Vera Miles, the Actress Hitchcock Planned a Career Around — and Lost

Vera Miles

Photo: Lustre Crème Shampoo / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 23, 1930 Boise City, Oklahoma, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Psycho, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The best-known thing Alfred Hitchcock ever said about Vera Miles was a complaint. She had become pregnant, he told François Truffaut, “just before the part that was going to turn her into a star. After that, I lost interest. I couldn’t get the rhythm going with her again.” The part was the lead in Vertigo, a film he had shaped as her showcase, and it went to Kim Novak. Miles told the same story in fewer words and with no visible wound: “He wanted to make me into a superstar, but I just wasn’t interested.”

Between those two sentences sits a career Hollywood has never filed correctly. Miles worked for John Ford twice and for Hitchcock three times, carried a run of Disney family pictures and spent four decades in television, yet she is remembered for one role: Lila Crane, the sister who walks up to the house on the hill in Psycho because nobody else will. Since the death of Pat Hitchcock, the director’s daughter, she has been the last surviving member of that cast.

Even her birthday needed correcting. Christopher McKittrick, whose biography Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away appeared last year, assembled census sheets, a 1958 arrival record and a divorce file to show that Vera June Ralston arrived in Boise City, Oklahoma, on August 23, 1930, and not in 1929, as reference books had printed for half a century. The family soon went back to Kansas. She grew up in Pratt and Wichita, worked nights as a Western Union operator-typist and graduated from Wichita North High School in 1948, the year she was crowned Miss Kansas and finished third runner-up at Miss America. Hollywood already had an actress called Vera Ralston, so she kept the surname of her first husband, the stuntman Bob Miles.

Los Angeles was slow to want her. She took uncredited bits, among them a chorus girl in Two Tickets to Broadway, a musical starring Janet Leigh, the woman whose sister she would play nine years later. “I was dropped by the best studios in town,” she once recalled. A Warner Bros. contract brought Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle, opposite Gordon Scott, whom she later married, and Hitchcock tested her nerve on television as an unstable young bride in “Revenge”, the pilot episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Then came 1956. Ford cast her in The Searchers as Laurie Jorgensen, the girl who waits years for Jeffrey Hunter while John Wayne hunts across the frontier. Hitchcock gave her Rose Balestrero in The Wrong Man, the wife who comes apart while Henry Fonda’s falsely accused musician is fed through the justice system. It is the more frightening performance of the two, and the less seen.

In 1957 Hitchcock signed her to a five-year personal contract, and the press was told she would succeed Grace Kelly, who had left films for Monaco. Vertigo was meant to prove it. Production slipped, Miles became pregnant, and the role passed to Novak. When Miles was free again, Hitchcock kept his new star. Three years later he gave Miles Lila Crane anyway, and once Janet Leigh’s Marion is gone from Psycho, it is Lila, impatient and practical and unafraid of a locked door, who drives the film down to the fruit cellar.

The cover of her biography uses the standard phrase, the Hitchcock blonde who got away, and the standard account follows from it: bad timing, a director’s pique, a career that stalled. That version flatters Hitchcock more than it describes her. Promoting a sequel decades later, Miles told The Spokesman-Review that Hitchcock “had a bit of a Pygmalion complex” and that she had turned down the makeover. The price was real. She never got the prestige vehicle that resets an actress’s value, and much of the 1960s went to Disney comedies and guest spots. What she refused was the job of becoming a second Grace Kelly, and a refusal is a different story from a loss.

Ford brought her back in 1962 for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as Hallie, the woman courted by John Wayne and James Stewart, whose choice between them carries the film’s verdict on how the West was settled. Television absorbed the rest of the decade: The Twilight Zone, the first episode of The Fugitive, two hours of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. For Disney she made Follow Me, Boys! with Fred MacMurray. In Hellfighters she played the mother of Katharine Ross, who was nine years younger, and her scenes as Wayne’s wife in The Green Berets ended up on the cutting-room floor. In 1973 she went toe to toe with Peter Falk in Columbo as a cosmetics queen who commits murder.

In 1983 she returned to Lila, now Lila Loomis, in Psycho II, beside Anthony Perkins; they were the only stars of the original to come back. Three episodes of Murder, She Wrote followed, the last of them in 1991, and the 1995 thriller Separate Lives was her final screen role. After it she left the industry and public life.

Miles married four times: to Bob Miles, with whom she had two daughters; to Gordon Scott, father of her son Michael; to the actor Keith Larsen, father of her son Erik; and briefly to the filmmaker Robert Jones. She is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When Jessica Biel prepared to play her in Hitchcock, the 2012 film about the making of Psycho, it was Miles’s grandson, the actor Jordan Essoe, who met with her.

The corrected birth date and the first full biography are the latest revisions to her record, and both push in the same direction, away from the woman who lost Vertigo and toward the one who decided what she would not become. In every screening of Psycho, it is still her hand that reaches for the chair in the cellar.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho, John Ford, The Searchers, Vera Miles, Vertigo

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