Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  11.

  Afterglow and Aftermath

  UNHAPPY THOUGH HE MAY have been, the pragmatic Hitchcock could take comfort in Psycho’s having earned $15 million domestically by the end of its first year of release. Many Hitchcock associates contend that the director personally realized well in excess of $15 million from the movie. This was in an era when the average movie ticket cost seventy cents. While the movie was the hottest thing on several continents, Lew Wasserman aggressively wooed—and signed—Hitchcock to a production deal with Universal-International. Cameraman South observed: “Knowing Universal, Wasserman, and that clan, Hitch wanted everything in writing that he had full, complete say-so as to everything he made.” The negotiations dragged on, but finally, lawyers for both parties struck a production agreement for five Hitchcock films, with options for more. As part of his studio deal, Hitchcock moved his “filmmaking” family into a lavish private compound situated close to the main studio gate. The enclave encompassed a capacious suite of offices filled with antiques; rooms for editing, art, costumes, and conferences; a twenty-seat screening room; a Kitchenette and private dining room; and a soundstage directly across the street. For Hitchcock, it represented the realization of a career-long goal. Such key members of Hitchcock’s technical team as cameramen Robert Burks and Leonard South, art directors Robert Boyle and Henry Bumstead, editor George Tomasini, and costume designer Edith Head were close at hand for consultation.

  In 1962, as part of his arrangement with the studio, Hitchcock swapped for about 150,000 shares of MCA stock all rights to Psycho and to his TV anthology series. In one fell swoop, the transaction made him the third largest shareholder in the company, a multimillionaire, and his own boss. Yet in the realm where art and commerce meet, Hitchcock and Universal were better matched fiscally than artistically. “Hitch was a rare combination of true artist, technician, and businessman,” Leonard South said. “[Lew] Wasserman was basically an agent who became a good friend. I think Wasserman always had the idea that there was more money to be made out of this man.” As agent Michael Ludmer observed: “The question arises ‘Why is there no indisputably great late-period Hitchcock movie?’ And the answers to that question are very complicated.”

  Once the public hysteria over Psycho had subsided, the question that Lew Wasserman had posed to Hitchcock (“What will you do for an encore?”) hung in the air. Members of the Hitchcock professional family assumed (indeed, hoped) that the director’s triumph in the horror genre would end his flirtation with that form. Before, during, and after his negotiations with Wasserman and Universal-International, the director appeared unable to decide upon any follow-up project. Hitchcock had thought of making for 20th Century-Fox a movie version of Piege pour un Homme Seul, a play by Robert Thomas about a woman who returns from a mysterious disappearance to find her husband insisting she is not his wife. He also poured considerable effort into a project from a novel by Paul Stanton, Village of Stars, a sort of The High and the Mighty set aboard a plane carrying an A-bomb. Hitchcock told columnists that the piece appealed to him for its topicality and also for its opportunity to wring suspense out of a confined space, a la Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window. After dropping both of these projects, the director developed a doomsday fantasy from Daphne Du Maurier’s short story, “The Birds” and then a movie to be taken from the wistful Sir James Barrie play about a melancholy ghost named “Mary Rose.” Also under discussion was a film adaptation of a Winston Graham novel, Marnie, about a sexually troubled kleptomaniac.

  In the end, Hitchcock settled on Marnie. The choice delighted screenwriter Joseph Stefano, with whom Hitchcock had exercised an option for two additional assignments during the shooting of Psycho. Believing that Hitchcock again wanted to try something entirely new, Stefano had hoped to interest him in collaborating on a romantic supernatural thriller, a la The Uninvited (1943). At least Marnie, Stefano believed, was very much “mainstream Hitchcock material.” The writer explained: “For a long time, I felt that doing Psycho was the biggest career mistake I ever made. I wanted to be associated with a real Hitchcock picture. Hitch was thrilled because Grace Kelly had agreed to star in Marnie. He said, ‘They [Kelly and Prince Rainier] need the money,’ and told me, ‘Now this is a different thing from Psycho because we’re going to change the story quite a bit.’ What fascinated Hitch about it was a strange trio: the woman, the husband who makes her go to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist who finds himself more and more romantically involved with the woman. The fifty-page treatment was exciting. It worked. I thought it was going to be a wonderful movie. But by the time I finished it, Grace Kelly had changed her mind. Hitchcock said, ‘Apparently, she got the money from some other sources.’ To him, Kelly had tricked him and he would not forgive her. I was shattered.”

