Customer Reviews

The Girl in Alfred Hitchock's Shower

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

All right then... let's just say you are a writer who, for decades, has nursed an adolescent crush on a pretty, all-but-unknown actress of sorts who happened to be the body double in the famous Psycho shower scene. Say that you have always longed to "tell her story". Problem is, there really isn't a whole lot of story for you to tell. At least not one that's remotely interesting to anyone other than, perhaps, the actress, her family & friends. Oh! and, of course, you the still-smitten writer. So you add A) some standard issue "behind the scenes" anecdotes about the film Psycho and B) a meandering narrative about a real-life serial killer who was said to have been inspired by said film. Throw in a few scraps about the early days of Playboy magazine and some obscure (for a reason) "Vegas in the '60s" stories and voila! A dull, disjointed mess of a book is born! My advice is to save your time and money and give this vanity project a pass.

Length:: 4:02 Mins

Hopefully this four-minute video review will convince you that this book is absolutely not worth reading.

I was fascinated by the mystery of what happened to Janet Leigh's body double for Hitchcock's "Psycho" shower scene. Was she murdered by a real life psycho who patterned his crimes after his movie doppelganger?

Robert Graysmith's 40-year personal obsession with pin-up model and part-time actress Marli Renfro does not pay off in his sloppily written riff that tries to be a crime novel with a twist.

Oddly structured with no real theme, the two -- or is it three? -- stories do not really merge at any point. And the big pay off is disappointing in that we do not really get any sense of the true life or mystery of the body double.

This story -- it's not really a novel -- reads like an overwritten, unedited, first draft.

On every page there's a hint of a wonderful noir tale of the darkside of Hollywood and the seductive lure of that shadowy place between reel and real life where the fantasies are manufactured.

In fact, don't even waste your time with this book.

I saw it in the library earlier today, and knew right away that the body-double the author was obsessed with was still alive, simply because the book contained photos from her collection! Talk about a dead giveaway.

But overall, it's just so poorly written. Yes, she's alive, but he didn't find her, she found him! She tells him where's she's been all this time (living a normal, boring life, away from Hollywood), but doesn't do so until the last three pages of the book.

The LAST THREE PAGES.

Perhaps this would've made an interesting article, but a 320 page book?

NOT.

I was initially attracted to this book by it's information on the making of 'Psycho' and the awful coincidence of real life tragedy. I can't believe how badly written it is - there is no structure, the narrative jumps about randomly while the author tries to make portentious-sounding links between totally unconnected events. Much of the book is a novelistic (and unconvincing) impression of what the characters might have been thinking. What little interesting info there is appears to be lifted from other sources.

Most shocking is the apparent lack of any editing - the book is stuffed with repetition, contradictory statements from page to page, baffling non-sequitors. I can't understand how this got to print.

Interesting title; interesting premise; and what seems to be a very well-researched mystery book...I was hooked! Throw in Alfred Hitchcock and I was a goner for this one, even though some of the reviews seemed a little unenthused. The book is mainly about Marli Renfro, a young girl whose big claim to fame is that she was the body double for Janet Leigh in Psycho's shower sequence. If you don't see Janet's face...well, that's Marli. A parallel story is detailed about Sonny Busch, a Norman Bates-like man with a seemingly domineering mother and a passion for strangling older ladies. As I read these fascinating tales, I kept waiting for the parallel paths to converge; strangely enough, they don't. Author Robert Graysmith, known for writing Zodiac, takes many detailed tangents...stories about Francis Ford Coppola, early Las Vegas, the town of Searchlight, and early nudie films. Again, I kept waiting for all of these tangents to tie together at the end, and disappointingly enough, they don't. Billed as a murder-mystery in the style of the famous noir movie Laura, the long-winded explanations of the book fizzle into a short ending that is extremely lackluster. Instead of this rambling tale, Graysmith should have written a number of short stories rather than trying to tie all of these unrelated vignettes together into one book. Although the stories of filming the shower sequence in "Psycho" are very interesting, I have a feeling there are other books that detail the same information. Probably best to check this out at a library rather than purchase it...you might be disappointed like I was. As a footnote, the details of Graysmith's obsession for Renfro and his collection of clippings of her nude magazine layouts seems just this side of creepy.

