MOVIEGOER MAGAZINE ARTICLE MARCH 1986 "ANTHONY PERKINS TAKES ON A NEW DIRECTION" BY DAVID FREEMAN Twenty-six years ago, as Norman Bates in Psycho, Anthony Perkins gave new meaning to the word "bloodbath." In 1983 he reprised that famous role. Now, as director and star of Psycho III, he brings the long, bloody Bates saga to an end. In Psycho III, Norman Bates was directed by the man who knows him best: Tony Perkins. He walks with a spring in his step, this tall, lanky man who looks just a little surprised at his own happiness. Surely this is an ideal, easygoing dad, used to filling the station wagon with wife, kids, and dog and driving over to the high school to watch soccer practice. But look again: he's a mite older than the perfect pop, and those eyes are set too deep to have practiced their gaze at PTA meetings. Could this possibly be the past and present proprieter of the Bates Motel, the man who changed the history of personal hygiene? Then a knowing, crinkling grin appears on that angular face, and you see that it is indeed Mr. Anthony Perkins. The first impression, though, was right: he does look calm and sensible, like a surburban squire, Hollywood division. Tony Perkins has lived a lot of his life in public. Until he was almost 40, he was a famous lost soul, renowned for his portrayals of sensitive, alienated, crazy sons. The best-known psycho in his repertoire, of course, was the devoted, demented man-child Norman Bates of Psycho, Psycho II, and now Psycho III. In 1973 he married Berinthia "Berry" Berenson, a photographer and model, sister of the actress Marisa Berenson, and grandniece of the famous art historian Bernard Berenson. Show business gossips predicted doom for the match, citing Perkins's history of public angst and the 16-year difference in age. It seems that the gossips were wrong. Almost 13 years later, the Perkinses have two sons and an apparently happy and stable life together in an old Spanish-style house in the Hollywood Hills. Twenty-six years have passed since Tony Perkins interrupted the most famous shower in cinema. Now in his sixth decade, a working actor since 1947, he stands on the brink of what could be the next great transition in his life: his emergence as a film director. In Psycho III, Norman Bate's third attempt to find happiness in the motel business. Perkins is working both before the camera and behind it. After he agreed to take on Psycho III, the budding film director went to the Cinema and Theatre Book Shop on Hollywood Boulevard in L.A. to see what he could learn about the craft. Perkins had directed for the stage before, and he had performed in a score of movies, but he was a novice at film directing. Still manuals on the subject turned out to be less than useful. "I couldn't follow any of them," he admits. "They were just too technical. I decided I would only go with things I could do myself, at least a little bit." Although he's too modest to say it, one of the things that Perkins can do, "at least a little bit," is work with actors from the inside out. No performer, when he or she is on the job, cares about sprockets per feet, or foot-candles. For actors, working with a director who's been the object of the camera's gaze himself is enormously helpful; it tends to create an atmosphere in which talented people can do their best work. Perkins tried not to be overawed by his new duties as a director. "I wouldn't be useful to the movie if I were intimidated," he says. "You have to behave a little like a general. You can have all your shots for the day written down in a little notebook, but if you haven't got a companionable and articulate way of disseminating the information, it will do you no good. On the other hand, you can be delightful and folksy, but if you don't come through, that folksiness will be a thin commodity by five o' clock the first day. "Being a first-time movie director is a bit like being a first-time bullfighter," he continues, clearly pleased with his newly minted simile. "You can find out all about the arena and the people who'll assist you and the outfit you'll wear__but until you get in that ring with the bull, you can't call yourself a bullfighter." In addition to the first taste of film directing that came with Psycho III, Perlkins is on his third go-round as the portrayer of Norman Bates. That's a tough combination. "I tried not to think of it as two jobs," he says. "It's all one job, and that's the way I tried to go at it." His best advice came from cinematographer Bruce Surtees, who had worked a lot with Clint Eastwood. "I asked him, "What did Eastwood do for his first picture?" He told me that Clint went to his mentor, Don Siegel, and said "What's your advice?" Siegel said, "Clint, a lot of people are going to ask you a lot of questions." Then he walked away. That was it. Now that I've directed a film, I can see that it wasn't bad counsel." Anthony Perkins was born in New York on April 4, 1932, the only child of Osgood Perkins, a well known stage and screen actor of the 20's and 30's. The elder Perkins still turns up on late-night TV, most notably with Paul Muni in the 1932 version of Scarface. During his son's early childhood, Osgood was on the road a lot. He