Anthony Perkins sings SUMMERTIME LOVE

Walk like an Egyptian

OK then, so it's Tony Perkins time again, just like "cryin' time" in that old song. I keep coming back to him, just because he was so mysterious, so misunderstood, and because he summed up in my mind what it means to be human: conflicted, passionate, vitriolic, kind, altriustic, selfish, brilliant, obtuse, and on and on it goes.

And he was cute, too. 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.

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 with its coathanger shoulders and long, gangly arms, which made his head seem 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?

Jaycee: I don't know where to start

This morning, for some reason, lines from Leonard Bernstein's Mass rise up unbidden in my mind:

I don't know where to start
There are scars I could show
If I opened my heart
But how far, Lord, but how far can I go?
I don't know.

What I say I don't feel
What I feel I don't show
What I show isn't real
What is real, Lord - I don't know
No, no, no - I don't know

Except for an intrusive migraine, I had a wonderful weekend, spending time with all four of my delightful, beloved grandkids. When I am with them, time stands still and all my life's griefs are postponed.

Why then do I feel so sick right now? I can't explain it. Maybe it's this: so often I wonder what sort of world I'll be leaving them.

This feeling goes beyond the usual frightening predictions about the environment and our feeble, too-little-too-late attempts to fix it. It's not even about the seething political standoff between the Middle East and the rest of the world. We seem to have conveniently forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist and will eventually - inevitably - be used.

Maybe I can only focus on one atrocity at a time.

Does this explain the migraine, I wonder? I overloaded myself with atrocity in the past week, first with the sickening, frightening Casey Anthony verdict - the dead-eyed, posturing sociopath exonerated from all wrong except lying to the police - followed too quickly by a TV program I both anticipated and dreaded.

It was Diane Sawyer's interview with Jaycee Dugard, imprisoned in stinking tents for eighteen years by a monster whose main pleasure and meaning in life came from the capture and rape of children.

I don't know if I can write about this at all, except that not writing about it might cost me even more.

In last night's special on ABC, Diane Sawyer towers over the eerily petite Jaycee, whose doll-like face makes her look closer to fifteen than thirty. For some reason that is never explained, she has an odd, awkward gait. Her immature face doesn't express very much when she speaks of the rapes, the terror, the giving birth alone in the back yard (not once, but twice).

I wonder if Jaycee survived by surrendering her will. I wonder if that was her strength. Perhaps it was the only way she could endure the non-stop torture of the crazed, stinking Phillip Garrido, a man who should have been in prison but was let out for "good behaviour". A man who could obviously manipulate the system (and human beings) any way he wanted.

And let's not get into the SIXTY times parole officers visited his house without seeing anything wrong. We watched a video of one such visit, and it was a cursory walk-through that only took a couple of minutes. No one ever looked in the back yard with its squalid squatter's village of tents, Jaycee's "home" for 18 years. Even after an alarmed neighbor called 9-1-1 and insisted that there were children living in the Garrido back yard, no one did anything. Perhaps the possibility was just too far-fetched.

I was still trying to absorb the jaw-dropping Casey Anthony verdict, the way in which that greasy, superficial bastard Jose Baez somehow utilized his client's inherent slipperiness and utter lack of a moral compass to score a victory that made many people feel physically ill. This was not to mention the defense team's champagne celebration minutes after the verdict: who cares about a murdered two-year-old girl when you've scored such a major legal triumph?

Hard on the heels of all this indigestible poison came the Sawyer interview, followed by an intense, passionate investigation of the story by Chris Cuomo. His hard-hitting, angry expose of Garrido's unimagineable crimes should win him an Emmy, but it will likely go to his cohort Sawyer for her  seniority and celebrity status.

I don't think I need to go over every detail of this case. By spending so long on this I may already have ruined a sublime summer day, and as they say, that would be letting the bad guys win.  There was at least some justice in Jaycee's case, even if it took an agonizingly long time.

Unlike the slippery Casey Anthony, the slimy Garrido got 431 years(and I hope they don't allow this demonic piece of shit to commit suicide: hold him to boring, punishing prison rituals for 30 more years!), which should I suppose be of some comfort to the family, if not the world.

But look at it this way. He got 431 years. And he didn't even kill any kids!

And yet, he did something to Jaycee that's so bizarre, I don't really know if I can describe it.

It's often said that people in prison don't age. It's ascribed to lack of sunlight, but some believe it comes from the isolated, unvarying life of prison routines. Someone pushes the pause button, and it stays there.

I couldn't figure out how to feel about Jaycee. I cried a bit, but then I'd get confused by her rather sweet, bland recalling of the horrendous evil forced on her child's body and on her victimized children.

