Redheads, ya gotta love ‘em.

First time I lay eyes on the fabulous Marli Renfro with her flaming hair and “oceanic eyes,” I’m a 16 year-old kid at the Roosevelt Drive-in, Langhorne, Pa.

On the marquee is advertised this “adults-only” movie obscurity called The Wacky Playboy. [At drive-in movies featuring adult fare you were considered an adult if you could drive in, assuming you were behind the wheel of a car.]

And there’s Renfro – her character’s name in the movie is Hans O’Toole, and she’s up there on the screen in glorious black and white. Renfro’s wearing a bikini and black pumps and doing a seductive shimmy dance for some bozo palming himself off as a big shot in a mansion he borrowed from a buddy for the weekend to impress Renfro and her fellow models.

It’s a comedy, but only for the outrageous burlesque-based sexual puns and innuendos being tossed around. Curiously, none of Renfro’s biographies, such as they are, even mention this movie. However, Renfro’s bump and grind performance is making me ache real bad. I think to myself then and there, I wanna be in a business where beautiful women like this take their clothes off and make me ache.

Be careful what you wish for.

Marli later stripped delightfully naked, in technicolor, for Francis Ford Coppola in a nudie flick called Tonight for Sure, about a mad bomber in Las Vegas. It’s a scene to which I sometimes moistened myself upon repeat viewings. Other than that, I’d get to see her from time to time in many of the men’s mags of the era. Like Ace and Escapade and Adam, the predecessor of Adam Film World. Renfro certainly got around.

Renfro was quite popular because she looked way different from the other bleach blonde Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren clones taking their clothes off. Maybe it’s still true, but I remember guys bonding with those pin-up models in ways inconceivable today.

[Because of the all the competition to show skin, it wasn’t mere coincidence that Mansfield finally had to bare it all in Promises Promises, with Van Doren upping the ante in Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt and Monroe going naked in her last film Something’s Got to Give which was never released thanks to the Kennedy brothers and her untimely death.]

In Marli’s heyday, I recalled reading an accompanying biog piece to one of her mens mag photo sets. It claimed she was Janet Leigh’s body double in Psycho. I figured, yeah, this is bullshit. Most of those bios were, with most of the models being given obviously made up names, probably to thwart stalkers.

[Another memorable glamour gal Judy Justice, for instance, would show up in one pictorial with that name then as Carol Dean in another with a totally different “life” saga told in an amazing three paragraphs of hipster bachelor pad language. You had to take notes to keep up with the players, which I did. I knew all the chicks who were taking their clothes off.]

Surprisingly, it turned out that the Renfro-Psycho skinny was actually on the level. Playboy even maximized the hype when they later shot Marli bathing in a shower stall for one of its covers. Because Renfro was so well known, Playboy at first was at odds using her, since it was selling its product on the unknown girl-next-door concept. But the Psycho storyline was impossible to be dismissed. Marli was getting her 15 minutes.

Now, 50 years later, we have the fact that Renfro [her actual name was Marlys Annelle Renfro] has been resurrected from pretty girl obscurity with a book titled, most aptly, The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shower [Berkley Books, NY]. You might also remember author Robert Graysmith as being the one who revealed TV star Bob Crane’s sordid sex life in Auto Focus a book which later became a really bad movie.

In Renfro’s case, rumor over the years was that she, like many an aspiring model in LA seeking fame and stardom, came to a foul end, hers allegedly at the hands of some sicko-creep momma’s boy named Sonny Busch. Think of the stereotypical goofball pulling wings maniacally off of flies, this was Sonny. Yet going one better, Sonny would crucify live critters to a wall to see how far he could stretch their limbs or wings out in a painful agony.

Ironic, even scarier than his relationship with his mother, was the fact that Busch was an even more messed up product of the Korean War with a dishonorable discharge and an Anthony Perkins lookalike.

Perkins as the creepy Norman Bates was Janet Leigh’s co-star in Psycho but it would be years before Leigh would finally admit in her own book that Renfro was her stand-in for that infamous shower scene, what with its 80 camera set ups and resulting 45-second montage of quick cuts, close-ups, wide angles and peek-a-boo flashes of naked flesh.

Tangential to the fact that while Renfro was cinematically being stabbed in a shower, Sonny Busch was off murdering LA women often in gruesome copycat scenarios reminiscent of the shower scene.

The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shower, among other curious aspects of Renfro’s life, details at great length how Hitch with an elaborately constructed story board to work from, directed one of the most iconic if not shocking and most talked about moments in cinematic history. Not to also mention brilliant.

Because if you watch that scene, even minutely, you’d really have no clue to the smoke and mirrors unless given the heads-up that Hitch, like a master magician, was pulling off a switch and a resultant grand illusion.

