Anthony Perkins: The PEOPLE Magazine Interview that "outed" him

 

Well, okay. . . I have a lot to say about all this, but I don't know where to start. Around the time Psycho II came out, and for no reason that I could comprehend, I began to be obsessed with Anthony Perkins. I had not even seen his masterful turn in the original Psycho - that came years later, and with it the realization that Psycho II was just a pale imitation, which Perkins seemed to be phoning in to help him pay the bills.

But from that point forward, I was seeking out Perkins' repertoire of movies on late night TV and in the VHS tapes (no, make that Beta!) that I could rent from the corner store. I became fascinated by this fairy-tale (excuse the pun) story of a man terrified of women, who admittedly DID have sex with men which he claimed felt "unreal", and who suddenly met this earth-mother paragon who completely set him free from the shackles of his (unreal-feeling) homoerotic impulses.

Well, that's pretty much it, isn't it? That's the myth, and it fit in well with the times and with the wild popularity of Mildred Newman. Her sappy self-help screed How to Be your Own Best Friend (which I dealt with in my last post) demonstrated that even someone as intelligent as Perkins could fall for an utter sham, since all his gay friends seemed to be doing the same thing. 

I didn't catch up with all this until - probably - Perkins' death from AIDS in the early 1990s. It all began to make sense to me then, and since then I have read two biographies: one sanitized and respectful, the other incredibly detailed and full of rather nasty gossip and hearsay. I had to average the two and guess at the rest. What the People article didn't say was that Perkins had had several long-term, committed relationships with men, most notably Tab Hunter and the dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, with whom he lived for years. (Sadly, Dale too fell for Mildred Newman's poisonous indoctrination.) 

It's too bad his close relationships with men, which obviously went far beyond casual pickups, were completely negated in this article. But what horrified his family and close friends was the way he "outed" himself as a man who for years and years had had sex with other men. His claim that his mother sexually abused him as a child (clearly, the reason he was so terrified of women) was also met with shock. Was he throwing in all these lurid details mainly to sell tickets? If so, it worked very well. 

Andy Warhol wryly observed in his infamous diary that he guessed Psycho II would make a lot of money, and that he found the People article hilarious because Perkins claimed his gay life was "all in the past". Somehow, I think Warhol and his whole erotic subculture knew him better than that. 

So how far have we come? It's been said that there are STILL no leading men in Hollywood who are openly gay. Only a straight actor can play a gay character. This was true when Tom Hanks played a man dying of AIDS in Philadelphia, but it seems equally true today. You just don't see gay playing gay. Too unbelievable, I guess.  Tom Cruise and his longtime companion John Travolta are still in the closet (with, presumably, that Scientology guy David Miscavige). 

I am a little embarrassed to admit that I ordered an extra copy of the Perkins issue from People, and kept it for years. The scan you see above, which I had to chop up and blow up to make it readable, came from a website. This thing is still around, along with the attitudes that still drive men and women to stay in the closet and live a secret life, or no life at all in which they can be truly themselves.

When Gay was NOT Okay: Anthony Perkins' Dilemma

 

The brilliant actor Anthony Perkins died of AIDS in 1990, after a long battle with his true nature. Back in the 1970s, unhappy in his career (mainly with being typecast as Norman Bates in Psycho) and feeling lonely and frustrated in his relationships, he took the advice of all his celebrity friends and began to see the avant-garde therapist of the day in hopes of curing his malaise.

According to Tony’s therapist Mildred Newman and her husband Bernard Berkowitz (authors of the wildly popular self-help bestseller How to Be your Own Best Friend),‘Analysts once thought that they had little chance of changing homosexuals’ preferences and had little success in that direction. But some refused to accept that and kept working with them, and we’ve found that a homosexual who really wants to change has a very good chance of doing so. Now we’re hearing all kinds of success stories. The nature of homosexuality hasn’t changed, but the way of looking at it has.’

Their incredibly insightful advice on how to find the road to happiness and self-acceptance:

‘When you do something that makes you feel bad inside, ask yourself if that’s the way you  want to feel. If not, stop doing what makes you feel that way. Instead, do the things that make you feel good about yourself. Love is an affirmation of the living, growing being in all of us.’ These sappy fridge-magnet platitudes damaged innumerable people who were looking for a way out of conflict with their sexual orientation.

Perkin’s friend Dodson Rader (also an unhappy client of Newman's for years) remembered a farcical occasion when Newman and her husband gave a party in their large duplex Manhattan apartment for all the gay men they believed to have cured.

