If I had the presence of mind to start jacking off at an earlier age, Marli Renfro would certainly have been one of those women to have inspired me.
Again, this striking strawberry blond vixen’s name is lost to the current generation, but in the early Sixties, Renfro was the go-to-gal as far as the mens magazine culture was concerned. Hardly a publication of the time existed that Renfro wasn’t on the cover of.
Her real claim to fame, however, is when Alfred Hitchcock began looking for a body double to stand in for Janet Leigh in the iconic Psycho shower scene.
Because she was used to being naked around people, Renfro was Hitchcock’s obvious choice [he would flirt with her constantly on the set], but it was a widely held belief that she came to a tragic, if not ironic end at the hands of a Hollywood nutcase named Sonny Busch. Busch, who murdered a number of women in a psychotic killing spree about the same time the picture came out, was precisely the type of character, down to the mother fixation, as portrayed by Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Busch even bore a very startling resemblance to Perkins.
So for years, it was assumed that Renfro had been one of Busch’s victims because of her physical similarity to one of the dead girls. At least that was what Robert Graysmith, a journalist and fan of Renfro’s had assumed as well, until he began doing some investigative digging. The results of his findings was a provocative book titled “The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shower” in which Renfro doesn’t meet the fate that was generally ascribed to her.
For a lot of girls in the skin trade, it ends badly. At least where Renfro’s concerned, it did not. She winds up happily married, still alive, apparently, and at one time was even a contestant on Wheel of Fortune.
In her heyday, Marli Renfro also appeared in several skinflicks including Francis Ford Coppola’s Tonight For Sure. In his pre-Godfather period, Coppola assembled nudie flicks. Which is probably more accurate to say than “directed”.
Because Coppola, as a kid trying to make his mark in the competitive film world and still survive, generally took work of the seedy nature, his task of which, usually, was to make lemonade out of lemons.
In one instance, in a page right out of the Roger Corman school of filmmaking, Coppola was handed a project that was supposed to be a nudie Western. A bad one at that. To it, Coppola added a subplot involving a Peeping Tom, and the results are still an unmitigated mess but at least interesting to watch from a voyeur’s perspective.
In the Coppola footage, Renfro appears as a model looking for work and is required to take her clothes off. None of the models employed in the film speak a word, so don’t look for lost Academy award opportunities. Because the movie’s in color, Renfro’s flaming head of hair makes her a distinctive, striking, and can’t miss performance.
Renfro is also seen in another black & white nudie obscurity called The Wacky Playboy.
