Anthony Perkins - Summertime Love

I cry when I hear this - no, not just a few tears but sobbing, full-on weeping, every single time, and just now when I heard it again. I am fascinated with Anthony Perkins and am once again making my way through a very difficult biography of him by Charles Winecoff. I say difficult because he really is presented warts and all, with an astounding degree of complexity and outright contradiction. He was so many things to so many people, some of them diametrically opposed, but all of it was real. Some of it was baffling and strange and even offputting, though he never violated his own integrity. So we have this fleeting, fragile two minutes in time from a musical everyone has forgotten. Greenwillow was a flop and only ran to near-empty houses for a few performances, and he had a cold when they did the original cast recording so there's a little catch in his voice on the high note at the end. He is speaking to us, just talking to us, telling us his soul, his complex and contradictory soul, in the simplest language you can imagine. Who can do that? No one else I can think of. Anyway, I haven't cried for a long time, not since those wretched dark deep nights of the pandemic when I thought the loneliness would never end. But this is different, and it's not like anything else I can even think of. I was sure it wouldn't affect me  this time - like every time - and within a few seconds I was sobbing.

Best death scene in film history!

Really and truly, this is the best. 

Being Alive

My relationship with this song is a strange one. Decades ago,  I used to watch Taxi, and I remembered an episode where Alex experiences an epiphany - has a near-death experience or something, and comes out the other side feeling superbly alive in every cell of his being. He sang a certain song - hell, I didn't even know what it was! But it recorded itself on my brain, stayed with me, until. . .

Then in the mid-'80s I was going through a Streisand phase, though I can barely stand her now, and the song seemed - it seemed - it seemed familiar, or did it? It may not have twigged at all that it was the same song Judd Hirsch sang on Taxi. It was later on, retroactively, that I made the connection. She sings the hell out of it, of course, but I've come to see her musical mannerisms as irritating.  Still. The power of the lyric was undeniable. Stephen Sondheim, for Christ's sake - it can't misfire altogether.

Tons of years had to go by, again, until I stumbled (again!) on this Dean Jones version. Dean freakin' JONES? The Disney guy, the wholesome goofier-version-of-Dick-Van-Dyke type of guy? I couldn't even imagine him singing a Broadway song like this one, singing it with haunted, even frightened eyes as Stephen (fucking!) Sondheim stood over him . . and singing it with such conviction and passion that I no longer want to hear anyone else sing it.

Ever.

There has to be something good about the internet - there is, actually, but with a lot of scum on the top and sludge on the bottom. Rediscovering something like this, something buried, can be compelling, but it all started with Judd Hirsch on Taxi - and then I forgot all about it.

Interestingly enough - or, at least, I find it so - Stephen Sondheim wrote this musical, Company, with Anthony Perkins in mind. The two were close friends, perhaps lovers, and this song wraps around Perkins' sensibilities very well, both in the fairly limited vocal range and the spare and even laconic sentiments. Perkins ducked away, citing other commitments, but many thought the Bobby character (with its veiled homosexual references) cut too close. The Dean Jones video was filmed, I think, as part of a TV special to demonstrate how an original cast recording is made, though I don't know if it was ever aired. 

The Greek chorus of friends in the song seems to be pushing the character out of a birth canal of fear and inhibition. I wonder if it really was that way with Perkins (and I confess I still have a "thing" for him), for he stated in an interview with People magazine that he never really felt close to another human being until he met his wife, Berry Berenson. And yet, and yet, there were both real and manufactured complications about his sexual orientation, as if that negated all the love and experiences they shared. And then there was the soul-shattering ending, Perkins dying far too young of AIDS, and Berry on one of the planes on 9-11. It has the dimensions of an epic love story ending in towering tragedy.

As I copied and pasted these lyrics, I decided to centre them, because I felt like something was going to arise from it, some shape. And it did. The verses are like chalices to me, maybe even communion cups, but in some cases more like trees. Some of them seem to leap upwards like dancers, others like dolphins. Not many poems will do this, take life and move, even beyond the words themselves.

So, this is the song Tony Perkins never sang, that was written for him, and about him.

Someone to hold you too close.

Someone to hurt you too deep.

Someone to sit in your chair,

To ruin your sleep,

(Dialogue)

Someone to need you too much.

Someone to know you too well.

Someone to pull you up short,

And put you through hell,

(Dialogue)

Someone you have to let in,

Someone whose feelings you spare,

Someone who, like it or not,

Will want you to share

A little, a lot.

(Dialogue)

Someone to crowd you with love.

Someone to force you to care.