‘The place was filled with about thirty couples, some of them very famous. Every one of them had a wife or girlfriend and they were all trying to prove to their shrink how happy they were in their new straight roles. About an hour and a half into the party, in walked the handsome young actor Barry Bostwick, who was starring in Grease, which had just opened on Broadway. Everybody stopped talking and stared at the door. It was astonishing. As the kid walked around the apartment, I noticed one guy after another would go over to him and slip him their phone numbers. Their sense of self-delusion was laughable’.

The programming (or de-programming) must have worked, for Perkins married socialite Berry Berenson in the late '70s and fathered two sons. But his secret double life never ended - it just went underground. When he tested positive for HIV/AIDS in the late1980s, his wife claimed she had no idea how he had contracted it. The disconnect in his life was profound, and it contributed to his early death. 

I'm sad to say that such forceful attempts to wrench around someone’s natural orientation haven’t ended. The religious right still persecutes anyone who does not match the one-man-one-woman-exclusively-forever ideal. They use Bible verses as projectile weapons to puncture any hope a gay person may have of attaining true self-acceptance. Conservative Christians still see repentance as the only cure, but isn’t the whole thing rather complicated, just like human beings themselves?

BUT NO, Mildred Newman says we can CHOOSE how we feel about everything! Feel bad about drinking alcohol? Don’t drink alcohol, drink Kool-Aid instead! (Or Flavor Ade, which worked well for Jim Jones and the People’s Temple.) The choice is yours. In any case, who needs detox or rehab? Doing something that makes you feel guilty or “bad” about yourself? Just stop doing it, and do something “nice” instead. So if you’re gay, just act straight for the rest of your life and you’ll be happy forever.

But in a significant way, Perkins won. After his death (and his funeral was attended by literally hundreds of his friends and supporters), he issued this statement to clarify the circumstances of his death: 

"I chose not to go public because, to misquote Casablanca, 'I'm not much at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of one old actor don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' There are so many who believe that this disease is God's vengeance, but I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness, and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cut-throat, competitive world in which I spent my life."

It's a bit of a trite statement to say "love wins", but sometimes, against the odds, and in the most unlikely of circumstances, it triumphs in the end. 

WHEN ROBOTS ATTACK! Best Scene in Disney's THE BLACK HOLE

Tony Perkins playing Norman Bates as a scientist who thinks he can defend himself against a killer robot with a file folder.

Anthony Perkins - Summertime Love

I cry when I hear this - no, not just a few tears but sobbing, full-on weeping, every single time, and just now when I heard it again. I am fascinated with Anthony Perkins and am once again making my way through a very difficult biography of him by Charles Winecoff. I say difficult because he really is presented warts and all, with an astounding degree of complexity and outright contradiction. He was so many things to so many people, some of them diametrically opposed, but all of it was real. Some of it was baffling and strange and even offputting, though he never violated his own integrity. So we have this fleeting, fragile two minutes in time from a musical everyone has forgotten. Greenwillow was a flop and only ran to near-empty houses for a few performances, and he had a cold when they did the original cast recording so there's a little catch in his voice on the high note at the end. He is speaking to us, just talking to us, telling us his soul, his complex and contradictory soul, in the simplest language you can imagine. Who can do that? No one else I can think of. Anyway, I haven't cried for a long time, not since those wretched dark deep nights of the pandemic when I thought the loneliness would never end. But this is different, and it's not like anything else I can even think of. I was sure it wouldn't affect me  this time - like every time - and within a few seconds I was sobbing.

Best death scene in film history!

Really and truly, this is the best. 

Being Alive

My relationship with this song is a strange one. Decades ago,  I used to watch Taxi, and I remembered an episode where Alex experiences an epiphany - has a near-death experience or something, and comes out the other side feeling superbly alive in every cell of his being. He sang a certain song - hell, I didn't even know what it was! But it recorded itself on my brain, stayed with me, until. . .

Then in the mid-'80s I was going through a Streisand phase, though I can barely stand her now, and the song seemed - it seemed - it seemed familiar, or did it? It may not have twigged at all that it was the same song Judd Hirsch sang on Taxi. It was later on, retroactively, that I made the connection. She sings the hell out of it, of course, but I've come to see her musical mannerisms as irritating.  Still. The power of the lyric was undeniable. Stephen Sondheim, for Christ's sake - it can't misfire altogether.

