"Lonely Tony Perkins" by Robert Johnson, Saturday Evening Post January 9, 1960
Although he has found success as an actor in Hollywood and on Broadway, young Anthony Perkins has some perplexing personal problems he still can't solve.
With the release of his new motion picture, On the Beach, Anthony Perkins faces what may well prove to be the most crucial test of his career. In recent years he has frequently been called the most talented actor of his age---either in pictures or on Broadway, where he is best remembered for his starring role two years ago in Look Homeward, Angel. But in On the Beach he plays a part completely new to him---that of a perfectly ordinary, uncomplicated young man with a wife and baby. As Stanley Kramer, the film's producer-director says, "It's the most normal thing Tony has ever done." And whether Perkins can score an equal success in such a role remains to be seen.
From the time he first won wide public acclaim---and an Academy Award nomination---for his part as Gary Cooper's son in Friendly Persuasion three years ago, Perkins has been known for his sensitive performances as a series of brooding, introspective youths teetering inconclusively on the brink of manhood and tortured by deep inner conflicts.
It is a role which fits him as if he invented it. Standing a skinny six feet two and a half inches, he has the awkward, unco-ordinated look and the round-shouldered stance of a recently sprouted adolescent. His head is heavy with its thick tangle of dark-brown hair, and his face tapers from a broad forehead above brown eyes down to a narrow chin beneath what is probably the most engagingly bashful grin in America.. Indeed everything about him somehow radiates the poignancy of youth.
But he is nearly twenty-eight years old now; and in the words of Robert Mulligan, a director who has worked with Perkins twice, "Tony obviously can't go on playing the awkward, gangling , shy boy forever."
Perkins himself feels this very keenly, and he hopes that On the Beach will show him instead as a mature young man. "I think I'm a little sterner, stronger than I was," he says " a little bit more level-headed, more gathered. Sometimes in a person's development as a public personality strange mutations take place, and a person becomes really different. He can change in appearance, gain or lose weight or marry and be in a television series. But I think I'm still more or less the same person as ever, grown up a little--like the boy in Friendly Persuasion or Look Homeward, Angel, only he's been to college now and he's a little bit more of a person than he was."
Yet some people who have worked with Tony Perkins feel that he needs to grow up still more before he can do justice to a mature part. Tony himself calls acting "The instantaneous accumulation of past experience. It's pouring boiling water on the instant coffee of what you've already experienced." The question is whether he has experienced enough of life to store up the necessary instant coffee.
Perkins has always lived more intensely in a world of his imagination--of books, movies, the theatre and games of make-believe--than in the real flesh and blood world, chiefly because he has never felt at ease in the intimate give-and-take of close human relationships. "My great problem," he says, "is that I've always felt---and especially since I've become a so-called personality and a celebrity and so forth---that it was all a very exposable myth that I was somebody. I've felt that this was an absurd dishonesty and that if I were close to people, it would be instantly evident and they would say, 'Well, gee, he's nothing at all. What do we want to see him for?' If I can talk to someone for just five minutes, five vital minutes, I feel I can carry on the myth of being a full person; but any longer and I would be shown up as an empty, worthless nothing."
Tony's feelings of inadequacy became more than he could bear about eighteen months ago during the shooting of Green Mansions, in which he starred with Audrey Hepburn. "I'd had a bad day with the picture," he says. "Everything I did was wrong. I couldn't expect them to listen to my suggestions when I was all colorless and shrinking, invisible. I just reached the point where I felt I needed some support on my side of life." In desperation he turned for help to Henry Silva, the picture's villain, and Silva suggested a doctor he knew, an analyst.
" I called from the set," Tony recalls, "and I put all my hopes on the telephone call. I said, 'This is Anthony Perkins; you may have heard of me.' He said, 'No, I never have.' So I thought, Well, he'll never see me. I'm sunk. But he said he would see me the following day."
Tony went to the analyst begging, in effect, "Give me a personality." Instead---and much more to the point---the doctor has helped him begin to understand the personality he has. And perhaps the most important thing Tony has come to understand is the part played in his life by his father, Osgood Perkins, one of the fine actors of the 20's and 30's.
