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.)

The loneliness of the long-distance drinker

ABC | PEOPLE

Elizabeth Vargas to Share Story of Alcohol Abuse and Anxiety in Book, ABC Special

By Mark Joyella on Aug. 23, 2016 - 5:40 PM

Two years after she announced she would write a memoir, 20/20 anchor Elizabeth Vargas will mark the release of her new book, Between Breaths: a Memoir of Panic and Addiction, with an hour-long ABC News special.

The special edition of 20/20 will feature ABC News Diane Sawyer interviewing Vargas about the secret she kept for years–and the difficult recovery she continues today.

Sawyer and Vargas will also report on the link between anxiety and alcohol abuse; and Vargas talks to an expert at the National Institutes of Health, visits a treatment center and speaks to alcoholics who are trying to get and stay sober.

The special airs Friday, September 9 at 10 p.m. ET, and the book will be released the following Tuesday. “When I first began to worry about my own drinking, I turned to books other women had written about their own alcoholism. I learned I was not alone, and it helped me find the courage to reach out and get help,” Vargas said when the book was announced in 2014. “I have spent my entire life telling other peoples’ stories. This one is my own, and is incredibly personal: the burden and loneliness of of the secret drinker.”

You know, even as I sit here, I wonder if I even want to do this.

I watched the 20-20 special with Diane Sawyer last night. Couldn't NOT watch it, I guess, for the same reason everyone else has: the train-wreck-in-slow-motion effect, the watching through your fingers, which is even more dramatic with a "celebrity" who has been in the limelight for some time. Not just for her journalism, but for her drinking.

Now, barely two years sober, Elizabeth Vargas announces she's releasing a memoir about her alcoholism titled, very curiously, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction. Note that "panic" (with that odd image of breathlessness) comes before "addiction". And nowhere does the title mention alcohol.

Strangely enough, last night, that's almost all she talked about: stumbling around blind-drunk, coming out of a blackout in the Emergency Room with her blood alcohol at a near-fatal level. . . fucking up at work. . . I don't know. I guess it's just that I've heard it all before. And heard it, and heard it, and heard it, particularly from celebrities.

All the way through this hard-to-watch thing, Diane Sawyer kept mentioning "red flags" (hiding booze, excuses at work, chunks of lost time, being unable to get off the sofa for her kids). But I saw some red flags of my own.

When I first saw an item on 20-20 about Vargas and her alcoholism, she said she announced it only because she was "scooped" and wanted to set the record straight. She looked very, very uncomfortable. Her smile was tight, her body language rigid, and she looked as if she couldn't wait to get out of there.

The story goes that her first stint in rehab was pretty much of a disaster. As was her second. The third time seemed to be the charm, except. . . 

Except that there were still red flags.

Sawyer: Do you think you hurt your children?

Vargas: Oh, no. I'd die for my children.

A little later on:

I will never be able to forgive myself for the way I hurt my children.

Sawyer asks her, near the end of the piece, "I know not every alcoholic wants to say how many days they have in. . . "

Vargas didn't just shut down. There was an audible slam. No, she did not want to say.

Sawyer was not quite ready to let up. "But do YOU know?"

"Oh yes. I know." But her face had closed down again, as it had done several times during the hour.

I have to tell you what I think about this. Addiction makes you lie. Otherwise, how could you hide all those bottles? And you don't necessarily stop lying because you have stopped drinking.

I don't think Vargas knows her sobriety date. She has had to start all over again so many times that she has lost track. But in the 15 years that I went to AA, I came to realize that a person's sobriety date is more important than their "belly-button birthday". If you don't know it, don't remember it, it's very likely you'll just keep re-setting the clock. 

So now, a book, a tell-all.  I wonder who told her to do this. For surely, someone did. Writing a memoir is a way to redeem yourself - quickly - by "breaking the silence" and "helping others reach out". It puts a shiny cover (literally) on the whole thing, makes you look noble for being brave enough to share it, and makes it all - what? Containable? At very least, it turns it into a commodity that can be bought and sold.

We live in a culture which claims that throwing the gates wide open and pouring out every trauma to the public is the path to "healing". "Sharing the pain" is supposed to give us lasting and/or permanent relief. Going public is therapeutic, isn't it? Well - isn't it?

I don't know how we've come to this point. It's not that I didn't identify with Vargas' blackouts, trips to the ER, high blood alcohol levels, and even screwing up at work (in her case, even on the air). It's that I DID identify. I did most of that stuff, and repeatedly. But I came to realize - the hard way - that it is very, very dangerous to expose yourself, to peel your skin off like that, when you're newly sober (meaning, the first five years or so).

