The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower
by Robert Graysmith
C2010 Berkeley Publishing - a Penguin Group
Marli Renfro, a nudist, and early Playboy Playmate, was the BODY DOUBLE not the STAND IN for Janet Leigh in Hitchcock's Psycho. The murder scene, filmed for days in a shower set, and then cut cut cut to build fear in the audience and get past the censors. Despite the black and white film - or perhaps because of it - the innovative flashes of pictures went so quick it was almost subliminal and the audiences' tension in watching the film exploded. Hitchcock's attention to detail was unprecedented and the scene was part of movie making history.
The author, true crime author Robert Graysmith, has long had a thing for this model, Marli Renfro, that spurred him on to detail a life gone bitterly ironic when she was murdered, but it turns out that the press had reported erroneously, because the reporters didn't know the difference between a Body Double and the Stand In. Turns out Marli never was murdered and has lived an OK life defined by outdoorsy activities.
Within this book Graysmith not only takes us on the behind the scenes making of a Hitchcock movie, but also the history of Playboy magazine and Clubs and the players in the early hours of the sexual revolution in the early 1960's.
Is it awful to reveal that I felt kind of wrongly lead on that Marli Renfro had not been murdered? I wish only that Graysmith had, at the point of revealing this to us readers, gone on to tell the story of the woman who had been, the Stand In!
All and all a fascinating tale and one that made me think of the days I worked as a movie extra.
C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.
