Anthony Perkins

Hollywood tried to market him as the All-American boy next door but it was a tough, if not impossible, sale.  He was anything but that.  When his acting was free of his peculiar mannerisms he wasn't a bad actor at all but he had facial tics, darting eyes, halting language, fingernails to chew and long arms and legs that he didn't seem able to control. He was 6'2" and major skinny.  He reminded me of some sort of neurotic crane.

The sad thing about all his mannerisms was the weirdness it projected and unhappily would keep him from achieving the leading man status he wanted.  Romantic, leading men needed to exude a self-confidence that he could never seem to manage.    

It didn't take long for Hollywood to catch on to the fact that Tony Perkins was gay.  Unfortunately he arrived in the movie capital when it was still not alright to be so inclined.  Of course, he did everything he could to throw off suspicions in his effort to hide but he was so nervous and goofy about it that he attracted even more attention.  The really sad thing is that he never wanted to be gay.  He was ashamed and uncomfortable about it... always.  

Never exactly easy to cast, his generally odd demeanor, especially after Psycho, meant that he was hired to play offbeat characters for the remainder of his career. He would eventually get all the calls for mama's boys, homophobes, neurotics and nasty villains.   

He was born in New York in 1932 to then-famous Osgood Perkins, one of the most respected stage and screen actors of his time, and his wife, the latter of whom had a profound influence on the young boy's life.  Tony resented that he didn't see much of his father and many times wished him dead.  When the boy was five, his father did die and the youngster was riddled with guilt.  He apparently had a child's version of a nervous breakdown.  Some would say he never truly recovered from his father's death.

He had always been very close to his mother, partially because his father was gone so much and partially because she was a controlling, manipulative and suffocating presence.  He said she even controlled his thoughts and feelings.  In later years he complained that when he was a young child she would caress him frequently, even massaging the inside of his thighs right up to his crotch. 

He knew, apparently, from early teen years that he wanted to be an actor and often stated that he wanted to be a better one than his father.  (It's speculative whether that was ever accomplished.)  He was highly educated, attending a number of schools including Columbia University and became a lifetime member of the famed Actors Studio.

He appeared in a slew of Broadway plays in his lifetime.  In the beginning he would be hired on at a theater to do anything from mopping floors and cleaning bathrooms to painting scenery and handling props.  He heard that actress Ruth Gordon's play about her early life was going to be filmed at MGM.  He had played the part in a stock production and wanted the movie role.

He shuffled on out to Hollywood and virtually rattled the gates at MGM until someone listened to him.  He got the role.  Jean Simmons played the title character, his girlfriend.  Spencer Tracy was the star.  The part was about a gawky, odd young kid and many would assume Perkins got the part because that's exactly what he was.  Tracy and director George Cukor were constantly annoyed with Perkins and his peculiar ways but he and Simmons had a bond.  As it turned out, the film, was not successful.

SImmons found him to be very funny and noted how he loved to talk although he was also a very good listener.  But she also said that he could suddenly say stop talking or would simply get up and leave.  Everyone knew he was overly-sensitive.

He was not as impressed with Hollywood as he had hoped he would be and he hightailed it back to Broadway where he replaced John Kerr in Tea and Sympathy. It's the story of a student who is ridiculed for his less-than-manly ways as he is taken under the wing of a headmaster's understanding wife.  It seemed like a part written especially for him and he received rave reviews.  He also appeared in a number of those classy live television shows.

Director William Wyler was starting to film Friendly Persuasion (1956), Jessamyn West's lovely story of a pacifist Quaker family during the Civil War.  Wyler had sent a scout to The Big Apple to search for talent for three of the young adult roles and Perkins was thrilled to get the part.  Fellow actors found him hardworking and sincere but detached.  He and his screen father, Gary Cooper, had a warm rapport during the filming and the older actor apparently had no idea Perkins was gay because he tried to fix him up with his daughter.  Cooper then said I think he'd do well to spend a summer on a ranch.  Perkins earned a best supporting acting Oscar nomination.  It was the only nomination in his career.

