MARLI Renfro is a footnote in the history of Hollywood, or at least was, until recently.
She had a part in one of the most famous films of all time – Psycho, made in 1960, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Her precise role in the movie, however, has been a well-kept secret. Now, a new book promises to reveal all.
Shortly before she died in October 2004, Janet Leigh, looking back over her distinguished career as an actress, said: “I’ve been in a great many films, but I suppose if an actress can be remembered for one role, then they’re very fortunate”.
In fact, her 53-year Hollywood career was overshadowed by her role as Marion Crane, who is slashed to death in a motel shower in Psycho – which, 50 years after it was first released, has just been re-issued.
That shower scene is now one of the most memorable in all of movie history, and the photograph of a screaming and naked Janet Leigh has attained iconic status, along with the photograph of Anita Ekberg prancing around in the Trevi fountain in Rome in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (also made in 1960).
But was Janet Leigh really the lady in the shower, and was she really naked? The standard answer up to recently was ‘yes’ to both parts of that question. The real story, though, is a bit more complicated.
The appearance of a book called The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shower adds a new dimension to one of the most talked about and influential films ever made.
Hitchcock was not only a masterly film director, he was also a skillful manipulator, not least of the media. And when it came to Psycho, he was aided and abetted by Janet Leigh. So back to our question – was she really the lady in the shower? Yes, of course she was, but she wasn’t the only lady in that famous scene. Was she really naked?
Here is her own answer, contained in a book she wrote in 1995: “Mr Hitchcock never asked me to do the scene nude ... There would have been no point in Hitch suggesting that I play the scene nude, because the industry operated at that time under the scrutiny of a censor’s office. Every script and finished product had to be approved by this board”.
Of course, the director skillfully created the illusion of nudity, which is what you’d expect in a shower scene anyway. Employing a mixture of fast cutting and Bernard Herrmann’s screeching music, the director assembled a brilliant montage of gore, violence and nudity – while actually revealing very little.
But while Hitchcock and Leigh always maintained that it was her body in the shower scene, we now know it wasn’t. The body belonged to a model called Marli Renfro. She was a Dallas-born stripper who worked in Las Vegas and posed for the cover of Playboy magazine in the September 1960 edition.
The American writer Robert Graysmith became interested in the story of Marli Renfro and set out to write a book about her. And it was he who established that she appeared as a body double for Janet Leigh in Psycho. In his new book The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shower, he tells us that the gorgeous and curvaceous redhead now lives in California’s Mojave desert.
Marli Renfro was paid just $500 for her role in one of the most famous movie scenes in history, in a film that made $15 million in its first year alone. Fifty years after Psycho’s release, we now learn that there were two women in Hitchcock’s shower.