It was my naked body in the Psycho shower scene
A new documentary shines a spotlight on the other woman who starred in the most famous three minutes in cinema history – not the leading lady Janet Leigh but an unknown 21-year-old model
From in Los Angeles
THE plastic shower curtain is ripped aside and a shadowy figure plunges a knife repeatedly into a naked Janet Leigh, her screams echoed by a stabbing violin. She slides down gleaming white tiles, the curtain lazily pops from its hooks, and her blood swirls down the plug-hole before the director cuts to a close-up of her cold, dead eye.
It has been almost 60 years since Alfred Hitchcock shot one of the most famous scenes in movie history for 1960 horror classic Psycho, shattering Hollywood taboos about sex and violence and making audiences scream in primal terror.
An acclaimed new documentary, 78/52, which premiered at the London Film Festival this month, explores the 78 camera set-ups and 52 cuts that went into that legendary three-minute scene.
But it also highlights the role of one of the unheralded figures who helped create this cinema history: Janet Leigh’s body double, Marli Renfro.
“I’m not famous but I did something famous,” says Renfro, aged 79, who was paid just $500 for spending a week being stabbed in a shower. “Really, I would have done it for free – though I was glad I was paid.
“When Psycho came out my room-mate said: ‘Oh, let’s go see it,’ and I thought: ‘How boring.’ I saw a lot of it being filmed… the bathtub, the interior of the Bates house, the stairway, and I saw other scenes being filmed. But we went to see it and it scared me half to death! I was really surprised. I just loved Psycho.
“So many people come up to me and they have to tell me their experiences that they had when they saw the movie. Some people would not take a shower for months or even years afterwards. Some even to this day still lock the door.”
Hitchcock was forced to search COVERED: Renfro, who appeared in Playboy, defends director Hitchcock for a body double after Leigh refused to appear naked in the shower.
Decades before Harvey Weinstein became an infamous Hollywood predator, Hitchcock – who allegedly made sexual advances to many of his leading ladies and sexually harassed The Birds star Tippi Hedren – ordered Renfro to strip naked during her audition, carefully appraising her every curve.
“I was interviewed by Mr Hitchcock and I had to disrobe,” she says. “Then he took me into Janet Leigh’s trailer and I had to disrobe for her. Our bodies were similar and I think that’s the reason I got hired.”
But she insists: “He was very professional and respected me on the set because I had very little on. He couldn’t have made me feel more comfortable. Everybody was dressed except for me.
“When I hear people talk DOUBLE: Marli spent a week in the shower badly of him now that he’s passed away I have no respect for those people at all.” During the shoot Leigh’s standin hid her long red mane beneath a blonde hairpiece. “It was about two hours in make-up, and they put a wig on me to match Janet’s hair,” says Renfro, who was shocked to find more than 20 people on the film set – all men. “I’m almost positive Hitchcock had a talk with everybody there – the cameraman, the grips, the lighting guys – to say: ‘No joking around. I want attitudes very low key’.” And Hitchcock had meticulously planned all 78 camera shots in advance. “He knew exactly what he wanted with every shot,” says Renfro. “I was originally hired for two days and wound up working for about seven. He told me before each take what he wanted. It was really easy working with him.” After filming the shower scene, Psycho star Anthony Perkins had to lift Renfro’s body, wrap her in the shower curtain and dump her in the boot of a car – but he kept painfully dropping her, she reveals.
“He reaches down to pick me up and he gets me up about six inches and – pow! – lets me go. He didn’t have his body set because I was dead weight.
“Then he took me out to dump me in the trunk but that was uncomfortable because it was just metal in the bottom of the trunk, they didn’t have a blanket or anything, so he dumped me in there – bang! Otherwise I enjoyed working with him.”
Soon after finishing Psycho, she appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s directorial debut, Tonight For Sure.
“I saw the genius in him, the way he worked,” she says of the future director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. “I thought: this is going to be another Hitchcock.”
Renfro was soon living the high life. She became Playboy magazine’s cover girl in September 1960, worked as one of Hugh Hefner’s first Playboy Club bunnies, dated legendary comedian Lenny Bruce and rode horses on Malibu beach with Steve McQueen.
FOR a period Renfro was a naturist, enjoying nudist retreats, but she admits: “I stopped when I got married – my first husband didn’t really approve. He went once and just clenched his teeth the whole time, which ruined everything.”
Her first husband even made her burn all her old glamour photos, perhaps driven by jealousy.
Renfro slid into obscurity, as Hitchcock and Leigh insisted for years that no body double appeared in Psycho.
“I believed that knife went into me,” said Leigh. “It was that real, that horrifying. I could feel it!”
Yet every shot in the shower without Leigh’s face is actually Renfro’s body, Hitchcock admitted years later. Film star Tony Curtis, Leigh’s then husband, claimed in his autobiography that she was driven to drink because everyone wanted to talk about the shower scene – a cinematic lie that haunted her. And the shadow of Psycho continued to loom over Renfro. In a macabre twist that could easily have sprung like a movie plot from Hitchcock’s head, Renfro’s murder was reported worldwide in 1988.
A twisted movie fan who was obsessed with Psycho raped and killed actress Myra Davis, who had stood in for Leigh during lighting set-up on the film, but had never appeared in the movie.
The killer thought he was attacking Leigh’s body double and Renfro’s name ended up in all the murder reports.
But by then Renfro had long turned her back on Hollywood, having retreated to California’s arid Mojave Desert in 1970, and remarried. She appeared in commercials and performed with local theatre groups. “About a year ago I did a mystery,” she says. Loving the great outdoors, she hiked in Alaska, swam with dolphins in Florida, rode horses and water-skied.
“I’m basically retired now,” says Renfro, a member of the Happy Hookers, a local group united by a love of crochet and knitting. She enjoys gardening, and when a neighbour cut down wildflowers in her garden she was “devastated, near tears… I was swearing like a sailor, I was so distraught.
“I’m into art right now. I’m taking Japanese Sumi-e painting: different brush strokes, all black and white.”
And just as Psycho famously ends with Janet Leigh’s car being pulled from a lake, so Renfro has spent the past week hauling heavy loads from deep waters. “I love fishing,” she explains. “I’ve been fishing all week at Lake Havasu in Arizona. Striped bass, big-mouth bass, you name it. I think I fish more than anything else. I’m on vacation but to be honest, now I’m retired every day is a vacation.”
But is Renfro afraid to go back in the shower? She smiles but she isn’t saying.