"My father died when I was five," Tony says. "We were just in the first stages of our relationship--when you're five, you're just beginning to know people anyway---and when he died it was such a blow to me, such a shock to me, that I talked myself into feeling that only knowing people up to a certain point is going to be good. After a certain point I feel, Oh, oh, hold on. I don't want my father to die again; I don't want to be kicked again. So I can only let a relationship with somebody exist up to X barrier. And then I will not go any further."
Short of that barrier, however, Tony can show great warmth and kindness. He's the kind of guy who'll always know your birthday," Henry Silva says, "even though you never told him." And Fred Astaire, with whom Tony worked in On the Beach, says, "He was terribly, terribly nice to me. He knew that I was concerned about playing my first serious part, and I used to talk to him about that. I had several scenes to play with him, and he'd give me sort of signs of encouragement when he was off screen. I really appreciated it."
Most actors also find Tony an extremely entertaining companion around the set. When he was working on The Matchmaker a couple of years ago, for instance, he and Shirley MacLaine took to each other immediately. As Tony says, " In this business, when you like people, you must like them intensely, you must lke them right away and you must like them all out, because you're only going to be together for maybe six weeks. You can't wait a week."
"I think Tony's very much fun," says Shirley--"way out of the confines of the kind of fun that everybody is used to. He's got a very vivid imagination; and if something that happens springboards something in his mind, he will go elaborate on it---like from a gust of wind at the door he could imagine he's on the Sahara during a sandstorm. And he brings you along in the gag. But," she adds, "his feelings get hurt if you step out of line."
One day Shirley noticed that Tony had a couple of large fan-magazine pictures of himself tacked up in his dressing room; and she took one and pasted it on the camera, where no one could miss it. "And I drew a mustache on it and eyebrows and earrings in his ears or something," she says "and he got very upset. I think it's immaturish of him to be mad because I put a picture up."
Probably what upset Tony most about this particular gag was that it dumped him off the make-believe plane by involving something as inherently real and intimate as his own face. He much prefers to leave his real self out of the game, hiding it behind an imaginary personality. And undoubtedly this self protective instinct goes far toward explaining his reputation---often exaggerated---for eccentricity. As Robert Mulligan says, " I think he gets a small belt, a kick, out of shocking people. It's part of the mask he wears to throw people off, so you don't get to know Tony. You're too busy noticing his bare feet, the rebel hat he's wearing or the stick he's juggling on his chin."
The result of these tactics is that there are probably not more than half a dozen people in the world who feel they really know Tony---and half of them are wrong. Shirley MacLaine realizes she doesn't."I've never been allowed that precious moment of seeing what Tony Perkins really is," she says. " I don't know what's an act and what isn't an act."
At that, Tony's relationship with Shirley was a good deal more spontaneous than he usually allows himself with girls---because Shirley is married. He is apt to to be rather guarded with unmarried girls. He has the idea that his acting would suffer if he were contentedly married or even engaged. "It's a question of a serene mind's making my performance less fertile, less vital," he explains, and his conscience won't permit him to cultivate a friendship which could end in matrimony. Since he is frequently attracted to marriageable girls, however, he sometimes "leaves it to fate" to decide what course the relationship will take. And he's not above giving fate a small nudge.
A year or so ago, for instance, he had gone to a premiere with Joan Collins, who is both unmarried and, says Tony, "the most gorgeous brunette I have ever seen in my life." When he brought her back to her apartment, she went out to the kitchen to make sandwiches---Tony doesn't drink. "And I thought to myself," he says, "I would really like to call this girl sometime. But then I thought, No, I can't call her. How could I get her to call me? So I took a pencil and I started writing my phone number on pieces of paper in the living room. I wrote it on her matches, I wrote it on her memo pad, I wrote it inside the script she was reading. And I put 'TP' after each one. Then when I left, I dashed home and I sat there by the telephone and I thought, Well, this will decide it---if she'll only call me. And I can't blame myself; I'm not pushing anything here."
But he needn't have worried about betraying his art. Joan never did call, and perhaps it is just as well. Tony has always been able to ease his way out of romantic involvements---as he did the three times he became engaged while in college. In the last analysis he simply cannot let anyone get that close to his real self.
