In his 2002 book Body Double, author Don Lasseter compounded the confusion and wrote that Davis and Renfro were the same person, meaning that Renfro was dead.
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I remember this confusion. So often there would be an article like "woman who doubled Janet Leigh in Psycho shower scene killed." Oops. But it would have been so ironic IF it had been true, and it is still ironic enough: a stand-in connected with a major murder movie..gets murdered.
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Author Robert Graysmith, who had a lifelong fascination with Renfro, noted a comment by Davis's granddaughter that Davis would never have done nude work.
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And yet Marli Renfro WOULD do nude work, and did, a lot in the late 50's and 60s. Some work for Playboy(a cover in Psycho year 1960?) John Gavin -- in a rare interview on Psycho -- said he watched the shower scene being filmed and saw "this nude woman standing there talking to Hitchocck before shooting the scene. Nobody cared."
He set out to find Renfro and discovered that she was living in California. He subsequently wrote a book, The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower (2010), about Renfro's role in Psycho and the confusion over Davis's death.
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I need to find that book . "Modern day Marli Renfro" appears in person in the documentary 78/52 (2017) and it IS a little disconcerting seeing this old, VERY wrinkled woman talking about all her nude work in Psycho and elsewhere but...time waits for no one. (78/52 means 78 camera set ups for 52 seconds of film -- or is it 78 EDITS? Or was it 45 seconds of film -- I thought Hitchcock said that once. Sheesh.)
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Renfro married and is known as Marli Renfro Peterson. She has lived in the Mojave Desert since 1970
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Still alive now?(2024?) I hope so . I guess I'll go look that up , too.
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roger1 (2493)
22 days ago
During the filming of Psycho, Janet Leigh also had a stand-in to check lighting. Her name was Myra Davis, also known as Myra Jones.
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It is rare that "movie stand ins" -- indeed, people who stand in for actors for lighting checks -- actually get NAMED -- "billing" if you will --- but so it has happened with the doomed Myra Davis.
But wait, there's more:
IMDB has a list of stand ins for key actors in Psycho. And the one who interests me is: Harold Lockwood.
Who he? He was MARTIN BALSAM's stand in for Psycho.
And the word is that...in order for Hitchcock to get the "human movements" just right for that terrifying high angle shot of Mother running out of her bedroom door at Arbogast to kill him -- that run was REHEARSED every night for several nights after daily filming on Psycho was completed. Was HItchcock there to supervise this? I don't know. But Harold Lockwood evidently had to stand in for Balsam and have "whoever played mother" (rumored to be a little person named Mitzi) keep running at him and running at him and running at him til they got it right.
You see the results in Hitchcock's Psycho -- and you can see the same shot DONE WRONG (no rehearsals?) in Van Sant's Psycho.
In Hitchcock's Psycho, Mother seems to take a scary, robotic "three big steps" to Arbogast, knife upraised above her head, and brings her knife down on his face just as he rears his head upwards to receive the first blow. In Van Sant's Psycho, not only is Arbogast (William H. Macy) looking the wrong way as from the shot before this one(bad editing gaffe) Mother runs out at him so fast that the impression is she is running PAST him(probably was, for real.) Just wrong.
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roger1 (2493)
22 days ago
But wait, there's more:
In a rather snarky interview to promote Van Sant's Psycho, William "Arbogast" Macy said of the original: "Have you noticed that when the Mother first slashes the detective's face...she misses?"
Au contraire, Mr. Macy. Granted Hitchcock wasn't going to make his Mother double hit Martin Balsam in the face with a knife -- even a rubber one -- so indeed, the knife probably swooped past Balsam's face. But it happens too fast to see in real time and HItchocck made sure to put the SOUND of the knife slashing flesh(as we had heard it STAB Janet Leigh) and the illusion is complete.
Certainly better staged than the very poor staging in the Van Sant of the overhead shot on the stair landing. (Such as how Balsam's face is raised upwards to the air as the knife comes down on it.) Thank you, Harold Lockwood!
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