PREMIERE MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1993, "THE PRODIGAL SON" By Frank Rose Few actors have been more defined by a single role than Anthony Perkins. He will always be Psycho's Norman Bates-doe-eyed, handsome, and shy. But underneath the granny wig lived a sensitive soul whose psychohistory paralleled that of his character in more ways than one. Although when he died of AIDS a year ago he was happily surrounded by family, this actor's life was a story of Freudianism run amok in theme park America. When Tony Perkins played Norman Bates, he pressed his finger firmly against America's psychosexual trigger. None of us would ever the same for it. One year after his death from AIDS, his story can finally be told... Anthony Perkins learned he'd tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from the National Enquirer. "It's wild, isn't it?" says his widow, Berry Perkins, as she sits outside the rambling Hollywood Hills house she and Tony shared with their two sons, Osgood and Elvis. "Thank God, in a way," she continues, her voice dropping almost to a whisper. "We had a couple of good years in there with medication and stuff that we might not have had. It really was a godsend." In fact, Perkins hadn't tested at all- as far as he knew. He had seen a doctor for Bell's palsy, a facial disorder, and apparently a technician had tested his blood on the sly. He was about to sue when Berry suggested he have a blood test to be sure. The shock when it came back positive was mitigated only by the news that Berry and the boys tested negative. Although friends doubt that Perkins had been promiscuous, the guilt he suffered was intense. "He became very depressed and very unlike himself," Berry says. "He felt like he had messed up our lives, and we kept telling him it was okay. I mean, it would have messed up our lives if he'd had a heart attack, like his dad did, which was what he'd always prayed for. At least we got a chance to say good-bye." "In the late '60s, before her marriage to Perkins, Berry Berenson and her sister Marisa, were the most glamorous duo in New York: Marisa, the ravishing model and budding movie star; Berry, the winsome fashion phtographer, protegee of Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and intimate of Halston. Twenty years of domesticity have added a soft patina to her luster, but today, in black tights and an old gray sweater, the only reminder of her past is her voice, which is soft and throaty and dramatic in a Lauren Bacall sort of way. "We had a very satisfying life together," she says. "It was a wonderful love affair. If anything else was going down, I certainly didn't know about it, and I don't think he intended to hurt me in any way." With headlines blaring- "Psycho' star Battling AIDS Virus"- Perkins enlisted actor Dennis Christopher to investigate doctors and therapies on his behalf. Virtually the only other friend he turned to was Marianne Williamson, Hollywood's resident guru. She urged him to join a support group, but he was afraid he'd never work again if people knew the reports were true. For two years he and Berry lived with their secret, trying to keep his weight up, hoping for a cure. "But when he went into the hospital," Berry says, "we made a very conscious decision, the boys and I, that we could either go through it completely alone in this house-just the four of us-and be really sad, or we could invite our close friends in to share this grief with us." The calls went out one by one, and as they did, the house became full of activity again, with tears and laughter in equal profusion. "It was great," says Berry. "For two weeks before he died we had this liveathon of people who would come and sleep on the floor in his room and curl up on couches and bring food, and he finally got how much people cared about him. It was really a nice thing for Tony to realize that people were willing to have a pajama party at his bedside. He was not a big pajama party kind of person-he didn't grow up with groups of people who had fun together." "He had fun watching other people have fun," Osgood puts in. "He liked to have a vicarious fun experience." Even as he faced death, Perkins distanced himself from it, examined it for flaws, and savored the experience. "He would say to me, 'This is very, very interesting.' " Richard Benjamin recalls. "He was not shying away from it. He was looking right at it, as it happened- right directly at it. And because he was looking into the eye of this, it gave us the courage to be there also." On the morning of what proved to be his final day, Berry called several friends, who arrived to find him unconscious and gasping for breath, with Berry and two nurses in attendance. Gathering with Osgood and Elvis in a circle outside his room, they held each other and cried untl the gasping stopped. More friends arrived. An announcement went out over the radio. The phone began to ring. Reporters and photographers for the tabloids were cruising the roads outside, scanning the property with telephoto lenses, looking for a scoop on the grief angle, ready to chase the hearse. A helicopter materialized overhead and hung in the sky, waiting for them to bring the body out. Big story here: Norman Bates has died of AIDS. It's been 33 years since Perkins starred in Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's now classic thriller about a nice young man whose future in the hospitality trade is fatally compromised by the interfering presense of his mummified mother. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who was in psychoanalysis when Hitchcock hired him,was fascinated by the question of what would make Norman Bates a killer. The only thing that would account for his problems, Stefano concluded, was close contact with a fearsome yet seductive mother. So he wrote some scenes of Norman as a teenager that were never intended to be shot. One such scene, which he laid out for Perkins during the shoot, involved Norman and his mother frolicking on the floor. Suddenly she realizes he has an erection, and her playfulness turns to fury. Screaming that he must forget he even has such a filthy thing, she pulls a dress over his head, smears his face with lipstick, and shoves him into a closet. "I had no idea about Tony's past." Stefano says now. Yes, he'd written the screenplay with Perkins in mind, and he knew that Perkins's father was Osgood Perins, a star of stage and screen during the '20s and '30s. But he didn't know that the elder Perkins had died of a heart attack when Tony was five-Norman's age when his father died- and he knew nothing of Tony's subsequent upbringing. So as they talked that day on the set. Stefano blithely described the relationship he envisioned between Normn and his mother. Perkins said nothing. His recollections at the time were of a father whose sudden death had seemed to make his own Oedipal fantasies come horrifyingly true, and of a strong-willed, puritanical New England mother who'd packed him off to boarding school and barely touched him at all. More than twenty years later, however, Perkins dscribed in a notoriously frank People magazine interview the mother he'd apparently blocked - the stern yet affectionate widow, who'd caressed him fondly, strokng his thighs, arousing painfully conflicted feelings of guilt and longing and shame. If Stefano knew nothing of all this, Hitchcock knew less. Psycho to him was a low-buget quickie, an experimental response to the cheapo horror flicks Roger Corman was cranking out for American International Pictures. He'd cast Perkns because the actor owed Paramount a picture and because his boy-next-door image meant that audiences would never suspect him of being the killer. As long as Hitchcock got the performance he wanted, he didn't care what made Perkins tick. And he was getting a good performance indeed. Lanky and doe-eyed, Perkins portrayed Norman as a sensitive, wounded youth, winning your heart before you have any hint at the enormity of his dysfunction. "You can feel your loneliness through him, your ostracism through him," says Dennis Christopher. "The next thing you know, you've got the knife in your hand." But what really set Psycho apart was the Freudian nightmare that lay at the root of the terror. In the gospel according to Freud, healthy development requires every little boy to outgrow his mother fixation, identify with his father, and marry a woman who will take his mother's place. But if the father is absent , or if the mother is domineering and seductive, this pattern can go awry. Norman Bates is an extreme case ; if every smother-mother produced a serial killer, the nation would be depopulated in short order. But there are other possible outcomes in the Freudian scheme of things. The son of such a mother might grow up impotent. He might become homosexual. Or he might become Tony Perkins and have an attraction devoted to him at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. The story of Tony Perkins is the story of Freudianism run amok in theme park America. It's the story of Hollywood abandoning it's talent to the pop-culture miasma it creates. Ultimately, however, it's the story of one man's attempt to repair his damaged life- damaged as all our lives are damaged- and to seek meaning and redemption through every means at his disposal: acting, fame, psychotherapy, spiritual gurus, home and family. "Talk about family values." says photographer Paul Jasmin, a close friend for 30 years. "That family is Tony's one great legacy." "This deck has always been the gathering ground, where we had my mom's and dad's birthday parties." says Osgood Perkins, tall and self-assured at nineteen. We're standing on a spacious redwood deck overlooking the near vertical backyard of the family's secluded, unpretentious hacienda. Osgood gestures toward an empty chaise lounge in the sun."The last time my dad got out of bed and really received company was on this deck. This deck is where the good times happened." In a small niche across from the chaise is a rustic shrine that would not look out of place outside an 18th-century Franciscan mission. Candles flank a wooden crucifix over a small box that contains Tony Perkins's ashes. Underneath is the legend, DON'T FENCE ME IN. "That was a lullaby he used to sing to me and my brother," Osgood explains. "It means, Don't control me- I am who I am and I have a certain place that I have to go to." Aside from a brief interview in The New York Times, the family's only public comment about Perkins's death has been the bittersweet statement he himself prepared. "I chose not to go public about this," he wrote. "because to misquote Casablanca, 'I'm not much at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of one old actor don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' There are many who believe that this disease is God's vengeance, but I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness, and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life." Berry Perkins wanders out from the living room, where she's been sifting through boxes of memorabilia and reading condolences. "That comment about an actor's life not amounting to a hill of beans? I got a letter from a fan who said, 'I really object to that. How could this man say that about himself?' "But Tony had a definite take on himself and what