  Instead, Hitchcock turned to the eerie Du Maurier horror fantasy, “The Birds.” Although Stefano felt nothing but “enormous fondness and gratitude” toward Hitchcock, the project held no appeal to the writer, who viewed it as another horror movie. Stefano declined the screenwriting job. Whether or not the director was conscious of it at the time, his choice of material signaled to some close associates that he was throwing down the gauntlet. Others wondered whether he might be throwing in the towel. Many believed he was listening much too closely to the advice of Lew Wasserman.. Different as it might have been from Psycho, The Birds was another offbeat shocker. The production proved to be extremely complex. Not only did Hitchcock undertake major special effects to depict the bird attacks but also once again attempted to play starmaker, this time to a completely inexperienced actress, former model ‘Tippi’ Hedren. “Hitch loved to challenge himself,” Leonard South said. “Creating a new star was the one thing he hadn’t done.” Despite Hitchcock’s disappointment with Vera Miles in the Fifties, an associate believed that Hitchcock’s quest to find a “new Grace Kelly” was revived by Psycho. “Hitchcock was the real star of Psycho and he knew it,” the colleague said. “It was as if he now believed that anything he touched—a novice performer, a not-good-enough project—he could turn into gold. It may have been understandable after the success of Psycho, but his judgment was badly clouded.”

  The Birds, coming three years after Psycho, virtually guaranteed Hitchcock and Universal reams of publicity and financial success. Yet even the release and advertising campaign for the film suggested that the director had taken to heart his lionization by intellectual critics. At the invitation of Robert Favre Le Bret, Hitchcock debuted The Birds and ‘Tippi’ Hedren to the world critics and press gathered at the Cannes Film Festival. In a newspaper ad for the film, Hitchcock proclaimed: “I have, in my time, produced many films whose major intent was to mystify and astonish their viewers. Inasmuch as such stories often brought much pleasure, they fulfilled their requirements. This time, however, I have introduced serious purpose beneath the pleasure. There is a terrifying meaning lurking right underneath the surface shock and suspense of The Birds. When you discover it, your pleasure will be more than doubled.” Serious purpose? Meaning? Had Hitchcock finally decided to declare himself an artist, to put to rest his public persona as merely a maker of “fun pictures”?

  Some critics made extravagant claims for the allegorical and symbolic content that they perceived in The Birds. Hitchcock’s rather remarkable film may even support some of their theories. But other observers took Hitchcock to task for what they saw as a pretentious, “New Wave”-style ending that left ambiguous not only the cause of the bird attacks but also the fate of the leading characters. “The Master,” wrote a critic for Time, “has traded in his uncomplicated tenets of terror for a new outlook that is vaguely nouvelle vague.”

  Robert Bloch commented: “After these great paeans of praise from the French, The Birds was to be Hitchcock’s career apotheosis—the film for which he would be remembered. I don’t think the film today is regarded in that light. I don’t think Hitch was satisfied with it and several times went back to what he thought of as a formula: more familiar kinds of materi
al and stars who were hot properties. To me that signified that he didn’t have much faith in the stories themselves.”

  It was during the production of The Birds that Universal first began to play watchdog over Hitchcock. Leonard South recalled, “A studio guy showed up on location in San Francisco asking such questions as, ‘Do you think you’re going to be out of here by Friday?’“ Hitch said, “When Friday comes, if we’re ready to come back to the studio, that’s what we’ll do.” Hitch called him “the hatchet man.” There was never any of that from Paramount, where [studio head] Y. Frank Freeman showed Hitch the greatest respect. [Paramount] was a much, much better operation for Hitch.”

  Matters were slowly to worsen between Hitchcock and the company. About midway through production on The Birds, Hitchcock again contacted Joseph Stefano about reviving Marnie as a starring vehicle for his protégée ‘Tippi’ Hedren. Stefano declined with regret because of his commitment as producer of the acclaimed science fiction TV series, “The Outer Limits.” “That did not go down at all well with him,” Stefano recalled. “The next thing I know, my agent told me that Hitchcock wants to loan me out to Columbia. I said, ‘Tell him, let’s just forget about [the commitment] until he wants me to do another picture. He doesn’t have to pay me.’” But to Hitchcock, it appeared, a commitment was a commitment. Since he didn’t want to pay Stefano for not doing another picture, why not make money on him?

