Kim Novak played Kit Marlowe, which was the pseudonym that Harry Cohn, CEO of Columbia Studios, suggested she should change her name to when she was a young starlet. Novak supplied the writers other inside jokes when they were naming Kit's aliases: Kit's real name is Susan Cameron, the name of Novak's agent during her time on the set. Another alias, Madeleine McKittrick, was a combination of the first name of one of her characters in Vertigo and the McKittrick hotel on Eddy Street in San Francisco where Vertigo's Maddy lived.