Someone to make you come through,

Who'll always be there,

As frightened as you,

Of being alive,

Being alive.

Being alive.

Being alive!

(Dialogue)

Somebody hold me too close.

Somebody hurt me too deep.

Somebody sit in my chair,

And ruin my sleep,

And make me aware,

Of being alive.

Being alive.

Somebody need me too much.

Somebody know me too well.

Somebody pull me up short,

And put me through hell,

And give me support,

For being alive.

Make me alive.

Make me alive.

Make me confused.

Mock me with praise.

Let me be used.

Vary my days.

But alone,

Is alone,

Not alive.

Somebody crowd me with love.

Somebody force me to care.

Somebody let me come through,

I'll always be there,

As frightened as you,

To help us survive,

Being alive.

Being alive.

Being alive!

And this, from the Broadway musical Greenwillow. This song is not like any of the others, so minimal it barely exists, with a glorious setting like a rich autumn day. Somehow he glides along it and does not mess with it or damage it, but lets it be gloriously whole.  And every time I hear it, I cry. Every time. I say, nah, not this time! I'm not going to cry this time. I just listened to it again, and my eyes are stinging and I sobbed again, and it was once more real, and alive.

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.)

Anthony Perkins action figure

I'm psycho, too

We all go a little mad sometimes

A strange animation. This was put together from a half-dozen still pictures gleaned from Psycho, the famous parlour scene in which Norman eerily proclaims, "We all go a little mad sometimes." As you can see, there is a frame or two missing here and there.

This was an unusual project. I tried to get as many facial expressions out of six frames as possible. Norman's kind of a strange character anyway, so watching him twitch around and go from ranty to sweet in a nanosecond is nothing new.

But it was also an eerie feeling. These are just still pictures taken from a movie from more than 50 years ago. Yet there are moments - seconds - when something seems to be happening. Some kind of movement, an integrity between the frames that creates - something. Animation fools the eye. Film itself is an illusion, a lot of still pictures that the eye or the brain kindly blurs together and interprets as motion. It's also kind of strange that the background is so similar, though the fact that it kind of seethes in and out adds a special weirdness. The pictures aren't all framed exactly the same, though they're closer than most groups of movie stills even approach. Only one of them is way out of proportion, but the expression was so good that I had to use it. It gives the whole thing a weird lurching quality that I like.

Norman seems to be yelling "stop!" - or is it "stab"? 

Death is a party, life is a bitch

I've always had a thing for Anthony Perkins, and I come back around to it every few years. This is the song I usually come back to. There was something curiously affecting about his voice. He wasn't a natural singer and did not have a big or resonant set of pipes. But he had something else. Along with his innate musicality, he had sincerity. His singing was like speaking in some ways - not speak-singing like those actors who can't sing, but communicating so much intensity with the song that it is like a conversation. 

Yes, he got typecast as Norman Bates, and the only sad thing about that was the dreadful set of sequels. Other than that, he got along well and performed, sometimes brilliantly, in just about every acting genre. People noticed he looked rather strange in the latter part of his life, that his face was somehow less mobile on one side. What people didn't know was that he had Bell's palsy, and in getting treatment for it he found out he had AIDS.

People don't die from AIDS any more, so we've lost touch with the horror of it. They can live a long time, though the disease must be a constant presence on some level. It does not "go away". Being bipolar does not "go away" either, it is a constant presence, and it is not pleasant to have to take six drugs to control it. Just thought I'd throw that in.

I've read a couple of Perkins bios. One was kind of raggy, sensational, as if that was the only part of his life that mattered. It recounted every escapade and foible, but second-hand, through the accounts of people who had known him. The other one was a little too reserved, respectful, but devoid of detail. I think he was both of those people, and neither - an enigma. When he died, closely attended by his wife Berry and their two sons, his friends decided to have a be-in in the sickroom, bringing sleeping bags and food and singing to him while he passed in and out of consciousness. At one point he sat up suddenly and said, "What is this, a death watch?" - provoking much hilarity.

To die like that - I've only ever heard of one other person who died like that, with a party going on around him. Alan Ginsberg. It says something about a person, if people show up for your death, sit at your bedside, listen to stories they've heard a dozen times, hug the wife and take the kids out for hamburgers so she can have a break. 

People constantly talk about giving, but it's also blessed to receive, to stop fighting the gift. I know something about this, and I am going to know a lot more about it. If people can't "take" (and they often won't or can't, thinking it's somehow selfish or "bad"), they block the goodwill. It can no longer flow. They keep their loved ones from helping them, refuse them. In essence, they hang up the phone on love.

