PEOPLE MAGAZINE ARTICLE AUGUST 16, 1976 COUPLES: " FORGET THE PSYCHO ROLES; TONY PERKINS IS A DOTING DADDY WITH MARISA'S SIB BERRY BERENSON"
Guess who's sharing Tony Perkins' shower? Berry Berenson and their sons Ozzie and Elvis.
Elvis Perkins, 6 months, was named not for some pelvis-shaking singer but just because his folks, actor Tony Perkins and photographer/model Berry Berenson, found it euphonious. Yet his big brother, Osgood, 2, can't pronounce it and calls the kid "Mushy." That term could be applied equally __if not pejoratively__to the domestic ecstasy of the whole Perkins menage. It's all a miracle not from Lourdes but from Vienna. Tony freely concedes that it took him 40 years of living, the formative last nine in psychotherapy, and the revelation of Berry before he could cope with a genuine relationship with a woman. Berenson, meanwhile, 24 at the time, found in Perkins the first man she could live with. "He made me more open about my emotions, because he's been analyzed."
Now, four years later, they're both happier than the clams they used to be and probably happier than any other couple in their crowd. He's, of course, Hollywood's favorite psycho who has been starring on Broadway for the past year (except for the brief interregnum of Richard Burton) as the tormented psychiatrist in Equus. She's the distant cousin of art historian Bernard Berenson, granddaughter of couturiere Elsa Schiaparelli, fair-haired kid sister of ultra-chic actress-model Marisa Berenson and a name in her own right as a model-photographer with a LIFE cover to her credit. Berry's career and social life are unregretfully on hold while she's joyously preoccupied breast-feeding Elvis and preparing homemade baby food for Osgood in their Lower West Side row house.
Ozzie, as he's called, was the other coup de foudre in their lives almost comparable to the impact of Tony's famous shrink Mildred (How to be Your Own Best Friend) Newman, who also attended Berry temporarily. Berry had barely moved in with Tony when she hit him with the "total surprise" that he would become a daddy for the first time at 41. "There was just no way she could get pregnant," marvels Perkins. Berry explains: " I was using a coil." Did they consider abortion? "Of course," Berry says, adding quickly, "but there was no way we were not going to have that child." Actually, she continues, "The idea of getting married was even heavier than getting pregnant." Tony snorts, "The press wrung that one dry: 'They will! They won't! The proud, expectant unwed parents!' "Finally, he remembers, "My agent, Sue Mengers, said, 'Marry this girl. This isn't just some kurveh (Yiddish for whore) you got pregnant. She has class.' " Two months later they were wed in his Cape Cod cottage. The bride went barefoot. Tony, the ever-boyish (but now graying) leading man, showed up in his 15 year old white bucks. If Mengers could only get 15 percent of the rapture of her client! And to think, Tony beams, as he blinks lovingly at his kids, "I had never even held a baby before."
Sue was not the first go-between on the Perkins-Berenson deal. It was an old-fashioned fix-up long planned by a mutual friend, culminating at a party at actress Ruth Ford's. Berry, escorted by Halston, was "a nervous wreck," she confides. " I always had such a crush on Tony. I had a scrapbook of him when I was 12. Once when he came to live in Paris, Marisa and I went through all the phone books trying to find his number."
Their next encounter three months later was a calamity preserved on tape that Tony and Berry can laugh over only now. She'd arrived at his place with her tape recorder to interrogate him for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine.
" I kept prolonging the answers and thinking of questions for you to ask me," he says. Later she kept finding pretexts to return to check various drafts of the article__it was not exactly Pulitzer Prize journalism. When the piece was finished, he picks up, " It was like, well, thank you so much, and she started to cry. So I thought, God I'll take her to the movies just to get her out of there." But at the same time he wa exultant that she was "not playing any girlish games. I didn't think there were any girls like that in the world. I couldn't understand why she wasn't already married." (Perkins' housemate for six years before Berenson, Grover Dale, the dancer-choreographer of The Magic Show, had by then moved out, and he has himself subsequently married.)
Both Perkins and Berenson were born in New York. His father, the original Osgood Perkins, was a suave stage and film actor of proper Boston origin who died when Tony was only 5. So his theatre manager mother dispatched him to the swanky Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge Massachusetts. He played summer stock in Vermont, and , after a half-hearted education at Rollins College and Columbia., established himself on Broadway in Tea and Sympathy. Then followed three dozen movie roles, from Hitchcock's Psycho to Mahogany. Lately he has also expanded creditably into screenwriting (The Last of Sheila with Stephen Sondheim) and directing (Bruce Jay Friedman's Steambath).
Berinthia, as Berry was born to the late diplomat Robert Berenson and Gogo Schiaparelli, studied "needlepoint and geography" at boarding schools in England, Switzerland and France. "She speaks five languages," Tony beams. She wound up going to typing school. Her photography ambitions were initially blocked by professional sexism until Lord Lichfield, made her his protegee ( "I became his slave," she says). Berry was also set back by her own insecurity. When asked to substitute for Marisa on the runway at a Manhattan show, Berry replied, "Oh, no, I can't.You don't understand. I'm fat and not very pretty." She credits Halston and socialite LouLou de la Felaise with ending her feelings of inadequacy.
Right now, Tony and Berry are lavishing their psychic energy on Ozzie and Elvis. They've ruled out nursemaids. "That's the big difference from the way we were raised," he notes. Berry is even contemplating starting a nursery school on the ground floor of their house. Tony still sees shrink Mildred Newman. "It's an educational process," he explains. "The course is about yourself and I haven't finished it yet. When I do I will be delighted to give it up." Berry is not in treatment, and whatever is missed in their tranquil homebody existence, it is not sister Marisa's jet-setting lifestyle. "That's not what we're all about or why we're together," Tony observes. "The last thing Berry and I want to be is the "fun couple" of the year." |