  Hitchcock next developed Marnie with Evan Hunter, screenwriter of The Birds. Later, he devised a completely different approach with playwright Jay Presson Allen. Stefano was stung by the lost opportunity to collaborate again with Hitchcock. The writer observed: “I don’t think he ever recovered from Psycho. But when we made it, Hitchcock was just trying to make a good movie. He seemed past the stage of needing to prove anything to anyone. I wish he’d called me and said, ‘Let’s do another picture for a million dollars.’ It would have been a killer, but he never needed or wanted to do that kind of thing again.”

  Much went awry for Hitchcock on Marnie (1964), a film that today divides even his admirers. The movie was the first for Geoffrey-Stanley Productions, named sentimentally by Hitchcock after a pair of Yorkshire terriers owned by him and his wife. “Hitch was absolutely partial to dogs,” Leonard South recalled, “and often brought Geoffrey and Stanley to work with him. He was keeping an eye on them playing outside his office one day when, right under his eyes, suddenly a truck backed over Geoffrey and killed him. Such a sensitive man as Hitch was—well, he wasn’t right for weeks and weeks.” That loss, compounded by the critical and financial flop of Marnie, was topped by the apathy of the public toward ‘Tippi’ Hedren—despite the actress’s coming through for her mentor with a remarkably moving and sensitive performance. The sixty-five-year-old director suffered a crisis of confidence.

  And with that crisis spiraled the interventions of Universal. Hitchcock hoped to revive the Sir James Barrie’s Scottish ghost story from a Jay Presson Allen screenplay, probably to star ‘Tippi’ Hedren. Universal executives urged Hitchcock not to make it; some say they prevented him from making it. Either way, he complied. The director next tried to interest such writers as novelist Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita, Pale Fire) as screenwriter for what he called a “downbeat, realistic spy thriller that debunks the James Bond idea.” The studio insisted that Hitchcock take a less gloomy approach to that material in Torn Curtain, and that he utilize the expensive—and inappropriate—services of Paul Newman and Julie Andrews. But when it came to spending money on creative elements more important to Hitchcock than star players, Universal bosses drew the line. Cameraman Leonard South observed: “The studio wanted big stars in it, but [Hitchcock] and Paul Newman did not get along well at all. Hitch wanted to do things right on that picture, shoot it in West Germany. Instead, Universal had a German crew shoot crappy background plates. Then, [Hitchcock] had a falling-out with Bernard Herrmann because Universal wanted a more upbeat score. Hitch lost all interest in the picture.” Recalling the “set piece” scene of the film—the long, slow killing in a kitchen by a spy and a hausfrau—Joseph Stefano said, “It saddened me. Hitchcock was now playing to his audience.” Indeed, Torn Curtain found its audience, albeit one increasingly impatient with Hitchcock for not giving them something as riveting as Psycho.

  The Universal executives imposed on Hitchcock Topaz, a Leon Uris best-seller about a spy scandal in the French government. Rushed into a globe-hopping production without a screenworthy script, Hitchcock tried to impart finesse and dash to what was otherwise an utter shambles. Shown in London and previewed in America with several different endings, Topaz was a financial failure and nearly Hitchcock’s Waterloo.

  Ironically, while newer Hitchcock efforts were striking out with fans and critics, the reputation of Psycho grew. The movie had become a staple on the revival-theater-and-campus circuit. By the early seventies, ten scholarly book-length studies of Hitchcock had been published, in addition to hundreds of articles from all over the world that featured Psycho as a key work in his career. In 1977 the movie appeared on the American Film Institute’s poll as one of the “Greatest Films of All Time,” as it already had on the polls of such journals as Sight and Sound. Universal made an additional $5 million from the first of several theatrical rereleases in 1965 before the parent company, MCA, had licensed Psycho for a network and syndicated television showings and for home videotape and disc sales. The New York Post declared Psycho the most profitable black-and-white film in the annals of cinema since D. W. Griffith’s silent classic, The Birth of a Nation (1915).

