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.)

Scary!

Church of the Holy Sea Monkey

Not-so-little pitchers

I only had five frames from different perspectives (two photographers, in fact, taking several different pitches), but this gives you the idea. Ryan has been working up to this for some time. I wasn't there, but his Mom tells me he did great!

Totally EPIC!

"I dream of love": a cat animation

Waffle falling over

A*P*E (1976) Trailer

Angryface

"TROG!!"

(These will look teeny if you're watching this on your phone. Best to click "watch on YouTube" at the bottom. )

Mutant sheep: the ultimate bad monster movie trailer

Every day when I get up in the morning, I think, ahhhh. Today I will find yet another cheesy monster movie trailer from the 1970s. There seem to be several million of them on the internet now. The thing is, I've heard that a lot of these were never released theatrically, and home video didn't really exist back then, so. . . ? I won't probe too deeply into that mystery.

Some of these are funny, some downright disgusting. This one is simply weird. I like weird, so long as it does not stray so far into the bizarre that one's normal orientation in reality is completely destroyed.

I think horror movies play with this, the sense that things are turning upside-down and there isn't a goddamn thing we can do to stop it or even slow it down. If you look at a human lifetime and try to add up how many ACTUAL moments of horror we experience, I think you'd find that oh fuck. Just watch the trailer.

Satan Wants Your Mind and Soul

I thought long and hard before posting this bizarre, even horrifying story about one of the strangest figures to inhabit the internet, the crazed evangelical preacher Jonathan Bell. I discovered JB maybe 3 or 4 years ago, stumbled on him while researching corrupt televangelists. You know the kind. But this. The more I found out about him, the more unbelievable it got.

I don't know if you want to read all of this or not, but it gave me a chance to trot out some of my favorite Pentecostal gifs, featuring some of the strangest human behaviour on record. These are Holy Ghosters of the most extreme degree, experiencing something called the Toronto Blessing (involving a lot of flailing around and guffawing). There are many more Bell videos on YouTube, though he really only did two official broadcasts: the "casual" one (excerpted above) and another, longer one he did dressed in (inexplicably) a tuxedo.

I suddenly realized that this guy, a former hairdresser, has hair so much like Donald Trump's that it's downright eerie.

(Excerpted from Snake Oil, 2009)

Upstart TV preachers flock to Dallas like young starlets drawn to Hollywood. So began the story of Jonathan Bell who arrived in Dallas from Kingston, Ontario in early 1992 with a vision from God to start a television ministry.

Accompanying Jonathan were Carrie Hart, a 71-year-old invalid, and her 35-year-old retarded son. With the $1400 per month that the Harts received in government checks, the three got set up in a one bedroom apartment in the predominately gay Oak Lawn section of Dallas, and Jonathan Bell Ministries was on its way.

That first Texas summer, however, took its toll on the trio of transplanted Canadians. Their living arrangement had deteriorated to the point that on the night of July 28th, police were called to the scene of a domestic disturbance at the ministry apartment, whereupon Jonathan was hauled in on aggravated assault of an invalid.

The police incident report reveals a sorry state of affairs: Jonathan typically sent the Harts out early each morning on ministry errands, and they were expected back promptly at 9 PM. Being late, or not following instructions exactly resulted in a beating. Neighbors told police that they had seen the Harts with bruises and black eyes. The Harts were given just a few dollars a month, and Jonathan got the only bed while they slept on the floor with no bedding.

In what may have been a water baptism gone horribly awry, Harry Hart, the son, claimed that earlier in the summer Jonathan had tried to drown him at an area lake by holding him underwater by his hair.

Within a few days of Jonathan's arrest, the Harts returned to Canada, and all charges were dropped.

This sordid little tale would not be worth telling if shortly thereafter Jonathan had not gone on to produce two of the most psychotic, disturbing religious programs ever made.

Flanked by a potted plant, Screaming Boy was born in the studios of Dallas Cable Access. Religious fury in a rented tux. The petulant, porcine pentecostal launched into a hellfire and brimstone sermon at max volume which didn't subside for a solid hour.

