Mother's not herself today

Howdy, ma'am

Shut up about it, I love him

Wait a minute, while I finish wiping my eyes. Which is always what happens when I listen to this, the most beautiful thing I've ever heard sung by a man who was beautiful and doomed.

Shouldn't say that, of course, because he DID live for 60 years and have a career and a loving wife and two fine sons and an endless parade of male lovers, some of them serious. His was a restless questing mercurial nature, anger and lightning in a bottle, a storm focused through a magnifying glass that would burn holes in people if he didn't like them.

I get obsessed, then unobsessed with Anthony Perkins, see him occasionally on Turner Classics (most recently in Goodbye, Again, in which he plays the most charming and doomed young man, someone you can't take your eyes off of though there is something about him that is always passing strange).

He comes around and over again, planetary, apogee, perigee, apogee. A few moons have sifted out of him by now and whirl around him in ebony-polished space, deep dimensional. Has he found his wife yet? Is that the way it happens? Berry Berenson was one of the doomed airline passengers on 9-11, and I cannot imagine a more horrible way to end a bittersweet life, the plane dropping lower and lower, people screaming and praying, the Trade Centre building getting closer and closer as everyone moans with the sickening realization that this can only end one way.

Never mind all that. You can tell what sortofa quirky following someone has on the internet by how many gifs you can find. Look up Gregory Peck, you won't find any. George Clooney? Forgetaboutit. But Perkins, hey. I have a whole storehouse of them and since I feel him in the room right now, as I always do when I listen to the devastating pure sincere notes of his transcendent singing, I want to try them out to see if they move now.

They didn't use-da before. Does this mean anything, I wonder?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Tony Perkins: do I really need a reason?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u7ynH1Jw_0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ita6MlbSH8I&feature=related

Look, Mother, I'm making a few bucks off self-caricature!

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.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Alive

I've been on a bit of a Stephen Sondheim kick lately, maybe because of his longtime connection with Anthony Perkins, one of my perennial preoccupations/happy obsessions. These two were similar in that they were both intricate, impossible, brilliant, and (in spite of their vast creative contribution) essentially unknowable.

Though Perkins was prematurely snatched at 60, Sondheim is still with us at 80-some. One of his many legendary shows was Company (1970), in which T. P. almost played Bobby, the still point at the centre of a comedy of couples. When it comes to relationships and love, Bobby won't commit, but committed people (or people who should be committed) swirl all around him.

Somehow Tony Perkins wasn't available. Another commitment, you see. Or he didn't really need to "play" Bobby; he was too busy being him.

I tried to find a really good version of an incredible song, Being Alive, Bobby's final soliloquy/aria/heartsong. I went through Bernadette Peters, whom I've always loved; Patty LuPone; Barbra Streisand; even Julie Andrews. Nada, naynay, nonenonenone, can't get into it and am almost at the point of giving up.

Then I stumbled on. . . this.

It's Dean Jones, yes, that Dean Jones from the Love Bug series and innumerable other Disney flicks. I didn't even know he could sing. It's a recording session, probably the original cast recording judging by the fact that Sondheim looks like a middle-aged juvenile delinquent. But what Jones does here is beyond singing. He opens his mouth, his eyes soft with a frightened vulnerability, and releases this hymn, this almost unbearable paean to the aching neccessity of love.

Jesus! He can't just sing: he can fly. Where has he been all my life? I don't know if I've ever heard a song turned inside-out like this. Along with flat-out artistry, he possesses a soaring technical brilliance, the ability to sustain a phrase in a clean, steady arc for an impossibly long time. He builds and builds the drama as the orchestra crescendos and begins to thunder at the end. . .and when it's over and he stands there with a tense, "was that any good?" look clearly visible on his face, there's an eerie silence in the studio. Sondheim mumbles something about it being adequate. Then, almost like at the end of Laugh-in, sparse applause, the sound of a few hands clapping.

When I hear something this good, which is never, I want to do something really extreme, like throw all my manuscripts on a bonfire, committ suttee or whatever it is (but my husband would have to do it first, damn it). When I hear something this exalted, I want to just chuck my ambitions and go take a long walk in the park (ten years ought to do it). But at the same time, it goads me to be better than I know how to be.

