That’s right, she doesn’t take showers. And who would blame her?
Janet Leigh, whose violent demise during a 165-second shower scene at the Bates Motel was the flashpoint in the groundbreaking horror film “Psycho,” has preferred baths since that movie was released 35 years ago this month.
Something about viewing that scene, about spending seven days to make it, about the impact it still wields more than three decades later, makes her just a bit skittish about standing under spraying water with her back to the bathroom door.
But Leigh doesn’t mind talking about it. In fact, she doesn`t mind talking about anything. Just a few weeks short of her 68th birthday, the one-time “nice girl” starlet has been out of films for a decade but is making a comeback of sorts, in a different discipline.
She is an author, an incarnation that is allowing her to reclaim at least a slice of the limelight, for at least a few moments, that she once embraced so gleefully. And it is clear that this woman with a tendency to lapse into infectious babble more akin to a high school pompon girl is enjoying the attention.
In Chicago recently to promote her second book, “Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller,” Leigh gladly undertook a media grind. On one day alone, she did 10 interviews before finishing her evening with a two-hour radio show. The next day, she stayed a half-hour longer during a book signing at Marshall Field’s that drew more than 200 people.
“It’s like Shelley Winters said to Vanity Fair,” Leigh recalled while sipping a strawberry milkshake at the Blackhawk Lodge. “If you’re a woman and over 50 years old in Hollywood, you might as well commit suicide. Well, I’m doing my damnedest to prove that isn’t true. I’m productive and I’m well past 50. I feel good and I want to be active.”
Characters with strength
That perspective is very much Janet Leigh. Throughout her career, she was never quite given the critical acclaim, never taken as seriously as other actresses of her time, and yet she has persevered with a certain spirit, occupying a warm spot in the conscience of movie fans and critics.
“I think she always brought intelligence to roles that were otherwise considered ingenues, nothing more than window dressing,” said Ron Falzone, film instructor at Columbia College, who specializes in teaching aspiring directors. “She always brought that sense of a woman who could give as good as she gets.”
Leigh as Marion Crane in “Psycho” was one example, Falzone said, as were her roles in “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The Vikings.” At a time when leading ladies in Hollywood largely were bimbos or subservient to their male counterparts, Leigh often conveyed that rare woman character “who was perfectly capable of functioning on her own,” Falzone said. She very likely is the forerunner of the strong women roles that began sprouting in the 1970s, he added.
The book on the making of “Psycho” arrives 11 years after her first. She wrote her autobiography, “There Really Was a Hollywood,” in 1984.
But she has quickened her writing pace dramatically. In October, Mira Books will release her first novel, “House of Destiny,” about two friends from wildly different backgrounds who come to Hollywood, form their own production company and take on the big studios.
And she’s got working notes on another novel and a “behind the scenes” book about one of her two more seriously considered films, “Touch of Evil” or “The Manchurian Candidate.” She won’t say which.
“I’ve shifted gears,” said Leigh, who actually has never been very far from writing since she was editor of the student newspaper at Weber Grammar School in Stockton, Calif., back in the 1930s. “I feel so turned on, inspired with writing, that I’m raring to go.”
She keeps a notebook in her purse to jot down turns of phrase, dialect and literary thoughts that come to her during her travels. Of a return to film, she says: “I don’t want to say that I will never do it, but it’s just not a priority.”
An American classic
Writing a book on “Psycho” hardly seemed a priority either, until about three years ago. She was speaking at Universal Studios in Orlando, at the Alfred Hitchcock exhibit, and sat for hours signing autographs. Friends encouraged her to write the book, precisely because the film has endured for so long.
“It’s because the audience participated in the film,” she said, explaining the staying power of “Psycho.” “It was the audience’s imagination. They were led very cleverly, very masterfully on a path and once they were on that path, they took it from there.”
“The public has made that film a classic. I didn’t do it. Mr. Hitchcock didn’t do it. Since they did it, as someone who was a participant in it, I wanted to set some things straight about the film,” Leigh said. “I thought the public deserved it.”
The book does include some intriguing nuggets about “Psycho,” the most shocking perhaps that Leigh received several hundred threatening letters for playing Marion Crane. Most of them were on the order of “I want to do to you what Norman did to Marion,” Leigh recalled, and some included extremely graphic references.
Half of those letters were disturbing enough that the FBI collected them for a file and apprehended a couple of the writers. To this day, she receives weird, sometimes threatening mail and phone calls, which have prompted her to change her phone number every four months or so.
Oddly enough, Leigh wrote, Anthony Perkins, who played haunting, twitchy serial slasher Norman Bates in “Psycho,” did not receive hate letters for his role.
