April 4, 1932 – His longtime friend, artist Don Bachardy:
“Of course we’d heard he’d married. I thought that was just awfully odd behavior for him. Did he honestly think that marriage to Berry Berenson (sister of actress, Marisa Berenson) could make him a heterosexual?”
Anthony Perkins had affairs with a number of notable men in the 1950s & 1960s: Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Stephen Rutledge, Rudolf Nureyev, Stephen Sondheim, & dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, with whom Perkins had a 6 year relationship before his marriage to Berenson.
He was a supremely talented, Oscar nominated actor of stage, screen & TV, but a single unforgettable film, Psycho (1960), resulted in just the sort of typecasting that murders a promising career. He was considered the heir apparent to James Dean. After starting off with star making Broadway performances in Tea & Sympathy & Look Homeward Angel, by the 1980s, Perkins was reduced to doing Psycho sequels & beer commercials in Japan.
Perkin’s era made for especially claustrophobic closets for gay actors. Tab Hunter: ” It was the excruciating dance of the 1950s”. Perkins found some satisfaction in the Times Square gay porno theaters where he passively watched other men have sex. The studio arranged dates with starlets for Modern Screen magazine, but there was always the fear gay actors had that a magazine like Confidential would expose them, the way it did with Hunter, one of Perkins’ first lovers. It was the 1950s, a public person could not leave the closet, even if they wanted to, & Perkins didn’t want to.
Perkins was nothing if not ambitious. Alan Sues (rest his soul): ”Nothing was going to get in the way of his career”. He lived platonically for years with a domineering older woman, Helen Merrill, while having sex with a long list of male lovers.
Yet, Perkins’ puzzling 1973 marriage to Berenson seems to have been more than just a marriage of convenience. Berenson had a crush on Perkins for years & pursued him relentlessly. After they married, the couple had 2 sons, Osgood & Elvis. Perkins was devoted to Berenson & the boys, but his gay friends privately doubted his claims that he was monogamous. While trying to convince Hollywood he was straight by getting married, Perkins seemed to have actually finally found some real happiness. Dominick Dunne (rest his soul):
“It was in a real sense, a marriage between them. Whatever they had, it was wonderful. I mean, it was a real & loving family.”
Perkins left this world in the autumn of 1992, from complications related to HIV. Perkins acknowledged he had AIDS after he took that final bow, in a statement dictated to his children:
“I chose not to go public about this because, to misquote Casablanca, ‘I’m not too much at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of one old actor don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy old world.”
He was just 60 years old. Perkins was cremated, & his ashes went to his family. His widow was killed on American Airlines Flight 11, during the September 11 attacks in 2001, the day before the anniversary of his death.
If you are interested in Perkins, & you should be, try Split Image: The Life Of Anthony Perkins (1996) by Charles Winecoff.
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