  Just after the slaying of the daughter of senatorial candidate Charles Percy in Chicago in 1966, CBS canceled a scheduled national airing of Psycho, even though network censors had spliced nine minutes of footage from the running time. To date, the film has never been shown on national television. In the early seventies, composer Bernard Herrmann conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra for a recording of a condensed version of his score for the film. Herrmann wrote in the liner notes for that album: “I felt that I was able to complement the black and white photography of the film with a black and white sound. I believe this is the only time in films that a purely string orchestra has been used.” On October 2, 1975, Herrmann conducted the National Philharmonic Orchestra in a recording of the entire score.

  Considering Hitchcock’s preference for working with familiar casts and crews, it may at first seem curious that few alumnae of Psycho were summoned for an encore. Newspapers reported that Anthony Perkins and Hitchcock had signed a two-picture deal. Perkins was said to be intent on interesting Hitchcock in something called The Man Who Lost His Head, but nothing came of it. Similarly, in the mid-sixties, Hitchcock summoned writer Robert Bloch to hatch a successor to Psycho. Bloch met Hitchcock to discuss the director’s notion to graft elements of the real-life murder cases of seductive British murderers Haigh and Christie of the forties onto an original suspense narrative that might form a long-hoped-for “prequel” to the classic Shadow of a Doubt (1942). Bloch—by that time the recipient of an “Edgar” award from The Mystery Writers of America for Psycho, and a prolific screenwriter—found himself unable to agree to the terms of Hitchcock’s contract. The arrangement proposed by Hitchcock meant that Bloch was to be paid only when and if he were to come up with an approach that pleased the director. Bloch moved on. No one dared reject Hitchcock. When the writer’s name came across Hitchcock’s desk on a short list of writers for a later project, the director wrote next to it: “Too many pictures for William Castle”—a reference to the director for whom Bloch had written Strait-Jacket, a low-budget shocker featuring Joan Crawford as an apparent axe-murderess.

  Janet Leigh, who today routinely turns over crank mail and death threats to the FBI after local station TV showings of Psycho, claimed to understand why she did not work again for Hitchcock. “I would have loved to have worked for him again,” she admitted. “But I understand why not. Marion was a one-time role. She made such an imprint, Hitchcock could not bring he
r back to life. And Psycho was a once-only film.”

  Certainly it was a once-only Hitchcock film for most of the technical crew. “Psycho was an experiment in solving movie-type problems with television solutions,” observed a member of the director’s feature-film team. “Hitchcock was unhappy with a lot of those TV guys and had no further use for them, except on his TV show.”

  In the remaining years of creativity that Hitchcock enjoyed after Psycho, he completed six pictures and planned at least half a dozen more, the final project being a never-filmed spy-romance set in New York and Finland—The Short Night. Yet the notoriety of his “thirty-day picture” dogged and overshadowed every project that the Master of Suspense undertook until his death in 1980. In the nearly thirty years since the release of Psycho, the picture slipped beyond mere popularity and into the annals of pop culture. As Peter Bogdanovich has pointed out, largely due to Psycho, audiences accustomed themselves to arriving at the start of a film. With Psycho, the barriers of big-screen shock and violence had been blown wide. After the Hitchcock film, the biggest star in the cast could die onscreen before the end of the movie. In 1981, a British group called Landscape had a hit record called “Norman Bates” and the video presented comic Pamela Stephenson as Marion Crane. In Carrie (1976), director Brian De Palma named the high school attended by the heroine “Bates High School.” Hitchcock’s film has spawned Bates Motel T-shirts and shower curtains. The shower scene has been parodied by such filmmakers as Mel Brooks in High Anxiety and reworked by Brian De Palma in Dressed to Kill and by Roman Polanski in Frantic. Even preadolescent kids are familiar with the “screeching violins” of Bernard Herrmann’s theme music, courtesy of local station television reruns of Psycho and “homages” to the composer’s work in numerous film scores, such as Carrie, Dressed to Kill, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Fatal Attraction. Universal produced and Richard Franklin directed Psycho II, not related to the novel of the same name by Robert Bloch. Earlier, Franklin had directed Roadgames starring Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh, as “Hitch.” Anthony Perkins directed Psycho III. The studio also produced an unsold television pilot, “Bates Motel.” On the Universal Studios Tour—on which the Psycho mansion is a key attraction—guides announce that plans are afoot for Psycho IV to star Perkins, perhaps from a screenplay by Joseph Stefano. In the 1989 edition of his TV Movies and Video Guide, critic Leonard Maltin wrote of the most recent sequel, “Goodnight, Norman.”