As if to compensate for his essentially shallow approach to life, however, Tony gives himself completely and passionately to his craft. Acting is, in a way, his outlet for all the emotionalism he otherwise keeps corked up inside; and as such it is the most important thing in his life. "The greatest reason why he'll go on to even greater success," says Stanley Kramer, after working with Tony in On the Beach, "is that he cares about the performance he turns in---and it's evident every single second. Nothing is too much. We could rehearse a scene, then shoot it ten times, and Tony would still say, 'Can we do it once more? Do you think it's there? Do you think we got it?"
Nor is his own performance all Tony cares about, as Joshua Logan discovered when he directed the actor in the still unreleased comedy Tall Story last summer. "Tony was intensely interested in everything about the picture," Logan says, "from the way we were planning to present the titles and the music that would be under the scenes, to all of the actors who played the bit parts."
Tony's interest in acting dates as far back as he can remember. His mother says, " I think from the time he was very young he took it for granted that he would be an actor like his father." and Tony adds, " I thought when I was a kid that the reason my parents named me Anthony Perkins was that it has seven letters in each word--it makes a good marquee."
An only child, Tony was born in New York City on April 4, 1932, and had what his fellow actor and childhood friend John Kerr describes as " a very average upbringing for an upper-middle-class city boy." Shortly after his father's death, Tony suffered an attack of tuberculosis which has left him with a permanent low threshold of exhaustion and which has disqualified him for military service. But except for a convalescent visit to his maternal grandmother in Florida at that time, he spent the first ten years of his life in New York, and he still considers it his home town.
Early in World War II he and his mother moved to Boston, where she ran the Stage Door Canteen, although she has never been a professional actress herself. Recalling those days, Mrs. Perkins remembers her son as "far from a model child." She says, "My friends with children the same age thought I was lax about discipline, but I felt that Tony had a unique and creative mind and I wanted to give him every chance to develop it." When he was thirteen, however, she sent him away to Brooks School, in North Andover, Massachusetts. "He was doing poor work in day school," she explains, "and I felt he needed the challenge of being with more men and boys."
Tony was miserable at boarding school, mostly because he preferred reading quietly in his room to joining in the boisterous activities of his contemporaries. But the summer after his fifteenth birthday his mother finally allowed him to try his impatient wings at acting. Through friends she arranged for him to join a summer-stock company in Brattleboro, Vermont. This he loved. "I painted scenery," he says, "collected props, rang the telephone bells, played the off-stage records. Then I'd run down and sell orange drink during intermissions." Better still, he made his debut as a professional actor, playing a supporting part in Junior Miss. One performance in particular haunts him to this day.
"I used to love to see how plays looked that I was a part of," he says. "And when it wasn't my scene, I used to dash out and stand at the back of the house and watch. I was watching Junior Miss one night. I heard the doorbell ring and the people on the stage said, 'I wonder who that could be,' and I thought, Oh, I wonder who that can be. And then I realized that it was I who was supposed to be there on the stage. It was the eeriest feeling--hearing the bell and watching the door and thinking, Who can that be? and then knowing that it was me."
Despite this monumental blunder, Perkins worked with stock companies during every summer vacation from then on, and he feels that this experience---augmented by later work on the Broadway stage---taught him all he knows about acting. "You do not learn about acting from being in the movies," he says. "Movies are made so mechanically. You do the best you can as fast as you can. It's the rehearsal that you're shooting. It's as if the day we first got together for rehearsal, six weeks before Look Homeward, Angel opened, we had all introduced ourselves and then the director had said, 'Listen, you know your parts; we're going to open tonight ! ' And yet that happens in movies every day. In all eight major studios, people get together and open that day."
Tony's first experience in making movies came in 1952, when he was a student at Rollins College in Florida. The summer after his sophomore year he heard that M-G-M was casting a picture called The Actress, based on a play in which he had recently appeared in stock, and was testing young men for the very part he had taken. Accordingly, he hitchhiked his way to California and, through the intercession of a friend of his father who workd for Metro, was given a screen test. No glad little cries of discovery were raised at the studio as a result of this, however, and by the time Tony returned to Rollins the next fall, he had given up all hope of getting the part. Then late in the autumn he received a telegram saying, as he remembers it, "How's $350 a week? Arrive December nineteenth."