But much more than the message itself was the delivery, complete with nervous tics, bulging veins, and a childish, bullying demeanor. An implicit "n'yah-n'yah n'yah n'yah-n'yah" was almost audible at the end of every sentence. His main message concerned those smug, self-satisfied, so-called Christians in "their fancy churches" who "weren't gonna make it in."

"I've been looking for a church here in Dallas where they don't just preach the Word on Sunday and live like the DEVIL the rest of the week! Last Friday I went to a singles get together at the Church of Christ, and they were going to show Terminator 2...to people who weren't even saved! I mean, COME ON!" [note that the singles group was going to show Terminator 2. I guess Jonathan took care of THAT!] "If you don't realize you're a filthy, rotten sinner, you're going to hell, Buck-o."

So don't you blame Screaming Boy when, on Judgement Day, you're on the wrong side of the gate. And, hey, you might be in a car crash tonight. You'll see. Jonathan's making it in, and you're not. N'yah-n'yah n'yah n'yah-n'yah.

"I"M NOT AN EXTREMIST!!!"

Speweth Jonathan: "I study the Bible five to eight hours a day!! And because I have faith as a child, Jesus Christ shows me visions all the time. He talks with me all the time, whether YOU believe it or not!" [So THERE!]

"Two years ago God gave me a vision where I saw young people, men and women - no children there - no clothes on...They had their hands up in the air and they were screaming and yelling in Hell!"

Also perversely compelling were the little tidbits he threw in about his own life. Abandoned by his mother at age eleven, Jonathan was put in a foster home with a man who sexually abused him. He suffered from depression until age twenty-seven, but managed to build a successful career as a hairdresser making, he claimed, $100,000 a year. He led a singles group at a church in Kingston, Ontario, but then God told him to go to Dallas and start his own ministry, and to build a Christian Boy's Ranch for abused youngsters.

Hmmmmmm... Good thing that in that vision of Hell that God gave Jonathan, none of the naked people were under eighteen.

My writing skills at conveying the viewing experience of watching Screaming Boy are woefully inadequate. If I said he was a cross between Porky Pig and Sam Kinison, would that help? If I noted that for no reason little subtitles would appear on the screen with slogans like "Satan Wants Your Mind and Soul," would you start to understand how mind-numbingly weird these shows were? Or that, in the finest cable access tradition, Jonathan spent half the time looking into the wrong camera?

Sadly, after producing just two one hour programs on Dallas Cable Access, Jonathan Bell vanished. Calls to Dallas Cable Access yeilded no information. Letters sent to his Dallas PO Box went unanswered.

While reviewing the two Screaming Boy episodes in preparation of this story, I decided to call the church in Kingston where Jonathan said he had led the singles group.

"We are in no way associated with Jonathan Bell. If you're writing something about him, please don't mention the name of this church. We don't know any more than what's been in the papers."

click

The papers?? Surely they weren't concerned about a little blurb in the Dallas paper almost three years ago about the assault on the Harts..

With much excitement and a healthy dose of foreboding, I dialed the number for the Kingston Whig-Standard. The worst was confirmed.

"A Kingston hairstylist and former host of a self-help cable TV show, who is facing a number of sexual charges involving children, will remain in jail until a bail hearing Monday.

"Jonathan Bell, the 35-year-old owner of the Jonathan Bell Salon at 477 Macdonnell St., appeared briefly at a bail hearing yesterday in provincial court on Wellington Street.
"He faces 11 sexual molestation charges, some of them stretching back almost two decades...

"Besides running his own salon, Bell was known to many people in the Kingston area through his short-lived Cablenet TV program, called Success In Life.

"Rob Heeney, program manager at Kingston Cablenet, said the show ran monthly from September 1993 to December 1993. 'It was a self-help show,' said Heeney. Part of the show involved Bell giving people make-overs."

--excerpted from The Kingston Whig-Standard, November 4, 1994.

Subsequent articles revealed that Jonathan pleaded not guilty, was denied bail, and that still more charges were filed.

