Janet Leigh on Surviving Hollywood With Style and Grace

One wonders how attuned to Leigh's personal tragedies Alfred Hitchcock might have been when he cast her as an insurance company secretary in Psycho - his cruelest audience hoax. Playing Marion Crane, the hard-up spinster with a bod for sin and a head for larceny, Leigh, the big box-office draw in the movie, is hacked to death in a Bates Motel shower stall one-third of the way into the plot. "But," says Leigh, with a satisfied grin, "searched for, talked about, and wondered about, for the rest of the movie." Hitchcock worked closely with Leigh, teasing her with off-color (unprintable) stories just before she did her takes and, from time to time, jollying-up her dressing room with prosthetic dummies of the corpse of Mama Bates.

"Did Mr. Hitchcock have a dirty mind? Yes, and so do I, doesn't everybody?" Leigh says, anticipating the question stirred up by the assertions of Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto. Did the suspense maestro fixate on her as he allegedly did on other flash-frozen blondes? "I can only speak for myself," she answers. "He was a genius and showed me nothing but professionalism and respect. I take exception to the negative approach of some biographers and just hope they had access to reliable sources and research." Still, Hitchcock's prurient and commercial instincts were flawless. He commenced - and advertised - Psycho with Leigh in a bra and half-slip, but would have preferred, he told Francois Truffaut, "the girl's bare breasts...rubbing against the man's chest."

Not only was Leigh's performance a study in frustration and compression - Hitchcock offered to pay for the trade paper ads that helped her win an Oscar nomination - but also, two years later, she won the Golden Bust Award from a brassiere manufacturer.

"I must have gotten 300 horror scripts after Psycho," Leigh notes, "but that was a once-in-a-lifetime role. I'm fortunate that I didn't get into a line of the same kind of pictures." Today, with Marion Crane and Norman Bates permanent pop culture fixtures, Leigh carries her own personal legacy from that picture. She never takes showers, and when she travels, she insists that hotel staffs always leave her shower door ajar from the time she checks in, until after she departs. They comply, even though they suspect she might be funning them. She's not: Leigh wants to know, at a glance, that no prankster is hiding there.

But if showers make Leigh squeamish, few other things do. When we traveled together for TV and radio appearances for Psycho's 30th anniversary, she amazed me by meeting directly with dozens of fans who materialized wherever she appeared, one or two of whom seemed to have slippery holds on reality. Older fans, who remembered Leigh from the '40s and '50s, gazed at her as if through misty soft-focus. When one suggested that she do a movie with Tony Curtis and her daughters, she smiled and without missing a beat, said, "Tony and Kelly just did a TV movie together playing father and daughter. Isn't that wonderful?" before moving on. Kids asked about her old pictures and often, while she dutifully autographed posters and lobby cards, sneaked in questions about Jamie Lee. "I'm very proud of both my daughters," Leigh boasts, "although they've yet to be given the chance to show what they're really capable of. There's no studio system anymore, so what can I advise them?"

During a two-year absence from the screen after Psycho, Leigh came clean to an interviewer about her teenage runaway marriage. "I agonized over that," she admits. "I was sure that it would ruin my career. No one gave a damn. But what was always funny to me was people later telling me about a rumor that I'd had a child that was hidden somewhere in northern California. When they heard about my teenage marriage, I guess they jumped from A to Z." Not only was Hollywood unfazed, but so, it seemed, was the rest of the nation, since Peter Lawford's wife, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, asked her to lend her celebrity weight to John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, which she did "with impassioned dedication." Leigh was at the top of a long list of celebrities who rallied around JFK, and her growing political involvement kept her from missing making movies.

When Leigh went back to work, it was to play the predatory, seductive stranger on the train whose non-sequiturs help rescue Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate. Meanwhile, Curtis, who had come into his own as a performer with Sweet Smell of Success and Some Like It Hot, applied the double standard - he could do location pictures without her - by accepting Taras Bulba, made in Argentina. Just before Leigh began rehearsals to star in Bye Bye Birdie, Curtis asked for a divorce, having fallen for Christine Kaufmann, his 17-year-old Taras Bulba co-star. Newspapers in 1962 announced their official separation. In July, 1963, the sun set on the Leigh-Curtis era-just as it earlier had on Doug and Mary's, Eddie and Debbie's, Liz and Eddie's.

By any standards, 1963 marked a turning point in Leigh's career. Bye Bye Birdie turned into a personal debacle: during shooting, Leigh noticed that George Sidney, who had guided her through The Red Danube, Scaramouche, Who Was That Lady?, and Pepe, had "changed somehow." Eventually, she was to write, his "dismissing behavior wreaked havoc with my already precarious stability." Only when Leigh saw the movie did she realize she had been edged out of center stage by a director smitten with his 21-year-old protegee, Ann-Margret. "I was shooting the scenes as they were in the script and really didn't see anything happening [on the set]," Leigh recalls, "except the gradual realization that obviously George had this infatuation with Ann. A lot of what you see onscreen with Ann-Margret was shot on a Sunday, after the movie [concluded principal photography]. I didn't know anything until I saw the preview, from which I ran out of the theater in hysterics."