Tony hastened to Hollywood and completed the picture during his Christmas vacation. It was not a wholly euphoric experience---"I didn't learn anything except to shut up and be there," he says---but he expected great things from the picture. He therefore transferred to Columbia University in New York for his senior year to be closer to the theatrical and television casting offices when The Actress brought him to their attention.
The picture opened in October, 1953---"with a conspicuous lack of success," Tony remarks. And despite the tireless efforts of a talent agency, no one seemed eager to hire the fledgling actor who had appeared in it. Finally the next spring, just as Tony's discouragement was turning from dark blue to black, he landed a minor part in one show of a television series. Small crumb that it was to nourish a boy's hopes, it marked a change in Tony's fortunes. Other television jobs followed---he recalls his roles as being "a furious lot of long-haired, desperate, searching, wide-eyed beatniks"---and then that summer he got his first really golden opportunity.
Tony's friend John Kerr was due to leave the cast of Tea and Sympathy, in which he and Deborah Kerr--no relation--had been starring on Broadway; and at John's suggestion Elia Kazan, the director, invited Tony to read for the part. "That part," says Tony, "is the best part written for a young man, ever. It runs the traditional gamut from the height of exhilaration to fathomless despair. It's a beautiful, great part."
But Tony almost muffed his chance. "I remember the afternoon they read him," says John Kerr. "He read with Deborah down in the lounge at the Barrymore Theatre, and I sat on the steps and listened. And I was afraid he wouldn't get it because he read kind of slowly and , you know, as if he were afraid to really read it."
"It was like a fraternity initiation, only worse," Tony says. "The lounge was pitch-black, and there were just two lamps, one for me and one for Deborah, and a big couch to sit on. It was so eerie and so awful that I was bloodless. "
Nevertheless, Tony did get the part, and he left Columbia a month short of graduation to begin rehearsals. " I couldn't do both," he says. "And rather than go to the registrar's office and get in a big deal, I just picked up my books, took my name off my locker and went to as many classrooms as possible and erased my name off the seating plan. I thought I'd get kind of a kick out of seeing how completely I could vanish without leaving a trace."
Disappearing thus magically from one world, he made an equally effective entrance into another. Both audiences and critics applauded his moving portrayal of the gentle, almost effeminate schoolboy in Tea and Sympathy, and by the time the play closed thirteen months later, Tony had established himself as a new actor of great promise.
From Broadway Tony went straight to Hollywood for Friendly Persuasion. William Wyler, the film's producer and director, had come East earlier to test new talent for three supporting parts, and Tony was one of the New York actors who read for him. The reading took place in Wyler's hotel room while the director had breakfast. "He sat there eating ham and eggs," Tony recalls. "He said, 'Read a couple of scenes.' So I thought, Jeepers Creepers, and just did my best. I read one of the scenes, and he kept eating. Then he said, 'Have a cup of coffee,' and I figured I had at least a good line on the part. Funny how little things like that mean so much."
Looking back, Wyler remembers, "He was lanky, like Cooper; you would believe him as Cooper's son. And I didn't want a fellow who was too physical. I wanted someone who looked strong in spirit."
After making Friendly Persuasion---but a year before it was released---Tony signed a seven-year nonexclusive contract with Paramount, and the studio lost no time in putting him to work. In the next two years he made six pictures, receiving star billing in the last five. Only one of those does he remember with any pleasure. This was Fear Strikes Out, based on the true story of baseball player Jimmy Piersall. Tony still considers his performance as Piersall the best of his career.
The role posed a double-barreled challege. Never having played baseball, he had to learn the game from scratch---and as a right-hander, which he is not. Even more arduously, he had to portray a man building up to, and finaly suffering, a severe nervous breakdown. Since Tony had, of course, never actually experienced the pressures of big-league baseball, Robert Mulligan, who directed the picture, pointed out to him that Piersall's anxieties were not really very different from Tony's own. "It was Tony's first starring picture," Mulligan says. "He was being given his first big break, first big chance to go somewhere---as Piersall was when he arrived at the Red Sox." Like Piersall, Tony had to make good; yet he knew---and Mulligan reminded him---that any one of a number of things could go wrong and send him back to the minor leagues of show business.
