Wired screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who had been nominated the previous year for North by Northwest: “I was pleased to read of your Academy Award nomination. Congratulations, and all that sort of thing. I hope you are well and happy.” Anthony Perkins cabled: “So happy for you. Hope it goes all the way.” Hitchcock wired Perkins, who had been snubbed for a deserved nomination: “I am asham
ed of your fellow actors.” Had Hitchcock been in a commiserating frame of mind, he might also have consoled composer Bernard Herrmann for being passed over for his electrifying score. Whatever Hitchcock’s motivations were at the time, he did forward a fan letter to Herrmann. The response of the composer may come as close to revealing his ambivalence toward writing for films as any statement a biographer is likely to find:

  Composing music for films (and television) is in many ways a very unrewarding artistic endeavor. So often one’s efforts are scarcely even noticed, not because the music is unworthy, nor that the picture may be more or less successful, but because it is frequently just taken for granted.

  On April 17, 1961 at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Alma and Alfred Hitchcock made a relatively rare appearance at the 33rd Academy Awards ceremony rubbing elbows with bejeweled, hopeful, edgy nominees, invitees and guests. Cyd Charisse (whom MGM recommended to Hitchcock for the female lead in North by Northwest) and her husband, Tony Martin, announced Freddie Francis—not John Russell—as the winner for best cinematographer for Sons and Lovers. Next, Tina Louise and Tony Randall handed out an art direction Oscar to the designers of The Apartment, not of Psycho. After Hugh Griffith called out the name Shirley Jones not Janet Leigh for best supporting actress, one sole award possibility for Psycho remained. Gina Lollobrigida sexily murmured, “The winner is Billy Wilder for The Apartment!” Again, Hitchcock was edged out. “I don’t think [Hitchcock] felt that his work was ever really appreciated to the point where he felt it should be,” Joseph Stefano observed. “I don’t think he ever really understood why he had never won an Oscar. He thought the industry looked down their noses at him. In the midst of so much, he was unhappy.”