Book Review - The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower

The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower (2010)

by Robert Graysmith

This is quite possibly one of the worst books I have ever read.  There is absolutely zero point to this nonfiction book ever being written...and here's why.

Marli Renfro was a body double for actress Janet Leigh in Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho.  That infamous shower scene -- if you didn't see Leigh's face in the shot, it was Renfro.  We learn that the beautiful Renfro had to keep her role a secret, but she managed to have a moderately successful career in the early 1960s posing nude for men's magazines and appearing in so-called "nudie cutie" films from director Russ Meyer.  

Cut to another true life storyline about Sonny Busch, a Norman Bates-ish killer who rapes and murders elderly women because of his obsession with his mother.  

Both the Renfro and Busch tales are told in a back-and-forth fashion -- Chapter One being about Renfro, then Two about Busch -- that the reader inevitably thinks that these two stories will combine at some awful moment with Busch killing Renfro.

Well, that never happens.  Renfro and Busch never meet.  Nothing in their lives ever comes into contact with one another.  The only connection is that Busch sees the movie Psycho.  That's it.  Nothing converges.

The true reason this book was written is revealed about halfway through when the author, Robert Graysmith, awkwardly switches to first person and reveals that he became obsessed with the beautiful Renfro at the age of eighteen after seeing her in Playboy magazine.  He vowed that some day he would write this woman's story -- simply because she was so goshdarn gorgeous.  

I guess that day has come.  Graysmith sets out to write her story, but realizes that there's not really a whole lot there.  She was a nudist?  Great.  She had the most exquisite breasts?  Well, that's cool, but this is a book, not a movie, and you can only describe her "erect, reddish pencil eraser" nipples so many times. 

So, in order to flesh the story out, he throws in this story about murderer Busch who Graysmith originally sets up to be the infamous "Bouncing Ball Strangler" who was tormenting women in Los Angeles in the 1960s.  But, the most ridiculous thing is that by the end of the book, Busch likely wasn't the Bouncing Ball Strangler and that whole aspect of the tale was just a tease.  Busch was just your regular, run-of-the-mill crazy murderer...totally not cool enough to get a nifty moniker from the media.

Yes, there were some interesting Hitchcock anecdotes to be had here, but they come in the book's first three chapters and after that, I couldn't have cared less.

Just painful stuff.  Really awful.