It is interesting and somewhat telling that upon his return to Canada he choose to name his new television program so similarly to Robert Tilton's "Success N Life," even though he expressed nothing but sneering contempt for "so-called preachers here in Dallas who live in their big, fancy houses."

It occurs to me now that what was played out on Dallas Cable Access was more than a tormented individual ranting and raving about Jesus. What we had witnessed was no less than Jonathan Bell in an all out battle with his personal demons, the title match for his very soul.

Chalk this one up for the Devil.

Man O' War: the look of eagles

One of the all-time champion thoroughbred racehorses, Man O' War, sire of generations of winners. And oh, that flaming sorrel coat!

Girl love

Can Bentley talk?

Should I post this? Maybe not

I have my reasons for thinking these things, but in saying them, I break many taboos. That's why I need to say them. I came to the conclusion that there is no one on earth I can share this with, and that appalls me and doesn't surprise me.

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

So why post all these cheap previews? Cuz I like them, s'why. And because no matter what I post, it makes no difference, I get views or I don't. I was getting 700 per post there for a while, and had no idea why. I'm back to getting, like, two, and I don't know why that is either. So I might as well just do what I like. If I write something and really put a lot of time, energy and effort into it, invariably, it gets hardly any views. So why am I doing this? For self-entertainment, I think. Just to have something to tend. Like a garden. Since I can't grow pot.

Oh by the way. . . interesting, unknown fact about me! I DID grow pot once. My parents were so oblivious of my goings-on that I grew an enormous pot plant in the window of my bedroom, and they never once said ONE THING about it. It never got to the size where I could get buds off it, but I dried and smoked the leaves one night (my parents were asleep upstairs), and the weatherman on TV suddenly seemed to be scat-singing. You know, those spontaneous riffs that jazz singers do. 

The Mighty Gorga Trailer

Trippy: the view from the bottom of a bucket

Anthony Perkins action figure

The truth about Marilyn Monroe

INT. CLOSET - GASKELL HOUSE 

The dull PURR of a COMBINATION LOCK is HEARD, a DOOR
opens, and a triangle of LIGHT falls on a PHOTOGRAPH of
MARILYN MONROE and JOE DIMAGGIO on their wedding day.

GRADY and James Leer stand in the doorway. Just below the
photograph of Marilyn and Joe--hanging next to a PIN-
STRIPED JERSEY bearing the number 5--is a SHORT BLACK SATIN
JACKET trimmed with an ERMINE COLLAR.

JAMES LEER
Is that really it?

GRADY
That's really it.

JAMES LEER
The one she wore on her wedding day?

GRADY
So I'm told.

James, in the presence of the holy grail of suicide
garments, stands speechless.

GRADY
Go ahead.

JAMES LEER
Really?

GRADY
Really.

James swallows, then goes to the jacket. Carefully, he
reaches out his fingers and touches the yellowed collar,
barely making contact, as though it might crumble to dust.

JAMES LEER
They're glass. The buttons.

GRADY
Like the lady herself.

GRADY says this airily, ironically, riding his buzz a
bit, but James nods solemnly, eyes transfixed on the
jacket, as if Marilyn herself were inside it.

JAMES LEER
She was small. Most people don't know that.
The shoulders are small.
(touching the satin)
It looks so perfect. I bet it's the only time
she wore it. That day. She must've felt so
...happy.

GRADY studies James as he takes the fringe of the jacket,
lifts it lightly.

JAMES LEER
It's feels unreal, like butterfly wings or...
something. It must've cost Dr. Gaskell a lot.

GRADY
I guess. Walter never tells Sara the truth
about how much he pays for these things.

JAMES LEER
You're really good friends with the
Chancellor, aren't you?

Grady's eyes slide, paranoid, but James' face remains
unchanged, consumed with the jacket.

GRADY
(carefully)
Pretty good. I'm friends with Dr. Gaskell,
too.

JAMES LEER
I guess you must be, if you know the
combination to his closet and he doesn't mind
your being here in their bedroom like this.

GRADY
Right.

A DOOR SLAMS downstairs and GRADY and James jump. The
CLICK of a woman's HIGH HEELS sends GRADY to the bedroom
window, where he watches Sara slide into a WHITE CITROEN
DS23, turn on the ignition, and motor away.