This song is about someone who can't fully live until he learns to open himself wide to the splendors and catastrophes of love. I wonder why I have such a visceral response to it. Love is at the centre of my life, and in fact, I know it is my central purpose. Of this I have no doubt. But what does it mean, what does it really mean to love? Do we ever get it right?

By Sondheim

I remember sky --
It was blue as ink.
Or at least I think
I remember sky
I remember snow --
Soft as feathers
Sharp as thumbtacks
Coming down like lint
And it made you squint
When the wind would blow
And ice, like vinyl on the streets,
Cold as silver, white as sheets,
Rain like strings
And changing things
Like leaves.
I remember leaves --
Green as spearmint, crisp as paper
I remember trees --
Bare as coat racks
Spread like broken umbrellas.
And parks and bridges, ponds and zoos,
Ruddy faces, muddy shoes.
Light and noise
And bees and boys
And days.
I remember days --
Or at least, I try.
But as years go by
They're a sort of haze.
And the bluest ink
Isn't really sky.
And at times, I think
I would gladly die
For a day
Of sky.

Light and shadow: the Perkins curse

It occurs to me that one of these days I should post a blog entry that's about something. So I will return to an old fascination which, for reasons unknown, has re-asserted itself.

Maybe it's Turner Classic Movies, that fusty old vault of forgotten Hollywood. Things pop up that maybe are best left in there. What constitutes a "classic" is a judgement call, and I don't know who makes it: Robert Osborne, whom despite his too-fast and slurry delivery is fascinating to listen to, or some producer or other.

They have festivals, of course, and not long ago it was Tony Perkins' turn. It could be argued that his life was a tragedy, but you'd only be partly right. I'm rereading Charles Winecoff's incredibly detailed but largely uncharitable bio Split Image, in which he seems to put Perkins' often troubled and even twisted life through a fine sieve (or a blender). Obviously gay (or I don't think he would rhapsodize about Perkin's sexy, pouty lips in The Tin Star), Winecoff has little sympathy for the double life he had to lead, both to stay employed and to stay married to a woman who was warmhearted but more than a little naive.

It all came to a dead stop, so to speak, when Perkins died of AIDS in 1992. He was 60 years old, and Norman Bates, the self-proclaimed "Hamlet of horror", had somehow consumed his career. He began as a fine young actor, dazzlingly beautiful rather than handsome, irresistable to women (especially older women, who wanted to take him home with them - which even happened in his own lifetime), and capable of roles as varied as college basketball star, insecure deputy sherriff, mentally ill baseball hero, Quaker enlisting in the Civil War, carefree-but-troubled-young-lawyer-romancing-Ingrid-Bergman-in-Paris-in-the-1960s, etc. etc. etc.

In other words, he was good. Good enough for Alfred Hitchcock, searching for someone to star in the mother of all slasher-films (Psycho), to say, "That young man over there. I want him."

Hitchy-baby, as I used to call him when he came over for beer and canapes, had an instinct for these things. Perkins was babyfaced, with marvelous dark eyes that could cloud over with an inexplicable anger. He was gangly and tall, with coathanger shoulders and very long arms, described by one friend as looking like a "prehistoric bird". He played the introverted loner to a T (for Tony), because in spite of his sweet smile and boyish charm, that's what he was.

I'm finding out, all over again, where it all came from. His father was Osgood Perkins, who lived up to his awful name: dire-looking, with a nose that could open letters. Absolutely cold, but addicted to the theatre and acting back when acting was very much paint-by-the-numbers. Was he any good? He fit the slot that seemed to be there, the slot with his name on it. Weirdly, he often starred as villains and other dark characters, typecast by his severe and unpleasant looks.

Osgood Perkins changed Tony's five-year-old life forever with a hell of a final act: dropping dead of a heart attack on his bathroom floor. Tony didn't cry, though he told People Magazine (in an infamous interview in which he almost outed himself) that he sobbed himself to sleep every night, thinking he had somehow killed him.

Tony inherited Osgood's scarecrow body, and as he aged his face began to twist and go off-centre, as if genes were finally having their way. He had a rich and varied career, if you take away the cheap slasher films he often resorted to in order to pay the rent and look after his wife and kids.