After James Dean's sudden death, his new studio, Paramount Pictures, thought that Perkins was his natural successor.  They certainly had some things in common (Actors Studio, sex lives, oddballs) but they were very different kinds of actors.  This idea quickly died.

For someone who was deep in that closet, he appeared to some remarkably cavalier about who he was seen with in public.  Fellow fledgling actors Scott Marlowe and Robert Francis were his frequent companions.  Then he met handsome Tab Hunter at the famed Chateau Marmont and they immediately began a relationship.

With boyfriend Tab Hunter

Apparently they didn't have a great deal in common but they lasted for two years.  They were frequently seen and more importantly photographed on dates with pretty beards.  And then in 1957, two problems arose which would signal the end of their relationship although they would always remain friendly.  One was the Hunter was outed by the salacious Confidential Magazine which sent shivers down the spines of Perkins and his new studio. 

The second incident involved Perkins's next movie, Fear Strikes Out (1957). It was the bio of Boston Red Sox baseball player Jimmy Piersall who suffered from bipolar disorder in a most public way.  It had been a television production starring Hunter and he wanted his studio, Warner Bros, to purchase the property for him.  He didn't like the movies he was offered and was dying to do something with a meaty part and he saw the Piersall story as the solution.  He tried to hide his disappointment when Paramount purchased it and gave it to his lover.

Perkins was deathly afraid to do the big mental breakdown scene, according to costar Karl Malden, likely because it was a little too close to home.  Perkins would spend much of his life in psychoanalysis and never particularly felt like he was going to be okay.  But Malden and much of the public felt he pulled it off.  Others carped he was not even slightly believable as a jock and that he displayed no emotional credibility.

I never found Perkins suitable for westerns but up next were two of them.  The Lonely Man (1957) paired him with an old New York buddy, Jack Palance.  Can you imagine more dissimilar types but there they were playing father and son?  It was said that Perkins had developed a bad case of staritis on the set.  The film was not successful.

More to everyone's liking was The Tin Star (1957) opposite Henry Fonda.  Director Anthony Mann's film focuses on the relationship between Fonda as a former sheriff and now bounty hunter helping Perkins as an inexperienced sheriff manage a rough town.

Around 1957 he made some recordings.  He had a pleasant voice but the albums didn't create any great stir.

Perkins moved into a period where he costarred opposite popular female stars in films that were somewhere between not so good and what were they thinking.  He and Sophia Loren starred in Desire Under the Elms (1958) based on Eugene O'Neill's somber play about a young man's love affair with his stepmother.  Watching the earthy Loren get steamy with the beanpole Perkins was hard to fathom.  Reviews of the film and the actors were not good but someone thought they should be reunited four years later for another loser, Five Miles to Midnight. 

He appeared in his first comedy, The Matchmaker (1958), so that he could be done with his contract.  The basis for the later Hello Dolly, it was not a happy set.  The director was disappointed with Perkins, saying he wasn't deep.  How deep, one ponders, does an actor have to be to do The Matchmaker?  Perkins and his screen sweetheart, Shirley MacLaine, did not get along at all.  He hated the servitude of working at Paramount

Green Mansions (1959) is simply to horrid to delve into with seriousness.  It has something to do with a man who is visiting a Venezuelan forest and falls in love with Rima, the Bird Girl.  Apparently the book was much admired.  I'd say it's Perkins's worst movie but he made so many bad films that it's hard to pinpoint just one.  So let's say it is Audrey Hepburn's worst film, an ill-fated vanity project, I suspect, from her director and husband Mel Ferrer.

Producer-director Stanley Kramer's On the Beach (1959) is one of the best movies Perkins ever appeared in and his performance is also one of his finest...  almost devoid of tics, his halting speech or his deer-in-the-headlights look.  Lordy, he actually had a wife and a baby.   The story of global nuclear annihilation and some residents of the last stronghold, Australia, is done stunningly well.   He wished he'd had a bigger part but he was on his best behavior with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire.

Perkins wanted to have the title role in Parrish (1961) but apparently wasn't going to be considered while WB execs wanted Jane Fonda to do the film, marking her screen debut.  None of that worked out but both ended up in a rom-com, Tall Story (1960), which is a great deal about basketball.  Tony Perkins in a rom-com?  Tony Perkins dribbling?  It was made on the cheap and was somewhat of a joke on both their résumés.  I admit I've never seen it.

