Magazine article 1959 "Tony Perkins the quiet rebel"
Determined to preserve his own identity, he steadfastly refuses to compromise with fame
During the Broadway run of the hit play Look Homeward Angel, the cast was always able to tell when the star, Tony Perkins, was upset. He would arrive at the theatre and, without a word to anybody, go into his dressing room, lock the door, and sit silently until curtain time. On other occasions he would come in and sit in front of the mirror and stare at his image for long periods, telling himself out loud, "You're beautiful. You're a beautiful kid! " Then he would turn to his understudy, Lionel Kane, and say, " I look good today, don't I?"
Kane explains that this was Perkins' way of rousing himself from a blue mood, but it is not surprising that such seemingly eccentric behavior should lead even Tony Perkins' closest associates to regard him as somewhat of an enigma. They do not question the fact that he is a brilliant and astonishingly versitile young actor, who, having scored a triumph last year as the soul-searching adolescent in Look Homeward Angel, has now turned in a performance as the youthful husband in the film On the Beach that preview critics believe should earn him a Academy Award nomination.
But while those who know Tony Perkins admire him as an artist and like him as an individual, they find themselves puzzled and disconcerted by unaccountable moods that he does not attempt to explain. They do not understand why, although he can be charming and articulate when he chooses, he frequently talks in such detached terms that he seems curiously impersonal, while at other times he takes no part in the conversation.
On occasion Perkins' behavior strikes others as being odd or perverse. He hitchhiked back and forth to work while making a film, made a habit of driving alone through deserted city streets early Sunday mornings, and abruptly walked out of parties without a word of good-bye. While Tony's conduct often puzzles people, including his mother and some of his friends, a close look at this young man shows him to be a consistent, though exceptionally complex, human being whose chief failing seems to be that because he is either unaware of the impression he is making on others or unconcerned about others' reactions, he frequently fails to make himself understood.
This failure to communicate with the people around him is a trait that apparently lies deeply rooted in Tony Perkins' past. It was characteristic of him during adolescence, and at the very start of his Hollywood career it made itself felt once again, brought to the fore, paradoxically, by the boy's sudden and unexpected success.
"I was a far more well-adjusted and outspoken person before that," said Perkins thoughtfully. "As long as I was struggling as the others were, I could be myself, one of the bunch. Once I had distinguished myself, though, I was leading the charge all alone. I thought I didn't deserve my success, and I felt guilty.
"Afterward, everything seemed alien, and I didn't think anything I had to say was worth saying. People chalked up my silence to moodiness or sullenness or, worst of all snobbishness! And I kept telling myself I was just shy and self-conscious.
'Ironically, I spent a couple of years playing parts in which I was supposed to be a decisive person, but all the while I was in a torment over this feeling of being a total cipher. It just about paralyzed me. And when it gets to that state, you know you want to do something about it."
What Tony Perkins did was consult a psychiatrist. In doing so, he acted in the manner of a young man who was more troubled than frightened, a young man who had---despite deep self-doubts---forged ahead in his career and whose strong sense of values kept him from making the common Hollywood mistake of confusing fame with happiness.
At the end of several months, Perkins felt that he had regained his equilibrium and could again handle his own problems. He had fortified his self-confidence by coming to a fundamental but deceptively simple conclusion. "I decided that I was at least as much of a person as anyone else was," he said.
What kind of a person, actually, is Tony Perkins? To the eye, he is, at twenty-seven, a tall, wiry, engaging young man, whose face swiftly mirrors his many subtle moods, with deep-set, probing eyes and a boyish grin that makes him seem years younger. Although he likes to dress casually---throughout the summer in Australia when he was making On the Beach, he wore sports shirts, shorts, and sneakers---he is acutely aware of style in clothing; when he sees someone wearing something he likes, he doesn't hesitate to ask where it was purchased. He is equally inquisitive about the preparation of any food that he enjoys.
Despite the fact that Perkins earns a handsome income, he lives simply. In New York, he has kept the same inexpensive apartment that he had when he first appeared on Broadway; each time he goes to Hollywood, he must search for another inconspicuous place to rent. He dates girls who appeal to him, with no regard for their pontential publicity value.
At this point in his career, Tony Perkins, like so many other young men moving up in their professions, is struggling to express his individuality to his own satisfaction without losing the approval and affection of his friends.