GRADY
We, better skedaddle. Close that closet--
James? You all right?

James is slumped on the Gaskell's white linen bed,
knapsack between his knees, head in hands.

JAMES LEER
I'm sorry. Professor Tripp. Maybe it's seeing
that jacket that belonged to her. It just
looks...really lonely. Hanging there. In a
closet. Maybe I'm just a little sad.

GRADY
Maybe. I'm feeling a little sad myself
tonight.

JAMES LEER
You mean, with your wife leaving you and ail?
Hannah mentioned something about it. About a
note.

GRADY
Yes. Well. It's complicated, James. I think we
should go now.

Without thinking, GRADY flicks out the bedroom light,
leaving James Leer in the dark for the second time today.

James just sits there, a shadow in a room of shadows.

The story behind this: I saw the movie Wonder Boys way back in 2000 (though it cannot be possible it was 17 years ago!). Most of it was convoluted and a bit of a mess, but I do remember the “Marilyn Monroe scene”. It was an important subplot of the movie. probably representing something-or-other, some deep symbolism about identity, dishonesty, etc. etc.

Michael Douglas plays a washed-up university professor/blocked writer with a young protégé, a very strange, fey, even creepy student played by (the strange, fey, even creepy) Toby Maguire.

The Marilyn scene involves Michael Douglas sneaking into the Chancellor’s bedroom to show his protégé a valuable collection of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia. Needless to say it doesn’t stop there, as Toby Maguire steals Marilyn’s wedding jacket which ends up in a stolen car, then on someone else’s back. Interestingly enough, we see one of the minor characters wearing it at the end. It looks like an exact replica of the black, fur-collared Monroe jacket with the small shoulders and the chic ¾ sleeves.

But the part I couldn’t get out of my mind were the Marilyn-obsessed Maguire's lines: “She was small. Most people don’t know that.” They stuck like a burr, though I couldn’t find them in any of the YouTube clips. I had to hunt it down in a transcript of the screenplay, but it was (surprisingly) not hard to find.

And it’s true. People weren’t talking about it then – they were still saying things like, “Marilyn Monroe was a size 16”, mostly to make themselves feel better about being fat. Though her weight fluctuated, in most of her photo shoots she looks to be around a size 6, though perhaps on the buxom side. Based on her surviving vintage dresses, couturiers have estimated her statistics as 35-22-35, though I have also heard 34-22-34 (which, during thinner periods, she may well have been).

The point is, these are not “fat” proportions. At all. Most women would envy them, particularly their symmetry (which is really more important than being thick or thin). Like the immortal Elizabeth Taylor, she had a very small natural waist, giving her a voluptuous shape which androgynes might call "fat" (but which isn't). Liz famously didn’t need much corseting for her Southern Gothic roles (such as in  Raintree County, one of my all-time favourite movies).

I’m not a man or anything, or at least I don't think so, and not particularly a Monroe fan (though I crush on Liz in some of her movies, big-time, and believe she was nothing short of brilliant as an actress). But I can see that Marilyn had just about the best breasts ever seen on a woman, breasts that would be ruined by a bra.

I also remember a movie – God, my mind is a junk drawer – called Soldier in the Rain, and I think it had Steve McQueen and Jackie Gleason in it. The two of them were fantasizing about women – Polynesian women, or something – and one of them referred to their breasts as “tilting up”. That’s what I’m talking about, a magnificent natural structure with no visible means of support.

I do remember the strangest things.

Cat in the box!

                                   Bentley in the box. 

What kind of bird is that?

"With a golden head, a white patch on black wings, and a call that sounds like a rusty farm gate opening, the Yellow-headed Blackbird demands your attention. Look for them in western and prairie wetlands, where they nest in reeds directly over the water. They’re just as impressive in winter, when huge flocks seem to roll across farm fields. Each bird gleans seeds from the ground, then leapfrogs over its flock mates to the front edge of the ever-advancing troupe." - Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/page.aspx?pid=1478