The book also states that director Hitchcock closed the set to the press and prohibited Leigh, Perkins and other actors from granting routine interviews during promotion of the film. In addition, the master of suspense caused an uproar by insisting that theater owners refuse entry to moviegoers who arrived after the film started. Also, he filmed and released trailers that deliberately misled the public about the plot.
Another clarification Leigh felt important to include in the book: She, not her stand-in, performed the entire shower scene, and the moleskin that covered those portions of her body that needed covering peeled free from her left breast just as her body flopped over the tub and she gave that cold, dead stare into the camera. While the film crew probably got an eyeful, that part of her anatomy was just out of the camera frame.
Speaking of Perkins, he allegedly played a frighteningly funny practical joke on filmgoers in Paris, where he was making a movie at the time “Psycho” was released. The story is that Perkins would lurk in the shadows outside theaters where the movie was showing and as the audience would file out, Perkins would lunge from the dark shouting, wild-eyed at the crowd.
Problems with the big scene
The book also discusses censors’ anxiety with the film. During a studio screening of “Psycho,” several board members of the Motion Picture Association of America swore they had seen Leigh naked in the shower. Hitchcock agreed to remove the nudity from the scene but simply returned several days later without changing a thing, and members flip-flopped. Those who had sworn they saw nudity in the earlier scene agreed that it was gone in the “new” version, and those who hadn’t seen nudity in the earlier cut now insisted they saw skin.
Hitchcock appeased them by removing an overhead shot of Marion’s body slumped over the tub, a shot some board members said revealed a clear view of the woman’s buttocks.
The film has never been shown on network television, Leigh wrote. The reason: Three days before CBS was to air the film in 1966, 21-year-old Valerie Percy, daughter of then-candidate for the U.S. Senate Charles Percy, was stabbed to death in the bedroom of the family’s Kenilworth home. CBS indefinitely postponed the broadcast in deference to the family.
For the record, the film was nominated for four Academy Awards in 1961, including Leigh for best supporting actress, but neither Perkins nor Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the powerful score, received nominations.
“Psycho” failed to win in any category except at the box office. Made for less than $900,000, “Psycho” took in more than $14.3 million, which Leigh calculated would total nearly $134 million at today’s ticket prices.
An illustrious career
The role of Marion Crane was a high point in a career that stretched over four decades and included 48 feature films and 18 made-for-TV movies. During that time, Leigh married Tony Curtis in 1951 and gave birth to two daughters who would become actresses–Jamie Lee and Kelly Curtis. She took a prominent fundraising and voter registration role in John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, suffered the agony of her father’s suicide in 1961 and divorced Curtis–allegedly over his spendthrift ways and his affair with another woman–in 1962.
Just six months later, she married stockbroker Robert Brandt, a union that remains solid to this day. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson offered her the post of ambassador to Finland, which she respectfully declined.
For years, Leigh has lead a nearly idyllic life. Homes in Beverly Hills and Sun Valley, Idaho. Snow skiing and tennis regularly. Romping about with the couple’s golden retriever and black Labrador. Yet a certain toughness remains in her, a drive.
“I call it resilience,” she said, laughing while she walked from one interview and to the next. “I’d like to tell you that I sat down and planned all this out, but it didn’t happen that way. I am just so fortunate and I feel really grateful.”
`Psycho’-facts for `Psycho’-fans
– The voice of Norman Bates’ mother is a mix of three actors, none of whom is Anthony Perkins.
– Ted Knight, famous for his role as anchorman Ted Baxter in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” has a non-speaking but very visible role as a police guard at the end of the film.
– The Victorian mansion Norman Bates shared with his mother was designed after a home in Kent, Ohio, near the Kent State University campus, and at one time was home to the Students for a Democratic Society.
– The interior scenes of the mansion were shot on the same stage where the 1925 Lon Chaney horror film “Phantom of the Opera” was made.
– Contrary to what tour guides at Universal Studios have been telling visitors, director Alfred Hitchcock did not use cold water to achieve an even more explosive shock from Janet Leigh and in fact insisted that the water temperature be comfortable.
– Nearly all the early reviews for “Psycho” were negative, but later in the year, after it became a box-office smash, critics reviewed it again and gave it much more favorable treatment.
– The bottom lines: Leigh accepted $25,000 for her most famous role, and has been quoted as saying she would have done it for free. Perkins received the highest salary, $40,000. Author Robert Bloch, who wrote “Psycho” based loosely on the grisly crimes of Plainfield, Wis., serial killer Ed Gein, cleared about $6,750 for the novel’s movie rights.