died of a heart attack when the child was 5. That calamity led to the most famous unresolved Oepidal conflict in show business. Young Tony's relationship with his widowed mother was a troubled one__perhaps not as much so as Norman Bate's relationship with his mom, but tough enough that the boy fell prey to a deep fear of women. If his emotional life was stunted, though, his professional life flourished. At 16, he was touring with Kay Francis in the W. Somerset Maugham play "Theatre". When he was 20 years old, George Cukor (who directed The Philadelphia Story) cast him in a film called The Actress. At 23, he appeared on Broadway with Deborah Kerr in the Elia Kazan production of Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy. Perkins played a prep school boy who doubts his own sexuality until the headmaster's wife (played by Kerr) takes him in her arms and utters the play's famous curtain line: "Years from now, when you talk of this__and you will__be kind." At a time when most young men are just getting used to the idea of being adults, Perkins was moving easily from Broadway to Hollywood, with a lot of live-drama television work in between. As the parts mounted up, the Anthony Pekins stage and screen persona__thin-skinned, confused, alienated, not a little crazed__began to burrow its way into the conciousness of audiences, where it has lived ever since. In 1959, Alfred Hitchcock cast him as Norman Bates. From the release of Psycho in 1960 until the present day, Perkins has been a fixture of American culture. Like Sean Connery of 007 fame, Christopher Reeve of Superman, Yul Brynner of The King and I, and Zero Mostel of Fiddler on the Roof, he is inescapably associated with his most famous role. Unlike any of those actors (with the possible exception of Connery), Perkins has been able to play other roles withot diminishing the paranoid power of his cinematic alter ego. Now, in his middle age, Perkins still projects a version of the troubled boy of almost 30 years ago. The onscreen face, seen most memorably in Psycho, seems to say, "Help me, help me." The anguish and confusion in that face tells us that Norman wants to help his mother, that he loves her, and that even if this love leads to terrible deeds, it is love nonetheless. Watching young Bates in that interior pain, you can almost hear the women in the audience thinking, "He's not so crazy. If I had a chance, I could help him." The men may say to themselves, "Okay, he's a little odd. But if we could just sit down and have a beer, I could straighten him out." Perkins has managed to present his characters' neuroses to the public in a way so appealing that despite the corpses a d unhappy romances littering his cinematic trail, the man remains sympathetic. That's a tough act to carry off, but it has made him an enduring star. There's a rule of thumb in Hollywood that sequels always cost more and earn less than the originals they follow. After appearing in Psycho II and III, as well as directing the latter, Perkins acknowledges that he's tackled a monster. "A sequel is the most demanding thing to do, because everyone has an idea about it. The dice are loaded. Particularly in a sequel, you can't hold anything back. You have to shoot the whole wad, squeeze it dry. You can't save anything for the next incarnation. If you do an audience will resent it, and rightly so." Warming to the subject, he goes on: "There's so much entertainment available today. If people have taken the trouble to get out of their houses and go see a movie, you have the obligations to them. You can trick them into the theatre with false promises. But if your movie doesn't deliver, it will sour the experience. You have to make them happy that they went to see it." During the postproduction work on Psycho III, Perkins refused to speculate about any future attempts on his part to lure audiences into the theaters. "It seems somehow disloyal to be talking about directing other movies while all my attention has to be on this picture." He will, of course, continue to consider screen roles as they turn up. It's clear that after the gothic intensity of Psycho II and III and the operatic gaudiness of the Ken Russell film Crimes of Passion (in which Perkins starred opposite Kathleen Turner as a minister who's also a sexual weirdo) he wouldn't mind doing something a little lighter__a comedy, perhaps. Then again, maybe Perkins has secretly been playing comedy all along. His own famous description of Norman Bates as "the Hamlet of horror" is both deadpan funny and dead-on accurate. In the meantime, until he has a chance to find out if film directing is merely a side trip in an already interesting journey, Anthony Perkins will continue to live the actor's life, working out everyday, taking his vitamins, and enjoying the pleasures of domesticity with his wife and sons. At 53 he's looking content, a man who's put his not-so-gothic house in order. Let's let him have the last word: "The Anthony Perkins of age 30 or even 40 could not have directed this picture. He was too inarticulate, too paranoid. Too easily hurt. Now I'm married, I've got a son in junior high school, and I'm still here, still staying above the waterline."