Sawyer is good at what she does, to say the least, but I think she decided in advance to be gentle with Jaycee. Yet there was a constant sense of probing, of "how did you manage to. . ." Jaycee dutifully said things like, "I wouldn't let evil win", which to my mind are things her therapist has probably said to her a million times.  

I also had the eerie feeling that someone had coached her not to smile too much. The serious face looked unnatural for her, almost practiced. Still and all, she smiled a lot for someone who had been in a sort of death camp for most of her life.

Sweet-smiling, smooth-faced, doll-like Jaycee had shut herself down so completely over those eighteen years that it amounted to something like brain damage. Have you ever known someone in that situation, a stroke victim maybe, or someone who has been through a bad car accident? I don't mean brain stem injury, where the person stumbles and slurs. I mean something more subtle, but still pervasive and permanent.

Perhaps she was always this way. Sweetness may just be the natural cast of her personality. But there is another, even more disturbing element to this story: Jaycee's mother.

When you see her, it's a shock: she seems to have absorbed all the darkness and rage and grief and even taken on the deep lines and shrivelled mouth that Jaycee was somehow spared. This is an angry, angry woman, even with her daughter safely home.

In the interview they looked like conjoined twins, constantly glued together. Even when she's smiling, Jaycee's mom looks old and used-up, dessicated. Meanwhile Jaycee is permanently serene, her skin like porcelain, her eyes deep and undisturbed like the eerie eyes of old-fashioned blinking dolls.

This man did a kind of damage that no one has a name for or even comprehends. The inevitable best-selling ghost-written memoir and pine cone necklaces (which both feel to me like grafts from therapists and other hangers-on) won't ever make up for it. When asked if she would consider a relationship with a man, the 30-year-old woman sweetly says she's just happy to stay here with her Mom. I wonder if a sexual relationship with a man will ever possible for her.

She's disabled. I can't blame her, and I am not a bit surprised. But I don't think too much will be said about it. Who will even notice? We only see what we want to see: a heroine, a brave girl who looked evil in the face and stared it down. When those parole officers walked through Garrido's squalid dwelling SIXTY times and saw nothing (or, for that matter, when a jury looked at a tiny girl's skull covered with duct tape and saw a swimming pool accident), they were looking directly at monstrous evil and not seeing it.  

"But we didn't know what was going on," survivors of the Second World War insisted. It couldn't have been that bad: millions of bodies casually thrown into the furnace for no crime other than being who they were. Such things just didn't happen on that scale. Yet Miep Gies, the woman who protected Anne Frank and her family and kept them safe from the Nazis for three years, insisted that people did know. They knew, and kept silent, because it was easier for them to look the other away.

Is it plain disbelief? An inability to absorb the fact that some people are utterly without conscience and seem to take pleasure in destroying their fellow human beings (particularly defenseless children)? If our fundamental sense of human decency slips away, then we begin to die. But some have the grotesque talent of diverting this death onto other people.

Jaycee's mother has died into her grief, and though she finally recovered her treasure in a blazing miracle that still defies all explanation, her face is set in a hard, cracked mask of tragedy. She looks a hundred years old. Jaycee is almost expressionless, a wax figurine, tiny and preserved.

Thank Phillip Garrido for such bizarre manipulations of time. No, thank the parole board who "monitored" his movements with an ankle bracelet and then ignored his constant sojourns into the back yard.

For a week now I've been hearing people praise the Casey Anthony verdict as proof that "the system works". Even people who believe she's guilty say it. I suppose it works as well as our other pathetic, ineffectual attempts to bring evil sociopaths to justice.

This hideous mess was preventable, and no one moved. No one acted.

No one wanted to know.

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

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

Dreamhorse

When I was a girl, horses galloped through my imagination.

Horses of beauty, pride and grace.

These were not horses I could ride or stroke or smell. I loved them, but they were not mine.

I read about Misty, and Stormy, Black Beauty, King of the Wind. Horses made not of hide nor hair, but words.

My horse could be anything. He could be blue. He could fly!

 

I named him Sea Mist. I named him Banner. He was proud and strong.

He was a rush of power blasting through snow. He leapt and wheeled and snorted. He was absolutely free

. . . but he was not mine.

If he were mine, I knew my world would be different. It would be made of gold and silver.

The shadows would lighten, the pain would end, and I would never again be afraid.

I rode sometimes, but then I had to go home. I loved the snorts, the sweat and the smell, and I wanted them to stay.

I want to sit on a horse and tear across fields and plunge into water. 

I want to sit on a horse and be absolutely free.

Dreamhorse has never left me: he stirs in my pulse. He sleeps in my veins.

But he is not real.

And he is not mine.