I don't know what got me started on all this. "Summertime Love". The title makes you think of Beach Blanket Bingo or something like that. But it's not like that at all. The song is from a strange, mystical stage musical called Greenwillow. It only ran for a couple of months.

"That actor who turned out to be gay". I don't much care about that any more, and he doesn't, where he is now. Such things really don't matter. The LGBTQ movement exists to prove it doesn't matter - doesn't nail you to a cross or suck the joy out of your life, because it can't.

How you die reflects how you have lived. Absolutely. I pray someone will be there, I do. Just one will be OK with me.

(A postscript. This needs to be said because it is part of the story. Less than ten years after AIDS claimed Tony, Berry Berenson was killed. She was on one of those planes that hit the World Trade Centre. I don't want to think about what those final minutes were like. But she, too, was not alone. I hope there was some shred of comfort in that.)

Cover your eyes: it's Equus

I made the mistake of watching Equus last night, the whole thing this time. I’ve bailed on it at least once, and I should have bailed on it again: it's heavy, dark, oppressive, and totally sickening at the end. In essence, it's one long monologue by Dr. Martin Dysart (played by a pockmarked, dead-eyed Richard Burton), a disaffected child psychiatrist who treats an adolescent boy (Alan Strang) who has blinded six horses for no reason anyone can determine.

The original Broadway play does NOT “show” the horses being blinded, but dramatizes and narrates it, which would be much more effective. Even Roger Ebert in his review from 1977 said he could not watch that part, and I even had to mute the sound. I didn’t like the boy at all – didn’t even care about him, dull, snotty-nosed kid without a single thought in his head. I soon became bored with all his self-created travails. 

And what was it about – how horrifying sex is? How religion destroys sex, how religion is sublimates sex – WHAT? Some say it was about, gasp, horrors, homosexuality, which might still have had some punch as a forbidden topic back in 1973 when it was first staged. Analysts to the stars like Mildred Newman (How to Be Your Own Best Friend, a bestselling masterwork of psychobabble) were still trying to "cure" it :"We've heard all kinds of success stories", she claimed, probably referring to Tony Perkins who later died of AIDS. But such sexual "deviancy", as it was known then, has no punch left in it now.

In the film version, Richard Burton is impossible to engage with. The many extreme closeups of his face are like a lunar landing, deeply pitted and utterly cold. On Broadway, the part was originated by Anthony Hopkins (who would have handled it better, though he’s still pretty stony), followed by Anthony Perkins, Leonard Nimoy, and maybe one other underappreciated Hollywood has-been.  Along with that snotty-nosed git of a boy,  I found it similarly hard to care about Burton’s character. In a rut? DO something about it, for God’s sake – have an affair with a girl or a boy or a PATIENT even. Get arrested! It would at least be a change of scene, wouldn’t it? No kaopectate needed. That reference gave me a good laugh, but it was the only time I actually felt something.

Maybe it’s a period piece, I don’t know – after all, this is Peter Shaffer, who wrote Amadeus, and that was a very long time ago. But the lines are just too flowery for normal speech – nobody talks that way or even thinks that way. (And we all know that going on and on about Greek mythology means you're actually a flaming poof.) It was self-consciously “beautiful”, verbal fireworks, real oooh and ahhh stuff, which I despise. Oh my God, how moving! Oh my God, how powerful! Makes me sick. How I hate writing that calls attention to itself.

It's a cheap trick. 

Anyway, I was going to bail at several points, and should have. Or keep it for another day, which means never - I would have deleted it. Then I kept looking at the time left and looked up the length in my movie book (TCM leaves 20 minutes or so between movies for endless fawning over 95-year-old legends of the screen). I had half an hour left and trudged through it, literally covering my eyes when the blinding scene came, and muting it. I refused to watch or listen. Now I still feel a little bit sick and have a hangover or aftertaste which is pretty awful. Is that “art”? Art is supposed to unsettle as well as entertain, but I'm not sure it's supposed to unsettle your stomach to this degree.

A little backnote. I remember, ages ago, reading (or reading parts of - it was essentially unreadable) an attack on Hollywood by former producer Julia Phillips, who managed to devastate/alienate everyone in her path. It was called You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, a good description of her own self-created fate.

I only mention it here because it talked about her relationship with Tony and Berry Perkins. She attended a performance of Equus on Broadway with the couple, starring I'm-not-sure-who (but I think it was Hopkins, the originator of the part), and said that when Tony embraced her he "felt her up": "highschoolhighschoolhighschool," she commented, later pronouncing Equus "a crock of faggot shit".

