Hollywood Gays (10 page)

Warhol wrote in June, 1983, “Chris [Makos] said that he visited Tony Perkins and Berry.... He said that when Berry went into the other room Tony started pointing to Chris’s crotch and saying, ‘I’d like to see you,’ and all Chris could say was, ‘All right, Norman.’ I never really liked Tony because he treated me badly once when he was with Tab Hunter.”

Fashion designer Halston was godfather to Tony and Berry’s first child. He told the press, “Tony has changed his lifestyle, not his life. He’s trying something new, and I feel the relationship will last, but Tony is Tony....” James Kirkwood, who shuttled between affirming himself as gay or bisexual, recalled, “Dr. Newman was always after me to ‘settle down.’ By that she meant a woman and matrimony. As if that would solve all my problems, rather than giving me an entirely new set.

“My particular problems for which I sought help related to my childhood and my reactions to my dysfunctional parents, not to my love life....Unfortunately, Mildred’s credo was something along the lines of, it’s okay to like yourself—unless you are gay. Somehow it took me a while to realize that.”

O’Dowd admitted, “Tony’s personal demons weren’t exorcized by marriage. But through it he did establish a lasting relationship that he couldn’t be blackmailed or condemned for. For all his aloofness, Tony often hunts for other people’s pat on his back....Above all, he wanted to be a father and live the childhood he himself never had.

“But he still hasn’t been able to kick drugs.” In his 1984 book
Hollywood Babylon II
, Kenneth Anger described “ever-gaunt, closeted, and neurotic Tony Perkins (the shrink blamed it all on Papa Osgood)” being arrested at the airport after Concording to London “with a supply of sensimilla and three microdots of LSD in his purse.”

The
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
printed: “Tony Perkins’ loping ultra-slimness isn’t owed to any celebrity workout nor visits to the neighborhood gym. Were he to visit a gym, the reason, say insiders, would be other than exercise. ‘Tony likes to maintain his home life,’ says openly gay poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, who had intimate relationships with a movie studio head and a record producer. ‘Tony, like lots of men on either side of the fence, has no trouble separating love and sex. Or sexercise, since Perkins’s hopped-up expression and emaciated frame make Mick Jagger look very nearly the picture of health and fitness.”

George Cukor offered, “We have some mutual friends...one of them recently came back from New York and said Tony is renowned in local showbiz circles for making available and partaking of drugs at his and other people’s parties. At least he supposedly does it behind closed doors....Strangely, for someone so public about his marriage, most of Tony’s men friends and guests are gay men, usually in show business.”

Arthur Lonergan, art director of
The Actress
, explained, “Perkins and I lost touch after a brief but pleasant yet platonic friendship. But one doesn’t really lose contact, it’s such a small (showbiz) world. I’ve heard that, apart from anything else, he hoped his marriage would change his image and career, but it hasn’t had an impact on his career....Larry Kramer, the screenwriter [
Women in Love
] who became a gay activist (and safe-sex advocate), used to be a patient of Mildred Newman, but apparently he left because he could accept himself but she couldn’t. Whereas everyone says Dr. Newman became a surrogate mother to Tony Perkins, one he’s always eager to please.

“It must be tough, the ambiguity in such a life. Perkins’s desires aren’t ambiguous at all, but he does one thing, and lives another way. The conflicts and pressure must be tremendous.” Even if self-imposed.

Whatever Tony felt about his conflicted private life, his career was spiraling downward. He went from playing, say, a homosexual terrorist in a B-movie starring Roger Moore to barely released junk like
Twice a Woman
(1985) in which he taunts a female, “They say you’ve become a lesbian.... Is it because you couldn’t have children?” and wherein he does play a heterosexual and murders a young woman, his lover. He flew to Europe to work in some Eastern European productions, which he declined to discuss, telling a friend, “You don’t even want to know.”

By now, villain roles in big-budget films were beyond his reach. When
The Silence of the Lambs
proved a homophobic hit, Perkins told friends he could envisage himself as “Hannibal the Cannibal” Lecter. A writer for
Premiere
magazine opined that Perkins was the only actor besides Anthony Hopkins he could see in the role; but Perkins’s version “would be a non-heterosexual Lecter.” (Hopkins won an Oscar for his
Silence
role, as did then-closeted Jodie Foster, playing the sexually unspecified Clarice.)

Lambs
costar Ron Vawter noted, “The filmmakers did go out of their way to make Hannibal heterosexual—he’s the ‘good’ villain. The bad villain, the serial murderer of women, is depicted as a transvestite or a gay transvestite—even though most people who kill women, by far, are straight men in pants.

“I pictured Perkins as Hannibal, but the powers that be wanted to insure that Hannibal be perceived as straight, so they cast a straight actor. Perkins never had a chance.”

Eventually Tony moved with his family to the Hollywood Hills, to be closer to work. He socialized with gay luminaries, including members of the so-called “velvet mafia” who would later attend his memorial service. But proximity to the studios didn’t result in much work or offers from non-independents, and his final effort was the barely seen
A Demon in My View
(1992).

By that time, Tony Perkins had become far more interesting as an entity and a case history than any of his post-Norman roles. He could have written a riveting personal bestseller—as I pointed out to him—had he been willing to be honest. He countered by wondering, “What was it that Oscar Wilde said about being honest, or about the truth?” 1 assumed he meant “The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” from the play
The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895, the same year Wilde was sentenced to prison—and hard labor—for not being heterosexual).

