In those years, in Hollywood, there were the good girls and the bad girls, and only a treacherous no man’s land in between. Janet Leigh’s colleague at MGM, Elizabeth Taylor, was a naughty girl. There were no vixen-like roles for Leigh. The studio developed the twice-married divorcé into a morally fastidious goody-goody girl, exemplifying the supposed values of repressed America in the early postwar years. Along with actresses such as Debbie Reynolds and Doris Day, Leigh represented the model to which teenage girls were supposed to aspire. Only terrible things happened if they headed out into the backseat of a coupe.

One evening in 1950, Leigh showed up at a cocktail party given by RKO Pictures. As she schmoozed with endless acumen, she was approached by a young man who introduced himself as Tony Curtis—a nobody by Hollywood standards. By rights, Leigh should have muttered a few polite words and turned away. But even in this room where good looks were the only entrée card that mattered, she was taken aback by this “devastatingly handsome young man—beautiful really—with black unruly hair, large sensitive eyes fringed by long dark lashes—and an irresistible personality.” He was from New York City, announcing it with his accent, and was under contract to Universal, the Motel Six of Studios. Leigh did something she rarely did. She gave Curtis her phone number in the small Beverly Hills house she had just purchased where she lived with her parents.

Whatever motivations led Curtis to the party, the moment he saw Leigh with her exquisite face, “look(s) sweet and vulnerable,” he had another agenda in mind, and it wasn’t getting his picture taken with the actress.

Curtis had the good sense not to seem too anxious but to wait a couple of days before calling Leigh. When he did, he pretended he was Cary Grant. She accepted his invitation to dinner. That evening Curtis told Leigh the story of his life: The poor son of a Jewish tailor, Bernie Schwartz had grown up in New York. Things had gotten so bad that for a couple of weeks, his parents put Tony and his brother Julius in an orphanage where at least they could get regular meals. When he was thirteen, he attended the American Legion parade on Second Avenue. His brother Julius was four years younger, not somebody Curtis wanted hanging around when he was with his friends. He pushed Julius away. Later that day, a truck ran over and killed his little brother. The death changed the family forever. His parents had a second child, but the departed Julius haunted their lives.

After that evening, Leigh and Curtis were in bed together faster than Gary Cooper’s quick draw. During his first months in Hollywood, Curtis had slept with innumerable women, some of whom he barely acknowledged. Leigh was different. Although she had only a couple of years of higher education, to him, she was a worldly, college-educated woman with a firm grasp on a world he had hardly seen.

What drew Leigh to Curtis was his warm, effusive soul. Brash, bold, spilling his ironic wit over everything, the actor exuded life. Although Leigh had also grown up poor, she had been brought up as a princess in a palace compared to Curtis. Being around him, she was passionately alive too.

Leigh and Curtis had not fully worked out whether theirs was an abiding love or just another Hollywood infatuation when they made their first public appearance together. But the second time they were spotted out together, the excitement they produced was remarkable. “Sounded to us like the fans in the bleachers gave the biggest hand to Janet Leigh and her date, Tony Curtis, as they emerged from his car,” wrote one Hollywood reporter.

The fans wanted to see two of their favorites in a love match, making real everything they saw in the movie theaters. They pushed Curtis and Leigh toward marriage, seeing the union as inevitable and natural. Yet when the couple decided to take their marital vows, the negative reactions stunned them. Leonard Goldstein, the CEO of Universal, warned Curtis that if he married Leigh, his growing fan base would cease pursuing him, destroying his career. MGM was no happier: in one unfortunate moment, Leigh would destroy the fantasies of young men from Maine to New Mexico.

The worst of the negativity came from the most unlikely of subjects---Leigh’s own father. Fred Morrison was his daughter’s business manager; he did not want to risk his status by her doing the incredibly silly thing of getting married once again.

Nevertheless, Curtis and Leigh married in a civil ceremony in June 1951 in Greenwich, Connecticut. The nuptials were greeted by an avalanche of publicity beyond anything the newlyweds thought possible. They were ambitious young actors using whatever it took to get where they wanted to go—and here, set before them, was an incredible tool that Curtis exploited to the fullest.

At movie premieres, Janet moved quickly up the red carpet, turning away from the adoring fans while Curtis held back, milking every moment. On one movie tour, the PR folks at Universal designed a breakaway shirt so that when teenage girls grabbed at Curtis, they would come away with a souvenir shirtsleeve. Curtis openly enjoyed the adoration; Leigh played the aggrieved innocent off-screen as much as on. “I can unequivocally state that I have never asked to have my picture taken or to be interviewed,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I only tried to comply with requests, whenever possible.” Yet even so, Movie columnist Hedda Hopper called the couple “publicity mad exhibitionists, ambitious, tiresome and crude.”