Thus, while Tony played his scenes of gathering torment, Mulligan would be saying to him, "What about this Perkins? Is he really a star? Has he got what it takes? Or is he just a fraud, a flash in the pan?" And Tony, always highly suggestible, would act out his own personal fears, smashing his fist through a closed door, swinging wildly at his "teammates" or clawing his way up the backstop, and the sound track was dubbed in later.
"Tony is deeply sensitive to language," Mulligan says. "He can be emotionally keyed up---as he had to be in that---and it's something very difficult for an actor to do alone. He needs that outside goad. But his response is immediate---fear or anger, he can feel anything very quickly---and real, very real." Tony, in fact, finished the picture so exhausted emotionally that he had to spend two weeks in the hospital.
Aside from Fear Strikes Out, however, Tony's career in Hollywood proceeded somewhat haltingly after Friendly Persuasion. "They put him in some awful junk," says William Wyler. "Instead
of carefully and jealously guarding him as a valuable property---as you would a new car even--they said, 'Quickly! Make a few pictures quick!' They've been intent on making money instead of developing Tony's talent."
Even films from which much was expected---like Desire Under the Elms and The Matchmaker---proved disappointing both at the box office and to Tony. "Very dry, very lifeless," he calls them both. Before either of these were released, however, his personal reputation had been shored up anew by his triumphant return to Broadway in Look Homeward, Angel. For eight months---all the time his movie commitments would allow---Tony played Eugene Gant to capacity audiences. "It's a highly emotional role, requiring a great deal of imagination," says Kermit Bloomgarden, the shows producer, " I think Tony's performance was brilliant."
When he left, the cast presented him with a cigarette box inscribed with the play's cast of characters. Since Tony does not smoke, however, the box remains empty---except for a note reading, "We love you and hate to see you go," and signed by all his fellow actors.
In the summer of 1958, following Look Homeward, Angel, Tony returned to Hollywood to make Green Mansions. He had high hopes that this would be the hit picture which had eluded him ever since his elevation to starring parts. He also hoped for at least a modest red-carpet reception from the studio now that he was a star. Instead, he wasn't even allowed through the gate.
"I went to the casting gate," he explains, "because that's the gate I went through when I was in The Actress. So I said 'Green Mansions. I'd like to go through.' 'What's your name?' 'Tony Perkins.' 'Tony Perkins? Are you a native bearer?' 'No, I'm a featured player.' I just didn't want to say, 'I'm the star. Let me in or I'll have you fired.' 'Well,' the man said, 'you can't go through this gate.' Finally one of the casting directors walked by, and he got me in."
Tony loved working with Audrey Hepburn, but he had "some very heated disagreements" with Mel Ferrer, Audrey's husband, who directed. Tony has always been an actor who wants close guidance from the director, but once he questioned Ferrer so persistently about how he wanted a certain scene played that, since the film was already behind schedule, the scene had to be left out entirely. And Tony says, "He angrily accused me of deliberately asking so many questions that we lost the scene." Indeed, what made the incident particularly galling to Ferrer was the knowledge that Tony had thought all along the scene should be dropped.
Long before this, however, Tony had resigned himself to the fact that Green Mansions would be his sixth starring picture in a row without a hit. As a result he was all the more anxious that On the Beach should not make it a seventh, and he and Stanley Kramer spent long hours polishing Tony's part before the actor left for Australia in January of last year. The picture is woven from three parellel plots of about equal importance. "Tony had some misgivings," Kramer says, "because his wasn't the starring role." And Perkins wanted to be very sure about his own part. "With a relatively small part," Tony says, "every word has to be just right. I worked harder on this script than any other script I've ever worked on."
During these sessions he found Kramer warm, friendly and co-operative. Thus he was thoroughly disconcerted to discover that in Melbourne the director had become "gruff, short, sacastic. I thought, God, I've made the mistake of the age. It was like some old boarding-school story: When the mother comes, the man rubs his hands and says, 'Yes, we're going to be wonderful friends.' Then just as soon as she leaves, it's into the pits with the seven hundred starving urchans."
But if Kramer's disposition was testy he had ample cause in the special problems posed by shooting the picture in Australia. One of these involved the necessity of setting up police barricades to keep the streets empty for scenes showing a lifeless city. The police were happy to oblige, Kramer explains, but the rest of the townsfolk "resented interference with their inalienable rights to cross the street and shove the cops around." Probably the Yankees' popularity reached its lowest point
on the Sunday when one over-officious member of the consabulary refused to let a minister cross the street to get to his own church, delaying services for forty minutes.