he deserved in his career," Berry continues, "and I think he underestimated himself like mad. He never wanted to see his movies. He always talked about them like they were shit. He was very strong and very intelligent, but I don't think he thought he contributed a hell of a lot to this world. Which is really sad." During one session with his analyst Mildred Newman, she asked Perkins what kind of woman he'd like to be with. He flipped through a copy of Vogue, until he came to a spread on photographer Berry Berenson, who as a twelve-year-old growing up in Switzerland had spent hours pasting Tony Perkins clippings into a scrapbook, nursing a hopeless crush. Berenson lived in New York now and, as cousin of art connoisseur Bernard Berenson and granddaughter of Elsa Schiaparelli, had entree to all that was glamorous in Manhattan, from Park Avenue society to Andy Warhol's factory. But she'd never fully given up her adolescent infatuation: What she most wanted was to meet Tony Perkins. It was her friend Joel Schumacher who made the introduction, Schumacher had just done the costumes for Play it as it Lays, which starred Perkins and Tuesday Weld. After the picture wrapped, Ruth Ford, one of the supporting actresses, gave a party for the cast and crew. Joel went with Tony, who disliked parties and was complaining about this one when Berry walked in with Halston. "I really didn't want to meet him," Berry recalls. "It was one of those things which I preferred to keep a fantasy. But I remember walking into the dining room, and I knew he was standing behind me because he was very intense, and I turned around and there he was. I practically fainted." Berry asked to interview him for Warhol's Interview magazine. That led to other meetings: to go over the transcript, to go over the edited transcript, to look at the phtographs, to look at the photographs again. Finally she ran out of excuses. "We were sitting there, and I had a feeling like it was the last time I would ever see him, because I was beginning to feel a bit ridiculous. He put on this Italian record, and it touched a chord in me and I started to cry-- hysterically! He didn't know what to do with this weeping woman, so he said, 'Well, would you like to go to the movies?' And I made him dinner and we never went to the movies and that was it." The sudden appearance of Berry Berenson in Tony Perkins's life was the kind of magical plot development you might expect in a backstage musical-- the fan offering her love to a waning star who seems incapable of accepting love from anyone but his fans. As Schumacher puts it, "Tony was always looking for answers. Being a movie star did not answer the question. Being a household word did not answer the question. What usually happens for a person on a spiritual path is that he meets someone who is a master. The master comes from love. I think Tony met the master when he met Berry." They were married in the garden at a minister's house in Truro in August 1973. He was 41; she was 25 and three months pregnant with Osgood. "A lot of people looked at the two of us and said, 'Who are they kidding? This is never going to work,' Berry recalls. "I was so naive I couldn't figure out what they were talking about. I'd say, 'Why not?' And it did work, much to everyone's amazement." Did she realize he--- "No." ---hadn't been with many other women? "He told me, and it just didn't register. I had been very sheltered. I hadn't had a boyfriend until I was nineteen, so it didn't seem so strange that he hadn't had that many. I mean this was literally my thinking." "She was very innocent," producer Howard Rosenman says. "He married her, so I guess he had an innocent side too. I think that's what he was going for." In any case, the effect was dramatic, "Tony became a human being, he seemed to enjoy his life. He wasn't so tortured." "Tony and Berry were like the wild, crazy people who found each other and proved that it could happen," Shumacher says. "Their marriage became a true source of hope for all the misfits and exotics, because they were us and we were them. But they weren't your average mom and pop." Not average, but with the birth of Osgood in 1974 and Elvis two years later, mom and pop was what they became. The role seemed to fulfill a deeply felt need in Perkins. As a middle-aged father, acting ceased to be a route to stardom and became a way to make a buck instead. "He wanted to take care of his family," says agent Sue Mengers. "So if a piece of garbage came up, he would do it rather than wait and see if something better came along." There were stipulations, however. "Unless it was fabulous, he didn't want to work during the summer, he'd rather be in Truro with Berry and the kids." His memorial service was a power event. It attracted such old friends as Sue Mengers and Mike Nichols, former costars like Janet Leigh and Sophia Loren, and moguls on the order of David Geffen, Barry Diller, and Sandy Gallin. Dan Ackroyd, a friend and neighbor took charge of security. A couple hundred people found their way through the hills to the house, clogging the narrow twisting roads, jamming the deck and the terrace as they listened to the proceedings on loudspeakers. At the end, they sang the lullaby Perkins had crooned to his boys when they were infants in the crib. It was a Cole Porter song that Roy Rogers had once sung, and it seemed right for the man they were remembering, a man who'd walled himself off in his guilt and fame, who'd broken down those walls only to find new ones erected against him: Let me be by myself in the evening breeze Listen to the mumur of the cottonwood trees Send me off forever, But I ask you please Don't fence me in.