When the couple married, they purchased a property in Beverly Hills that Leigh furnished like her own dollhouse. She kept it impeccably clean and neat, as if expecting at any moment a photographer from a fan magazine to arrive to shoot life at home with Janet and Tony. She had what her daughter Jamie Lee called “a powerful drive for immaculate order and control”—and she proceeded to try to make Curtis a worthy resident of her doll house.

When he asked for a glass of water, Leigh gave it to him. As soon as he took a sip, she picked it up and brought the tumbler back to the kitchen so it would not ruin the living room decor. At parties, Leigh stood apart from her husband, watching him. When he grasped a wine glass as if he was trying to strangle the crystal, she signaled Curtis that he should hold it gently by his fingertips.

Curtis felt like an outlier in Leigh’s world. “After I married Janet, I sensed some antagonism from people in Hollywood, perhaps because this Jewish kid had married a shiksa screen idol,” he later said. His marriage to Janet gave him entree to the group of WASP actors around Debbie Reynolds, Hollywood's most elite social circle. He wanted to be in their lofty company, but if he had to give up his Jewish identity, he did not want to be one of them. He signaled that in part by refusing to accede to their ideas of good manners.

One evening, Curtis and Leigh were at a party at the New York residence of Cole Porter. Porter’s minions had set out an array of cutlery around the plates. Leigh kept whispering to her husband, trying to get him to use the right utensil. The more she implored him, the more studiously he grabbed the wrong fork.

Everything at the dinner was done with refined taste, including the wine glasses. They were so delicate that when Ethel Merman gently squeezed hers, it changed shape. When at the songstress's encouragement, Curtis attempted the same, the crystal shattered. “Don’t worry, kid,” Merman said and broke her own glass. The host smiled, but Leigh looked at her husband with dour disdain.

The world thought Leigh had the perfect marriage. By sheer force of will, she had to keep up the veneer, hiding the truths that lay within. The gossip that her marriage was in trouble became a drumbeat so loud she could not cover her ears to block it out, and she did something that stars rarely did. She went on the offensive, writing a lengthy story for Silver Screen, denying the reports and insisting that she and Curtis remained profoundly in love. She talked to other magazines, too, pushing a tale she so desperately wanted to believe.

When Hitchcock sent Leigh the novel Psycho in October 1959 and asked her to play Marion Crane, the main female character in the film, she was open to a daring role she might not have so quickly accepted if her marriage had been a loving sanctuary. She was paid only $25,000, a third of her usual fee, and did not even get star billing. It was simply “And Janet Leigh as Marion Crane” at the end of the other actor credits.

Like so many actresses before her, Leigh’s first meeting with Hitchcock was at his house on Bellagio Road. He saw no need to try to impress her with his artwork and his cultured life. Nor did he seek to intimidate the actress, turning her into a malleable piece of clay. The director clearly thought Leigh would do what she was asked in the way he wanted her to do it. His elaborate storyboards were like comic books setting out every scene. The camera angles had also been meticulously set out. During the shooting, there would be no improvisation and no frenzied rewriting of the script. If Leigh kept precisely to the words her character spoke, she would be fine.

Leigh invented an entire life for her character, everything from her family, to the schools she attended, the food and movies she liked, her fears and dreams. Growing up in Stockton, Leigh knew women struggling with all sorts of difficulties. She had fled that world, but if she could remove the veneer of glamour she had so laboriously applied to herself and go back emotionally to the town in which she was brought up, she might not just play Marion but be her.

When Leigh walked onto the set the first day, no one had any idea that her life with Curtis had deteriorated into a cold war that sometimes exploded in curses and rebukes. A movie set had always been a sanctuary for Leigh, and she entered it with a feeling of joy and anticipation. But her troubles were still deep within her, and they would come forward to help inform her portrayal of Marion.

Hitchcock was notorious for giving his actors almost no advice and tearing their heads off if they dared ask him too many questions. He treated Leigh differently. She was so genial, polite, and thankful that Hitchcock could hardly be less than gracious. He did leave the grotesque mannequin for serial killer Norman Bates’ mother sitting in her chair in her dressing room. And he peppered her with dirty limericks and foul jokes until her face turned pink. “What he liked to do most,” Leigh recalled, “was to make me blush, and that is not a hard thing to do.”

Leigh was not offended by jokes that would have turned a nun to stone. She even made her own contributions to the off-color stew. One day she asked members of the crew to place a toilet in her dressing room. Then she had them take a picture of her sitting on the john reading the script. Hitchcock was the king of potty humor, and he was rightfully amused; it was just the kind of thing he might have done.