The writer is obsessed by a comely model, Marli Renfro, who was Janet Leigh's body double in the shower scene of "Psycho". For about 75% of the book stories about Renfro were interspersed with stories about two serial killers, who may or may not have killed Renfro in a recreation of that scene.

Perhaps Graysmith wished to throw us off the way Hitchcock liked to toy with his audience. But Graysmith isn't as skilled as Hitchcock, not by a long shot.

Unless you are interested in Renfro, and I wasn't all the stories about her were tedious and repetitious.

I came upon this book in the library and was, of course, intrigued. I mean, Alfred Hitchcock, shower scene in "psycho," a true story of murder, etc. Well the main mystery here is how any professional publisher could let such a mess get through. The writing is dreadful and the "narrative" hopelessly confusing. Among other things, the author often refers to events he hasn't discussed as if readers knew all about it. The book is full of profound insights like "American in 1960 was a nation of repressed,conforming men, voyeurs who secretly watched but never acrtually engaged a human being." As I said above, fifty pages of this junk, much of it an excruciating, disjointed account of the filming of the shower scene, was more than enough. The previous reviewer is right on in asserting that it sounds like a rough draft. This book would embarrass Norman Bates.

The Robert Graysmith depicted in David Fincher's film "Zodiac" is clearly in evidence here, as Graysmith continues to show his obsessive nature. Just as he was dominated by his desire to uncover the identity of one of history's most intriguing serial killers, an obsession that led to his divorce, he is bedeviled by model and Playboy bunny Marli Renfro. Unfortunately for Graysmith, while attempting to solve the riddle of the Zodiac made for relevant and arresting reading, endless observations of the unquestionably sexy Renfro seem like just one long wet dream, with the author locked into his childhood fantasies and the reader asking, What the heck? In chapter after chapter, Graysmith indulges in his puerile obsession with breasts, curves, hips, buttocks, etc., and it feels like watching a young boy with his first Playboy magazine. "Marli's taut, round buttocks shone in the strong light," he writes in describing a nude photo shoot. Since we know that Graysmith wasn't present at the shoot, we realize that we have been unwittingly let into an obsession that hasn't subsided with the passing of years and, while Renfro seems like a really nice person, is she really worth a book length discussion? There were many women pursuing the same type of work in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Connecting the most tenuous of threads, Graysmith manages to tie Renfro into a real life murder mystery, as if to justify his main focus: to share his wet dream with the rest of us. In Graysmith's mind, Renfro is not just a sexy woman, she is a goddess. Everything she does is beyond the abilities of mere mortals. "Marli rode her horse down through a dune area toward the beach in a relaxed, upright position. Her strong back enabled her to perfectly balance herself, usually a problem for a female rider." Again, since Graysmith wasn't with Renfro as she rode through the dunes, we know that we are inside Graysmith's obsession once more, and it would be interesting if it weren't so obvious and, dare I say, pathetic.

Aside from Graysmith's obsession, he could have used a better editor. At one point in the book, he states that screenwriter Arthur Guy Empey was the "author of a bestseller that sold a million copies," yet doesn't bother to tell us what that book is. Later, he writes that Peter Gowland, a photographer, is the son of two actors, yet doesn't tell us who they are. Very curious omissions, and a tad frustrating for the reader.

I am normally a huge fan of Graysmith, but this story needed to get off of Marli's seeming perfection (ad nauseum) and focus on what makes his books so much fun: murder.

I agree 100% with the negative reviews. To call this book disjointed and unorganized would be misleading. It isn't even up to those standards. I honestly can say that I have no idea what the author was aiming for, because he jumps from one thing to another with no apparent logic. Calling this mess a waste of time is too kind, because it doesn't deserve any classification whatsoever, really. Judging this book by it's cover is a compliment, because the title is the only thing that is interesting.