I interviewed Tony Perkins twice after 1972, in New York and L.A. He’d improved as an interviewee, as hopefully I’d improved as an interviewer, and the two sessions (one for
British Photoplay
, the other for
In Style
magazine) were pleasant enough and could have extended into private encounters but for Perkins’s rather frightening mien and reputation. Besides which, as I reminded him at the end of our New York session at Oscar’s in the Waldorf-Astoria, ‘We each have a partner, you know; and it’s the ‘80s, time to play it safe.” He smiled sarcastically, then snapped, “Okay, you can pay the entire bill, it won’t be Dutch treat!” and called for the waiter to bring one check.

The next and final session was to have been a phone interview; but he sweetly requested that we meet in person, never alluding to the abrupt ending of our prior meeting, and even adding, “I really enjoyed our last several interviews (we’d done two), and I’d really like to see you again.” Despite it all, Tony Perkins could be disarmingly likeable, and never entirely lost his stellar charisma.

Q: You’ve used the word “hate” three times in the last few sentences...twice about food.

A: (Winces, then smiles.) Maybe I’m a hater-o-sexual.

Q: I’ve heard rumors. Seriously, though.

A: Everything’s serious. Too serious.

Q: What foods do you hate?

A: That’s far too personal. (Grins.)

Q: In that case, what person or persons do you hate?

A: I don’t hate him, but what a joke—Truman Capote. (I ask why.) He said things about me at parties.

Q: About your marriage? Or your...what?

A: About anything that came into his head.

Q: Why do you say he was a joke? (No reply.) His seeming a stereotype?

A: Not only that, though he was undeniably repellent. But he did stop being a writer. Bragging all those years about a novel (
Answered Prayers
) that never existed!

Q: Other than the excerpted chapters. Did he question whether you were gay or bi?

A: No. Whether I was gay or straight.

Q: Why didn’t bi occur to him?

A: (Shrugs.) Actors think about it, bisexuality. It’s part of acting, unless you do Westerns. Most roles have those facets to them. But writers like Mr. Capote (this time pronounced to rhyme with compote) are one or the other, so they only think that way.

Q: What about bisexual writers?

A: Name one.

Q: Gore Vidal?

A: Ask anyone who knows him. “Bisexual” may be politically correct, but he has no interest in women. Not that way. And he’s not Paul Newman’s only friend.
We’re
friends too, and I’ve heard Joanne (Woodward) saying that Gore’s never lusted after her, only after Paul.

Q: It’s certainly not known to the general public that Gore has lived with Howard Austen since before I was born.

A: Which was...1957?

Q: Thanks, 1954. I’ve heard that Gore himself points out that it isn’t, today, a sexual relationship.

A: (Harrumphs.) Some marriage!

Q: It does seem needless to point it out.

A: And
he’s
(mincingly)
bi
-sexual?

Q: Behave yourself, Norman! (He stares, his mouth open.) I couldn’t help myself. It was kind of fun.

A: (Both laugh.) One more of those, and there’ll be some harsh discipline....Back to our...what? Talk?

Q: Conversation. Or
Psycho
-analysis?

A: You’re asking for it.

Q: Gore Vidal. Okay. You’re an actor who reads. What do you—

A: Not him. Not anymore. Mr. Vidal (“Veedle”) is not very much for plot. Elegant, “bisexual” prose, but plots? You don’t read a novel to be bored. I don’t.

Q: As an essayist he’s excellent.

A: Was. Paranoia’s set in. Why do you think he’s so great? To me, he’s a climber. He cares desperately what other people think, but always pretends he’s insensitive to it. He’s
so
above it all. At least Capote wasn’t as pompous or paranoid. You could count on Truman for his ratty little genuine opinion. With Vidal, it’s all so calculated.

Q: But he’s said some—

A: Let me finish. He won’t even say
he’s
allegedly, supposedly bisexual. He only says that sex acts are this or they’re that, but he’s...
above
it all. He won’t commit. So he’s not so brave.

Q: He’s far from the only one not to commit to a category.

A: Why should anyone?

Q: Because we all fall into certain categories. Sometimes several. And others will categorize us anyway, often inaccurately or prejudicially.

A: I’m married and a parent. Doesn’t that say something?

Q: That since about age 40 you’ve been that and that, but one category doesn’t necessarily exclude another.

A: You mean (mock-shocked) life is not that simple?

Q: Life isn’t either/or. It’s and/but.

A: Contradictions, contradictions.

Q: Also pretenses, changes, experiments,
diversity
.

A: Is it true Mr. Capote opened his heart and his mouth to you?

Q: What?

A: He gave you a blow job?

Q: How on earth could you know about that?

A: That was Truman—have mouth, will travel. He didn’t only give good prose, he was...
he
said he wasn’t promiscuous. And he wasn’t, from behind. He just reckoned that if you used your mouth, it didn’t count. (Leer.)

Q: Did you know him, or he you?

A: Not that way. Andy Warhol had a crush on him. During the Stone Age.

Q: Hmm. I’ve seen most of your movies—a varied lot. Do I recall some Westerns?

A: (A half-smile.) It
was
varied. I do recall a few. One with Paul.

Q: I’ll bet casting directors didn’t think of you as the Western type.

A: I’ll bet they didn’t. Westerns are so simplistic.

Q: Sometimes there’s quite a bit under the surface.

A: I doubt it. Comedies are elementary school, drama’s high school, and Westerns are Sunday school. To simplify it for you.

Q: What’s college?

A: Your turn.

Q: Costume movies, I guess, historical movies. Do you like Westerns?

A: It’s a genre obsessed with masculinity, and troubled by it. I find that boring. It’s so juvenile.

Q: Is it paranoia or insecurity?

A: It’s boring. Just take things as they are. Westerns aren’t happy or...accepting. They’re so predictable.

Q: Formulaic.

A: Archaic. Your turn.

Q: Comedies. I imagine producers don’t think of you for comedy....

A: Producers with impaired imaginations do not.

Q: I’m told you have a wicked sense of humor.