I haven’t reached the part yet in the book where Busch and Renfro’s lives were supposed to have collided, but the first half of Graysmith’s book is coming off like a James Ellroy LA crime noir complete with a movie buff’s appetite for chatty gossip and copious behind-the-scenes detail.

Hitchcock, who was supposed to have put up $850,000 of his own money to shoot Psycho because Paramount wouldn’t back him [and he very much resented it], elected to shoot in black and white for a more obvious reason: the blood factor. Blood was less objectionable in black and white considering the overbearing censorship he had to deal with, and Hitchcock on a relative Five & Dime budget accomplished all this with the simple trick of an offbeat camera angle, a retractable knife and chocolate syrup [because of its consistency] issuing from plastic squeeze bottles.

Besides having little or no recourse with the dollars [he got Leigh on the cheap and she was thrilled to do it], Hitchcock also apparently wanted the self-satisfaction of accomplishing what Roger Corman and William Castle did on their small budgets. Plus the fact that Hitchcock, whether true or not, sought to one-up Henri-Georges Clouzot’s bathroom scene from the thriller Diabolique.

Graysmith, likewise, paints Hitchcock as having a “lascivious schoolboy attitude” towards women as he and a naked Renfro apparently had a very good rapport on the set. Hitchcock in other renderings comes off as a cold martinet who had little time for actors, but not so in Graysmith’s account.

In fact, just the opposite, where a story, right out of Hitchcock’s film Rear Window, is told how Hitch once got Grace Kelly, on a whim, to strip naked for him while he watched her through a telescope. What Hitchcock was doing on his end of the lens isn’t mentioned, but one might presume.

For her part, Renfro comes off as an educated, erudite, well read young woman who opted for designer clothes, filet mignon, medium rare hamburgers and champagne. She also loved classical music and could hold her own very well in social circumstances.

Built like one, obviously, Renfro was no Hollywood bimbo, though apparently she turned down Perkins’ advances. [Wasn’t he gay with Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter as alleged lovers?] All because she was dating a fellow nudist from the Sun Dial Club in Los Angeles at the time, she told Perkins. Now there’s a well conceived, intelligent reason for rejection.

Renfro, who didn’t mind being naked, evidently had some pretty traditional views about the sex act even though she also dated her share of celebrities like actor Hugh O’Brien and comedian Lenny Bruce.

When Hitchcock realized that it would be a near impossibility to use Leigh all the way through the shower scene because of the nudity factor [you weren’t even allowed to show a belly button], a quick call was put out to find a stand in. Mario Caselli, a Hollywood photographer and Playboy contributor, recommended Renfro who generally got $25 an hour and $150 a day. She was paid $500 for her work on Psycho. Renfro never used an agent and always repped herself.

Besides being a model, Renfro was also a chorus dancer, with a matching 7 ½ size foot to Leigh’s. [Hitchcock was a foot fetishist, apparently, and a close-up of feet in the scene was important to him.] Renfro also was the same height as Leigh, 5’ 3” and had a near matching figure, 36-23-35.

But because Renfro had strawberry blond hair [her nose freckles had to be touched up continually], she was required to wear a short cropped wig, matching Leigh’s hair style in the scene which took about a week and a half to finish.

Because of certain close-ups of her hands, Renfro was also a little self conscious about the fact that she had lost a finger on her right one due to a lawn mower accident when she was a child. It was re-attached successfully but still noticeable, she felt. Hitchcock, who joked about Renfro losing it from picking her nose, told her not to worry.

Because of the nudity, it was supposed to have been a closed set but was anything but with bleachers set up to accommodate the leering press. Which apparently irritated Renfro but to what end Graysmith doesn’t elaborate, other than to say that once people got over the shock value, the nude girl-thing got pretty boring after awhile. Not uncommon to the way a porn shoot would strike the curious on looker.

On a 42-day overall schedule, shooting of the shower scene commenced December 18, 1959 and by New Year’s weekend, the editing of it was complete. Graysmith even mentions how a 16 year-old Michael Douglas would be hanging around the editing bay stupefied by what he was watching come together on the Movieola.

Once the film was completed, Hitchcock arranged a viewing for Paramount’s Luigi Luraschi who headed the censorship dept. Shouting wildly, Luraschi was convinced he saw a breast but Hitchcock convinced him otherwise, that it was a trick of his dirty mind.

In all, Psycho broke several other taboos including showing a toilet [and a flushing one at that] for the first time ever on screen. One moment, however, was lost. A fleeting shot of Renfro’s naked ass was eventually deleted- the only sequence from the shower scene that had to positively go.

What his crew especially liked about Hitchcock, no fan of rehearsals, was that he generally wrapped up a working day by 6 pm and was considered very casual in his approach to directing. Smoking cigars and talking about politics and baseball between takes, Hitchcock felt he wasn’t directing actors so much as manipulating his audience.

“There’s no terror in the bang,” he said. “Only in the anticipation of it.”