To achieve this, Perkins must walk a tightrope. He must be a quiet rebel, a reasonable nonconformist. When for example, he was questioned about the fact that for months he had hitchhiked back and forth to work at Allied Artists, he replied, "When I first came to Hollywood, I didn't know how to drive. I lived at one end of Sunset Boulevard, and the studio was at the other end. There was a lot of traffic going by every morning and every evening, so the simplest way to get there seemed to be to just stand with my thumb out and get a ride. Finally, of course, I learned to drive and got my own car."
With equal logic, he explained his enjoyment of cruising alone in New York in his Thunderbird at six A.M. "On Sunday mornings," he said, "if you drive slowly and see something you want to look at, you can stop in the middle of the street, if you want to. There's no one to tell you to move on. It seems like a perfectly legitimate and uneccentric thing to do."
No matter what Tony Perkins intends doing, whether of his own volition or at the urging of others, he must have reasons that his intellect can accept, and he needs time to mull them over. "Tony is not the kind of fellow who immediately warms up to you or your ideas," commented producer-director Stanley Kramer, who chose Perkins for a pivotal role in On the Beach. "He may be impressed by what you've said, but at the moment you get absolutely no reaction.
"Then, maybe a couple of days later, he'll have formed his own conclusions, and he'll come by with a big grin, at peace with himself. 'Now I've found a way to do this that will satisfy everything you want,' he'll say, 'and still I'll feel it.' "
To reconcile his views with those of others, Tony Perkins relies on his reasoning powers. There are times, however, when he seems unable or unwilling to make a decision based primarily on his personal desires, and he then seeks reasons that lie beyond himself.
"I'm always better if I seem to be doing something for a purpose other than just my own satisfaction," he explained. "I've been aware of this for some time. Psychiatry tells you that you should do things for yourself, for your own best reasons. I've always found it preferable to do things for another reason---to please a director, for instance, or to make another actor look good.
"In a picture like On the Beach, I can pin this reason to the fact that it's a worthwhile film, an important one. That means more to me than it should perhaps. But what is the alternative? To do something for glory, or for money, or for some other silly reason?"
With such an outlook, Tony Perkins risks making the mistake of assuming that to act in his own best interests is always selfish and bad, while acting to the advantage of others is always unselfish and good. It may well have been this kind of muddled thinking that led him to yield to the urging of people who wanted him for the picture Green Mansions, a box-office failure.
Tony longs for everybody's approval. Speaking of himself as an actor, he once said, with painful honesty, "I need people to tell me I'm good, because I can give so many reasons why I'm not."
He has also admitted, " I take criticism too seriously, too defensively."
One director said, "Tony is easier to work with than any star I've ever been associated with, but when he's been hurt, even if you've just been kidding, he bounces back so far that you never make that mistake again."
In spite of his own deep feeling of insecurity, or possibly because of it, Tony Perkins is highly sensitive to the fears and doubts of others. On the first day of rehearsal for Look Homeward Angel, when his understudy, very nervous, walked in, Tony got up from the long table where he was sitting with other members of the cast and sauntered over to introduce himself.
" He was warm and friendly," said Lionel Kane, "and made what would have been very difficult for me very easy."
This is Tony Perkins today, a remarkable young man, more mature than most his age, capable of surmounting his own anxieties so that he can help sustain others. He has forged the will to be self-reliant out of a sense of personal inadequacy.
"I think I've had this drive to be independent becase when I was five my father left us, in a final way," said Tony, referring to the death, in 1937, of Osgood Perkins, the well-known actor. " I felt as if I'd been deserted and should be on my own. That's probably the single most important thing that has made me an independent person.
"Then, too, my mother was the opposite of the overprotective mother. She pratically thrust me into situations where I would be on my own. I remember being left at home alone when I was very young, because she was working. Once---I must have been six or so---when we were living in New York, I had to go down to buy some bacon. On the way, I had the money snatched out of my hands by a couple of kids. I was totally alarmed that such a thing could happen. It seemed to me it must have been two Martians, rather than two kids."
At another point, while evaluating the people who have influenced his development, Tony said, "My mother, considered realistically, unidealistically, comes out as well as anyone I know. As far as rules of conduct go---what to do, how to think, how best to live---I hark back to her first. Educated, intelligent, selfless to the right degree, she is a wonderful person."
Tony's mother, Janet Perkins, is a self-sufficient woman, strikingly youthful in appearance, as well as in spirit, who describes herself, in contrast to her creative son, as "the administrative type." It is not difficult to trace her contribution to Tony's independent spirit.
