“It’s a shower scene,” Walter said.
She’d thought she knew what that meant. She’d done shower scenes. Indoors, for sophisticated comedies. Outdoors, for Westerns. Show a shape behind a curtain or a waterfall, and then let Debra Paget or Dorothy Provine step out wrapped in a towel and smile.
They always joked about shooting a version “for France.” Without the curtain.
In France, Brigitte Bardot showed everything. Hitch would have loved to have BB in his sights. But Hollywood wasn’t ready yet …
So, a shower scene …
A Hitchcock shower scene.
Not a tease, not titillation — except for very specialized tastes (ie: his). Not a barber’s scene, but a butcher’s. Not for France, but for … well, for Transylvania or the Cannibal Islands or wherever women were meat to be carved …
There were caresses … the water, and the tip of the blade.
Not a single clean shocking chop but a frenzy of pizzicato stabs.
“This boy,” Hitch said, embarrassing Tony Perkins, “he has an eye for the ladies … no, a knife for the ladies.”
She’d been prodded, over and over. She’d been sliced, if only in illusion — the dull edge of the prop drawn over the soft skin of her stomach, again and again. After the fourth or fifth pass, it felt like a real knife … after the fourth or fifth day, she thought she was bleeding out, though it was only chocolate syrup, swirling around her dirty feet …
Some shower scene.
Her skin still burned with the rashes raised by the knife … with the little blisters made when the lights boiled the water on her shoulders. The sores scraped open and leaked as she was wrapped in a torn curtain, packaged like carved meat, suitable for dumping in a swamp.
She was uncomfortable in her clothes. She might never be comfortable in her clothes again.
If she kept driving North (by North-West?), she’d hit San Francisco … city of ups and downs … But before then, she’d need to sleep.
Not in a motel. Not after this week’s work.
Her blouse was soaked through. No amount of towelling would ever get her dry.
“Do you swallow, Jayne…do you?”
The soles of her feet were ridged, painful to stand on.
“I spy … with my little eye … something beginning wi-i-i-ith … P.”
Pigeon? Psychopath? Perkins?
“Pudenda!”
Every time the crotch-skin came off, Hitch sprung another letter on her … another word for vagina. F. C. T. Q. P. M.
M for Mousehole? Whoever said that?
Sometimes Hitch took the knife himself and got in close. He said Perkins wasn’t holding it right, was stabbing like a fairy …
Perkins’s eyes narrowed at that. They didn’t slide over Jayne’s body like Hitch’s, or any of the other guys on the crew.
… but it was an excuse.
The director just plain liked sticking it to a naked woman.
Any woman? Or just Jayne?
He’d have preferred doing it to Janet, because she was a Star. Really, he’d have wanted to stab Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman, who were more than Stars. But he’d make do with Jayne Swallow … or Jana Wróbel … or some blonde off the street.
Oh, he never touched her with anything that wasn’t sharp. Never even shook hands.
“How do you shake hands with a naked lady?” he’d asked, when they were introduced — she’d been cast from cheesecake 8 x 10s, without an audition — on set. How indeed? Or was that his way of avoiding physical contact with her? Did he not trust himself?
Others had auditioned, she learned … but turned him down. They’d found out what he wanted and preferred not to be a part of it. Blondes who did naked pin-ups, strippers, girls who did stag films…they didn’t want to be cut-up in a shower, even with Janet Leigh’s head on top of their bodies.
So, Jayne Swallow.
Scree! Scree! Scree!
Now, she really had what Hitch wanted … and he’d have to pay more than scale to get it back. But it wasn’t the money. That wasn’t her mcguffin. She wanted something else. What? Revenge? Retribution? To be treated like a person rather than a broken doll?
It wasn’t just Hitch. She stood in for Janet Leigh. He stood in for everyone who’d cut her.
Since driving off the Lot, she’d been seeing him everywhere. In the broken side-mirror, through the misted-over rear window. In every film, there he was, somewhere. If only in a photo on the wall. Unmistakable, of course. That fat, double bass-belly … that caricature silhouette … doleful, little boy eyes like raisins in uncooked dough … the loose cheeks, like Droopy in the cartoons … that comb-over wisp.
He was waiting for a bus. He was smoking a cigar. He was getting a shoe-shine. He was wearing a too-big cowboy hat. He was smirking in a billboard ad for an all-you-can-scoff restaurant. He was fussing with dogs. He was the odd, short, fat boy out in a police line-up of tall, thin, unshaven crooks. He was up on a bell-tower, with a high-powered rifle. He was in a closet, with a bag full of sharp, sharp knives. He was in the back seat with a rope. He wore white editors’ gloves to handle his murder weapons.
She looked at the mirror, and saw no one there.
Nothing beginning with H.
But there was a shape in the road, flapping. She swerved to avoid it.
A huge gull, one wing snapped. The storm had driven it ashore.
It was behind her now. Not road kill, but a road casualty. Suitable for stuffing and mounting.
Hitch said that about Marion Crane, too, in a line he’d wanted in the script but not snuck past the censors. They were Jesuits, used to playing word games with clever naughty schoolboys.
Birds … Crane, Swallow … suitable for stuffing and mounting.
Another dark shape came out of the rain and gained on the car. A man on a motorcycle. A wild one? Like Brando. No, a highway cop. He wore a helmet and a rain-slicker. Water poured in runnels off the back of his cape. It looked like a set of folded, see-through wings. His goggles were like big glass eyes.
Her heartrate raced.
…stop, thief!
Had the studio called the cops yet? Had Hitch denounced her sabotage?
“I’ll take it out of her fine sweet flesh” Hitch would say. “Every pound of meat, every inch of skin!”
She was a thief. Not like Cary Grant, suave and calculating … but a purse-snatcher, vindictive and desperate … taking something not because it was valuable to her but because it was valuable to the person she’d stolen from.
The cop signaled her to pull over.
He had a gun. She didn’t. She was terrified.
Cops weren’t your friends.
She’d found that out the minute she got off the bus in Los Angeles. She’d been young and innocent then, with a hometown photo studio portfolio and a notion to get into the movies. She learned fast. Cops locked you up when you hadn’t done anything. Cops squeezed the merchandise and extracted fines that didn’t involve money. They let the big crooks walk free and cracked down on the hustlers. They always busted the wrong man. Beat patrolmen, vice dicks, harness bulls, traffic cops. The enemy.
Her brakes weren’t good. It took maybe thirty yards to pull over. With a sound like a scream in the rain.
The wipers still ticked as the motor idled. The screech slowed.
In the rear-view, she saw the cop unstraddle his ride. The rain poured off his helmet, goggles, cape, boots. He strode through the storm towards her. He wasn’t like the city cops she’d met, bellies bulging over their belts, flab-rolls easing around their holstered guns. He was Jimmy Stewart lean, snake-hipped. A cowboy with an armored skullcap.