Goddamn it, I don't know how to get one of these, but finding a picture of one was ecstatic enough. It even looks a bit like him.
Too bad they didn't make a Norman Bates, complete with wig and a little tiny knife.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Gay? Okay.
What is it about a certain kind of man, a certain kind of gay man, a certain kind of closeted gay man, a certain kind of famous closeted gay man, a certain kind of feyly-beautiful-as-a-youth-but-ageing-into-skin-the-texture-of-chipped-beef famous closeted gay man, that - oh, shit, let's skip this and get into Anthony Perkins again.
Older women devoured him, as seen in the above shot with the frighteningly carnivorous actress Melina Mercouri. It's not often a person other than a dentist gets to see someone's entire upper teeth. There is no record of his response. He did live with older women, but completely nonsexually. He was in the closet, eh? Do you see the look on his face in most of these pictures? Was that closet the size of Hollywood, or the size of the entire world?
Hey, I liked him anyway, but it's too bad he couldn't just be, that he had to try to be respectable so he could have kids and a home. He thought he couldn't have kids and a home with the men he loved, so picked a slightly butch woman who came from money. Fortunately she willingly revolved around him as if he were a particularly strange, remote planet with a strong gravitational pull.
I like that coat with the stripes, I like it a lot, but he looks to be on the verge of hysterics. In most of these shots, he hasn't even played Master Bates yet (master of his domain, perhaps even Master of the Universe). That last one, well, I had to throw that in to demonstrate the fact that he was not only a famous closeted gay man with, etc. etc. , but that he had quite possibly the longest neck in human history. In later years, he wore a concrete brace with little, what-do-you-call-those-things, epaulets or something, to keep his head from falling off. It was only partially successful. His head had a habit of rolling down the Hollywood hills all the way to the East coast and landing in Stephen Sondheim's garbage pail.
Do you know the weirdest fact about Tony Perkins? During his five seconds as an action hero in Disney's limp space epic, The Black Hole, there was an Anthony Perkins doll which would probably go for thousands on eBay if you could ever find one. But I'll bet Melina Mercouri ate every last one.
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Tinker, tailor, part 2
Yesterday I wrote about a strange connection I discovered when researching Irish gypsy/traveller culture: people referred to these often-reviled people as "tinkers", and I remembered that my Irish great-grandfather was a tinker/tinsmith.
It seemed unlikely he had anything to do with a culture that was looked down upon, until I remembered the greyhound cookie cutter he made, not a practical thing because the legs of the cookies always broke off. Then I found out in my research that these Irish "travellers" (tinkers?) traditionally raised and raced greyhounds.
The hair on my neck stood up. It was the weirdest feeling. Even weirder was the feeling when I googled "greyhound cookie cutters", expecting exactly nothing, and got at least a dozen images. Most showed the dog safely standing up, with only two legs (front and back fused together). This one came closest to my great-grandfather's tin artwork. Who knows what connection he may have had to greyhounds. Could it be that he was a "traveller", too?