“Jayne Swallow? Do you swallow, Jayne … do you?”
Every morning the same routine. Even before the robe came off.
“Take a bird name, chickie,” her agent, Walter, had said … “bird names are good.”
So, goodbye Jana Wróbel … hello, Jayne Swallow.
She should have gone with Joan Sparrow or Junie Peacock. By the time she signed on for Hitch, it was too late. She’d heard all the lines.
The set was festooned with dead birds. They stank under the hot lights. Chemicals. The glass eyes of the mountain eagle perched above a doorway reminded her of Hitch’s watery ogling.
Hitchcock. That was a bird name, too. And a dirty meaning, which no one threw in the director’s face every morning.
“Good morning, Mr. Softcock … Good afternoon, Mr. Halfcock … Good eeev-ning, Mr. Cocksucker … how do you like it?”
He’d screech like a bird at that … Scree! Scree! Scree!
There was a bird name in his damn movie. Janet Leigh’s character. Jayne’s character. Crane. Marion Crane.
… which made Jayne and Janet Hitch’s Marion-ettes. The whole shoot was their funeral, scored with the slow, solemn, ridiculous tune. Jayne danced and strings cut into her wrists and neck.
In the end, the wires were snipped and she fell all in a heap, unstrung. Over and over. Like a sack of potatoes. Like a side of beef with arms and legs. Chocolate oozed from her wounds. Then she got up and died all over again.
Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump … Scree! Scree! Scree!
She drove North on the Pacific Coast Highway.
To disguise herself, in case anyone from the studio should be crossing the road in front of the car, she’d worn sunglasses and a headscarf. Marilyn’s famous I-don’t-want-to-be-recognized look. She’d taken off the disguise when she was safely out of Los Angeles and the rain got heavy.
Even without the shades, it was hard to see the road ahead. Short-lived, clear triangles were wiped in thick water on the windshield. A deluge. Mudslide weather. After months of California sun, you found out where the ceiling leaked. There wasn’t much traffic, which was a mercy. The car weaved from side to side as the wheel fought her grip. Her tires weren’t the newest. She struggled, as if she’d been force-fed booze by a spy ring and set loose on a twisty cliff road to meet an unsuspicious accident.
The squeak of the wipers. The beat of her heart.
The voices in her head. Hitch’s. Her agent’s. Hers.
“Do you swallow, Jayne…do you?”
Tony Perkins’s. “I like stuffing … birds.”
Scree! Scree! Scree!
The window-seals were blown. Water seeped into the car, pouring in rivulets over the dash and inside the doors. Droplets formed this side of the glass, too many to wipe away with her cuff. Her seat was damp. She shivered. She’d been fighting the flu since her first day in the shower. With all the water, no one noticed her nose was streaming … except Becca, the make up woman, and she kept secrets like a priest in a confessional.
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.