Though Vargas wasn't as tight-lipped and uncomfortable as on that first night of revelation, there was still some acting going on. This woman makes her living in front of the camera, has done so for twenty years. Her face flitted from warmly confidential to deer-in-the-headlights to wretchedly guilty, to unreadable. Understandable, perhaps, but why stand under the glare of TV lights so soon? 

But the thing that I puzzled over most was the emphasis. The show I watched last night was almost all about alcoholism. Yes, there was some reference to anxiety and panic, but not as much as I thought there would be. And yet, the title of her memoir leaves out alcohol altogether! "Addiction" can mean playing too much bingo. The "between breaths" - a very strange allusion, I think - seems to be pointing to something like asthma or emphysema. It's as if she still can't quite spit it out - in writing, at least - that she's an alcoholic. Perhaps "someone" advised her not to put that in the title. Emphasize the panic and anxiety. They'll go down better. They are, after all, badges of honour in her high-pressure industry.

Why do I get this slightly vertiginous sense of spin?

It has taken me a long time to write about all this. Last November (November 30, to be exact) I celebrated 25 years of sobriety. Though I no longer attend AA, I would return to it in a heartbeat if I felt my sobriety were compromised. But I still remember, as booze-drenched as I was, what my last day of drinking was like.

You have to remember that date, or at least the date you first dragged your ass into detox or a meeting (or a meeting in detox). Otherwise, you're doomed to repeat it. It means you're "vague-ing" it off (and vague can be a verb, as far as I am concerned).

My last day of drinking was stupid, boring and depressing, but it summed up the sad joke my life had become. I was huddled in bed in the middle of the afternoon. It was deluging rain outside, had been for days, and so dark it was almost like night. The blinds were closed.  I had a bottle of cheap wine in my hand and I was taking pulls out of it. When I had sucked it dry, I threw it on the floor and said, "It's not enough." And then, for the first time in probably years, I heard myself.

In moving to Vancouver from a small town in Alberta, I had wanted so much more. I had ranted in my diary about this in a nearly-unreadable, intoxicated scrawl: "How the FUCK did this happen?? I had so many dreams and I lost them all and I want them back. In fact, I insist on it!" It was a funny thing to say during your last week of drinking.

There was another thing. I have to say this, I really do, because it's so important, a huge factor in my recovery. Before moving to Vancouver, I wondered aloud to my much-older sister what would happen if I couldn't adapt myself to life in the big city. She shrugged, made a pooh-pooh mouth, and in her best little ice-water voice, the one with the heartless little lilt in it, she said, "Oh well, I guess you'll just self-destruct."

Lying in that bed shaking my empty fist, I was GOD-DAMNED if I was going to let that poisonous prophecy come true. That toxic bitch probably has no idea how much she helped me that day.

But I digress. I think. 

I don't know about getting my dreams back, but at least I didn't die. It was extremely rough in the land of the sober, and sometimes I thought sobriety was even worse than drinking. I latched on to people very hard back then, and I think in a lot of cases I made them uncomfortable. It was extreme even by AA standards.

But I wasn't going to put my "anxiety" (or my PTSD or my bipolar disorder, then undiagnosed, or perhaps underdiagnosed) ahead of my drinking at a meeting. I had to talk about alcohol, even as I was thoroughly sick of it. Because anxiety wasn't really my problem. Panic wasn't my problem, nor was some sort of vague respiratory condition. Calling it that would have sanitized my messy, tawdry, stigmatized condition, and I couldn't afford to do that.

It's a long time later, years and years and years, and though for the most part I don't even think about alcohol, watching something like that 20-20 show last night can start things clanging. I don't think Elizabeth Vargas is out of the woods yet. She may have a couple more trips to rehab before she gets her feet on the ground (and don't get me wrong - I sincerely hope she does). Whoever advised her to do the book so early in her recovery - a recovery that seems rather fragile to me - is cockeyed. And if she decided on her own, then SHE'S cockeyed. But I think somebody should have taken her aside and set her straight. Too much "brave" too soon can be a recipe for rehab (again). And fourth times are seldom lucky.

The 20-20 Facebook page has hundreds and hundreds of comments, almost all of them rhapsodic, about Vargas' honesty and courage. But I think when sobriety is relatively new, these kinds of revelations need to be shared only with a trusted few. To throw it wide open is to open yourself to infection. It's peeling all your skin off. Why is unmitigated, unregulated, unrestrained "sharing" considered so therapeutic? Because it reduces the stigma! - doesn't it? 

Except that it doesn't. 

So what does? People going about their business, sober, once they have met the dragon face-on. Living a good life, a productive life, even a happy life - sober. It's being an example. People can pay attention to it or not, but if there are enough examples walking around like that, it can't help but make a difference.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!