Leigh’s character was the key to Psycho: the film rises and falls on the audience identifying with this woman who has just committed a major felony. And Leigh had secrets that she held as tightly as Marion did. The actress feared her career would be destroyed if the public learned she had previously been married when she was just a young teenager. And then there was her marriage to Tony; that was false, too. At whatever cost, she knew she must maintain the facade. All of that played in one way or another into her characterization of Marion Crane. In her public life, Leigh’s face was a mask showing little of substance, but in the film, her face reads like a novel, telling tales within tales, exposing Marion’s fear and guilt as she slowly realizes the magnitude of what she has done.

Every few years, there is a piece of art—a novel, a movie, a play—that resonates so deeply with the American psyche that everyone seems to have seen or read it or at least knows about it. Moviegoers formed lines outside theaters across America to see Psycho. They screamed out at the shower scene in an overwhelming chorus of horror and left the theaters shaken by what they had seen. And they never forgot. In 2022 Variety named Psycho the greatest movie of all time.

Leigh was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress and won a Golden Globe. Curtis was also on a roll, with an Academy Award nomination for his role in The Defiant Ones (1958) and the popular and critical acclaim of Some Like it Hot (1959).

Curtis luxuriated in his success, but his wife did not. Curtis felt Leigh was jealous of actresses like Elizabeth Taylor, who had reached a level of fame she would never attain, and yet at the same time felt overwhelmed by the celebrity she had achieved.

Leigh started drinking. She was a lousy drunk, snarly and belligerent, stripped of the veneer that protected her. As she downed her drinks, her relationship with Curtis became largely disdainful distance or intimate shouting matches. The slurs and accusations were sometimes thrown out in front of their two daughters.

But the show that was their marriage had to go on. For their tenth wedding anniversary in June 1961, they staged a party extravagant even by Hollywood standards. The couple built a dance floor over the pool, a dais for the orchestra, and a platform for tables to hold the 250 guests that included the film elite from Frank Sinatra to Doris Day and Gene Kelly to Jack Lemmon. The last guest did not leave until after 5:30 in the morning.

On a Sunday two months after the anniversary party, Leigh’s parents came over as they often did. They had been fighting. Their faces were clenched with tension. Fred had an insurance brokerage business only because his daughter was a star. Not much of a businessman, he was in trouble and had come to ask for a loan. Curtis had enough of relatives hitting him up for money, and he turned down his father-in-law.

Leigh flew off to Nice as a guest of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy to attend Monte Carlo’s International Red Cross Ball hosted by Princess Grace. It should have been a welcome respite, but Leigh carried all her problems with her.

Dressed in a gown that made her look every bit the movie star, Leigh walked into the Monte Carlo Casino for the ball. Her friend Sammy Davis Jr. was the headliner. When the Black entertainer did not receive the reception she felt he deserved, Leigh got up and walked to the powder room. There she began sobbing uncontrollably, her body shaking. It was terrifying to be like this, not knowing why it was happening or how to end it. When she finally got a measure of control, she left the event as it was hardly beginning and was driven back to her hotel room, where she lay filled with nameless despair.

On Sunday afternoon, Leigh was still suffering when Curtis called to tell her, “Janet, your dad died last night. He committed suicide.” She fell into an emotional coma from which there seemed no release. It worsened when she arrived back in Los Angeles and learned Tony had found her 52-year-old father in his office next to a half-empty bottle of pills. Next to him lay a note, much of which became public.

“Helen, I also just wanted to tell you one thing. Now maybe you can be happy because you have to have a man dead before you can be happy so—I hate you.”

Despite everything, Leigh, Curtis, and their two daughters sailed to Argentina, where he was filming Taras Bulba. The voyage gave them plenty of time to do their favorite thing: argue. Some couples fight so much that verbal warfare is their natural communication idiom. That’s how it had become with the two of them, throwing invective and random objects at each other in drunken scenes. It did not help in Argentina when Curtis fell in love with his seventeen-year-old costar, Christine Kaufmann. Half Curtis’s age and a minor, Leigh considered it more shameful business. Curtis didn’t care. He was in love.

On their return to LA, the couple got into a fight that, even by their standards, was excessive. Between outbursts and drinks, Leigh went into her powder room to try to make up her tear-streaked face. As she did so, she downed a large number of red pills. Curtis rushed in and pounded on her back until she coughed up most of the drugs.

However Curtis felt about his wife of ten years and the mother of their two children, he surely should have tried to get her help and be with her until he no longer feared she would do this again. But he had traveled as far down the road as he was willing to go, and he wanted to be with his young mistress, whom he later married, and he left for good.

Right after the divorce, Leigh married Bob Brandt, a stockbroker and outdoorsman. Curtis speculated that his ex-wife may have begun their affair when she was still married to him. If that were true, few would fault her. Leigh retreated into her new marriage and a career that never again reached the peaks of Psycho. She wore the smile she always wore. Everything was perfect and always would be.

From HITCHCOCK'S BLONDES: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director's Dark Obsession by Laurence Leamer, to be published on October 10th, 2023, by Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2023 by Laurence Leamer.