" When he was born," Mrs. Perkins recalled, "I had a woman obstetrician who believed that a woman shouldn't have any unpleasant recollections of childbirth. She gave a combination of drugs which meant, as a result, that I had no recollection whatsoever of the birth. So from the start, I had a detached feeling about Tony.
"Oh, he was my child, and I myself took care of him when he was a baby, because I knew then that I could have no more children and I didn't want to be cheated out of a moment of his growing up. I felt that this was the time to enjoy him, while he was little. Perhaps if more parents realized that, they wouldn't feel so bad when their children become independent at an early age, because they would realize how much happiness they have had.
"As Tony grew up, he was my special interest--my only interest--in life, but I always had had this detached feeling about him, that whatever he wants to do, he has a perfect right to."
Although Mrs. Perkins refrained from making any particular effort to interest her son in the theatre, it soon became clear that he was drawn to his father's profession. "As Tony grew older and saw other boys with their fathers, he badly missed his own father. And the only identification he could have with his father was through the theatre."
As a youngster, Tony contracted tuberculosis, from which he recovered completely, only to become gravely ill with scarlet fever. The single physical reminder that he has of these sicknesses today is his need for sufficient sleep. It is characteristic of Perkins, however, that he makes no effort to explain such matters to others. Consequently, while making On the Beach, he would baffle members of the company with whom he had gathered for an evening's relaxation by getting up abruptly and leaving at ten P.M. "He acted like a starlet who had to have the circles out from under her eyes by dawn," one observer commented acidly.
His childhood illnesses may also have been key factors in his development into an introspective boy. " In a way, Tony has always lived in a dream world," said his mother. "He loved to read, and he read everything. If I missed a book or a magazine, I knew I'd find it in his room. He has always been a solitary, self-sufficient person. He never asked, 'What can I do?' He had so much to do by himself."
One of Mrs. Perkins' recollections of ten-year-old Tony at camp indicates he was already consciously avoiding situations in which he might encounter disapproval. His mother wanted him to learn to play baseball, because she thought it was a wonderful sport and "his father played it and enjoyed it." Tony, she soon found out, did not.
When she asked her son why, he replied, "You're out in the field, and you miss catching a ball, and everybody's mad at you. Not me!"
At fourteen, Tony was sent to private school. Nothing in his life had prepared him for the experience. It was no place for a "solitary, self-sufficient person who loved to read." Once, when he accidently failed to attend a school ball game, he was visited in his room by a group of boys who "bumped me around a bit to teach me not to forget next time." During his first year, he wrote to plead with his mother to transfer him elsewhere. She replied with a note urging him to stiffen his spirit---and along with the note she sent a baseball glove.
Young Perkins lived in this alien world until he was seventeen, feeling isolated, his self-confidence undermined. Eight years later, this wretched period was evoked when he took over the role of the tormented prep-school boy in the Broadway play Tea and Sympathy.
Tony Perkins will probably never forget his private school experience. Even today, he may occasionnaly find himself shaken by a sudden emotional association. This happened, for example, on the movie set in Melbourne. He overheard some members of the company discussing a poker game held at Stanley Kramer's home the previous night. Bothered because he had not been invited, Tony remarked to Kramer at lunch the next day that he regretted not having had a chance to win a little money. The director explained that nine men had been playing, and that this was about the limit, although he had heard of ten in a game. "Maybe I should take that as a hint." said Tony lightly. Kramer laughed. "Maybe you should."
It was , as Perkins himself consciously realized, simply a joking exchange. Yet a few minutes later he got up from the table and walked away, emotionally upset. Fortunately, because he now understands himself very well in many respects, Tony knew what had occured.
"It was all in my imagination," he explained later. "But it was a real harking-back to when that kind of thing used to happen all the time."
Perkins believes, however, that the private school experience did teach him to be a tough thinker about himself, drilling home lessons in how to get along with people, lessons that enabled him to be popular and happy during his senior year in a public high school.
Perkins felt that there was nothing remarkable in his ability to alter his behavior completely from what it had been during the three years at private school. "Just as it isn't too difficult to adapt yourself to different fictional parts," he maintained, "it isn't too difficult to adapt different facets of your own personality. I've done that a couple of times in my life. Same personality, different angle."
When he analyzed the basis of his senior-year popularity, Perkins spoke of himself in a casual, unself-conscious way. "I think I was personable, witty and clever; I was co-editor of the school paper and in dramatics--all of that comes first, so nobody feels they've got an edge on you. That's the basis of all adolescent popularity, I believe most adolescents want to be superior to someone, and as long as that someone isn't you, you're all right."