Leigh was further devastated by the assassination of her friend John Kennedy. The end of her marriage to Curtis, the death of Kennedy, the blow to her star status in Birdie (which ranked among 1963's ten most successful movies), came to symbolize for Leigh "one of my dark times, except that, out of that dark, came light because of Bob." During the filming of Birdie, Leigh met Robert Brandt, so strappingly handsome that he easily could have faced the cameras had he not been a highly successful corporate stockbroker and they married soon after. Having seen her third marriage end, and seeing the handwriting on the wall that her leading lady days were on the wane, Leigh wisely opted for a shift in priorities. She was determined that her new marriage would endure, not only for the sake of her husband and her children, but for herself. Already in her mid-thirties - the same age as recent suicide Marilyn Monroe, in fact - Leigh decided that her personal life came first now. This marriage would provide Leigh with both the personal and financial security that was denied to such other stars as Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds, whose businessmen husbands mismanaged their money and their careers, and forced them into projects that tarnished their prestige.

"It was a time of such readjustment," Leigh says. "I was very worried about a succession of traumas for the kids. Tony and I got separated in March and I married Bob in September, three months after we met. I was anxious to help in any way I could with Bob in his business. I wanted the transition for the children to be as smooth as possible. And, taking on another marriage, I wanted to start out with us both knowing where we were, so that we would be traveling the same road. Those things were more in my mind than anything else. I don't know that I paid a lot of attention to movies." Moving off the fast track of ambitious stars scrambling for career plums was a sanguine step, and perhaps the central reason why Leigh retains such grace and sanity today.

Extended European location shooting figured into her decision to renege on plans to play the sophisticate that Blake Edwards had created for her in The Pink Panther, thus allowing Capucine to waltz away with one of the most successful movies of the decade. Decisions like this explain why Leigh spent most of the '60s in patchier stuff, all of it filmed near home: Wives and Lovers (replacing Shirley MacLaine, who refused it), Harper (she was good, just lost in the shuffle), Three on a Couch (playing a psychiatrist opposite Jerry Lewis), Hello Down There (with Tony Randall and Merv Griffin), and, making the jump to character parts as a brassy divorcee, One Is a Lonely Number.

In 1975, with Jamie Lee and Kelly enrolled in colleges back east and her husband redirecting his work to Manhattan, Leigh finally got a chance to debut on Broadway opposite Jack Cassidy in Murder Among Friends. Alas, it opened and closed quickly. Following the lead of Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds - who unlike Leigh, had to work for financial reasons - she also tried her luck at TV pilots, both of them a little ahead of their time. "My Wife's Jane," a comedy about a daytime soap star "was going to be on until the daytime soap people told the network: 'You can't make fun of such a lucrative audience.' " Later, "Molly McGuire," about a divorcee raising her child solo "worried the network bosses because it was about a divorced lady." Like Reynolds, MacLaine, and Mitzi Gaynor, Leigh might have shaken her assets and glitzed out on the nightclub circuit, but again, neither her livelihood nor her ego depended on it. "Believe me, if it were a matter of needing to put food on the table for my family," she says, "I'd sell toilet paper."

Leigh admits that self-doubt has often kept her from pursuing roles in which she might have been memorable. In the '50s, she coveted the parts won by Jean Simmons in The Robe and by Deborah Kerr in Quo Vadis, but, more recently, she declined to pursue such premiere character assignments as the one Simmons played in the TV mini-series "The Thorn Birds" or Kerr's in the TV version of Barbara Taylor Bradford's "A Woman of Substance." However, she admits regret that she and Jamie Lee did not "find out soon enough" about Terms of Endearment "because Jamie could have campaigned for the two of us." She also voices disappointment "that we weren't thought of for Postcards From the Edge, because we would have been very good. I don't get thought of for great things like those. And just to do something is not worth the effort." Then, why not aggressively campaign for juicy roles like Shirley MacLaine and others do? "This is a big problem with me," she says, reddening. "I find it very difficult to sell myself. I am not an aggressive person, for myself. Jamie Lee, Bob, and Kelly - everybody - gets furious with me about this. Maybe it's that old fear of rejection. If I don't push for it, it's not like I know that producers have definitely said: 'We don't want her' I think it goes back to that incident [running away and getting married] when I was 14. I think I maybe never felt worthy, that I shouldn't be aggressive. I went so far the other way because I was grateful for anything good. I almost felt I didn't deserve the good that came to me. But it came down to priorities, too. If you are driven about your career, something else has to give. Maybe I didn't want [my private life] to suffer. But," Leigh says, frankly, "maybe it wouldn't have suffered." Even from one as clear-eyed as Janet Leigh, those words sound poignant. But, as she puts it, "No regrets."

Stephen Rebello is the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, and a frequent contributor to these pages.

Photos by: Bettman Archive, Kobal Collection, Collector's Bookstore

Photography: Jon Ragel

Makeup: Jasmine/Celestine Cloutier

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