Yes. Wife and kids, though he was known all over Hollywood as a promiscuous homosexual. He was seeing a shrink called Mildred Newman (who co-wrote the blockbuster, groundbreaking psychobabble classic How to Be Your Own Best Friend), who believed she could straighten gay men out. In fact, it was her particular specialty. Another Newman disciple, one of Tony's longterm lovers, got married at about the same time. It was all very odd.

Berry Berenson, sister of supermodel Marisa, was from a blueblood family but came across as sweet and pretty, as well as pretty naive. Is that why Tony was so attracted? I can see them together for the first time (someone wrote a stage play about it: I'll try to find the link, as the guy playing Tony is phenomenal), Berry all breathless because she was finally meeting her idol and interviewing him for Andy Warhol's magazine. What was Tony Perkins really really like?

Next thing you know he was making her pregnant, but one wonders. This man was vastly complicated. He and Stephen Sondheim (yes, that Stephen Sondheim) hung out together and forced everyone around them into impossibly difficult word/mind games, a manifestation of the nasty, manipulative side of him. Yet, by all accounts, he was an attentive and loving father to his two boys, Osgood (ouch) and Elvis (double-ouch).

OK then, before this becomes another version of War and Peace, Perkins finally died of AIDS. For a long time he didn't say anything, but when he was near death he issued a statement to the effect that he had learned more about love and humanity and acceptance during his time in the world of AIDS than he had in his entire career in Hollywood.

When he lay dying in his bed, his friends brought sleeping bags over and literally camped around him. At one point, he woke out of a deep coma, sat up and said, "What's going on? What is this, a death watch?" It was the last laugh he'd ever get.

How we die is often a profound reflection of how we have lived. Devotion like this does not happen to people who are not deeply cherished. It's extraordinary, but just one more paradox in the enigmatic puzzle of his life.

There is a horrible postscript, or perhaps a few of them. On September 11, 2001, Berry Berenson boarded a plane she would never get off. The last few minutes of her life must have been horrific as the jet flew bizarrely off-course, sank lower and lower, then smashed into the World Trade Centre.

Why, why? These are unanswerable questions. On doing some digging, I turned up more sorrow. Elvis Perkins is a somewhat successful rock musician (Tony was a gifted pianist, as well as a screenwriter, painter and singer), but his songs are morbid and inspired by the death of his parents. Osgood, known as Oz Perkins, seems to dribble away on the IMDB after a few forgettable slasher-type films. Neither of them resemble their ideally beautiful father in his youth. They look coarse by comparison. What happened?

I have mixed feelings about Perkins. When Goodbye Again came on the other night (with the radiant, mature Ingrid Bergman playing his motherly lover), I was simply entranced. Perkins exuded a unique charm that somehow gripped you. It was powerful, a solar energy, dazzlingly bright but curiously cold. Did anyone really get close to this man? Did his one massive hit really destroy his career, or was he already dissolving into the tics, stammers and other irritating mannerisms that marked all his later films? Hitchy-baby didn't just randomly pull him out of the pack. He picked him because of his uncanny, even spooky ability to read his actors.

He picked him because Norman Bates was Tony's dark double, his father dying when he was five, his mother (in this case, rotting in the attic) sucking the air out of his life. He picked him for that disturbing untapped anger that made his dark eyes so fascinating. He was already Norman Bates, a character he would come to love and despise.

What's the conclusion? Sometimes success can be the worst thing that can happen to you. Is there a Perkins curse? Think of Osgood Perkins lying dead on his bathroom floor, Tony in a coma in his bedroom, Berry disintegrated in a second, his sons still stuck in glue or flypaper or some force field they can't break or even understand.

But think of the great times, hanging out with his sons, basking in Berry's warm unconditional acceptance, the obvious love of his friends, the Oscar nomination, the truly fulfilling parts that he nailed with his prodigious talent.

His delight in word games and mind games and singing (and by the way, he had a marvelous singing voice, lyrical and completely unpretentious) and playing his beloved piano.

This is a man who lived. Lived all the complications and contradictions of the painfully, profoundly gifted. I love him, I do. I can't get away from him, and he isn't even here. That's a man, is it not? That is a man.