Tons of years had to go by, again, until I stumbled (again!) on this Dean Jones version. Dean freakin' JONES? The Disney guy, the wholesome goofier-version-of-Dick-Van-Dyke type of guy? I couldn't even imagine him singing a Broadway song like this one, singing it with haunted, even frightened eyes as Stephen (fucking!) Sondheim stood over him . . and singing it with such conviction and passion that I no longer want to hear anyone else sing it.

Ever.

There has to be something good about the internet - there is, actually, but with a lot of scum on the top and sludge on the bottom. Rediscovering something like this, something buried, can be compelling, but it all started with Judd Hirsch on Taxi - and then I forgot all about it.

Interestingly enough - or, at least, I find it so - Stephen Sondheim wrote this musical, Company, with Anthony Perkins in mind. The two were close friends, perhaps lovers, and this song wraps around Perkins' sensibilities very well, both in the fairly limited vocal range and the spare and even laconic sentiments. Perkins ducked away, citing other commitments, but many thought the Bobby character (with its veiled homosexual references) cut too close. The Dean Jones video was filmed, I think, as part of a TV special to demonstrate how an original cast recording is made, though I don't know if it was ever aired. 

The Greek chorus of friends in the song seems to be pushing the character out of a birth canal of fear and inhibition. I wonder if it really was that way with Perkins (and I confess I still have a "thing" for him), for he stated in an interview with People magazine that he never really felt close to another human being until he met his wife, Berry Berenson. And yet, and yet, there were both real and manufactured complications about his sexual orientation, as if that negated all the love and experiences they shared. And then there was the soul-shattering ending, Perkins dying far too young of AIDS, and Berry on one of the planes on 9-11. It has the dimensions of an epic love story ending in towering tragedy.

As I copied and pasted these lyrics, I decided to centre them, because I felt like something was going to arise from it, some shape. And it did. The verses are like chalices to me, maybe even communion cups, but in some cases more like trees. Some of them seem to leap upwards like dancers, others like dolphins. Not many poems will do this, take life and move, even beyond the words themselves.

So, this is the song Tony Perkins never sang, that was written for him, and about him.

Someone to hold you too close.

Someone to hurt you too deep.

Someone to sit in your chair,

To ruin your sleep,

(Dialogue)

Someone to need you too much.

Someone to know you too well.

Someone to pull you up short,

And put you through hell,

(Dialogue)

Someone you have to let in,

Someone whose feelings you spare,

Someone who, like it or not,

Will want you to share

A little, a lot.

(Dialogue)

Someone to crowd you with love.

Someone to force you to care.

Someone to make you come through,

Who'll always be there,

As frightened as you,

Of being alive,

Being alive.

Being alive.

Being alive!

(Dialogue)

Somebody hold me too close.

Somebody hurt me too deep.

Somebody sit in my chair,

And ruin my sleep,

And make me aware,

Of being alive.

Being alive.

Somebody need me too much.

Somebody know me too well.

Somebody pull me up short,

And put me through hell,

And give me support,

For being alive.

Make me alive.

Make me alive.

Make me confused.

Mock me with praise.

Let me be used.

Vary my days.

But alone,

Is alone,

Not alive.

Somebody crowd me with love.

Somebody force me to care.

Somebody let me come through,

I'll always be there,

As frightened as you,

To help us survive,

Being alive.

Being alive.

Being alive!

And this, from the Broadway musical Greenwillow. This song is not like any of the others, so minimal it barely exists, with a glorious setting like a rich autumn day. Somehow he glides along it and does not mess with it or damage it, but lets it be gloriously whole.  And every time I hear it, I cry. Every time. I say, nah, not this time! I'm not going to cry this time. I just listened to it again, and my eyes are stinging and I sobbed again, and it was once more real, and alive.

Star-crossed: the life and times of Anthony Perkins

I keep coming back to Tony Perkins, and have never been sure why. The reasons are complicated: he was mysterious, misunderstood, and summed up in my  mind what it means to be human: conflicted, passionate, vitriolic, kind, altruistic, selfish, brilliant, obtuse, and on and on the list goes.

And he was cute, too, when he was young and first became a big star. Cute in a way women loved, right up to and including the gorgeous, girlish Berry Berenson (sister of supermodel Marisa), who married him in spite of the open secret of his homosexuality. They had two sons and stayed together for 20 years, until he died of AIDS. Tragically, Berry was on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Centre on 9-11.

