Hollywood Gays (8 page)

“But someone must have tipped Cary off, because by the time we wrapped, he’d experienced a substantial personality change. He was guarded and no longer very spontaneous. He seemed more mature, but that boyishness—his fun and clowning, and, well, the
joy
—had mostly gone. Not just vanished, but banished. It’s awful what Hollywood can do to a personality.” The awful truth....

P.S. Although the practice was even more rare in 1904 England than it is there today, “Cary Grant” was circumcised.

ANTHONY PERKINS

(1932-1992)

“I put Anthony Perkins into his first film,” said director George Cukor about
The Actress
(1953). “He had a fresh, boyish, somewhat nervous quality. I was impressed by his attractiveness
and
his difference…. People seem oblivious to all the pictures he did before
Psycho
(1960). It was altogether another Tony Perkins, and he was like that until about the late ‘60s. Then Norman Bates began catching up with him. Not merely professionally, which had already happened, but facially, particularly the eyes.

“The actor playing all these lunatics and scary kooks in all these exploitation pictures is not the actor I chose. As for all the anecdotes about him making the rounds for so many years, they indicate he’s not the same boy, either.”

Interesting that Cukor still referred to him as a “boy,” for until his death at 60 from AIDS, Tony Perkins retained a boyish quality, albeit no longer the boy-next-door but rather an aging, haunted Peter Pan. “He went from what one Hollywood columnist described as ‘Peter Pansy’ to a somewhat ghoulish image,” felt Brian O’Dowd, Perkins’s close friend and dresser in such films as
Psycho II
(1983),
Psycho III
(1986), and
The Lucky Stiff
(1988). “If he looks like a serial murderer at times, it’s just his occasional demeanor. At times he may seem chilling, but he’s just a conflicted, occasionally tormented man who sometimes has a great sense of humor and can be great fun to be with.”

From the start, the actor exhibited a sensitivity on screen that got him cast in more peripheral roles. His quirkily ingratiating smile and tentative mannerisms and shrugs lacked the gravity and self-confidence of typical leading men. He often played sons, employees, or kids by comparison to the male lead. Gary Cooper, his costar in
Friendly Persuasion
(1956), Perkins’s first movie since
The Actress
, advised, “I think he’d do well to spend a summer on a ranch.” Costar Yves Montand (
Goodbye Again
, aka
Aimez-vous Brahms?
, 1961) observed, “He seems to drink from the fountain of youth. He looks so young and innocent. He is playing the little boyfriend of Ingrid Bergman, my mistress.”

(Decades later, Perkins claimed that Bergman, Jane Fonda, and Brigitte Bardot each tried to seduce him—all denied it, as did Victoria Principal, his alleged partner in what Perkins told several people was his first heterosexual experience.)

O’Dowd explained, “Tony’s father was a character actor, Osgood Perkins. He died in his mid forties when Tony was five. It seems Osgood had health and chemical problems, and he was too hard on Tony. On the distaff side, Tony would be the first to say he wished he’d had someone else for a mother.... He did want to act and follow in his father’s footsteps. But not as a character actor. He told me he wanted to outshine his father.”

Though appealing, tall, and lanky, Perkins didn’t set Broadway or Hollywood on their stereotype-prone ears. His big-time stage bow was as the suspected-homosexual student in
Tea and Sympathy
. The movie version in 1956, however, starred John Kerr. George Cukor, who like many gay directors evaded gay-tinged projects, bypassed
Tea
and stated, “For that character, who is thought so different, Hollywood, as ever, wanted an actor who was not, let’s just say, sexually unusual.

“Despite its sensationalism at that time,
Tea and Sympathy’s
moral was you shouldn’t treat someone you think is different badly because they might just be normal and
shy
.”