Equally annoying for Kramer and his companions
was the Austarlian insect population. January is midsummer in Melbourne, and the flies were out in force, especially on the beaches where certain scenes had to be shot. It became necessary, in fact, to hire a man with a machine which sprayed forth large clouds of fly repellent. "And for thirty seconds thereafter, says Tony, "the flies would be stunned. So the order of the day would be, 'O.K., everybody ready. Hand on switch. Fly man!' And then, swoosh---you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. There would be a deathly silence, a few coughs, and we would wait for this stuff to drift away; and then, zing---we would do the scene and hope to get through before the flies came back."
Most trying of all in some ways was the fact that their sound stage for interior scenes had been improvised from a building at the local fairgrounds formerly used to show livestock. It was impossible to soundproof. This proved to be all the more unsettling because a few hundred yards away was the city's harness racing track, and nearer still, much of the time was Billy Graham. Many an otherwise unblemished take was ruined by the shouts of repentant sinners and unrepentant horse players. Only once were the tables turned. In one scene Fred Astaire commits suicide by locking himself in his garage and revving up the engine of his beloved racing Ferrari car. This makes quite a racket in the picture, but it made a great deal more in actuality, and, says Stanley Kramer with unholy satisfaction, "We nearly blew Billy Graham right out of Australia."
Depite such small diversions, however, life proved fairly dull for the film company. They were there for three months and, says Tony, "There was always a slight feeling of wanting to be home." In addition there was little to do after a day's shooting. Night life in Melbourne is almost nonexistent. "Everything closes at six, Tony says. "And they have what is known as the 'Six O' Clock Swill.' People line up with buckets and old hats and shoes and they just pour in the beer and then they sit and drink it---because the lock goes on at six."
Generally Tony had dinner with Donna Anderson, who plays his wife in the picture. "Tony was a tremendous eater," she says. "he kept saying something about a diet he was on, but he would often have five or six helpings of something he liked." And by the time they were through eating, "it was just like the blitz was on," says Tony. "Black. No sign of life. The best fun we would have was to go to Stanley's and play poker. I never played before, but I loved to play. It's not like money when you're playing with pounds; it's just paper. I ended up winning the equivalent of about three hundred American dollars."
Returning to America, Tony started almost immediately preparing for his part in Joshua Logan's Tall Story, in which he plays a naive and studious basketball player. "It is a type." says Logan, "that has been used for many years---the schnook. But Tony takes this threadbare type and makes in into something human and believable and completely his own."
Logan feels that Tony's range is extraordinary. "He can be wildly comic, vicious, charming, evil, joyful, innocent, sophisticated, tender, poetic, stupid and bumbling---all these things and many more---at will. All he needs is a little suggestion from the director." So impressed is Logan with Perkins' talent, in fact, that he hopes Tony will be free to play the lead in the film version of Moss Hart's autobiography, Act One, movie rights to which Logan has purchased.
That is stil a long way in the future, however. Meanwhile, Tony is keeping busy. Late last November he started work on an Alfred Hitchcock picture called Psycho, the style of which can perhaps best be described as Hitchcock Macabre. After this, if all goes well, he will fulfill a long-standing ambition to do a Broadway musical. This show, which opens in Philadelphia later this month, is Frank Loesser's Greenwillow, and it will
be Tony's only singing part except for a television show called Joey, which he did shortly after finishing Friendly Persuasion in 1955. Tony enjoys singing; and for a while after Joey he made records for the Epic label and later for RCA Victor. But he got out of recording because he had to spend so much time promoting his records. "I had one big seller, Moonlight Swim," he says, "but to be a good recording star you've got to be only a recording star. I think if I had devoted myself to it, I would, you know, be as good as anybody. But it wasn't worth that much to me."
For better or worse, Tony's future seems to lie mainly in motion pictures. If he can make the difficult transition to mature parts, there should ne no limit to his success. But, as William Wyler says, "Tony should watch now and be very careful. Audiences are fickle. He should choose carefully. It's hard to look good in a lousy picture."
THE END |
