Anthony Perkins

Even I can’t quite believe I hadn’t written about Anthony Perkins before. It’s frankly amazing. Anthony Perkins is one of the most notable figures in both horror and the queer history of Hollywood, and it seems shocking that I didn’t slot him into a June or October months ago. I guess I’ve failed him, too; a read through his biography convinces me that I’m not the only one who did. He went from being typecast one way to being typecast another, and he endured conversion therapy and was forced to hide his sexuality from his children by the beliefs of the time. And then The National Enquirer literally stole his blood.

Perkins was born in Manhattan, the son of minor actor Osgood Perkins. His father died when he was five; his mother became involved with Michaela O’Harra in a relationship that may or may not have been sexual. She apparently also assaulted her son, touching him in appropriate ways and places into his adulthood. He said she didn’t realize what it was doing to him, but if so, she must’ve been appallingly clueless. He was a poor student, and I can’t imagine why.

He was first romantically attracted to another boy in high school, while he was doing summer stock. He attended Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where he befriended a music student named Fred Rogers who let Perkins use his piano. Rogers was one of the only people to stay friends with him during the school’s lavender scare; Perkins was only not expelled because of the intervention of a theatre professor. Nevertheless, he transferred to Columbia. He didn’t, it seems, graduate, instead starting his Broadway career.

He had also spent a summer vacation in Hollywood, where he was fortunate enough to draw on family connections and get a role in George Cukor’s The Actress. Cukor had known his father. Elia Kazan, who considered the elder Perkins one of the greatest actors of his time, hired the younger Perkins in the Broadway run of Tea and Sympathy, replacing its original lead John Kerr, who became one of his lifelong friends. After it ended, he was scouted by William Wyler’s assistant to be in Friendly Persuasion, and out to Hollywood he went again.

Paramount decided to groom him as a teen idol, ironically alongside his then-partner Tab Hunter. They even had him sing. He had a passable singing voice, though he himself disliked it. However, what he craved was more complex roles. He was able to go to back to Broadway for Look Homeward, Angel. He was offered the role of Joe in Some Like It Hot but the studio prevented him from taking it because they didn’t want him to appear in drag. Strangely, he was instead cast as the male lead in The Matchmaker, which includes a drag scene. But only one, I suppose is the difference.

He tried to get pay equality for costar Shirley MacLaine, though the studio refused. She later said it was hard to get to know him, a sentiment repeated throughout things said by people who knew him either personally or professionally. Part of that was his sexuality; he had avoided the draft by telling the board he was gay, which was apparently a difficult moment for him. Possibly it was the first time he’d ever said it out loud. The studio was consistently trying to force him into more stereotypically masculine roles, preventing him from playing Tony in West Side Story.

Post-Psycho, Perkins continued acting more steadily than I think people may realize, in part because so many of the films sank without a trace longterm. He cowrote The Last of Shiela alongside sometime partner Stephen Sondheim; they did several unproduced projects as well. He married actress Berry Berenson, with whom he had two children. This seems to have been during a stretch when he was undergoing conversion therapy. His son, Oz, would later use the way his mother tried to keep him and his brother sheltered from his father’s sexuality as inspiration for Longlegs.

In 1990, while filming Psycho IV, he developed a facial palsy. Berenson expressed belief that The National Enquirer bribed someone to steal some of his blood and test it, since Perkins never had an HIV test deliberately. He sought treatment anonymously, choosing to keep his status private. He had felt it wasn’t important. It’s possible, though, that given AIDS was seen as a gay disease, it was still more hiding of his sexuality, a thing he’d been doing all his life at that point. That poor man.