While Hollywood, specifically Paramount, was cautious about giving Perkins leading roles, critics could be downright prickly. More than one announced that Perkins as a baseball player in
Fear Strikes Out
(1957) was “not believable” or “is wanting in athletic or emotional credibility.” In years to come, as a bizarre assortment of mama’s boys, neurotics, “confirmed bachelors,” and blatantly homophobic gay villains, no one called Perkins unbelievable. Director John Huston, a liberal politically but not vis-à-vis feminism or the gay community, helmed the Paul Newman vehicle
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
(1972):

“He isn’t easy to cast,” said Huston of the by-then supporting (or character) actor. “Putting him in a Western is casting against type....I understand he’s a friend of Paul’s....” A critic reviewing
The Tin Star
(1957) had remarked “how encumbered [Perkins] seemed by six-guns” in that movie.

For years after
Psycho
, Perkins declined any role involving drag and/or non-heterosexuality (before his most famous movie, he’d reportedly nixed
Some like It Hot
, 1959, because it required sustained cross-dressing of its two male leads). “All his bisexual, asexual, and gay roles were taken on reluctantly,” said O’Dowd. However, Tony had already displayed drag in
The Matchmaker
(1958), where (as in
Hot
) it served as an escape route and a necessity—the case in most Hollywood movies where a hetero character “must” assume womenswear. On the tall, broad-shouldered actor, the period drag looked positively eerie, including a veiled hat and a long gown that foreshadowed Mother Bates two years later.

After
Psycho
and until the mid-1960s, Tony moved to Europe. He informed
Paris Match
, “Hollywood thrives on repetition, which may be okay for films but is death for actors....Europe gives me permission to act more mature.” Perhaps another motive for moving to Paris was to be far from Tinseltown’s prying eyes. A bachelor in his late twenties and early thirties, the
Psycho
star was the object of more speculation than ever; not just in L.A. but the American media. Fan magazines ran jejune stories with titles like “My Fantasy Girl Is Still a Dream, By Tony Perkins,” “Wanted: A Wife/Apply: Desperate Tony Perkins!” and even “Tony Perkins’ Secret Mystery Girl—Why You Never See Her...!”

Former talent agent Robert Hussong recalled how in spite of Paris’s free-wheeling attitude toward stars and sexuality, Tony insisted on deep-closet maneuvers to hide the fact of his boyfriends and male lovers. “For instance, after lunch I’d have to leave separately from Tony and his beau from the restaurant, taking the guy with me to Tony’s apartment, while Tony got there on his own. I’d enter the apartment building with the guy as if it was business, then I’d leave on my own, giving Tony and his beau time to have some fun, and then I’d go back to Tony’s apartment and escort the guy out and drive him home.

“Later, at night, they might meet someplace for dinner, and so that they wouldn’t seem too much like a couple, I’d ‘happen’ to drop by and join them for coffee after their meal. Then maybe we’d repeat the whole charade if Tony and his beau wanted to get intimate after dinner. But I don’t believe Tony ever let any of his boyfriends stay overnight.” Did the actor imagine that spies or paparazzi were stationed outside his building and favorite eateries day and night?

Perkins’s former agent, himself gay, approved the extreme caution. “You couldn’t be too careful in those days.” (Many in Hollywood would say the same about
these
days.)

By 1970, Perkins was starring for the small screen in
How Awful About Allan
, from a novel by the author of
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
The same year, he did a minor role in Paul Newman’s politically correct non-hit
WUSA
, and two years later was in Newman’s own
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
, also featuring Newman pals Tab Hunter and Roddy McDowall. In ‘72 he played another memorable neurotic in the cult film
Play It As It Lays
.

“I used to say that I wondered if the movies were for me,” he apprised
Coronet
magazine. ‘‘I’d gone and decided that if
Psycho
wasn’t a hit, I’d consider giving up acting, or at least movies. Now I just take a role and don’t worry about it. I used to worry about everything.... I used to care about the body of work, but I think I’m resigned to being a puppet, which is what actors really are. We interpret other people’s work....At some point I’d like to direct.” Via the
Psycho
-revisited phenomenon, he got his wish, but the quality of his few directed horror films left much to be desired.

