Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

She could still feel water on her body. For days, she’d been pounded by studio hoses. The temperature varied from lukewarm to icy. The pressure kept up. Extra steam was pumped in, to show on film. She’d been scalded and she’d been frozen, but most of all she’d been soaked. She thought she’d never be dry again.

Before Jayne got into the fake bathtub each morning, Becca had to apply three moleskin patches that transformed her into a sexless thing, like that new blonde doll her niece had, Barbie … or a dressmaker’s dummy with a head.

She might as well not have a head … her face would not be in the film. Janet Leigh’s would be. The most Jayne would show was a tangle of wet blonde hair, seen from behind, as the knife scored down her unrecognizable back.

… in the book, the girl in the shower had her head cut off with an axe. One chop. Too swift for Hitch. He preferred the death of a thousand cuts. A thousand stabs. A thousand edits.

She was the only person on the crew who’d read the novel — not especially, but just by coincidence, a few months ago. Something to read while a photographer got his lights set just so . The first rule of show business was always take a book to read. There was so much waiting while men fiddled before they could start proper work. On the average Western, you could read From Here to Eternity while the bar room mirror was being replaced between fights.

Hitch disapproved of Jayne’s book-learning. He intended to make a play of keeping the twist secret … not letting audiences into theaters after the movie started, appearing in jokey public service messages saying “Please don’t tell the ending, it’s the only one we have.” But the picture’s last reel wasn’t an atomic plan guarded by the FBI. The paperback was in every book-rack in America. If it were down to Hitch, he’d confiscate the whole run and have the books pulped. It wasn’t even his ending, really. It was Robert Bloch’s. The writer was seldom mentioned. Hitch pretended he’d made it all up. Jayne sympathised …. Bloch was the only participant getting a worse deal out of the movie than her.

A clot of liquid earth splattered against the windshield, dislodged from the hillside above. The wipers smeared it into a blotch. She saw obscene shapes in the mud pattern, setting off bells at the Catholic Legion of Decency. Soon, the dirt was gone. Eventually, water got rid of all the disgusting messes in the world.

After a few hours in the movie shower, those patches would wash off Jayne’s censorable areas. It didn’t matter what spirit-gum Becca tried. Water would always win.

Then, spittle would rattle in Hitch’s mouth. He would observe, lugubriously, “I spy … with my little eye … something beginning wi-i-i-ith … N! Nipple!”

Always, the director would insist on pretending to help Becca re-apply the recalcitrant triangles … risking the wrath of the unions. The film’s credited make up men were already complaining about being gypped out of the chance to work with naked broads and stuck with be-wigging skeletons or filling John Gavin’s chin-dimple. There was an issue about whether the patches were make up or costume.

Jayne had posed for smut pictures. Walter said no one would ever know, the pay was better than extra work, and the skin game had been good enough for Marilyn. For Swank and Gent —she’d never made it into Playboy —they shot her as was and smoothed her to plasticity with an airbrush. For the movies, the transformation was managed on set.

“Have you shaved today, Jayne Swallow? Shaved down there?”

Unless she did, the crotch-patch was agony to get off. No matter how many times it washed free during the day, it was always stuck fast at the end of the shoot. She was raw from the ripping.

“I thought of becoming a barber,” Hitch said. “If you need a hand, I have my cut throat …”

At that, at the thought of a straight-razor on her pubes, he would flush with unconcealable excitement … and her guts would twist into knots.

“You’ll love Hitch,” Walter said. “And he’ll love you. He loves blondes. And bird names. Birds are in all his films.”

Sure, she was blonde. With a little help from a bottle. Another reason to shave down there .

We can’t all be Marilyn. We can’t all be Janet Leigh.

Being Janet Leigh was Jayne’s job on this film.

Body double. Stand-in. Stunt double. Torso dummy.

Oh, Janet did her time in the shower. From the neck up.

The rest of it, though … weeks of close-ups of tummy, hands, feet, ass, thighs, throat … that was Jayne.

“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.