I did see Psycho (1960) and it was the zenith of Anthony Perkins's career and also became the film that ruined his career if not his life.  Oh, let's be clear, he was absolute perfection in it and because he was, people took a good hard look at him, pieced together all the weird stuff known about him and decided it was type-casting and he was to be avoided. 

In 1960 he moved to Paris and lived there for around five years.  He felt he needed to get away from America and re-establish himself as an actor.  He loved the French outlook on life and the general European way of live and let live.  His chief motivation was to live freer as a gay man and certainly without the scrutiny he would never get accustomed to.

Phaedra (1962) seemed like Desire Under the Elms all over again with Perkins having an affair with his stepmother.  But it was done in the Greek Isles which is far better than a dreary Paramount sound stage.  Melina Mercouri fascinated me.  I'm not sure what I think of her acting abilities but she set a movie screen on fire.  She and Perkins became great friends for life.  Platonic though the relationship was, be bought her panties for gifts and she kept a framed photo of him next to her bedside.  Only in Hollywood... and Greece. 

Sometimes I feel as though I'm the only person on the planet who didn't like Orson Welles's The Trial (1962) but like it I did not.  Maybe I should say I just didn't get it, didn't connect, was confused, lost and ultimately I just didn't care about these strange people and their bizarre happenings and thoughts.  Even the stimulating presence of Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau and Elsa Martinelli couldn't save it.  I know some whose eyes roll into the back of their heads when they sing its praises.  Perkins thought it was the best film he ever made.  Of course he did.

When he returned to the states, he moved in with a female friend and they lived together platonically for about 10 years.  He would always have a thing for older women who could mother him.  He and his own mother were distant.  She was having her own relationship with a woman. 

I was rather hypnotized by Pretty Poison (1968) where he was most appropriately cast opposite Tuesday Weld who, although I enormously like her, surely traveled down some of the same winding roads he did.  What a pair.  And to hear they didn't get along seems almost criminal.  They should have been comrades, cop partners, having each other's back.  He plays an arsonist fresh out of a mental institution who becomes enamored of a teenage girl who wants to kill her mother.  I liked the dark story and thought Perkins and Weld played neurotic especially well.

With Tuesday Weld... what a pair

Catch 22 (1970) came nowhere close to being the success the book was, despite the helming by the new genius director, Mike Nichols, and an all-star cast.  Perkins plays a chaplain in a story of a soldier desperately trying to be declared insane during WWII so he can get out of flying missions.  The zany humor and the surreal nature of the piece made it infinitely more popular years later.

Perkins took on the role of a gay man paid by his mother to stay married to a woman in Play It As It Lays (1972) based on Joan Didion's take on Tinseltown existentialism.  Obviously it was but one more offbeat role which everyone, critics and public alike, were coming to expect from him.  Weld 

requested him as her costar and they got on far better here than they had previously.  

Perkins had enjoyed a long-term relationship with dancer-choreographer Grover Dale and most people knew it although, as usual, Perkins wanted to keep it under wraps because of the ever-present threat of his career being ruined.  Apparently he didn't realize his career was already on that trajectory.  He'd had other relationships that lasted for some time but his m.o. and usual habitat in New York was Times Square with the offers of the kinky sex that he favored.

He had a penchant for rough sex, the rougher the better.  He loved role-playing and nothing more than hiring two hustlers to break into his apartment and rape him.  Humiliation, lighted cigarettes and bodily fluids were part of his repertoire.  No wonder the all-American boy nextdoor thing didn't work out.

His extensive drug use was noted.  He would be a pot smoker most of his adult life and a heavy one in the last part of it.  Cocaine was part of the thrill and so was LSD for a short period.

Perkins and Paul Newman had been buddies since they, too, met at the Chateau Marmont.  Those who studied at the Actors Studio always had a bond.  They shared the desire to keep their private lives private.  They had worked together before, along with Joanne Woodward and Laurence Harvey, in WUSA in 1970.