Tony Perkins had hoped to enter Harvard, his father's college, but his grades were below it's entrance standards, primarily because of his private school academic record. He enrolled instead at Rollins College, in Florida where his abilities and his personality flourished. One year his short stories won all prizes awarded by the quarterly literary magazine, and for two successive years he received scholarships as a history major.
All the while, Tony had become increasingly absorbed by the theatre. From the time he was fifteen, he had taken part in summer-stock productions, and when he was twenty, while on vacation, he had gone to Hollywood to appear in a film called The Actress. He returned to Rollins, he completed his junior year, and then wrote his mother that he was transferring to Columbia University, which incidentally, is only a few subway stops removed from Broadway and television casting offices.
Tony Perkins never completed his college education, but by then nothing much mattered except acting. He appeared in several television plays, and was then chosen by director Elia Kazan to replace John Kerr, one of Tony's friends, in Tea and Sympathy. When the drama's run ended, he found himself facing what he has since described as the most difficult choice of his life: to accept a role in a play by a highly successful author, or to make another movie. He chose the film and appeared as Gary Cooper's son in Friendly Persuasion, which thrust him into the limelight. The play closed out of town.
Hollywood, shrewdly appraising the box-office value of this dynamic new talent, tapped Tony for six major motion pictures, one after the other. By movie-world standards, he had it made. But not by the Perkins family standards. He had been approached to star in another play on Broadway, the dramatization of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. There were sensible reasons not to do it. His services were in great demand in Hollywood, and he could earn more money there. By going to New York he would be placing himself on the critics' chopping block, and the play itself might prove a dud. Why risk it?
Tony's answer was forthright and unassuming. "I felt I wasn't getting the training every actor needs. The amount of acting you do in any picture is pretty small for the time consumed. So many hours are taken up with setups, adjusting lights, angles, retakes. And you've got no contact with the audience, because between you come the cameraman, director, editor, cutter---many people. But I guess I've got no complaint. Lots of times they make you seem better than you are. The theatre is a far better training ground. You learn your lines, rehearse, and get out on the stage--just you and the audience. After a while, the theatre makes you an actor."
Implicit in this reasoning is the conviction that, at all costs, he must seek self-fulfillment, that he does not want a technician to make him seem better than he is, but he does want to become as good as he can possibly be. For an individual like Tony Perkins success cannot be measured in terms of money or fame alone but must also contribute to a feeling of personal development.
To hold such a view requires courage, and Perkins was soon put to the test. After he began rehearsing the play, he was plunged into an agony of self-doubt. An associate who observed him closely during this period reported, "Tony's anguish was genuine. He believed everyone else would be wonderful, and he would be terrible. Part of the difficulty stemmed from the fact that few things are harder for him to do than to raise his voice in anger, and the role required it. Tony drove himself desperately, and his ultimate portrayal of Eugene Gant was something that he ripped from within himself."
On November 28, 1957, the play opened on Broadway. Tony's performance was hailed by the critics as "one that should live long in theatrical memory," "a delight to watch", and "a masterly portrait of yearning youth". Another reviewer commented that is was too bad that Osgood Perkins "couldn't have lived to see this performance and hear the ovation the audience gave his son at the final curtain," and a magazine critic wrote that "young Anthony Perkins, whose father was one of the most gifted actors, demonstrates that he is just about equally endowed." If, as a youngster, Tony Perkins had unconsciously turned to acting in search of identification with his father, he had come full circle.
Few professionals who have worked with Tony Perkins would challenge director Stanley Kramer's statement that, "he has a tremendously deep well of talent and has only started his career." Perkins' future is filled with complex possibilities because he is a complex young man. His creative impulses have expressed themselves in singing, painting, and playing jazz piano. he has made a few vocal recordings, because he enjoys doing them and also, according to his mother, because he enjoys being popular with teenagers. At present, he is dedicated to improving himself as an actor, although he would eventually like to try writing and direction.
He is levelheaded about his talent. "When I left Hollywood to do Look Homeward, Angel, I thought I was pretty indispensable, one of the most important young actors around," he admitted. "After a year in New York, I went back and some people said, "Gee, I haven't seen you in a while. Where have you been?" When I told them I had appeared in a play, they were surprised. Not that they were uninformed---they just had other things to think about. And I didn't feel any need to chase out and let everybody know what I'd been doing. I feel the same way today. The only thing that matters is what I'm going to do next."
THE END
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