BTW, "Lunch" (as it became known) was considered career suicide for a woman who often inspired the urge for homicide amongst her cohorts. This is an excerpt from a surprisingly long Wikipedia entry:

On its release most critics agreed that the book was both scandalous and career-ending. (Even with a quarter of the 1,000-page original manuscript excised, it took lawyers at Random House fourteen months to approve it for publication. Lewis Cole, in The Nation, described it as being "[not] written but spat out, a breakneck, formless performance piece...propelled by spite and vanity".Newsweek's review called it a "573-page primal scream", while one Hollywood producer said it was "the longest suicide note in history".In the 2003 documentary version of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, based on Peter Biskind's 1998 anecdotal history of New Hollywood, Richard Dreyfuss recalled his initial fury at Phillips' revelations, before more circumspectly listening to "a little voice inside my head [saying] 'Richard, Richard, the truth was so much worse'." Despite Phillips' criticisms of Steven Spielberg in the book, Spielberg nevertheless invited her to a 1997 screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a way of "keeping his friends close and his enemies closer."

The "career-ending" thing is a little ambiguous. Do they mean HER career, or the careers of those people she so savagely, publicly eviscerated? Why did she hate everybody so much? If the book was so suicidal, why is 85% of the Wiki entry dedicated to it? Why is she remembered far more for the memoir than for anything else? I also have a sneaking suspicion that people would be far more upset if they were left out of the book. Nothing is more devastating than being ignored by Julia Phillips.

Her feud with Erica Jong was legendary, and there are quite long passages in Lunch where she trashes her. Erica gets her revenge in more than one of her books, depicting her as a ball-crushing, narcissistic bitch in one of her novels (the one after Fear of Flying, whatever it's called) and having another go at her in one of her memoirs, insisting the two of them kissed and made up while Phillips was in the death-throes of cancer. In this scenario, Phillips apologized to her profusely - but we'll never know what really happened. Let's not forget that Jong primarily writes fiction.

With such a histrionic cast, it's all pretty good theatre, I'd say. Much better than the psychological clinker that is Equus. It's a bummer, folks. If you do watch it, fast-forward over the horse-blinding part. Or just put your hands over your eyes.

Post-thoughts. This is a tiny clip of Daniel Radcliffe's go at Alan Strang. I wish it were longer. I do like the idea of stylized, abstract human/horse figures, as it both takes away from the horror of watching actual horses have their eyes gouged out, and brings the horse/boy relationship uncomfortably close. These creatures are like centaurs in reverse. Not half-horse and half-human, but mostly human with a horse's head and impulse-driven brain.  Sublimely beautiful, yet grotesque. Just the way the actor shakes the horse's head is eerily natural. I guess Equus was just one of those stage plays that got lost in translation.

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The Kojak paper doll and other '60s artifacts

Seldom do I find something this exquisite on the internet. A Telly Savalas paper doll! I especially love the yellow cargo pants (he was ahead of his time) and the striped shirt with the "whatever" at the front. At first I thought it was a tie, but I think not. It's one of those lace-up things.

This, of course, got me on a Thing. Celebrity paper dolls, but boy dolls. I remembered this bashful Tony Perkins pose with the pink polka-dot briefs and the upside-down turquoise trench coat. The text on these is in some sort of foreign language, Swedish I think, so I won't try to translate.

Though the name is cut off at the bottom (and crappy cropping is one of the things I hate MOST about Pinterest), this is Micky Dolenz of The Monkees. Really, he's nicely turned-out here, though I do wonder at the difficulty of snipping out all those little tabs. As I recall from girlhood, when I used to try to actually do these things, the scissors would always slip, causing almost all the tabs to be sliced off. Then you had to sort of tape the clothes on, defeating the purpose of the thing.

Here you can play with your Monkee all you want. Mike Nesmith being the coolest.

This is kind of a nice Elvis layout. Too many tabs by half, however. In some cases you were supposed to glue the paper onto stiff cardboard, let it dry, and THEN cut it out. Maybe then it could stand alone?

Prince Charles! I didn't know he existed as a paper doll. (Can Prince Harry be far behind?) Note that you put one set of clothes on top of the other. I guess they believed having a Prince in his gotchies would be a bit unsuitable.

There's something a bit dodgy about this Steve Austin doll. The head definitely does not belong to the body. I think this is probably a generic doll with interchangeable heads. It would help if they could get the size right.

My personal favorite: the Hoss Cartwright paper doll, complete with ten-gallon hat, though I don't see his Colt 45 anywhere. But the more I think about it - Dan Blocker in his underwear - uh - um - gghhgh - excuse me.