Brian O’Dowd felt that “Tony grew estranged from Hollywood. He maybe stayed in movies because of
Psycho
, but that’s what cut him off from the Hollywood A-list and made him come to resent film and not feel any great responsibility toward it....All through the ‘80s he’d complained bitterly about the ‘monster shit’ and the ‘stereotypical shit’ given to him. I once suggested that he let it all go, leave the movies for a few years. But he got close to tears and said, ‘It’s all I know how to do now. What else can I be, a drug dealer?’ I was sorry I’d spoken up, but then he hugged me, smacked my bum [bottom], and all was well.”

In 1972 I was asked by Australia’s
Screen
magazine to try and get an interview with Tony Perkins, to be titled “What Ever Happened to Anthony Perkins?” It was to focus on his recent roles, on
Psycho
, of course on the upcoming
The Last of Sheila
(which he cowrote with his friend the gay composer Stephen Sondheim but didn’t appear in), and—get this—his private life.

The interview wound up a cover story. Perkins had readily agreed to do it, and only after its completion wondered if he might get the cover—compared to today’s publicity maze, where a cover is often expected as a condition of the interview. During our session, Perkins avoided Norman Bates and most specifics about
Psycho
, speaking instead about its prestigious director. He said little about his screenplay and less about buddy Sondheim, actually labeling him a “confirmed bachelor.” And Anthony’s own private life? A single paragraph:

“Everyone keeps droning on about long affairs and relationships. Why does everyone always measure everything by quantity? I know of marriages inside and out of the entertainment sphere that’re long but miserable, and I know there’ve been relationships, affairs, what have you, that weren’t long but were intensely pleasing to me at the time.”

Q: Are there any roles in
The Last of Sheila
you could have played?

A: I can think of a few.

Q: Why didn’t you?

A: I wanted to go around and see the other side. I helped create these fictional beings, but I don’t have to inhabit them. It’s a satisfying change. It’s a new kind of high. Some writers say that writing’s like a drug, and others do it while they’re actually high.

Q: Have you experimented with drugs?

A: No comment. Why?

Q: There’s a perception that Hollywood is quite drug-happy. If that’s the way to put it.

A: I’ve experimented. Here and there.

Q: What about feuding actors in Hollywood?

A: It takes two to feud.

Q: Joan Hackett was quoted as saying (after
How Awful About Allan
) that she thinks you’re “nuts.”

A: That might be. I’m in psychoanalysis. She has a few kinks up her sleeve too. You know she smokes pipes?

Q: Don’t they do that in Scandinavia?

A: I don’t think so.

Q: I do. At our Cairo hotel, every night there was a group of Danish women who’d sit on the verandah and smoke pipes.

A: She used to be jealous of me. End of discussion. I want to say something, and I’d like this to be quoted. Most of the time, people worry about others trying to harm them—in Hollywood, and everywhere, as a matter of fact. But to me, it’s funny, and I’ve given this some thought, how people spend almost no time worrying about the harm they can do to themselves. Think about it.

Q: It’s a good point. But how, specifically, do people harm themselves?

A: In a myriad of ways.

Q: Such as? (No reply.) Drugs?

A: Yes, and others.

Q: Like what?

A: One thing some of us do is let other people make our decisions for us. Or our value judgments.

Q: You said you’re in psychoanalysis?

A: Yeah.

Q: Do you think it’s more necessary for actors?

A: Actors, yeah, and it depends on your childhood. Losing a parent young is a compelling reason to visit a professional.

Q: But are they really experts? Aren’t they apt to follow their prejudices?

A: Yes.

Q: So shouldn’t one beware taking their opinions as truth?

A: You have to find a good shrink.

Q: One who agrees with you?

A: You both have to have the same goal. But the magazine doesn’t want to hear about this. Your readers are probably more concerned with...kangaroos! (Laughs nervously.)

Q: Who are your heroes?

A: That’s not a good question.