There was something star-crossed about both of them, I think.

I've read lots of stuff about him, including Charles Winecoff's Split Image, which in some ways is the best bio of anyone I've ever read, but which in other ways offends the hell out of me. Never has a biographer been so thorough in ferreting out the real Perkins, penetrating the million smokescreens he put up, but then he wrecks it: he quotes "an unnamed source" who claims to have been Perkins' lover, outlining in excruciating, completely unnecessary detail what he liked to do in bed. Would a heterosexual actor have been subjected to such humiliation, and from a completely unreliable kiss-and-tell source who probably sought some sort of payoff?

I found another book about him, Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life by Ronald Bergan, and I pounced on it. I thought it might be bland compared to Winecoff's claw-sharpening meow-fest, but on the first page it grabbed me because of a surprisingly bang-on description of his unusual body type.


The author was speaking to the actor backstage after a performance. "He was stripped to the waist, revealing the smooth-skinned svelte figure of a man half his age - he was forty-seven at the time - and what the actor William Chappell described as 'an Egyptian torso, unnaturally broad in the shoulder and small in the waist and so flat it is almost one-dimensional.' Oh yes.

In spite of his great natural talent and versatility as an actor, there was a strangeness about Tony, a remoteness: he was the perennial outsider, but didn't seem to mind it, which made him even more odd. He wasn't a warm actor, but had certain abilities that were unique and eerie. In the Ken Russell turkey Crimes of Passion, he plays a demented minister addicted to sex toys and porn. Kathleen Turner plays a part-time hooker, and at the height of his Byzantine fits of craziness they have this conversation:

"If you're a minister, I'm Snow White. Who are you? You're not a reverend. Who are you?"

"I'm you."

Yes. Tony was us. He needled, he probed, he burrowed inside, he smiled boyishly as he found the subtle flaw and put his hand into it. The cracked cup, the broken building, the chipped tooth, all these were the province of Perkins and his calmly detached fascination. He snooped around the edges of the human condition, not unaffected of course, and capable of a paradoxical deep devotion to friends and family, but still the perennial observer. Why did people like him so much, care so much about a man who seemed almost cold? And they did, they loved him. As he lay dying of AIDS, literally gasping out his last, friends camped around his bedside in sleeping bags. Hundreds of people came to his memorial service, which lasted hours.


Tony loved dogs, but he was definitely more cat than dog, sniffing delicately, warily drawing back. And sometimes lunging forward in almost predatory sensuality. Bergan claims he had charm, but in the original, supernatural sense, a spellbinding power.

A friend once tried to describe his unusual body type with its coathanger shoulders and long, gangly arms, which made his head seem proportionally small: he resembled "some sort of great prehistoric bird". Exotic, a little scary, impossible to comprehend, echoing all those stuffed owls and ravens of Psycho. Oh yes, Psycho, we were getting to that. Or were we?

(BLOGGER'S NOTE. Having just posted about the Anthony Perkins action figure - and I've been looking for a good photo of that '80s artifact for a long time - I thought of this piece that I wrote SIX YEARS ago, and felt I was within my rights to dust it off. Unlike most of my longer pieces, it actually got some views. I used a huge font which I felt I had to reduce. The photos have been changed almost completely.)

Anthony Perkins action figure

I'm psycho, too

We all go a little mad sometimes

A strange animation. This was put together from a half-dozen still pictures gleaned from Psycho, the famous parlour scene in which Norman eerily proclaims, "We all go a little mad sometimes." As you can see, there is a frame or two missing here and there.

This was an unusual project. I tried to get as many facial expressions out of six frames as possible. Norman's kind of a strange character anyway, so watching him twitch around and go from ranty to sweet in a nanosecond is nothing new.

But it was also an eerie feeling. These are just still pictures taken from a movie from more than 50 years ago. Yet there are moments - seconds - when something seems to be happening. Some kind of movement, an integrity between the frames that creates - something. Animation fools the eye. Film itself is an illusion, a lot of still pictures that the eye or the brain kindly blurs together and interprets as motion. It's also kind of strange that the background is so similar, though the fact that it kind of seethes in and out adds a special weirdness. The pictures aren't all framed exactly the same, though they're closer than most groups of movie stills even approach. Only one of them is way out of proportion, but the expression was so good that I had to use it. It gives the whole thing a weird lurching quality that I like.

Norman seems to be yelling "stop!" - or is it "stab"?