Newman cooks while Perkins jingles his coins

Newman was co-producing a western, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), with John Huston directing.  I thought the story of the west's famous hanging judge was just a mess... too many characters, too many side stories, an absence of judicious editing, a rare Newman performance lacking excitement.  On the other hand, there was Ava Gardner and Jacqueline Bisset.  And Roddy McDowall was there and so was Tab Hunter in his one scene.  The Old West was never so gay.  The ex-lovers hadn't seen one another in 10 years and only now had a brief moment.

Perkins had been in therapy for years, 20 of them with one Mildred Newman.  She became the co-author of the popular How to be Your Own Best Friend.  It's not likely their relationship would have been approved by her alma mater but she was another older woman.  He had so many issues... his complicated feelings for his parents, his neuroses, nervousness, his strange career and always, but always, how to shed his homosexuality.  

That last one was the one subject on which he and his too-cozy therapist totally agreed.  In fact, she said all of his problems were based on his being gay and she set off on a mission to cure him which included electro-shock treatments and encouraging him to have an affair of several days with future Dallas actress Victoria Principal on the Bean movie.  He was 39 and she was the first... woman.  Newman embraced the philosophy that it just took the right woman.

Perkins was a great lover of games, particularly word games.  I know he and I shared a great love for the word game, Jotto.  Someone else who loved games and whodunits was his buddy Stephen Sondheim and together they wrote the screenplay for what would become a great sleuth movie, The Last of Sheila (1973).  The experience was good for Perkins's fragile ego.   Good job, boys, I loved it.

In 1972 at a wrap party for Play It As It Lays, Perkins met freelance photographer Berry Berenson.  She was the granddaughter of Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the sister of model-actress Marisa (Cabaret) Berenson.  They married in 1973 when she was three months' pregnant.

Interesting that his former lover, Grover Dale, also married a woman around the same time.  It was catching.

Ah, at last he's straight. Dr. Newman was right... it just takes the right woman.  Now Perkins talked about formerly being gay.  A son would be born and shortly thereafter another.  By all I've read, it was a vibrant family relationship.  She was good for him.  They had fun together.  He absolutely loved being a father and he wanted to be a better one than his father had been.

 

It had been years since he appeared in a mainstream movie but he joined another all-star cast for the superb Agatha Christie blockbuster, Murder on the Orient Express (1974). He played Richard Widmark's fey secretary.  It is arguably, perhaps, the last good film he made.

Mahogany (1975) came about in an effort to help turn singer Diana Ross into a movie star.  It's an old-fashioned woman's picture set in the world of high fashion.  Perkins's role had been rewritten some after he signed on to turn his character into a Norman Bates clone.  He is sadistic, controlling and homophobic while also playing the role as super-swish.  It's rather bizarre, helped immensely by a scene in which Billy Dee Williams beats him up as Perkins laughs.

In the 80s it's likely Berry encouraged him to just get a job... do something, get involved.  He'd been depressed.  So what did the actor who wanted to get away from Norman Bates do?  He made three sequels to Psycho in the form of Psycho II and Psycho III in the 1980s and in 1990 a TV movie, Psycho IV.  It had come to that.  The remainder of his films are not worth chatting up... more wacko stuff, mainly in projects no one has ever heard of.  For a man who spent his life wanting to be a better actor than his father, it certainly hadn't ended in a way he would have anticipated.

None of his confidents believed that he had given up male sex but it was never exactly a table topic.  Perkins still liked to say

it was in his past.  He had talked about how horrible AIDS was.  He certainly couldn't stop talking about it.

Some were shocked when he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1990 and some, of course, were not.  Two years later he would die from the hideous disease.  Unfortunately, he found out he had it by reading it in The National Enquirer.  How awful that would be.

I've often considered that Anthony Perkins didn't want to be an actor anymore than he wanted to be gay.  I mean he was a very shy, uncomfortable, fidgety, neurotic man who didn't want to draw attention to himself and spent much of his life hiding.  Does that sound like the kind of person who wants to be an actor?  Perhaps he just had some pathological need to be better than this father at the father's occupation.  Too bad he wasn't an accountant.

On September 11, 2001, Berry Berenson Perkins was on the plane that crashed into the Twin Towers.

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